Trump branded himself as the president who “never started any wars.” Yet nine months in, Europe and the Middle East are burning. Russia cuts cables, bankrolls terrorists, and dares NATO while Ukraine is told its survival is “Zelenskyy’s war.” Israel is leveling Gaza City while children starve. Edwin called them “Donald Trump’s wars,” joined at the hip with Putin and Netanyahu, and it’s hard to see it otherwise. A country that signals we don’t have your back to its allies isn’t keeping peace — it’s inviting catastrophe.
The same logic of violence plays out at home. A father in Chicago doesn’t survive a routine traffic stop, killed by ICE agents now flush with $170 billion and shielded by masks. “They will kill more people, they will cover it up, and America will reject them entirely,” Edwin warns, and the history of police abuse makes that feel less like speculation than inevitability. When a federal force is built to intimidate rather than protect, what’s left is state-sponsored fear.
That fear grows out of weakness, not strength. Trump is, as Susan put it, “underwater with every group but white people,” and his own choices are why — tariffs that gut farmers, hospitals collapsing, corruption disguised as policy. Americans don’t buy a president who switches sides in a war or one who treats power as a racket for himself. Watching J.D. Vance step into Charlie Kirk’s podcast from the White House doesn’t project stability; it looks like cosplay to fill the vacuum of a declining leader.
And yet the dangers remain explosive. The Epstein files inch toward release, a shadow Trump can’t shake, while Gaza shows him “guilty as Bibi Netanyahu” in exporting human misery. What hangs over every piece of this presidency is desperation —alliances traded for leverage, institutions bent to protect him, violence normalized as policy. The conversation between Susan and Edwin makes the stakes clear. Tune in, because weakness in the Oval Office is costing lives everywhere.