CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

“I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” Redux

Photo by Sebastian Enrique

“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.” – President Donald J. Trump, May 2026

“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.”

– President Donald J. Trump, May 2026

Trump is Melania without the olive-green Zara jacket[1]: He cares about nothing. When asked about rising gas prices in March, he responded, “If they rise, they rise. I don’t have any concern about it.” Asked about the suspension of “peace” talks with Iran in June, he said, “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less.” In December 2025, at a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he stated that “I’m not concerned about anything that Israel is doing” in Gaza. On May 27th, he announced, “I don’t care about the midterms.” Trump’s promiscuous indifference is exceeded only by the pathological know-nothingism he deploys to evade responsibility for his crimes.

What Trump does care about is personal aggrandizement. He cannot refrain from talking about his ballroom, his triumphal arch, his reflecting “pond,” his delusional “extreme intelligence,” and ultimately himself. In his own eyes, he sees himself as a master builder – after all, it’s in his genes, an expression of his “stable genius.” A deluded modern-day Ramesses II, he erects monuments to himself, plastering his face and name everywhere, from the Kennedy Center to $1 coins and $250 commemorative bills. In his second term, Trump’s scowling face now drapes down from banners on three federal buildings (Labor, Justice, and Agriculture) that represent institutions degraded in his wake. His face will soon adorn “limited-edition” U.S. passports, though, to borrow Mr. T’s favorite phrase, one pities the fool who applies for one and advertises their idolatry – and idiocy – to the world for the next ten years. Then again, if the SAVE Act passes, possessing one may be a strategic move on their part to ensure that, come November, they are not disenfranchised at the midterms, assuming, of course, there are any.

Trump’s indifference and the destruction it has wrought is criminal in scope. He does not care that his policies, including the dismantling of USAID and the closure of the CDC’s advisory committee on infectious diseases will result in tens of millions of deaths worldwide, and perhaps usher in another pandemic during which our know-it-all president once again recommends bleach as a cure.

What is more tragic is that we have let Trump’s self-professed indifference go as far as it has while we try to pinpoint its cause. However, whether Trump is insane, the paranoid Captain Queeg of our Ship of State, a demented narcissist, or simply incompetent is a determination best left to mental health experts, hundreds of whom have already signed petitions alerting us to his mental instability.

Whatever his mental state, we know with certainty that he is an adjudicated criminal. He has broken, and continues to break, the law – both in and out of office – without facing any real consequences for his transgressions, which include sexual assault, 34 felonies, possible war crimes in Venezuela and Iran, and complicity in Israeli’s war crimes and genocide in Gaza. Whether these actions see him confined to a psychiatric facility or a federal prison is beside the point. Whatever the ultimate site of his confinement, he must be held accountable, something those who operate within the system refuse to do.

Even more disturbing Trump’s behavior has exposed the systemic indifference that defines our republic – an indifference to corruption historically obscured by a national hagiography that existed long before he took office, twice. It is the same indifference that allowed Harry S. Truman to nuke Japan, not once but twice (possibly serving as a precedent for Trump’s genocidal threats against Iran), that shrugged off George W. Bush’s crusade against Iraq and Afghanistan, that turned a blind eye to Obama’s drone strikes, and that ensured that virtually none of the Wall Street executives responsible for the 2008 financial crisis spent a single night in prison. The result: a kind of fait accompli fatalism in which the Department of Justice can argue that Trump can tear down the East Wing – and the Statue of Liberty – on a whim........

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