Saturday, March 29, 2025

Trump's kids at play: Pete Hegseth's emoji fest puts America's military at risk

 
Top headline: Slate, 3/26/2025
Bottom headlineNew York Times, 3/26/2025

Dan Kois reports at Slate:
But I want to focus on another aspect of the messages, the one that I find, upon reflection, unexpectedly upsetting: the emoji! 
“I will say a prayer for victory,” J.D. Vance texted, to which two people responded with the prayer-hands emoji. 
When Waltz reported to the group that the target—“their top missile guy”—had entered his girlfriend’s house and that the house has been destroyed, someone reacted with the thumbs-up emoji. 
And then Waltz wrote, in response to a military action that, according to reports, killed 53 Yemenis: “👊🇺🇸🔥. 
” I’ve understood, on some level, how fundamentally unserious so many members of the Trump administration are about government, about duty, and about service. But reading these messages, and boggling at these emoji—at these high-ranking government officials responding to operational details of an airstrike the way I do to my daughter texting me that she got an A on her English paper—really drove home how repulsive this all is. [emphasis added]

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