Donald Trump is talking again. That is usually a bad sign for everyone with ears. This time, he is talking about the war in Afghanistan. He says the NATO troops—the ones from places like the UK—didn't really fight. He says they stayed in the back. He says they were hiding in the shade while the Americans did all the hard work. This is coming from a guy who had 'bone spurs' when it was time to go to Vietnam. It is funny in a very dark and stupid way. He is the ultimate tough guy who never actually touched a gun. But he loves to tell everyone else they are cowards. It is his brand. It is what he does.

Then we have Keir Starmer. He is the Prime Minister of the UK. He looks like he was made in a factory that builds accountants. He is very upset. He says Trump is 'diminishing' the sacrifice of the troops. He is doing that thing where politicians stand very still and look very sad for the cameras. He is using the dead to make himself look like a big man. It is a classic move for a guy who has the charisma of a wet paper bag. When you have no real ideas for how to fix your own crumbling country, you just wrap yourself in the flag. You say the other guy is being mean to the heroes. It is cheap. It is easy. And it works on people who don't think too hard.

The war in Afghanistan lasted twenty years. Think about that for a second. Twenty years of blowing things up and building roads that just got blown up again. Twenty years of spending trillions of dollars that could have been used for literally anything else. What did we get for it? The Taliban is back in charge. They have all the same beards and all the same rules. The whole thing was a giant waste of life and money. It was a twenty-year long mistake that everyone agreed to keep making. But now, these two guys are fighting about who sat in the front seat of the car during the crash. It is like two kids fighting over a toy that is already broken and covered in dirt. It does not matter who was on the front line because the line was moving in the wrong direction the whole time.

Trump likes to pretend he is the only one who knows the truth. He thinks that by insulting the UK and other allies, he looks strong. He thinks his fans in the US will love him for saying 'America First' even when it comes to dying in a desert. He does not care about the facts. He does not care about the people who actually bled. To him, they are just props in a movie he is making about himself. He is a bully who thinks the world is a reality TV show. If you are not on his team, you are a loser. Even if you were the one actually carrying the heavy gear while he was playing golf.

On the other side, you have the UK political class. They are all 'horrified.' They are all 'disgusted.' They are lining up to say how much they love the military. These are the same people who cut veteran benefits and let old soldiers sleep on the streets. But the moment a loud-mouthed American says something mean, they become the biggest fans of the army. It is performative. It is a play. They are acting a part so they can look moral and grand. They don't actually care about the sacrifice. If they did, they would have stopped the war ten years earlier. They just like the way 'sacrifice' sounds in a speech. It makes them sound like they have a soul.

This is the state of our world. We have a guy who dodged the draft telling people they weren't brave enough. And we have a guy who never stood for anything in his life telling us he is the defender of honor. It is a race to the bottom. No one wins this argument. The soldiers who died are still dead. Their families are still sad. The country of Afghanistan is still a mess. And we are stuck in the middle, watching two groups of rich guys argue about who is more patriotic. It is exhausting. It is boring. It makes me want to go back to sleep and never wake up. Both sides are using the military like a shield to hide their own failures. Trump fails because he is a jerk who hates his friends. Starmer fails because he is a hollow suit who only knows how to react to things other people say. They are two sides of the same useless coin. And the coin is stuck in the mud.