Across the United States, poverty has spread into suburbs, small towns, and once-prosperous urban neighbourhoods. In cities like Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, homelessness has become a permanent feature of the landscape, not a temporary crisis
Doddering Donald Trump strikes another bump. Last I checked, the United States was not the United Nations. The United States was not Interpol. The United States military was not the UN Peace Keeping Force. So, what is the USA under Donald Trump doing by attacking Islamic State (ISIS) militants in Nigeria with the reason given as that they were harming local Christians. Why is Donald Trump acting like the global ambassador to the KuKuKu? China is attacking Christians all over China if these Christians do not fall in line with the Communist Party’s ideology. Somehow, I don’t see USA attacking China and a press release from the White House saying the Chinese were harming local Christian interests, so bam!!
What about the interests of the common United States citizen, who is overburdened paying increased prices of essentials after the supplier exporting countries have been tariffed at 50 to 100 per cent? Isn’t the president of the United States supposed to look after its own citizens? Or is that just a hobby?
The United States likes to see itself as the epicentre of the free world, the referee of global morality, the first responder to every conflict that can be framed as a battle between good and evil. Yet, under Donald Trump’s second coming as commander in chief, that impulse has taken on a sharper, more theatrical edge, even as the social and economic foundations of American life continue to fray at home. The December 26, 2025 strike on Islamic State militants in northwest Nigeria, justified publicly on the grounds that Christians were being targeted, is not an isolated military decision. It is emblematic of a worldview that treats the United States as a self-appointed global guardian of selective causes while millions of its own citizens sink deeper into insecurity, poverty, and despair.
At last check, the United States was not the United Nations, not Interpol, and not a roaming UN peacekeeping force with a religious mandate. Yet Trump’s rhetoric around the Nigeria strike sounded less like sober statecraft and more like the language of a televangelist generalissimo. In his Christmas Day post, issued comfortably from Mar-a-Lago, he spoke of “innocent Christians” being killed “at levels not seen for many years, and even centuries.” The hyperbole was deliberate, the moral framing unmistakable. America, in this telling, is not merely defending its interests or responding to a direct threat, but acting as a global ambassador to a particular civilizational narrative.
This raises an obvious question: why Nigeria and not China? Christians in China face sustained pressure to align with Communist Party ideology, underground churches are raided, crosses are torn down, pastors are detained. Yet there are no U.S. warships firing missiles into Guangdong, no Truth Social posts declaring that Beijing has crossed a red line by harming Christian interests. The answer is not hard to find. Nigeria is weak, fragmented, and dependent; China is powerful, economically intertwined with the United States, and capable of retaliation. Moral outrage, when filtered through power politics, becomes highly selective.
While American missiles fly thousands of miles away, the interests of ordinary U.S. citizens are increasingly treated as an afterthought. Trump’s renewed enthusiasm for punitive tariffs—50, 75, even 100 per cent on imports from supplier countries—has been sold as economic nationalism, as a way to protect American jobs. In reality, it has functioned as a blunt tax on consumers already stretched thin. Prices of essentials have risen steadily. Food, clothing, electronics, household goods—everything costs more. For families living paycheck to paycheck, this is not an abstract debate about trade policy; it is the daily arithmetic of survival.
Across the United States, poverty is no longer confined to the stereotypical images of inner-city decay or remote rural hardship. It has spread into suburbs, small towns, and once-prosperous urban neighbourhoods. In cities like Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, homelessness has become a permanent feature of the landscape, not a temporary crisis. Tents line sidewalks beneath luxury apartment towers. Families live out of cars while working full-time jobs that no longer cover rent. Food banks report record demand, not just from the unemployed but from teachers, nurses, and retail workers.
In the Midwest, towns hollowed out by decades of deindustrialisation are now being hit by a second wave of decline as consumption slumps. When people stop buying, stores close. When stores close, jobs vanish. In Cleveland, Detroit, and Toledo, small retailers that survived the pandemic are finally giving up, unable to cope with higher import costs, shrinking customer spending, and rising commercial rents. “For lease” signs multiply on main streets that once bustled with life.
The South tells a similar story. In Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, poverty rates were already among the highest in the nation. Now, with inflation biting hard and state safety nets thin, families are being pushed to the edge. School districts quietly acknowledge that children are missing classes not because of truancy in the traditional sense, but because their parents cannot afford associated costs. While public education is nominally free, the reality includes fees for transportation, meals, uniforms, supplies, and extracurriculars. When a family must choose between paying for school lunches and paying the electricity bill, school attendance becomes collateral damage.
In parts of Texas and Florida, the myth of endless opportunity is colliding with economic reality. Service-sector jobs—retail, hospitality, food service—are being cut as consumer spending slows. Shopping malls that were reinvented as lifestyle centres after the pandemic are once again half-empty. Restaurants close not because they are poorly run, but because fewer people can afford to eat out. Young people, including recent graduates, find themselves underemployed or jobless, cycling through gig work that offers no security and no future.
The tech hubs are not immune. In San Francisco and Seattle, waves of layoffs have followed the end of cheap money and speculative growth. Startups shut down overnight. Established firms quietly trim their workforces. Highly skilled workers compete for fewer openings, while those without in-demand credentials fall through the cracks. The ripple effects extend outward: when tech workers stop spending, the cafés, cleaners, childcare providers, and small service businesses that depend on them suffer.
Education, long touted as America’s ladder out of poverty, is itself becoming less accessible. College tuition, already exorbitant, continues to rise. Community colleges face funding cuts. Families that once stretched to send their children to private schools or even modest colleges are pulling back. Students drop out or delay education, not because of lack of ambition, but because the numbers simply do not add up. The result is a generation caught between debt and deprivation, promised opportunity but delivered precarity.
Against this backdrop, the image of the U.S. president ordering airstrikes abroad to defend Christians in Nigeria feels jarring, even obscene. It is not that violence against civilians elsewhere does not matter. It is that the moral energy expended on distant conflicts contrasts starkly with the indifference shown toward suffering at home. When American children go hungry, when schools struggle to keep students enrolled, when entire communities slide into hopelessness, the question “Isn’t the president supposed to look after his own citizens?” stops being rhetorical.
The Nigeria strike itself is wrapped in layers of ambiguity. U.S. Africa Command initially said it was conducted at the request of Nigerian authorities, then quietly removed that wording. Nigeria’s government insists the security situation is complex, that both Muslims and Christians are targeted by armed groups, and that framing the conflict as religious persecution oversimplifies reality. Yet Trump’s narrative flattened these nuances into a story of Christian victimhood and American righteous intervention.
This kind of framing plays well with certain domestic audiences. It reinforces a sense of civilizational struggle, of America as the last bastion of a threatened faith. It distracts from uncomfortable economic truths. It channels frustration away from policy failures at home and toward enemies abroad. Historically, leaders facing domestic discontent have often reached for foreign adventures, symbolic or real, to project strength and purpose.
Meanwhile, the costs of these adventures—financial, moral, and strategic—are borne by the same citizens already struggling. Military operations are not free. Intelligence flights, warship deployments, precision munitions, logistical support—all are paid for by taxpayers. Every dollar spent projecting power abroad is a dollar not spent on affordable housing, school nutrition programs, job retraining, or healthcare access.
In New York City, shelters overflow while public housing waitlists stretch for years. In Appalachia, opioid addiction continues to ravage communities with little federal attention beyond platitudes. In Native American reservations, basic infrastructure—clean water, reliable electricity, adequate schools—remains lacking. These are not new problems, but they are worsening, and they are largely absent from the presidential bully pulpit.
The contradiction is stark. On one hand, a president who claims to champion the forgotten American worker. On the other, policies that raise consumer prices, depress consumption, and accelerate job losses in vulnerable sectors. On one hand, soaring rhetoric about protecting Christians abroad. On the other, silence as American children miss school because their parents cannot afford the hidden costs of education.
The United States does not need to retreat entirely from the world to address these contradictions. But it does need a recalibration of priorities. Acting as a self-appointed global moral enforcer while neglecting domestic decay is not leadership; it is escapism on a grand scale. The legitimacy of any foreign intervention ultimately rests on the health of the society undertaking it. A nation that cannot ensure basic dignity for its own people risks hollowing out the very values it claims to defend elsewhere.
Donald Trump’s Nigeria strike, announced amid holiday leisure, encapsulates this tension. It is a spectacle of power that distracts from quieter, more pervasive crises unfolding across American cities and towns. Poverty in the United States today is not always dramatic or headline-grabbing. It is incremental, grinding, and invisible to those insulated by wealth. But it is real, and it is growing.
If the United States is to reclaim any credible moral authority—at home or abroad—it must first confront these realities honestly. Otherwise, every missile launched in the name of distant justice will echo back as a question unanswered: who, exactly, is looking after the common American citizen?
