There is a particular stench that rises off an administration when the walls start closing in, a sour, metallic odor of panic disguised as strength. And nowhere is that stench more pungent than in the Trump administration’s latest catastrophe: Operation Southern Spear, a military escalation in the Caribbean so reckless, so grotesquely disproportionate, that even calling it “policy” feels like affording it too much dignity...
The facts, as reported, are damning enough:
More than 20 U.S. strikes against 21 vessels.
At least 80 people dead, and counting.
Some “suspected smugglers,” yes, but countless others with no ability to defend themselves, no warning, no due process.
Fifteen thousand U.S. troops deployed.
The USS Gerald R. Ford steaming toward an island chain that never declared war on us.
This isn’t interdiction.
This isn’t law enforcement.
This isn’t even geopolitics.
This is bomb-first, justify-later militarism, the kind Pete Hegseth salivates over on TV, and Donald Trump deploys whenever he needs a convenient plume of smoke to hide his own moral fires.
And make no mistake: he needs this one.
Epstein.
Epstein.
Epstein.
The Epstein scandal is gnawing its way through the last flimsy curtains protecting Trump from the truth about himself, and, more importantly, from the truth about his base. The sordid headlines, the resurfaced photos, the whispered testimony: none of it plays well with the “family values” crowd. They’ll forgive the lies, the riots, the fascism, the starvation policies, but dragging the Epstein corpse back onto the stage threatens the one idol they cannot lose: the illusion of moral superiority.
So what do tyrants do when scandal looms?
They bomb something.
And they pray the American people, or at least the MAGA faithful, are hypnotized by the spectacle.
Enter Hegseth the Warmonger, Trump the Escape Artist
Hegseth stood there like a cowboy on borrowed courage, announcing the strikes with a grin that betrayed exactly zero regard for the human beings in the blast radius. He spoke of “combatants,” “targets,” and “decisive action,” as though he were briefing a war the American people had actually signed off on.
But narcotics traffickers aren’t sovereign nations.
Unarmed families on fishing boats aren’t enemy combatants.
And the Caribbean is not, despite the fantasies of the Trump administration, a war zone.
To expand the definition of “threat” until it includes anyone within missile range is to erase the most basic principle of justice: due process.
Trump’s regime is not simply cutting legal corners.
It is grinding the entire concept of law beneath the treads of an aircraft carrier.
This is how dictatorships behave:
Bomb first, lie in prime time, blame the dead.
Collateral Damage Isn’t a Footnote, It’s the Point
When a government chooses to bomb vessels without identification, without verification, and without the slightest acknowledgement of civilian presence, it’s not “collateral damage.”
It’s policy by indifference.
And in that indifference, innocent men, women, and children disappear into the sea.
Not because they posed a threat.
Not because they were smugglers.
But because the Trump administration needed footage,explosions, plumes, the performing of power, to splash across a cable news cycle poisoned by its own scandals.
Epstein.
Epstein.
Epstein.
The Caribbean becomes a cinematic backdrop.
Human beings become props.
War becomes content.
This is not leadership.
It is not strategy.
It is a distraction dressed in camouflage, staged by men who confuse strength with cruelty and patriotism with the sound of missiles hitting the water.
A New Doctrine: Violence as Messaging
The military buildup underway in the region, the largest since the Cold War, isn’t just excessive. It’s revelatory.
It reveals a government that prefers war to questions.
Spectacle to accountability.
Bombs to truth.
It reveals the ease with which Trump and his circle weaponize the Pentagon for domestic political gain, turning soldiers into chess pieces and foreign civilians into afterthoughts.
It reveals the return of an old American sickness:
When the President feels cornered, the rest of the world pays the price.
The “Southern Spear” is not pointed at drug traffickers.
It is pointed at us, at our complacency, our exhaustion, our willingness to let a corrupt man use war as deodorant for scandal.
War Is Not a Distraction, It’s a Crime
Let’s call this what it is:
A reckless, unauthorized, morally bankrupt military operation
waged in the name of political survival
at the expense of human life.
And let’s ask an honest question:
Who benefits?
Certainly not the Caribbean.
Certainly not the families who now fear the sky.
Certainly not the American people.
The only winner is a cornered authoritarian who has always believed that violence, or at least the performance of it, can keep his base loyal, fearful, angry, and blind.
War, for Trump, is not a tool of statecraft.
It is an opiate.
A show.
A shield.
Epstein.
Epstein.
Epstein.
And the bodies in the water are just the cost of the ticket.
We Must Not Look Away
The bombs falling in the Caribbean today will echo far into our future.
They echo in the normalization of militarized foreign policy without oversight.
They echo in the quiet acceptance of civilian casualties as background noise.
They echo in the dangerous precedent that an American president can wage war to save himself from scandal, and get away with it.
This moment demands clarity:
War is not a distraction.
War is a crime when wielded for political survival.
And the Trump administration is committing that crime in real time.
If we don’t condemn it now, loudly and without nuance, then we have already surrendered the moral muscle democracy needs to survive.
And we will deserve the silence that follows.
— Michael Jochum
Michael Jochum is a writer and musician reflecting on art, politics, and the human condition. Find him on Facebook.
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