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.
