TRUMP SHRUGS AND SAYS SHIT HAPPENS BECAUSE HE THINKS SHIT HAPPENING WOULD BE FINE FOR HIM

This passage from Time magazine's cover story on President Trump and the war in Iran is getting a lot of attention:

Asked whether Americans should be worried about retaliatory attacks at home, Trump acknowledges the possibility. “I guess,” he says. “But I think they’re worried about that all the time. We think about it all the time. We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die."

First, I want to draw your attention to "But I think [Americans are] worried about that all the time." I live in Manhattan. I lived here on 9/11. The vast majority of my fellow New Yorkers aren't "worried about that all the time." We know the risks, and we know they haven't gone away. We know, for instance, that an ISIS-inspired terrorist drove a pickup truck into cylists and runners back in 2017, killing eight of them. Terrorism happens, and we know our city is a much more likely target than the outer-ring suburbs and rural communities where Trump supporters tend to live. But we get on with our lives. We're not perpetually fearful. It's Trumpers who are obsessed with terrorism fears and the fear of "sleeper cells."

🚨 THIS IS INSANE: Democrats have ONCE AGAIN voted to KEEP DHS CLOSED, despite the highly elevated terror threat by Iranian sleeper cells in the United States

Democrats DO NOT CARE about the safety of you and your family.

It’s ALL about political power.

STOP VOTING DEMOCRAT! pic.twitter.com/LFU5HrsSVy

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) March 5, 2026

🚨 BREAKING: US Senate REJECTS effort to reopen the Department of Homeland Security in a 51-45 vote, despite an ACTIVE threat of terrorist sleeper cells amid conflict with Iran

John Fetterman joined Republicans voting YEA

Chuck Schumer and the Democrats are TRAITORS and must… pic.twitter.com/g6lEnSyXeJ

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) March 5, 2026

Which gets us to the calculation Trump has made. We know he's a narcissist who doesn't care about other people's deaths unless he thinks he can leverage them for his own purposes. So his administration has waved Charlie Kirk's bloody shirt ever since the bigoted podcaster was killed -- but if you're a servicemember who's a casualty of this war, Trump doesn't want to talk about you.

I don't know whether he'll want to talk about any victims of terrorism on U.S. soil. Other Republicans obviously will -- they'll want to blame the casualties on Democrats, even if Homeland Security funding has been restored. But Trump might just want to shrug the deaths off the way he's shrugging them off here, and the way he's shrugging off the deaths of servicemembers now.

But in any case, he thinks he can avoid blame, either by persuading us (or at least the Republican voter base) that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, shit happens, or by leveraging the deaths to stir up outrage. It's certainly worked for Republican presidents in the past.

The Republican voter base will be enthusiastically on Trump's side if there's a terror attack here. I don't think he should assume that the rest of America will feel the same. Most Americans despise the war, according to nearly all polling on the subject.

Many politicians make cynical calculations about life-and-death issues, but I think Trump cares less than any other president we've had about the lives lost as the result of his actions. He's gambling that civilian deaths won't lower his poll numbers. That's pretty much all he cares about.