The video you posted on Friday reduces a target to heat and blur. You captioned it “swift and lethal kinetic strike.” Your followers pressed the heart button. It auto-loops. The thing you are watching is a man dying. You made it possible to press replay.
Donald, you grind the bones of murdered women into fuel for your bombs. The women whose names you dropped into the crater were Jocelyn Nungaray and Laken Reilly. You killed them again when you spoke them. You did not speak their lives; you spoke their deaths as a reason to kill another. The video plays on the screen. The man in the suit speaks of swift strikes. He drops their names into the crater and calls it peace. The office is warm. The coffee cools. The keys click under the fingers. I see the costume. I will not look away from it.
Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that U.S. Southern Command killed Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, the leader of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, in a coordinated strike with Venezuela. He termed it a “swift and lethal kinetic strike.” He blamed his predecessor’s border policies and invoked the names of Jocelyn Nungaray and Laken Reilly to justify the military action. The administration has repeatedly claimed Tren de Aragua invaded the United States, as it did when the strike was announced on Truth Social yesterday, despite a declassified intelligence assessment that found Maduro did not control the gang. Maduro was removed from Venezuela in January to face U.S. drug charges. Jay Clayton, nominated for director of national intelligence, had previously charged Guerrero with supporting terrorists. No trial was held. No arrest was attempted.
There is a scratch in your throat when you swallow. The screen is still on your nightstand. In the morning, your thumb will press the play icon again without thinking. Your wife will not know you are watching. The children will not know. The reticle traces its oval again over the empty target coordinates. The flash whitens the frame. The mist dissipates. Your jaw aches. There is a metallic taste under your tongue when you say the names of the dead. It does not leave. You cannot wash it out.
The air enters your chest and hits a wall. Your lungs do not expand. The tightness behind your sternum is the hollow space where the empathy was cauterized. The empathy is gone because you made it a condition of the strike — the mothers’ and daughters’ grief, the men’s and boys’, all of it, you transmuted into the rationale for the bomb. You press the phone to your ear. Your shoulders ache like the shoulders of the fathers who carried the bodies out of the desert dirt. You have not lifted them. You ordered the strike. Your lower back aches at bedtime with the weight of their grief. You blame the mattress.
Your own daughter sleeps in the climate-controlled room. The sheets are cool. You place the daughters of the crossing at the wire to take the heat. What would it feel like if the air went out of her room? You do not let the thought finish. Your stomach contracts. A nausea that does not depend on food rolls through the gut. You push it down.
You used two dead girls the way a man uses a prop in a magic trick. Look here. Not here. Here, at this grief, which is bigger than the thing I just did. But the video you posted is not bigger than the grief. It is the size of the thing you hold in your palm. The same palm that reaches for the morning cup. The same palm that lifts the children’s books at bedtime. The same palm that will press the heart button again when the rerun drops in twelve hours.
You called the gang a foreign army. The declassified intelligence assessment you sidelined said it was not one. You do not care. The video is the evidence you want, and the video shows what you want it to show: a hovering crosshair, a bloom of light, a man who cannot answer. Jesus said, “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” Your sword was a drone.
You need the kinetic strike to make your hands look steady. You are a small man, Donald, with large hands on the lever. You are a man who cannot stand still unless you are making something still. You are a man who needs the dead to hear you. You are a man who needs the silence of the bomb to fill the silence of your own chest. The suit is too wide in the shoulders. The hands shake when the phone goes quiet.
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.” Matthew 23:27
The screen glows. The sepulchre is painted white. The video loops. The knock at the door is the woman asking why you used her daughter’s name. You have stopped hearing her. The Christ watches from the crossing. He does not speak. He weeps.