By John & Nisha Whitehead
July 21,
2026
“If you kill Americans, if you threaten
Americans anywhere on Earth, we will hunt you down without
apology and without hesitation and we
will kill you.”— Secretary of War Pete
Hegseth
Having burned through billions of dollars and
depleted critical munitions stockpiles, the
Pentagon is running out of money.
Our
money.
According to the Washington Post, the
Pentagon is facing an urgent budget shortfall caused largely
by the Iran war, with some critical funding accounts
expected to run dry within weeks. Training, maintenance and
other military priorities are reportedly being squeezed as
the government struggles to sustain Trump’s escalating
conflict.
Once again, the government is looking to the
American people for a taxpayer-funded bailout—this time to
the tune of $67
billion.
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Nor is the $67 billion emergency infusion
the end of it.
Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget calls
for an unprecedented $1.5 trillion in national-defense
spending—a staggering increase that would pour still more
money into a military apparatus that cannot account honestly
for the costs of its current war, maintain its existing
priorities, or keep from returning to taxpayers for another
bailout.
The problem is not simply how much the war
machine consumes. It is how little accountability
accompanies that spending.
The government can launch a
war, exhaust military resources, conceal its full costs, and
return to Congress for billions more without anyone
responsible being required to admit error, change course, or
answer for the lives lost.
That is becoming a familiar
pattern under Donald Trump.
He makes the
decisions—others absorb the consequences.
He
launches the war—the troops make the sacrifices, and
taxpayers inherit the bill.
The Iran war is not merely
another example of government waste, although the cost is
already staggering. The war has already cost an estimated $80
to $100 billion, not counting its long-term economic
impact, future veteran expenses, or the cost of repairing
damaged military bases. Analysts estimate that the broader
toll on American households could
eventually reach as much as $1,000 per
household.
Yet the true cost cannot be measured in
dollars alone.
American service members are dying in a
war Trump started without meaningful congressional
authorization, without a credible plan for ending it, and
without an honest accounting of what it will cost.
The
Pentagon is draining resources from training, maintenance
and weapons programs to keep the conflict going. Congress is
being asked to supply billions more. And the American
people—already struggling under the weight of debt,
inflation and economic uncertainty—are expected to pay
without question.
This is government without
accountability.
It is also the Trump business model
applied to government: take the risks, claim the credit,
transfer the losses and leave someone else to clean up the
wreckage.
Trump has spent a lifetime marketing himself
as a brilliant businessman, yet his record
is littered with bankruptcies, defaults, failed ventures and
losses shifted onto others.
In private business, a
failed venture can be abandoned and its consequences
transferred.
A president’s failures are not so
easily contained, yet Trump continues to govern as though
America were merely another disposable business
venture.
And when Trump’s own decisions cost
American lives, deplete military stockpiles and burn through
billions of taxpayer dollars, the bill never finds its way
to him.
It finds its way to us.
Yet the contrast
between those who make these decisions and those forced to
live with them could hardly be more stark.
While
American service members are being returned home in
flag-draped coffins, Trump
moves from golf courses to galas to grand
spectacles.
While the Pentagon scrambles
to find the money and munitions, Trump lavishes
attention on the trappings of power, from gilded
alterations to the people’s house to extravagant
ceremonial projects.
While ordinary
Americans struggle with inflation, instability and the
cascading costs of his policies, Trump presides over the
pageantry of the presidency seemingly untouched by the
consequences.
And while the American people are told
to sacrifice, Trump’s family continues converting access
to presidential power into extraordinary
private wealth.
Trump reported more than $1.4
billion in income from his family’s cryptocurrency
ventures in 2025, while Reuters calculated that the
family added at least $2.3 billion to its fortune through
its principal crypto businesses after Trump returned to
the presidency.
The problem is not merely one of
appearances.
It is that Trump remains conspicuously
insulated from the human and financial consequences of his
own decisions.
That insulation from consequence is
matched by a swaggering display of bluster and bravado that
passes for leadership within the Trump
administration.
Take Pete Hegseth, the self-styled
“Secretary of War,” who speaks less like a civilian
entrusted with the grave responsibility of war and peace
than a character delivering an action-movie
threat.
“If you kill Americans, we
will hunt you down,” Hegseth warned.
The Trump
administration has embraced that threat as a statement
of national resolve: anyone who kills an American will be
hunted down and made to pay.
Unless, of course, the
Americans are killed by their own government.
Unless
they are service members sent to die in a preemptive war the
president started without constitutional authority and
cannot seem to end.
Unless they are shot
by immigration agents or police officers conditioned to
treat fear, resistance and the mere presence of a weapon as
a license to kill.
Unless they die
in government custody.
Unless they become casualties
of public-health safeguards weakened by mass firings, budget
cuts, political interference and administrative
incompetence.
In those cases, no one is hunted
down, no one in power is made to pay, and no one is held
responsible.
This is the double standard that passes
for justice in the American Police State.
Yet this
culture of official impunity did not begin with Donald
Trump.
For decades, presidents of both parties have
expanded executive power, surrendered constitutional checks,
protected government agents from meaningful accountability
and conditioned the public to accept official violence as
the unavoidable price of security.
Trump inherited
that machinery.
He has also embraced its deadliest
powers, accelerated its abuses and made
the elimination of accountability a governing
principle.
The Iran war is merely the latest—and
most visible—example.
American service members are
dying in a war that is not making America safer, no matter
what Trump insists to the contrary.
Seventeen American
service members have reportedly been killed
in the war, while more than 400
have been injured. Rather than treating those deaths as
evidence of the terrible costs and strategic failures of his
war, Trump has used them to justify further escalation,
warning that Iran will “pay many times over” for every
American life lost.
This is how endless wars become
unending.
Every American death becomes a reason to
continue the war that caused it. Every retaliation generates
another retaliation. Every escalation becomes the excuse for
another escalation. Every failure is rebranded as a reason
to stay the course.
The president starts the war. The
military carries it out. American service members die in it.
And the public is told that questioning the wisdom or
legality of the conflict is tantamount to betraying the
troops.
This is not a strategy for peace.
It is
a self-perpetuating cycle of death, vengeance and political
evasion.
Trump’s response to the mounting casualties
has not been restraint, transparency or a serious accounting
of how the country became trapped in another Middle Eastern
war.
It has been more threats, more bombs, more
chest-beating and more demands that the American people fall
in line—and not even a glimmer of ownership for the
mistakes that landed us here.
Meanwhile, the dead
become justification for still more death.
The
failures become justification for still more
money.
And those who made the decisions remain
insulated from the consequences.
Yet the Iran war is
only one front in the government’s longstanding war on
accountability.
The same culture of impunity that
shields presidents from responsibility for unconstitutional
wars also protects government agents from meaningful
scrutiny when raids, detentions and uses of force result in
injury or death.
Nowhere is that more visible than in
the Trump administration’s increasingly militarized
approach to immigration enforcement.
Federal
immigration agents carry out raids in masks, tactical gear
and unmarked vehicles. They detain people at homes,
workplaces, traffic stops and routine immigration
appointments. Record numbers of people are being arrested
and warehoused in detention centers, many of them with no
criminal history.
The Trump administration calls this
law enforcement.
But law enforcement without
transparency, restraint or accountability quickly becomes
something far more dangerous.
In recent weeks, ICE
agents have fatally
shot men in Texas and Maine, prompting senators to
demand body cameras, visible identification, clearer
use-of-force rules and greater transparency about who is
being entrusted with the power to kill.
Both men were
reportedly shot in their vehicles. Neither
was the intended target of the enforcement action.
Neither encounter was captured on an officer’s body
camera.
A temporary pause in ICE traffic stops
reportedly lasted
only one day before the White House intervened and
ordered the operations resumed.
That is the Trump
administration’s idea of accountability: pause briefly,
manage the fallout, and then allow the machinery to continue
operating as before.
There is no meaningful
independent review.
There is no public accounting of
what went wrong.
There is no assurance that deadly
force will be treated as a last resort rather than an
acceptable consequence of aggressive
enforcement.
Instead, the government investigates
itself, controls the evidence, shapes the official
narrative, and moves on.
The government kills. The
government investigates. The government absolves
itself.
This is not unique to immigration
enforcement.
The same pattern has defined policing in
America for decades.
Police officers are trained to
perceive threats everywhere and to treat their subjective
fear as more important than the objective constitutional
rights of the people they serve.
Reach for your wallet
and you may be shot. Hold a cellphone and you may be shot.
Fail to obey confusing or contradictory commands quickly
enough and you may be shot.
Possess a firearm—even
lawfully—and the government may argue that the exercise of
your Second Amendment rights made you sufficiently dangerous
to kill. Then the legal system steps in to prevent a jury
from ever weighing what happened.
Qualified immunity,
judicial deference and doctrines that elevate “officer
safety” above almost every competing constitutional
consideration have helped create a system in which
government agents can use deadly force and avoid meaningful
scrutiny afterward.
Trump did not create this
system.
Police militarization, qualified immunity,
aggressive federal enforcement and institutional
self-protection were firmly entrenched long before he
returned to office.
What Trump has done is intensify
those tendencies, remove restraints, reward aggression and
treat demands for accountability as attacks on law
enforcement itself.
The result is a system in which
the greater the government’s power, the smaller the
consequences for its abuse.
The police state does not
have to pull a trigger to put lives at risk.
It can
also endanger the public by weakening the safeguards
designed to prevent avoidable harm.
Public-health
agencies, food inspectors, disease-surveillance programs,
medical researchers and drug-safety personnel exist because
failures in these areas can have deadly
consequences.
When those protections are weakened,
risks increase. When expertise is driven out, warnings are
missed. When oversight disappears, preventable crises become
more likely.
The Trump administration’s mass
firings, funding cuts and political interference have
hollowed out critical public-health and food-safety
agencies.
The Food and Drug Administration reportedly
lost thousands of employees in 2025 and hundreds more in
2026. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the
Food Safety and Inspection Service and other agencies
responsible for protecting the public have also undergone
substantial staffing reductions. Foreign food-facility
inspections have fallen to historic lows following layoffs
and budget cuts, even as the American food supply becomes
more global, complex and difficult to monitor. Programs that
track and respond to emerging disease threats have also been
scaled back.
These are not abstract bureaucratic
changes.
They determine whether contaminated food and
unsafe drugs are identified before people are harmed,
whether emerging diseases are contained before they spread,
and whether qualified experts are available before a
manageable threat becomes a national crisis.
No
government can eliminate every danger or prevent every
death, but when an administration knowingly strips away
safeguards, disregards expert warnings and replaces
competence with loyalty, it cannot pretend that the
resulting harm has nothing to do with its
decisions.
Accountability requires recognizing that
policy choices have foreseeable consequences—and asking
who ordered the cuts, ignored the warnings, benefited from
dismantling oversight and will answer when the public is
harmed.
Yet when those consequences arrive, no one in
power accepts responsibility. The victims and their families
are left to absorb the consequences, while the officials who
made the decisions retreat behind bureaucracy, immunity and
plausible deniability.
The same machinery of official
impunity operates across administrations and
agencies.
What distinguishes Trump is the speed with
which his administration has dismantled remaining
safeguards, dismissed expertise and treated accountability
as an obstacle to power.
The pattern is the same
whether the harm occurs on a battlefield, during an
immigration raid, in a police encounter or through the
failure of an institution charged with protecting the
public.
Those with power make the decisions. Those
without power bear the consequences.
This is how
official impunity becomes a system of
government.
Presidents claim immunity. Congress
surrenders its constitutional responsibilities. Military
officials classify their mistakes. Federal agencies
investigate themselves. Police officers invoke qualified
immunity. Prosecutors protect government agents. Courts keep
juries from weighing the evidence. Corporations profit from
government contracts. Officials leave public service for
lucrative private-sector positions with the very industries
they once oversaw.
Taxpayers pay every settlement,
bailout, reconstruction cost and replenishment
bill.
The names and political parties change. The
machinery of impunity remains.
What distinguishes
Trump is not that he created this machinery but the
brazenness with which he uses it. He treats oversight as
obstruction, criticism as disloyalty, constitutional
restraints as inconveniences, and public office as a vehicle
for private power and profit.
Under Trump, the buck
stops nowhere.
Every consequence is transferred to
someone else.
No one in power pays a personal price.
No one admits fault. No one resigns. No one is prosecuted.
No one is held accountable.
Instead, the public is
told to move on. The policies continue. The machinery rolls
forward.
This is how temporary abuses become permanent
powers.
It is how republics become empires. It is how
elected public servants become rulers who answer to no one.
And it is how a government learns that it can inflict
enormous harm without ever being required to pay a
price.
Trump and Hegseth insist that anyone who kills
an American will be hunted down and made to pay.
Yet
who demands accountability when the decisions that cost
American lives originate in the White House?
Who
answers for the service members sent to die in an
unconstitutional war launched without meaningful public
debate or congressional authorization? Who answers for those
who die during immigration raids, police encounters or
government detention? Who answers when those in power enrich
themselves while everyone else is left to bear the danger,
instability and cost?
In the American Police State,
the answer is almost always the same: Those in power are
protected. Those without power bear the
consequences.
The government operates above the law.
Those who wield power become untouchable. Those who suffer
are treated as disposable. Justice becomes whatever the
government says it is.
And the machinery of government
moves on without accountability.
As I make clear in my
book Battlefield
America: The War on the American People and its
fictional counterpart The
Erik Blair Diaries, that is how the American Police
State gets away with murder.
WC:
2605
Constitutional attorney and author John W.
Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford
Institute. His latest books The
Erik Blair Diaries and Battlefield
America: The War on the American People are
available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at
johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive
Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The
Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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