The Lord Doesn’t Think About Anybody

Trump’s instinct is feudalism. The rest of us need to start thinking about each other.

“I don’t think about anybody.”

Donald Trump said this at a White House press gaggle on May 13, 2025, when a reporter asked directly whether the financial suffering of Americans factored into his thinking about the Iran war he had launched. He wasn’t caught off guard. He wasn’t misquoted. He was asked a simple question and gave a simple answer. The only thing that motivates him, he explained, is preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon. Everything else, the inflation, the food prices, the families choosing between electricity and groceries, doesn’t register. Not even a little bit.

He was, for once, being completely honest.

It would be easy to dismiss this as characteristic bluster, the kind of thing that gets clipped, shared, and forgotten by the next news cycle. But Trump has a habit of revealing himself most clearly when he thinks he’s making a different point entirely. What he described in that gaggle, a hierarchy in which the financial suffering of ordinary Americans doesn’t even register as a variable worth considering, is not an aberration. It is the operating system. And it is older than Trump by several centuries. The medieval term for it was feudalism. The people at the bottom were called serfs. The countries that existed to serve the lord’s interests were called vassal states. Trump, who once openly threatened to reduce Canada to exactly that status, appears to have built his entire worldview around a system he would have felt entirely at home in, provided, of course, that he was the one holding the title.

Start with the serfs.

In Arizona, food bank usage is up 42 percent. Nationally, SNAP enrollment has fallen below 40 million for the first time since 2020, not because hunger has declined, but because the administration has made the program harder to access and is now cutting $187 billion from it. The vehicle for those cuts is a piece of legislation called the One Big Beautiful Bill, which adds $4.5 trillion to the deficit while stripping food assistance from tens of millions of the poorest Americans. The Kraft Heinz CFO, on an earnings call, described the reduction in SNAP transactions as “down in line with expectations, if not even a little more than expected.” A corporation modeling the hunger of its customer base as a revenue line item, calmly, in front of investors.

In Cameron Parish, Louisiana, shrimpers who once put their children through college on a single boat now watch liquefied natural gas tankers move through waters where shrimp used to run. Their catch is roughly half what it was. Their energy bills are rising. The federal government’s own projections link LNG exports directly to higher domestic energy prices, simple supply and demand, American households competing with buyers in Berlin and Beijing for access to American gas. The profits load onto ships and leave. The costs stay.

In Lexington, Nebraska, 3,200 meatpacking workers are losing their jobs at a Tyson Foods plant while beef prices hit all-time highs. Four companies control roughly 90 percent of the American beef market. Economists and trade lawyers who have studied the industry describe a documented pattern of strategic plant closures used to suppress cattle prices while keeping beef prices elevated, a market so concentrated that the normal relationship between supply and demand has been severed. The town will not easily recover. There are no comparable employers within reach.

In New Mexico, the private equity firm Blackstone has applied to acquire PNM, the state’s largest public utility, in an $11.5 billion deal. Forty percent of PNM’s current customers already live below the poverty line. Nearly 40,000 households are behind on their utility bills. Former state regulators and energy lawyers who have reviewed the application describe a structure designed to pass the costs of Blackstone’s data center expansion onto ratepayers who cannot afford their current bills. More than 50 documents in the application have been designated confidential. The Public Regulation Commission that will decide the deal was converted from an elected body to a gubernatorial appointment two years ago.

These are not separate stories. They are the same story, told in different zip codes. In each case the mechanism is identical: common resources extracted, profits privatized, costs socialized, communities left to absorb consequences they had no voice in creating. The people at the bottom of the hierarchy pay. The people at the top collect. And the man at the top of the political hierarchy told us plainly, when asked, that he doesn’t think about any of it.

While this was happening, the President of the United States boarded Air Force One bound for Beijing. He brought no China experts, according to Brett Bruen, a former U.S. diplomat who noted the absence publicly. He brought CEOs. He brought his family. He posted on Truth Social during the flight about a tech executive’s invitation to the summit, reputation management at 30,000 feet, en route to a bilateral meeting with the second largest economy on earth. When Air Force One landed, Xi Jinping was not there. No senior Chinese officials were there. The American president was greeted by schoolchildren with flags. Earlier that same week, Xi had received Iran’s foreign minister with full ceremonial honors. Former ambassadors and protocol experts noted the downgrade immediately and without ambiguity; this was a message deliberately calibrated. Xi had read the situation correctly: this was not a head of state arriving to conduct geopolitics. This was a trade delegation, arriving to ask for things, and it was welcomed accordingly.

Ordinary Chinese citizens read it the same way. A taxi driver in Jinan, speaking to the New York Times, put it plainly: “The fact that he’s taking the initiative to visit China means that China can control him, right? It means that this trade war isn’t just unsuccessful for China, it means that the U.S. is also struggling.” A 74-year-old retiree in the same city offered a quieter observation: “Everyone wants a good life. Which ordinary person wants to fight? When you’re constantly at war, it’s the ordinary people who suffer.”

He had never heard of Cameron Parish. He understood the arithmetic perfectly.

The economics of empire are one thing. The enforcement mechanisms are another. Both begin with the same answer to the same question: who matters enough to protect, and who exists merely to be managed. At home, the answer comes through a budget. Abroad, it comes through a different kind of pressure entirely.

In Mexico, American intelligence and military operations have been conducted on sovereign territory in ways that have created a significant and documented diplomatic rupture. The factual record here is layered and requires some care, because official denials exist and are on the record. What is not in dispute: in Chihuahua, CIA operatives were present during a counter-cartel operation conducted without authorization from Mexico’s federal government. Mexico’s own attorney general confirmed the incident. President Claudia Sheinbaum acknowledged it was a violation of law. The Los Angeles Times, reporting a month before CNN picked up the story, documented that this was at least the third such operation this year, and that CIA operatives had been dressed in Chihuahua state police uniforms, not advising from a joint command center, but actively concealing their identity during operations on foreign soil.

When CNN reported the CIA had been involved in a car bombing that killed a cartel figure on a major highway outside Mexico City, the CIA called the reporting false and salacious. The New York Times offered a narrower counter-narrative: that the CIA had provided intelligence and planning support but was not physically present at the moment of the killing. A distinction involved in planning an assassination on foreign soil but not present at detonation makes for a fine line on which to rest a denial.

What requires no anonymous sources, no interpretive judgment, and no disputed claims is what happened next. Pete Hegseth sat before Congress in an open hearing and accepted congratulations from a colleague for having American military forces inside Mexico “for the first time.” He did not correct the premise, he elaborated on it, describing an “unprecedented amount of partnership” and adding: “We would encourage Defensa and Marina to continue where they can to partner and do more. That’s the expectation of the United States government, step up so that we don’t have to.” The gap between what Mexico’s government was saying publicly and what America’s Defense Secretary was saying on the record, in open session, before Congress, was not a gap at all. It was a demonstration of the hierarchy in practice. The vassal state doesn’t get to set the terms of the denial.

Austria recently scrambled Eurofighters on two consecutive days to intercept American special operations aircraft, likely U-28As operated by Air Force Special Operations Command, according to reporting in The War Zone, had entered its airspace without authorization. Not once, but twice. Austria is a NATO-adjacent neutral nation, not an adversary. These are not the habits of a power that considers its allies’ sovereignty a meaningful constraint. They are the habits of a power that has decided the rules apply to others.

Canada was supposed to be the vassal state. Trump said as much, openly, before his inauguration and repeatedly since. His National Security Strategy codified it; Canada lumped into the Western Hemisphere alongside Mexico and Latin America, subject to the same coercive economic nationalism, the same pressure to align strictly with American interests or face consequences. Kerry Buck, Canada’s former NATO ambassador, used the term without hesitation in a December 2025 analysis: vassal state, offering military protection only if Canada helps further American interests. Artur Wilczynski, a former intelligence officer, read the same document and saw a justification for political interference, the strategy’s explicit language about rewarding “government, political policies and movements broadly aligned with our principles” is, as he noted, a description of meddling in allied nations’ internal affairs. The tools of the feudal lord, updated for the 21st century.

It didn’t work. Mark Carney’s government has spent the intervening months doing what Canada’s former ambassador said was essential: diversifying, building new alliances, finding partners who don’t treat the relationship as tribute. When Carney told a room of business leaders that every country in the world, with one exception, is desperate to do more business with Canada, he wasn’t boasting. He was describing a strategy. The vassal refused the title. The lord is still waiting for the tribute that isn’t coming.

Which brings us back to the serfs.

Trump’s feudal worldview is not subtle. He has told us, in plain language, who he thinks about, and it is not Americans struggling with food prices, and not shrimpers watching their coastline industrialized for foreign profit, not meatpackers losing jobs in towns that will become ghost towns, and not utility customers who cannot keep their lights on. He thinks about the lords. The CEOs on Air Force One, billionaires whose tax cuts are financed by cutting food assistance to tens of millions of people. The investors whose returns are protected by a government that calls itself the people’s champion while modeling their hunger as a revenue line item.

The countries he calls vassals are the ones that haven’t yet submitted. The ones that have are called partners. Mexico tolerates CIA operations on its soil and receives partnership language from a Defense Secretary taking congressional bows. Canada refused and is building a future without him. The difference between a vassal and an ally, in this framework, is simply the degree of submission.

Here is what history records, reliably and without exception: feudalism ends.

In 1381, English peasants marched on London. They had been taxed to fund wars they had no stake in, watched their lords demand more while delivering less, and finally named what was being done to them. Wat Tyler led perhaps 100,000 people to the capital. The revolt was suppressed. Tyler was killed. The young king made promises he immediately broke. And yet the poll tax was abandoned, serfdom in England began its terminal decline, and the lords who believed they had won discovered over the following century that they had only postponed the inevitable. They won the battle. They lost the system.

In the 13th century, a collection of Swiss cantons found themselves effectively vassals of the Habsburg empire, required to pay tribute, required to defer, required to accept the terms the empire set. They did not storm Vienna. They did something quieter and more durable. They organized laterally, building obligations to each other rather than petitioning upward for better treatment from the lord. They created parallel structures of mutual support that made the Habsburg extractive relationship progressively less relevant. When the empire eventually sent an army, at Morgarten in 1315, it met people who had already decided they were no longer vassals and were willing to defend that decision. The Swiss Confederation that emerged was not built on a single dramatic uprising. It was built on the prior decision to stop waiting for the empire to become fair.

In 1776, a group of men who thought of themselves as freeborn English subjects sat down and wrote a document explaining why they would no longer pay tribute to a king who taxed them without their consent, quartered soldiers in their homes, and treated their complaints as sedition. They did not write that the king was unkind. They wrote a 27-count indictment, specific charge by specific charge, each grievance documented, each remedy implied. Thomas Jefferson understood that a vague complaint is easily absorbed and forgotten. A specific indictment creates a standard. It names what is owed. It records what was refused. It makes the refusal visible to everyone who comes after.

In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi walked 240 miles to the sea and made salt. The British Empire had made it illegal for Indians to produce or sell salt without paying a tax to the Crown, one of the clearer examples in history of a lord extracting tribute from a basic resource the people needed to survive. Gandhi’s march was nonviolent by strategy, not by naivety. He understood that the empire’s violence was its vulnerability. When colonial police beat unarmed marchers at Dharasana, the world watched. The empire discredited itself. The vassal did not need to match the lord’s force. The vassal needed the lord to reveal what it actually was.

None of these people were waiting for the system to fix itself. None of them were asking the lord to become more generous. They were doing something both simpler and more difficult: naming the system, counting themselves, and deciding that the arithmetic entitled them to something different. The arithmetic has not changed.

The most durable of these transformations did not come through violence. They came through something the Swiss understood instinctively and Gandhi understood strategically: that the most powerful thing a vassal can do is stop organizing their life around the lord’s terms. Build lateral and build local. Build relationships of mutual obligation that make the extractive relationship progressively irrelevant. Not a single dramatic confrontation, but a sustained, deliberate construction of something the lord cannot easily tax, cannot easily seize, and cannot easily destroy, because it belongs to everyone and to no one in particular.

In the parts of this series that follow, that is the tradition we intend to explore. Not the romance of uprising, but the harder and more lasting work of building structures that distribute power rather than concentrate it. The Swiss cantons did not petition the Habsburgs for better terms. They made the Habsburg terms irrelevant. That is the model. That is our work.

Trump told us he doesn’t think about anybody.

The question the rest of us need to sit with is whether we are thinking about each other.