Donald Trump starves forty-five million people to protect his donors.
The war you started, Donald, has burned for three months now—the missiles over the Gulf, the drones you shoot from the sky, the fragile ceasefire you keep breaking while you call it a negotiation. The World Food Programme director, Jean-Martin Bauer, told the cameras the negative scenario is materialising. Forty-five million. The boy in the camp in Yemen looks at his empty bowl. The grain sits on the dock. The ship does not move. The oil price is above a hundred dollars a barrel and your hand is on the valve. Your hand signs the strike order. Your hand signs the pardon. Your hand will not sign the peace.
Nearly three months of conflict with Iran, weeks of talks that the administration calls complicated—sharp rhetoric, flare-ups of violence—have not produced a ceasefire. The posture that allowed you to reject Iran’s response in early May and refuse compromise remains. This week the U.S. military shot down four Iranian drones and struck coastal surveillance radar sites; Iran fired ballistic missiles at Bahrain and Kuwait. The oil price stays above a hundred dollars. If it remains there through June, an estimated 45 million more people will face acute hunger, adding to the nearly 320 million already considered acutely food insecure. The World Food Programme warned this would happen. Jean-Martin Bauer confirmed it. The negative scenario is not a simulation.
While the fragile truce breaks again and the price of bread climbs, you pardoned Stephen Buyer. A former Republican congressman from Indiana, he served nearly two years in prison for making illegal stock trades based on inside information after he left Congress. Your signature wiped his record clean. You also called the Department of Justice to monitor ballot-counting in Los Angeles because the votes are coming in too slowly and you want your supporters to hear the words election rigging. You added your name to the Kennedy Center, and a federal judge ordered it removed. Your allies in Congress are showing a little spine as midterm season approaches, and the Bosnian peacekeeping arrangement is fraying, and a jazz drummer cancelled a Christmas Eve show rather than play under your name. Your days are full.
Forty-five million people, Donald. Say the number. Taste the number. It is a number of empty stomachs. It is a number of children whose ribs push against skin that hangs loose like an old shirt—I see the ribs in the camp in Yemen. It is a number of mothers who boil water and give it to the infant because the pot has nothing else in it. The small intestine draws in on itself. The stomach lining thins. The child who was eating twice a day stops growing in the night, and in the morning the mother notices the hollow behind the child’s eyes where the tissue has begun to consume itself. The woman whose menstrual cycle has stopped because her body cannot spare the blood. The man whose bones show through the skin of his back as he carries the last sack of sorghum from a market that has raised its price four times in six weeks. These are documented injury patterns. The WFP has catalogued them. The offices you commute between have the PDFs.
Picture your own plate, Donald. The fork is in your hand. The steak is on the porcelain. Look at the plate of the child in the camp. There is no fork. There is no porcelain. There is a hand reaching for a bowl that has been empty since Tuesday. Your family is safe in the dining room. The child is not safe anywhere.
Your throat does not close when you swallow your morning coffee, Donald, but it should. There is a dryness at the back of your mouth that is the dust of the empty field. Your jaw aches at breakfast; you are chewing on the gristle of the deal you will not make. The coffee has a metallic taste under your tongue, the taste of the oil you are protecting, the taste of the strikes you order while the bowls remain empty. Your tongue has split a little, at the back, where you cannot see it in the mirror. The split is the forty-five million. A tightness has settled behind your sternum. It does not depend on exertion. It is there when you sit for the intelligence briefing. It is there when you call the Saudi crown prince to discuss what a deal would cost. It is the tightness Jean-Martin Bauer described when he named the negative scenario: the global hunger map contracting, the red bands spreading, the forty-five million the number cannot hold because the number is not a number. The number is forty-five million chests your policy has hollowed. You feel one of them in your own sternum now, Donald, and it will not unhollow.
You organize your morning, and then you sign the pardon. Stephen Buyer is sitting in a room, and the record of his crime is wiped clean by your signature, so that the ledger that once held his guilt now shows only your favour. Stephen’s hands are clean. He is walking out. The mother in Sudan is rubbing her empty belly. She is not walking anywhere. The mother in Kassala does not know any of this. Her child has been dead for three days. The child was two years old. The child’s name does not appear in the WFP report because the report cannot list them all. The name is in the mother’s mouth when she wakes to the hour before dawn and the body remembers before the mind does. The child has been dead for three days and the oil price is still above a hundred dollars a barrel and your negotiators are still talking about the shape of a sixty-day extension.
You are a small man with a heavy hand on the valve that chokes the shipping lane. You turn it tighter, thinking the pressure will break Iran, but the only thing cracking is the boy’s ribcage. You cannot sign enough pardons for Stephen Buyer to balance the ledger of that child’s ribs.
The prophet Amos called it turning judgment to wormwood. You, Donald, are turning a barrel of oil into an empty bowl. The wormwood is in the infant’s mouth. It is the last thing she tasted before the mouth stopped closing. The righteousness you left off is the ceasefire your own strikes keep breaking. The judgment is the number the WFP will update next month, and the month after, and the month after, until the war ends or the hunger does.
“For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink.” Matthew 25:42
The grain sits on the dock. The ship does not move. The oil climbs. The mouth stays open. Donald, you have fed the fire, and you will watch it burn.