Horrible days don’t usually start out as horrible days.
As we woke up, made breakfast, walked the dog, got the kids off to school, went to work, or did whatever we did most Thursday mornings here in America, September 11th, 2001, was just another ordinary Tuesday to us… until it wasn’t.
Soon, all hell would break loose, and we would face one of the most catastrophic days in our history.
For those who didn’t live through it, there’s no way to accurately describe the immediate existential free fall: the urgency, the chaos, and the abject terror of those first moments and the hours that followed.
Nothing felt secure. No place felt safe. No one was immune to the shaking. No one was insulated from the grieving. Everyone was shaken to their core.
So many memories are burned into my brain about those first days: unthinkable images of carnage I’ll never get out of my head, paralyzing waves of fear I’d never experienced, a leaden heaviness that I have rarely felt since.
But I remember more about that time too: I remember America being its best self.
I remember the fierce flood of goodness that arrived almost instantaneously. I remember people’s staggering courage. I remember their incomprehensible selflessness. I remember a unity that transcended politics. I remember a kindness that bridged religious traditions. I remember a defiant, expansive love standing stridently in the face of the hatred of a few. I remember humanity showing itself in breathtaking ways.
A mantra soon rose in those days: “Never forget.”
I suppose that meant different things to different people: For some it was a declaration to remember the people who died and the lives that were squandered and the legacy they had left. For some it was a prayer to the heavens, a commitment to live fully from a place of benevolence. For some it was a condemnation of any hatred born out of bigotry. For some it was a patriotic pledge of love of country. For some it was a promise not to lose sight of all they had seen and experienced, about how beautiful people can be.
As I look at this version of America twenty-five years later, it seems as though we’ve all broken our promises, whether to God or country or the fallen or survivors or ourselves.
We’ve forgotten all that we learned on that horrible day in September.
We’ve forgotten how dependent we are on one another, how connected we all are, how tethered to each other’s lives we are, despite the surface differences or the myth of our separation.
We’ve forgotten that in the end, a life in front of us in peril is a life that deserves our attention, a life we’re charged with saving.
We’ve forgotten how difficult and painful a path every person is walking, and how pointless it is to try and make that path more difficult and painful for them.
We’ve forgotten how fragile and fleeting and priceless this life is, and how wasteful it is to spend a moment of it with contempt for strangers.
This is why the grief feels amplified on this September 11th: because of all the promises we’ve broken and all the forgetting we’ve done.
And, worse, today it feels as though for far too many Americans, the words “Never Forget” are now simply thinly veiled expressions of blind hatred of entire people groups, based on a violence they had nothing to do with and gave no approval of. It has simply become a rallying cry for those who seek an excuse to dehumanize their neighbors, for people harboring the same senseless ugliness that authored the nightmare to begin with.
That’s why our forgetting is such a tragedy: we squandered the lessons we could have learned.
September 11th, 2001 was a nightmare for us as a nation, but we woke up that day too. We saw ourselves clearly. We saw through the walls and the barriers of created divisions, past the chasms and gaps of surface difference. We stopped the petty bullshit of partisanism, tribalism, and territorialism, and we realized our oneness. We caught a glimpse of what America can be when it finds unity in diversity.
That’s what I wish we would have never forgotten in the years since that horrible day in September.
That day we learned to cherish life; to love people fully, to live with open-handed gratitude, to recognize the value of every human being, to move quickly toward someone in pain, to not withhold compassion, to see the best in people, to care for one another as our own.
May we not need another horrible day to remember that again, America.
Of all the lies Donald Trump, that fact-fucking, grief-grafting, tragedy-jacking, bullshit-belching, pathological, sociopathic shitheel, has sluiced through that puckered little piss hole, his lies about September 11 are the ones that fucking get me the most.
Every time.
I wish they didn’t. After all these years of deceit and delusion and relentless daily derangement, you would think I could roll my eyes and move on.
I never can.
This one gets under my skin, behind my ribs, into that place where anger and grief are so fucking tangled I don’t know which I’m feeling first.
Because it’s 9/11.
And I can’t make myself be numb to that.
Because like so many of us, I lived through it, and it’s fucking personal.
It remains one of the darkest days of my life, and even now, twenty-five years later, sitting here trying to reach backward and retrieve what it felt like to inhabit those first impossible hours in real time, I come up empty in exactly the place I came up empty then.
I remember being breathless. Untethered from any sense of reality I had ever known, staring at towers I had grown up marveling at, those immense silver monoliths teeming with the small, sacred, staggering ordinariness of an average Tuesday: elevators rising, phones ringing, coffee cooling beside keyboards, restaurant kitchens clattering, somebody bitching about a meeting, somebody making lunch plans, somebody kissing someone goodbye without knowing they had just spoken the last unremarkable sentence of their life.
All those private little universes humming along behind all that steel and glass, every floor crowded with errands and appetites and aggravations and people who fully expected to be somewhere else by dinner.
And then they weren’t.
People I loved worked there.
People I knew worked there.
Then I watched those towers burn and buckle and accordion into themselves with thousands of people still in them, saw paper drift with this almost obscene delicacy through that crystalline September blue, saw two familiar pieces of my horizon become smoke and pulverized steel and absence while my brain kept rejecting what my eyes had absorbed.
I have never found a word big enough to hold it.
The sky stayed.
The people didn’t.
All across this country, we stood wherever that morning had stranded us, gathered around televisions, hovering beside landlines, calling and calling and calling, trying to comprehend something so monstrous, so far outside the architecture of anything we understood that there was nothing to do but stare at the wound it had opened in the world.
We were all asking: How could this happen? What do we do now?
Donald Trump asked a different question:
How do I make myself the fucking hero of this?
That same afternoon, while Manhattan choked on ash, while people walked north wearing powdered pieces of an office, a desk, a human being in their hair, Trump called WWOR-TV and talked about 40 Wall Street. His building. Now the tallest downtown, he bragged. It wasn’t, but that didn’t matter to him.
Three thousand people had just been murdered and this necrotic narcissist heard a real-estate opportunity ka-chinging beneath the sirens.
Two days later, he turned up in front of cameras. Where exactly? Who the fuck knows. Near enough to the smoking pile to get attention. Firefighters slept against concrete, too exhausted to find somewhere softer. Search dogs kept working until their paws bled. The cameras recorded that—the bodies giving out, the terrible, stubborn effort to find somebody who still had a breath left. All that footage from the most photographed square mile on the planet. And in that vast, unbearable record of what it took to be useful in the ruins, where is one fucking frame of Donald Trump moving so much as a pebble?
Not. One.
If he had moved ONE GODDAMN BRICK, that brick would have a provenance more thoroughly documented than the Crown Jewels. Mar-a-Lago would hang a fifty-foot oil painting of Trump heaving an I-beam across his shoulders while a bald eagle cries into the Hudson.
Not one photograph exists. Not a shred of evidence for any of it — not the hundreds of men he says he sent, not the rubble he says he moved, not one minute of him lifting a finger for anybody. None of it happened. It has never stopped him from saying it happened.
He said it again on Fox last week. And then today, somehow, inexplicably, he made it worse. Days before we honor the fallen, twenty-five years after 9/11, he came up with something new.
Now there were two firemen. Big strong guys, shockingly. They grabbed him under the arms — got to get you out of here — and they lifted him up and started running with him.
Running with him.
Give me a fucking break.
Every time he tells it he gets braver and the men who save him get bigger, and now this man who has never lifted anything heavier than a nine iron is being carried out of the smoke like a wounded general while actual firefighters were going the other way and not coming back.
Come the fuck on.
I know by now that nothing should surprise me, but what guts me most is the gobsmacking contempt embedded in all of it, the breathtaking callousness, cruelty, predatory indifference and psychic frigidity of this malevolent, melon-hued megalomaniac toward the people who never needed to embroider themselves into the story because they were already inside it, breathing it, bleeding into it, carrying it home.
It went into them: concrete, pulverized glass, asbestos, benzene, human remains, an entire vertical city ground into poisonous gray particulate that slipped into the lungs of people too busy searching for other human beings to wonder what the air might cost them. September 11 did not stop taking lives when the towers fell. Coughs became scans, scans became biopsies, and men and women who had walked into hell looking for strangers discovered that hell had hitched a ride home inside their bodies.
I knew people who died that morning. I knew others who died because of that morning. Around here, everybody knew somebody.
My roommate had worked at Windows on the World. So had my boyfriend at the time. Friends of friends, people from firehouses, a friend’s husband, a face you recognized from the train.
For weeks afterward, the cars sat in the commuter lots exactly where they had been left. Rows of them. Coffee calcifying in cup holders. A cardigan slumped across a passenger seat because the office got cold. Parking permits dangling from rearview mirrors. All those small, mundane keepsakes of a life in motion suddenly unbearable, because the hands that left them there were never coming back for them.
Nothing inside those cars knew the world had ended for someone.
That is grief. The ordinary becoming sacred. Milk in the refrigerator. A dog cocking its head at every familiar engine. A voicemail nobody deletes because there is breath in it. A fucking Tuesday that never got to finish.
And Donald Trump reached into that. Forced himself into it, the way he forces himself onto women, because intrusion is his native language, because nothing is allowed to remain outside the radius of his appetite, because every wound, every loss, every grave seems to present itself to him as one more opening through which he can shove some swollen little fantasy of his own importance.
He scavenges catastrophe, siphons courage, strip-mines sorrow, fingers through bereavement for anything bright enough to steal, then crams the whole blood-slick bundle through the distended sausage casing of his self-regard until somebody else’s heroism comes squirming out the other end stamped TRUMP, shrink-wrapped and ready for resale.
He is a sociopath. He has no regard for human life or human suffering. Where empathy should live in a person, there is only an empty elevator shaft, the doors sliding open onto cold black nothing, no car, no cables, no bottom, just a lightless plummet through all the floors of human feeling that were never fucking built.
He is a sadistic, self-fellating sack of shit who feeds on grief. He lied about our dead while families were still dialing phones, still searching hospitals, still saying missing because dead was a word too monstrous to let into the room.
And he is lying about them now, a quarter-century later, while their names are still being read aloud.
The responders earned their place with blood and breath and broken bodies and years they never got back. The dead paid for theirs with everything.
Donald Trump does not get to shoplift valor from either of them.
This week, families will gather again at Ground Zero and read the names for hours, each one opening onto an entire life that goes on existing in the people left behind: keys turning in the door at six o’clock, a laugh unmistakable across a crowded room, perfume lingering in the collar of a coat, pipe tobacco ghosting the lining of a jacket, handwriting slanting across a grocery list nobody can quite bring themselves to throw away, the warm hollow on one side of a bed, the throwaway last sentence someone has carried ever since because nobody knew it was going to be the last.
That day belongs to the people who died in those attacks and the people September 11 kept killing long after the skyline cleared. To the ones who never came home and the ones who ran toward the smoke. To the families who learned how absence can inhabit a house, settle into drawers and closets and holidays, change the shape of a dinner table and the sound of a room. To the people who remain, who gather every year to lift those names into the September air so the dead are not reduced to a number, a photograph, a date carved into stone.
I don’t expect a creature capable of such abject, unabashed depravity to understand what it means to mourn, what it means to remember, what it means to be humbled, what it means to honor any of them.
I just wish he would get the fuck out of the way while the rest of us do.
Councilwoman Vickie Paladino is demanding that Mayor Zohran Mamdani “not show his face” at New York City’s 9/11 ceremony, insisting that he does not belong on that “sacred ground.”
But let’s remember the basic facts.
When 9/11 happened, Rudy Giuliani was the Republican mayor of New York, George Pataki was the Republican governor, and George W. Bush was the Republican president. The attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda—not by any American political party or child.
Zohran Mamdani was nine years old.
Paladino is obviously not literally claiming that a nine-year-old caused 9/11. But portraying New York’s first Muslim mayor as somehow unworthy of standing at the memorial raises a troubling question: why should a Muslim American have to repeatedly prove his loyalty before being allowed to mourn alongside fellow New Yorkers?
Mamdani moved to New York at age seven. He has designated September 11 as a Day of Remembrance and Service and said he will attend the ceremony to honor the victims, their families, and the first responders who sacrificed everything.
Paladino does not speak for “the people.” Mamdani is the city’s elected mayor—and Muslim New Yorkers have every right to stand at Ground Zero, remember the victims, and mourn with their fellow Americans.
After years of being scam-call free on my personal phone, over the past few weeks it seems that at least once a day I get this same call:
Hello, this is Sarah Jenkins giving you a call back from 5 Step Business Loans.com. Today is Thursday, September 10th. My phone number is 877-577-1143. And our file shows you’ve got some unsecured debt still due. I wanted to let you know that you can enroll to have them consolidated into a 0% interest loan with the new 0 interest consolidation lending program. So any amount, small or large, is not non-collectible through this program. But we have to enroll. So give me a call back and we can get you all set up. It won’t take long. It’s really a one and done setup, so I’ll keep your account open through the end of the week. To connect with a specialist now, press 5 or you can call me directly at 877-577-1143. Again, press 5 to speak with the lending specialist now, or call me at 877-577-1143. You can also visit our website at five-stepbusinessloans.com and apply online. You can also press 9 to be added to our do not call list if you are no longer interested.
Naturally the first couple times this happened I pressed 9, but apparently that made no difference, and once I realized since the name of the loan company always changed this was actually a scam operation and that by pressing 9 I confirmed they’d reached a “live” number.
So a couple days ago I decided to return the call. No longer having to check my language like I had to do when I’d get scam calls at work, I um…well let’s just say the past year’s worth of anger and frustration found an outlet.
“Do you wanna fuck?” I asked “Jason” or whatever his name was.
“Uh…” He was obviously taken aback. Then a few seconds later, “Sure.”
And the bastard hung up on me!
Did I leave it?
Do you know me at all? 😈
“Jason” suprisingly answered again.
“So Jason, when are we gonna hook up and make some wild monkey sex?”
Click.
I called back again.
This time I got “John.”
I asked if he was into anal.
Click.
I called back yet again.
This time It went immediately to on-hold music. After about a minute or so the call disconnected.
I called back yet again.
This time I got a recorded message telling me I’d reached a number no longer in service.
They’d blocked me!
It was then I noticed the callback number they provided wasn’t actually the number displayed on my phone.
So I called THAT number.
Apparently it was a direct line to the scammer call center, bypassing the bullshit message instructing me to press 9 if I didn’t want to received any more calls.
“Jason” answered.
“Hey Jason, you didn’t answer me…when are we gonna hook up…”
Click.
It seems I’d found their kryptonite.
Today when the call came in, I called back.
“Robert” answered.
Hi, this is Robert. Who do I have the pleasure of speaking with today?”
“Hey Robert,” I said, “I’ve just got a quick question.”
“Go ahead.”
“So…do you take it up the ass as well as your mother does?”
“Oh [long pause] you should not have said that.”
Click.
I called back on both the provided number and the one that showed up on my phone.
Immediately blocked.
I have a feeling this isn’t over yet, but I have found an effective way of shutting them up.
A 67-year-old Arizona realtor went on a racist and homophobic tirade in first-class on an American Airlines flight Thursday night. By the time the plane diverted to Baltimore, the passengers had him zip-tied and duct-taped to his seat.
Arthur Lundeen was flying from Dallas to Newark when witnesses say he started yelling about Jesus and telling people on the flight that they were going to hell. When a Black flight attendant tried to calm him down, Lundeen allegedly called him the N-word and then began using anti-gay slurs, including the F-slur.
The man then turned physical. Lundeen allegedly put his hands around the neck of the passenger sitting beside him, struck the man’s computer and shoved a woman who tried to intervene. Other passengers stepped in to restrain him, including retired law enforcement officer Juan Mejia. The flight crew provided zip ties, and when Lundeen managed to work partly free, a few rolls of duct tape became the next solution. Mejia says Lundeen bit his hand and forearm during the struggle.
Photos from the flight show Lundeen strapped to his first-class seat with duct tape across his torso, wrists and forehead. Police arrested him after the plane landed in Baltimore, and he was charged with second-degree assault and disorderly conduct. The FBI is investigating the incident—including hate crime enhancements.
Long Realty, the real estate brokerage that he worked for terminated its relationship with Lundeen shortly after he was identified.
Lundeen managed to turn a first-class ticket into an arrest, an FBI investigation, unemployment and being duct-taped to a chair in front of a cabin full of strangers—while the internet watched it unfold in near real-time. His opinions were his own. The art project was a group effort.
It turns out hate speech can come with a few restraints.
Bourbon-brined, grievance-gargling, pomade-plastered Pentagon pick-me prick Pete Hegseth is destroying our fucking military.
He’s ripping experienced leadership out by the roots, draining lifetimes of military knowledge through the floorboards, poisoning promotions and turning what was once the world’s most formidable fighting force into a loyalty-soaked revenge arcade for political sycophants.
Every one of us is less safe, less secure, more exposed and more vulnerable because this spectacularly unqualified little fuckwit has been allowed to take a blowtorch to the load-bearing beams while everybody who could stop him stands around admiring the fucking sparks.
This should be the biggest scandal on the news, but Hegseth is running feral while the obese, orange, ossifying, orthopedically elevated octogenarian obscenity of a so-called Commander-in-Chief, a sagging sack of appetites and adipose with the moral architecture of a tapeworm and the cognitive sparkle of a concussed turnip, wanders off to fondle ballrooms, granite walkways, helipads and whatever other architectural dick-extension flutters through his marble-addled frontal lobe while American service members fight and die in his endless, illegal, unconstitutional war with Iran.
All of that contempt, neglect and appetite for more is sitting there in plain sight on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which limped into port in Thailand this week looking like a hundred-thousand-ton fucking ghost.
And it made me sick to my stomach.
For weeks we’ve heard about exhausted sailors and Marines, mental-health crises, terrified families telling anyone who’d listen their loved ones were breaking, only to have Hegseth basically accuse those families of lying.
Donald Trump, the five-time draft-dodging military dilettante whose closest relationship to sacrifice is insulting the people who make it, heard the Lincoln had endured the longest consecutive stretch at sea without a real port call for a modern carrier and said it was “not nearly long enough.”
Bitch, you take a golf cart to the buffet line.
And this wasn’t the ordinary oxidation and wear of some garden-variety deployment. Iran hammered the Navy’s main logistics hub in Bahrain at the beginning of Trump’s war, stretching supply lines thousands of miles and helping turn the mundane maintenance, cleaning, resupply and human relief of a normal port call into another casualty of Darth Dorito’s geopolitical dick-swinging.
So the Lincoln kept going.
Month after month of strain, separation, heat and seawater until she finally came in looking like something had been taken out of her.
I know ships rust. Saltwater is a ravenous, remorseless bastard that chews paint and punishes steel.
Battered. Depleted. Scarred. Pushed past reason and still expected to perform.
That is draft-dodging Donald Trump and day-drunk Pete Hegseth’s military in one fucking image.
I’ve always loved warships. Years ago, when Leo was little, we hit the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel coming home from the Outer Banks as enormous Navy vessels headed toward Norfolk, and I was practically bouncing in my seat grabbing my phone and checking hull numbers as they passed, collecting them in my head like baseball cards because I wanted to know every fucking one of them.
These massive gray leviathans sliding through dark water with that impossible marriage of menace and majesty, carrying sailors, history and enough American firepower to rearrange somebody’s entire coastline.
I felt like a little kid.
I was in awe.
I still am.
And that memory was still sitting there in my head when I saw the Lincoln come into Thailand, weather-whipped, corrosion-streaked and almost spectral, her crew saying they wanted home, American power looking wounded while the soft-handed assholes responsible congratulated themselves on toughness.
And inside all that battered steel were thousands of sailors and Marines who looked like somebody had been strip-mining them too.
Because Trump and Hegseth are depredators, rapacious consumers who use, push, bleed, hollow out and keep demanding more from anything unfortunate enough to fall within their reach until the shine is gone, the marrow is sucked dry and somebody else is left carrying the damage.
They mistake resilience for permission, endurance for an invitation and sacrifice for an endlessly renewable resource they’re entitled to keep fucking consuming.
Sailors. Marines. Soldiers. Airmen. Stretched thin, ground down, overruled and treated like human inventory with no expiration date by political leaders who think patriotism means swallowing whatever punishment gets shoveled down from above, snapping a salute and waiting politely for another scoop.
And the bastard holding the shovel has been waiting years for his turn.
Hegseth came into this job hauling a fetid duffel bag stuffed with old resentments, bruised ego, perceived betrayals and unprocessed humiliation from an institution he spent years sneering at as weak and woke, and Trump handed this damaged little DUI hire the Pentagon and enough power to start converting private wounds into promotions, purges and national defense policy.
He isn’t reforming the military.
He’s getting even with it.
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll finally walked after watching senior leadership get hacked apart, promotions pawed through and the Army’s upper command turned into some fucked-up combination of ideological casting call, personal burn book and Survivor: Pentagon, except the immunity idol is apparently blind obedience to the booze-breathed peacock upstairs.
Driscoll went to Trump to tell him how fucking bad it had gotten.
Trump, who has been considerably busier building shrines to himself and pissing his name across Washington like some incontinent pharaoh armed with a Dymo label maker, was reportedly surprised.
Of course he fucking was.
He doesn’t pay attention because he doesn’t give a shit. Are they killing the people he wants killed? Do the explosions make him look tough? Can he slap his name on a ship after scraping somebody else’s off first?
That’s about the outer limit of this lacquered little Caesar’s geopolitical imagination.
China knew. Russia knew. Iran knew. Every foreign intelligence service with electricity and two functioning eyeballs knew America was bleeding senior military experience while Donald Trump played Louis XIV of Palm Beach and his gin-drenched GI Joe took a Sawzall to the Army.
Hegseth inherited ten active-duty four-star Army generals.
He’s down to five.
Half the constellation of stars over the Army’s senior command has blinked out while its Secretary leaves, its permanent Chief of Staff seat sits empty and the Vice Chief does double duty as drones, AI and electronic warfare rewrite combat underneath their boots.
Pete Hegseth has taken out more American generals than Iranian ones.
C.Q. Brown, only the second Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs, fired. Lisa Franchetti, first woman to lead the Navy, fired. Linda Fagan, first woman to lead an armed-service branch, fired. Randy George, Purple Heart recipient and forty-two-year Army veteran, pushed out, while Hegseth claws through the upper ranks with Leatherface-level personnel instincts and the wounded vanity of a prom king who discovered somebody else got elected class president.
And this sexist, bigoted fucknugget told us what he wanted: generals and admirals involved in “DEI woke shit” had to go.
In Hegseth’s rancid culture-war lexicon, “DEI” is a linguistic trapdoor beneath any woman or person of color these meritocracy-molesting motherfuckers would rather believe was handed a career than concede might simply be more accomplished than they are.
He’s been reaching his sticky little ideological fingers into promotion lists already vetted by people who actually know what the fuck they’re doing, and the result is a senior military landscape being bleached of women and Black officers while Kegbreath congratulates himself on restoring “merit.”
There isn’t a single active-duty female four-star general or admiral left.
And this asshole reportedly thought Driscoll wasn’t sufficiently deferential.
Deferential.
To Pete fucking Hegseth.
A smug, self-sanctifying little martinet with the magnificent certitude of a guy who read three Sun Tzu quotes under wolf photos on Instagram and has spent ever since wondering why nobody’s asked him to take Constantinople.
My dad spent fifty years at the Department of Defense designing weapons systems on an Army base here in Jersey, and some of my sweetest childhood memories are tangled up in that place. Summer was the officers’ club pool, chlorine stiffening our hair, Coppertone slick on our skin, while Dad was inside those buildings doing work Kim and I were far too little to understand.
We got one dollar to split fries from the 19th Hole, one grease-translucent paper basket, ketchup packets ripped open with wet teeth and two Malooly girls attempting bilateral potato diplomacy without plunging the family into armed conflict. Camp David had Begin, Sadat and Carter. We had one suspiciously enormous crinkle-cut and no neutral observer. Henry Kissinger could’ve shuttle-diplomacied his ass between us all afternoon and eventually told Dad, “Sir, buy another basket.”
God, I love that memory.
My dad gave that place nearly his entire working life, and I miss him every single day.
But I’m glad he didn’t have to see this shit.
I’m glad he didn’t have to see what became of his beloved Department of Defense.
There are Republicans in Congress who know exactly what this motherfucker is.
They know he’s unfit. They know he’s reckless. They know he’s hollowing out the military in real time, and they’re still standing there with their hands jammed into their pockets pretending somebody misplaced the emergency brake.
Maybe one of them will eventually locate a vertebra.
I also might wake up tomorrow a natural blonde with a metabolism from 1997 and discover somebody accidentally paid off my mortgage.
So I’m not holding my fucking breath.
When we take Congress back, this cannot end with Hegseth packing up his protein powder, pocket squares and Patton fantasies and slithering back onto cable television to explain how the woke generals betrayed him.
I want investigations.
The fishing boats. Minab. The double tap. The military lawyers. The warnings. The orders. The people who objected and the assholes who overruled them.
I want every bloody decision dragged out by the ankles, dumped onto a congressional table and dissected until we know who did what, who authorized what and whose blood is attached to which fucking signature.
I want war-crimes investigations.
I want war-crimes trials.
Period.
I do not give one solitary shit what letter is next to your name when you vote.
If you have eyes in your head and a functioning fucking pulse, you can see what Pete Hegseth is doing.
He has to go.
And getting his ass thrown out of the Pentagon does not erase what he did inside it.
He should be shackled to this record for the rest of his life, to the leaders he purged, the military he politicized, the families he dismissed and the warnings he ignored, because somebody handed a bitter, damaged, catastrophically unqualified cable-news cosplay commando the most formidable fighting force humanity has ever assembled, and he used it as a chew toy for his ego, a scratching post for his resentments and a fucking sledgehammer for his revenge.
Pete Hegseth wanted to remake the American military in his own image.
