We should be talking about masked government agents, endless war, disappearing constitutional safeguards and an imperial presidency accountable to no one. “A head for an eye” may be Trump’s philosophy of war, but it is also a warning about the kind of government that philosophy produces. They reveal the priorities of a government that increasingly treats public money as a fund for war, political propaganda, personal glorification and imperial spectacle. Trump’s war with Iran is testing whether a president can bypass Congress, wage war on his own authority and force the country to absorb the consequences afterward. It is a government organized around war: war abroad, war at the border, war in the streets, war on dissent, war on privacy, war on poverty’s victims and war on anyone who refuses to fall in line.