Let me tell you about the word our “leader” chose.
On Friday, the president sat in the White House with the CEOs of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, L3Harris, Honeywell, and RTX. Seven defense contractors at a table with the man who started a war eight days ago, the very same man who promised to end all wars, by the way. When it was over, Trump posted on Truth Social that they’d agreed to quadruple production of what he called “Exquisite Class Weaponry.”
Exquisite. The word you use at a wine bar or to describe art, or the best meal of your life. The word on the tag of something you can’t afford. He used it for the missiles tearing through Iranian cities right now, killing people whose names none of us will ever learn. Killing 200 young girls, and calling it an “accident” while also touting precision and strength.
They say it’s about nuclear nonproliferation. They said that about Iraq, too.
I sat with that for a while. Not because it surprised me. Nothing surprises me anymore. Not the violence at the hands of ICE, not demonizing and stripping trans people of rights, not bombs dropped on foreign countries, not the rich eating children. Because it confirmed what I already knew: their cruelty is not a side effect. It is the product. And they’ve given the product a name that sounds like jewelry, and that is the point.
Here’s the math, plain and simple. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates the first 100 hours of Operation Epic Fury cost $3.7 billion, roughly $891 million a day. In the same vein, Penn Wharton projects a direct cost of $65 billion. The broader economic damage could hit $210 billion. As of today, Saturday, March 7th, 2026, over 3,000 targets have been struck inside Iran so far. At least 1,332 dead. Six American service members killed. And the response to running low on interceptors is not to stop. It’s to build more, faster, better, stronger. While still missing targets? And the deaths of soldiers are justified because “Some people will have to die”? Despicable.
No timelines were provided. No weapons were specified. Just the word exquisite and a photo op for our attention hungry predator in chief. Lockheed posted on X that they’d “agreed to quadruple critical munitions production.” Like a seasonal product launch. Because it was.
I want you to sit with that $891 million for a second, just as I have. I’m writing this from my apartment in Baltimore where I can hear the neighbors through the walls and one of my cats is in the springs of the couch he destroyed, the other wanting attention that I am too tired to provide.
I am a chronically ill, AuDHD, trans woman unable to qualify for food stamps and going through the grueling process of applying for disability when the systems in place are constantly failing me. I know what it feels like to calculate whether groceries or medication wins this week. I know what these numbers mean when they don’t go to people like me. Or people worse off than me, which is most of the country right now.
In 2024, the U.S. counted 771,400 people experiencing homelessness in a single night. The highest number ever recorded. A 30 percent jump since 2022. Homelessness rose in 43 states. Black Americans, Indigenous communities, queer youth, disabled people: disproportionately represented in every dataset. The federal response? Cut housing programs. Slash anti-poverty funding. Gut rural housing investments. Put up architecture to keep unhoused people from finding a place to sleep or seek shelter.
People experiencing homelessness die nearly 30 years earlier than the average American, often from going through horrendous adversity, all of which is entirely treatable. Yet, there’s no supplemental spending bill for any of that. There’s one being floated for the war. North of $50 billion. Yep, fifty billion.
One day of bombs could fund permanent supportive housing for tens of thousands of people. But this country has an $886 billion defense budget with proposals to push it past $1.5 trillion, twelve billionaires worth more than most nations, and it still can’t find the money to keep people alive. The money was never missing. The will was. How then can we be great? How then are we truly free when our lives are worth less than the weapons that end the lives of others under the guise of national security?
And it’s not just the war. The same administration writing checks to weapons manufacturers is writing signing bonuses to ICE agents. A bounty system in federal clothing. Latine families, Arab Americans, Black immigrants, swept up by a paramilitary force with financial incentive and zero accountability. Trans rights gutted at every level of governance. The economy contracting while survival gets more expensive. People are starving, and the only budget that grows is the one that kills, the one that keeps the machine of oppression running full steam ahead.
Smedley Butler said it in 1935, a two-time Medal of Honor recipient and retired Marine major general. He wrote a book called War Is a Racket and the thesis was three sentences:
“War is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the many; out of war, nations acquire additional territory; out of war, a few people make huge fortunes.”
Ninety-one years later, nothing about that has changed. The racket just got a White House meeting and a publicist with no regard for truth or justice.
This is not a spending problem. It has never been a spending problem. Every dollar quadrupled into weapons production is a dollar that will never become a roof, a meal, a medication, a reason for someone to believe this country gives a damn whether they live or die. Right now I’m being called a domestic threat due to my gender, and it makes me scared to leave the house. I used to ride around on scooters with nothing but whimsy.
They’re calling the bombs exquisite. They’re building them four times faster. 771,000 Americans are sleeping outside tonight while the war machine hums, while genocide is funded and stomachs are empty.
Exquisite. I hope that word follows them beyond the grave, where their bones too will rot. Just. Like. Ours.
By Gemma Flora Ortwerth
Gemma Ortwerth 
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