Six months. That is how long Donald Trump has been launching America’s long-range missiles and interceptors at Iran in a war of choice that nobody voted for, nobody asked for, and nobody can explain the endgame of. Now the shelves are looking thin, and the man who emptied them went on television Tuesday morning to point at Joe Biden.
“They talk about munitions, and we’re fine with munitions, we’re fine,” Trump told Real America’s Voice, before immediately contradicting himself. “But the reason it would be lower, and we’re building them like crazy, but the reason it’s low is [Joe Biden] gave three hundred billion dollars worth to Ukraine.”
Shealeah Craighead (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsThey never mention that, he insisted. Nobody likes to mention that. What Trump himself never mentions is the six-month bombing campaign he ordered against Iran that is the actual, documented reason the U.S. is running short on long-range missiles and interceptors. Biden authorized some Tomahawk transfers to Ukraine in 2024. Trump has been firing munitions at Iran continuously since early this year. One of these things depleted the stockpile. It is not the one Trump is blaming on a man who has been out of office since January.
The contradiction does not even hold together within a single sentence. Trump insists he inherited a depleted stockpile. He also insists there is no shortage. Both cannot be true. Neither is the point. The point is to redirect accountability away from the person who gave the order and toward someone the base already hates. This is not a gaffe or a stumble. It is a strategy, and it is the same strategy this administration applies to every crisis it manufactures: break something, blame the last guy, demand the public stop asking questions.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, an institution not known for antiwar agitation, has stated plainly that “the United States has enough missiles to continue fighting this war under any plausible scenario.” So the shortage Trump is panicking about on camera may be less about national security and more about political cover. He needs a scapegoat for an unpopular war that is burning through weapons, money, and public patience, and Joe Biden is the most convenient corpse to prop up in front of the cameras.
Daniel Schwen (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsThen came the grift. Trump mused that he would “like to give to Ukraine also, but they have to pay, meaning the European Union. I give it to the European Union, they have money, and they pay top dollar, they pay full dollar.” The president of the United States, overseeing a war he started, is framing military aid like a timeshare pitch. Weapons are not a commodity. Munitions are not inventory to be flipped for cash. The fact that Trump can pivot from blaming his predecessor for a shortage to demanding that allies pay retail for the privilege of defending themselves tells you everything about who this war is actually serving.
A country that spends more on its military than the next ten nations combined should not be running out of weapons after six months of conflict with a single adversary. But it is, because the person commanding that military treats the arsenal like a personal toy and the accountability like someone else’s problem. The communities that will absorb the cost of replenishment, the service members deployed to a war with no stated objective, the families watching the Pentagon budget swallow everything else, they are the ones bearing the harm. Trump is on television selling a story. The rest of us are living with the consequences.
Amir Pashaei (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsThe answer is not to debate whether Biden sent too much to Ukraine. The answer is to demand accountability for the war that actually depleted this stockpile, and for the president who started it and will not take responsibility for a single round fired.