If the world is but a simulation and we’re all just players stuck in this awful game where every character’s objective is to troll each other into absolute oblivion, State Secretary Marco Rubio is in this week’s lead.

Speaking to ABC’s Good Morning America about Trump’s ongoing war in Iran on Monday, Rubio started asserting that Iranians might want to move in a “different direction” with their new government. “Imagine if instead of spending billions on weapons, Iran spent that money on its people,” he said. “They’d have a much different country.”

Is this play… about us? The U.S. is the literal top spender on weapons, spending more on our military than over 144 countries combined; the Congressional Budget Office expects defense budgets to exceed 1.1 trillion dollars in the next decade; and our Secretary of War Defense Pete Hegseth just burned through $93 billion in a single month by splurging on king crab legs, ice cream machines, and donuts. What’s more is that it took six days for the war in Iran to hit $11.3 billion for American taxpayers, and a little over two weeks for the Pentagon to declare that the U.S. would be spending more in Iran than it has in Ukraine since 2022. Meanwhile, GOP lawmakers in Congress suggested last week that the U.S. make further cuts to healthcare to help contribute to the cost of the war. Which begs the sentiment: Imagine if instead of spending billions on a war no one asked for, America spent that money on its people…

Alas, this play is not about us, we are not in a simulation, and this is not a game—but rather, yet another horrible iteration of the administration’s biggest hypocritical delusions—because we could really use any single drip in the fucking bucket that goes into the defense spending to fix, say, any of the grievances that inspired millions of Americans to protest this weekend. As of Tuesday, the war hit its 32nd day, and air strikes waged by the U.S. and Israel are continuing across Iran. (Strikes that, by the way, bombed a school full of children.)

Also on Monday, Trump posted on Truth Social that, “The United States of America is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran”—shedding his original messaging that the reason for the initial attacks was because of claims that Iran was capable of making nuclear weapons. He then added some extra bloodlust. “Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island.” Your move, Hague…

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