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The president of the United States wants you to die. He — along with his advisors, toadies, financial supporters, and minions — wants you gone, not just from the public sphere, where you might protest or vote or otherwise oppose him, but from this earth entirely. He would prefer you dead.

I don’t mean this as some sort of whiny hyperbole. It’s not a warning. This isn’t a metaphor. I’m being about as earnest and literal as I can be, and we all know how annoying that is. I’m looking at the policies this administration has enacted, and their likely effect on large swathes of humanity, both within this country and abroad. Here’s a quick rundown of the past year:

Whatever the stated reason for any of these moves — eliminating waste and fraud, expanding U.S. territory, providing some possibly illusory sense of security for U.S. interests — each one has the corollary effect of death. People have died and will die as a result of these decisions. Maybe a few, maybe a lot, maybe a whole lot. The latest measles epidemic has killed 3 people — so far. In 2025, 32 people died in ICE custody, the most since 2004, and that doesn’t count those who were not technically in ICE custody. Around 100 people died in the U.S. military’s Maduro-snatching effort in Venezuela; not all of them were combatants. Oh, look, here’s a Harvard study that says the USAID shutdown led to “hundreds of thousands of deaths” already.

All of these deaths were unnecessary, and none of them was accidental. Each was the result of a set of choices made by the president and his people, and each was predictable. When you erode trust in vaccines, communicable diseases spread. When you send ill-trained, ill-tempered agents to Minnesota or Chicago or Maine on ill-defined missions, they are going to wield violence carelessly. When you cut off HIV medication and food assistance, people die of AIDS, starvation, and malnutrition. No one should be surprised about any of this. When in a few years we see rates of heart disease start to spike because too many idiots are eating too much beef tallow, we should not raise an eyebrow. It’s the inevitable consequence.

The dead-simple question I want to ask, and that I want you to consider, is: Why?

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Before I go any further, let me first say that I hate writing about this. This situation that we — the people of the United States, not to mention the people of Earth — find ourselves in is the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen. Did you read that letter/text the president sent to Norway? I could feel my brain cells committing seppuku one by one as I strained to get through it. I would much rather be writing about butter or paper clips or fresh herbs, but instead I have to put out this analysis of why the president wants people to die. If you don’t like this, if you’d prefer I return to food, travel, and ersatz existentialism, blame that guy, not me.

Okay, so: Why does the president want people — almost certainly including you, {{first_name|dear subscriber}} — to die? We can simplify that question by asking another: Are the deaths the point, or do they serve another goal?

I used to think it was the latter. I used to hope it was the latter. The president and his people have so venerated the 1950s that I wondered if shrinking the population — through deaths and deportations — was their attempt to recreate that country, where in 1955 only 165 million people lived here, or less than half the present-day number. It’s horrific, but on some level understandable. Maybe this country was not meant to support 350 million people. Maybe we’ve become unwieldy, fundamentally inefficient. Trying to maintain the smoothly functioning nation of 70 years ago with twice as many people, and a hundred times as many complications, is insanity. Better (maybe!) to downsize, to adjust our ambitions. Though the MAGA crowd won’t like it, this would also reduce the country’s carbon footprint — fewer people, fewer cars, fewer cows. This isn’t just a right-wing fantasy; you see it in some sci-fi as well, where a sustainable future is one with less of us overall. It’s like a compromised post-apocalyptic scenario: Lots of people die, but not everyone, and what’s on the other end just makes more sense.

Of course, none of us want to be the ones killed for this imaginary future — and to get us back to 1955 population levels, that would require a whooooooole lot of killing. (And deporting. But mostly killing.) At the rate the current administration is killing and deporting people (and one must always be skeptical of the administration’s own claims), it would take about 66 years to shrink us down by half. As always, these schmucks are incompetent², even when it comes to murder.

Perhaps¹ they just want to ethnically cleanse the United States, ridding the nation of everyone who’s neither white nor Christian. That’s still an enormous number of people: about 140 million, give or take. They are not remotely on track to get rid of that many in the near future. It’s almost like no one takes Stephen Miller seriously!

With that in mind, I feel like the deaths cannot be serving some larger goal — the deaths are the goal, in and of themselves. The United States is not killing people because they’re brown, or Muslim, or so that oil and real-estate executives can make billions of dollars. (Those are just welcome side effects!) The United States is killing people simply because it can. And because it wants everyone to know that it can, and that no one can stop it. It will blow Venezuelan fishermen out of the water and shoot Minnesota moms in the face and strangle detainees in Texas and condemn faceless Africans to starvation, and so what? What are you, what is anyone, going to do about it? Write a letter? Throw water balloons? Dance in protest wearing a fox mask? They will kill you — us — to remind you that you are powerless. Each pointless death is the point. No one is targeted, no one is considered, no one is an individual with a set of circumstances, eyewitnesses, video evidence, and forensic testimony. We are all just bodies in waiting, corpses who have fooled ourselves into thinking our lives matter to the nation we still somehow love. Each one of us who falls is a warning, sure, to those who remain standing, but more important (to the administration goons doing the killing) is that when we’re dead, we’re gone — one less voice to mute, one less mail-in ballot, one less obstacle to their dream of total power.

This is all idiotic, and ultimately self-defeating, but it’s what we’re dealing with right now. For me, it clarifies things: There is no compromise you can make in the face of a power that would prefer you dead. We all must fight, in every way that we can, to expose their murderous hypocrisy — and to continue to exist in their faces and remind them of the hollowness of their ambitions and the poison they’ve accepted into their souls. We are living, breathing obstacles to their enshittified vision of the world, and each minor act of resistance, or at least noncompliance, is the kind of sabotage they just can’t bear. Don’t make it easy for them. Don’t die.

And remember this: They can’t kill all of us. I mean, they can kill a lot of us, but they can’t kill us all. They’re just not that good at it. 🪨🪨🪨