Respecting the Dead
Life During Trumptime 7/20/26 - 7/26/26
It’s weird what breaks through my emotional armor these days. I read the news all day and report it for a living. The job requires a certain remove. But I’m still human and, from time to time, I see something that upsets me. Law enforcement using tear gas to clear protestors away from St John’s Church and Trump’s subsequent photo-op was one such moment.
I had a similar feeling this week when Trump claimed America’s dead troops had agreed with him that Iran must not obtain a nuclear weapon. Putting words in the mouth of people who died for you in a war struck me as particularly tasteless. The same day we learned that the Pentagon had removed the names of some of the dead from its official list of war dead. The Pentagon said Iran had killed them after Trump declared a cease-fire in April so they technically didn’t die in the war.
One of the only things that makes me feel better when faced with a series of events this grotesque is to find a joke that matches it in kind.
7/20/26
I started the week wondering about America’s casualty rate in the Iran War. The New York Times reported that the Pentagon had withheld the number of US military casualties. The exposure of shoddy public accounting of the dead and injured followed a weekend where three US soldiers died during an Iranian strike on Jordan.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell pushed back against the Times reporting in several posts on X. “The Department of War rejects these baseless and malicious accusations of hiding injury numbers as outright lies from partisan hacks at the New York Times who are desperate to smear America’s military and its leadership,” he said in one post. “Claims of concealment are fabrications meant to further distress the American people in the wake of three service members killed in action.”
Trump announced a new 50% tariff against some goods from Canada. According to a press release from the White House, the new tariff was in response to Canada’s “discriminatory treatment of American products.” This so-called discriminatory treatment is a series of tariffs Canada leveled against the US in response to America’s original run of tariffs against Canada.
The trade war continues apace.
7/21/26
Trump added fuel to the speculative fire about the number of America’s Iran War casualties with a Truth Social post.
Afghanistan War: 20 years, 2000 DEAD.
Iraq War: 9 years, 4,600 DEAD.
Vietnam War: 19 years and 5 months, 58,220 DEAD.
Korean War: 3 years and 1 month, 36,574 DEAD.
Venezuela War: 1 day, 0 DEAD.
Iran Military Conflict: 4 months, 18 DEAD.
The Pentagon, which earlier this year positioned itself as an AI first military, is burning through its AI tokens according to WIRED.
In order to use Ask Sage, the Army had access to 100,000,000 tokens as part of an annual subscription to an “enterprise pack.” Tokens represent a unit of output, either in text or image, from an LLM. For the Ask Sage tool, a single token equates to about 3.7 characters, according to documents viewed by WIRED. The Defense Department burned through some 20 billion tokens per day during the 38-day Operation Epic Fury in Iran, according to Breaking Defense.
Trump approved a deal with Saudi Arabia that would see the US help set up a civilian nuclear program in the Kingdom. The deal will run three decades, cost billions of dollars, and provide a path for Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium in the country. Trump promised this will not lead to more nuclear bombs in the world. Critics are skeptical.
While Saudi Arabia is getting nuclear materials, Trump is taking steps to ensure Iran loses theirs. He told reporters that the US would soon hit a suspected Iranian nuclear site in Pickaxe Mountain. “We’ll be hitting that area very probably pretty soon. There’s not a thing they can do about it. You know, normally I wouldn’t say that. If I thought they could do something about it, I would never say that. But we’ll be hitting that area pretty soon, and very heavily,” he told reporters during a meeting with the president of Lebanon.
7/22/26
Trump attended the transfer of the remains of US service members killed during the war with Iran at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Speaking with reporters on the tarmac before flying to Dover, Trump told reporters that the fallen soldiers had agreed with him on the war. “All of them said very strongly, ‘We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon,’” Trump said.
7/23/26
Iraq attempted to mediate a peace deal between the United States and Iran, but Iran rejected it. “The problem is not passing messages. The problem is America’s outlook, which is illogical, greedy and controlling,” Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi told reporters.
The United States isn’t building munitions fast enough to keep up with the demand for the war. Iran, apparently, isn’t having the same problem. Stories in several news outlets this week reviewed satellite imagery from the country and came to the conclusion that Iran was bouncing back from Israeli and American airstrikes. “Iran is rebuilding everything. I am very worried,” an Israeli official told The Wall Street Journal.
The Lloyd’s Market Association — a group of insurance underwriters in London — announced its maritime insurance policies wouldn’t cover transit fees or tolls charged for traveling through the Strait of Hormuz. “Under the clause, insurers will not cover any such payment. In addition, where a payment has been made, cover for the relevant vessel will cease due to the risk of a breach of sanctions and/or terrorism legislation in the US, UK or EU,” the announcement said.
7/24/26
Western intelligence believes that the Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new supreme leader, is more interested in a nuclear weapon than his father. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei famously issued a fatwa against the weapons in 2003 and called them un-Islamic. Iran’s nuclear program walked right up to the line of weaponized enrichment, but it never quite crossed it and many (though not all) believed Ali Khamenei’s distaste for nukes was genuine. America killed Ali Khamenei at the start of the war in an air strike and now his son is in charge and it’s possible he’s got a different position on nuclear weapons.
The track record for authoritarian regimes that have given up their nuclear ambitions isn’t good. Libya was close, but stopped because Gaddafi wanted better relations with the west. When civil war broke out in the country, NATO provided air cover while rebels fought Gaddafi’s military. He lost and videos of his horrific and violent death circulated on the internet. North Korea, by contrast, never gave up on nukes despite international pressure. Now the Kim regime is vouchsafed by a nuclear deterrent. The lesson of recent history is very clear to any world leader thinking about pursuing its own nuclear program.
Trump did an hour-long standup set at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.
7/25/26
After thirteen days of bombing targets in Iran the US military took a breath. When America stopped attacking, Iran stopped too and its officials said they’d hold off so long as the US did. According to Haaretz, the sudden cessation of operations caught Israel off guard. Over the weekend it seemed that Trump wanted to talk again. America was running low on munitions and letting some Iranian projectiles slip through its defenses to save on supply.
7/26/26
CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper recommended that the US stop bombing targets around the Strait of Hormuz, according to Axios.
Why it matters: The recommendation by Cooper, the commander of the U.S. Military Central Command (CENTCOM), together with other advisers impacted President Trump’s decision on Friday to pause U.S. strikes against Iran, the sources said.
It was an acknowledgement by both military and civilian advisers to the president that there are limits to what can be accomplished through military action, and specifically an air power campaign.
The Pentagon changed how it categorized Iran War casualties. The tab for Operation Epic Fury listed 14 dead and 417 wounded in action. But there’s a new category for “Overseas Operation” that starts July 7, 2026 and counts four additional dead and 268 wounded in action, as of this writing. ABC News caught the subtle change of the accounting and it’s unclear why the Pentagon started the new category.