Trump's 'macho' monsters just revealed what they really are

Across Iran and the Caribbean, Donald Trump and his lickspittles delight in killing as if people were expendable scenery, not human beings with loved ones and families. Meanwhile, they ignore the death and destruction their fellow psychopath, Vladimir Putin, rains down on Ukraine every night.

India and America invite Iran to send an UNARMED ship to the Indian Ocean to participate in military exercises, and Trump and Whiskey Pete decided it would be fun to blow it out of the water, leaving more than 100 sailors miles from shore, desperate for a rescue. Instead of saving them, as international law requires, we simply left them to drown.

Whiskey Pete called it “quiet death.” In fact, there was a lot of screaming and sobbing, although the bombers couldn’t hear it from 20,000 feet any more than Hegseth could in his drunken haze.

Just like they blew up a boat in the Caribbean and then, when two fishermen survived clinging to a piece of debris and were desperately waving for help, came back with an illegally unmarked plane and blew them into bits of blood and gristle. Another clear violation of international and American law.

And then they bombed a girl’s school in Iran, killing at least 160 children, and then lied about it while also humble-bragging that “people will die” in their war of choice. As Stephen “Nosferatu” Miller gleefully announced after the little girls were slaughtered:

“What you’re seeing right now … is a military under President Trump’s leadership that is not fighting politically correct. That isn’t fighting with its hands tied behind its back.”

And Hegseth bragged:

“No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically-correct wars.”

When he was asked about the six American soldiers who were killed because Putin is helping Iran target Americans in the region, his reply was disgusting:

“When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it. The press only wants to make the president look bad.”

These are the ghouls who were delighted — thrilled — when masked ICE thugs in Minneapolis shot Renee Good in the face and Alex Pretti in the back. They then went on TV, giddy, and smeared them to the world. And killed dozens of people so far this year in their concentration camps while delighting in tearing children from their parents.

Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025 who’s gleefully overseen the firing of hundreds of thousands of federal workers, shattering their lives and families while throwing the American government into crisis, apparently gets off on thinking of them crying themselves to sleep at night, worrying about getting thrown out on the street with their children because they can’t pay rent:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”

Yeah, trauma. It’s what today’s Republicans love, so long as it happens to other people. It’s their drug of choice.

Vought’s and Musk’s massive cuts to the federal workforce to pay for tax cuts for billionaires — in this case, laying off thousands from the National Weather Service — meant that families in Michigan had virtually no warning that tornadoes were bearing down on them this past weekend. Three people are now dead and a dozen more in the hospital clinging to life.

Of course they weren’t billionaires, so their lives don’t much matter, right? Like the millions who lost their health insurance when the Big Beautiful Bill redirected ACA subsidies and Medicaid revenue to tax cuts for the morbidly rich. Or the pregnant women across red states who are dying at more than twice the rate of women in blue states because of misogynistic GOP anti-abortion laws.

Trump, Hegseth, Vance, Miller, Leavitt, et al think this sort of thing makes them seem “macho” and “tough.” Nearly 90 percent of Republican voters agree with them.

What it really does is reveal them as psychopaths, the very human embodiment of evil. If they’d been born in a different time or place, they’d be Ted Bundys or Charles Mansons and their GOP followers would be “good Germans” watching with a smile and a salute as the boxcars roll by.

When those six U.S. service members were killed by Iranian retaliation, Trump refused to remove his $50 souvenir hat (available for sale on his website) or bow his head and shrugged, saying that “sadly, there will likely be more … That’s the way it is.”

Those soldiers are just suckers and losers, after all; they should have had the good sense of the Trump men to complain about bone spurs or simply flee the country to avoid the draft, like Grandpa Drumpf did when Germany kicked him out for refusing to serve.

“War Secretary” Hegseth — with his Crusader cross and Dius Vult slogan tattoos — brags that they’ve “only just begun” putting “narco‑terrorists at the bottom of the ocean,” with no interest in who is actually on board the boats they’re striking. After all, they’re not white people and they’re not rich.

This isn’t the language of leaders reluctantly using force as a last resort; it’s the rhetoric of psychopaths who see the rest of humanity as disposable, as dots in a video game, as objects whose death is entertainment, so long as their own luxury and power are secure.

Elon Musk throws a quarter-billion dollars into the 2024 election to put Trump in the White House and in turn is given an opportunity to kill over a million Black and brown children on the other side of the planet by gutting USAID. As Bill Gates noted, it was “the richest man in the world killing the poorest children.”

When a college Republican chat room devolved into a Nazi-loving, Black- and Hispanic-loathing festival of hate, conspiracy theories, and Hitler adoration last week it was just another Thursday. Like Musk giving the Nazi salute — twice — at a Trump rally.

My dad’s Republican Party — Eisenhower’s and Romney’s and McCain’s Republican Party — is long dead and gone, and in its place is a cult built on grievance, paranoia, white supremacy, and a love for authoritarian strongmen including Putin and Orbán.

They delight in death and destruction. They love the language of blood and gore. They’re monsters.

• Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.