One avoidable death every 86.4 seconds. Updated in real time.
👆 Click a president's name to see their TL;DR breakdown — receipts, crimes, and body count included. You can also click any column header to sort the chart.
If you look at this and say to yourself 'at least my guy ranks better than their guy', you are part of the problem.
YouTube removed this song in 2025 for “violent or graphic content.”
What they meant was: the truth hit too hard.
This page documents the avoidable and unavoidable deaths attributed to major U.S. policy decisions from 1933 to the present. These deaths result from war, economic destabilization, resource extraction, covert operations, deregulation, public health failures, and systemic neglect—foreign and domestic.
The data shown here is based on available historical research, government records, academic estimates, and credible investigative journalism. Where direct counts are not available, reasonable estimates are used.
The true toll is likely significantly higher—conservatively estimated at 2–3 times more than recorded. The average avoidable death rate attributable to U.S. political policy is estimated at 1,000 people per day, globally.
To put that in perspective: that's a 9/11 every 3 days, a Vietnam War every 2 months, a sports stadium of people eliminated every 3–4 months, and a small to medium-sized city wiped out every year.
Ethical & Moral Breakdown:
FDR is celebrated as the man who saved capitalism and crushed fascism — but beneath the marble busts lies a legacy soaked in racial injustice, state-sanctioned imprisonment, and genocidal inaction. While he built the New Deal, it was built on white supremacy: Black workers were excluded from Social Security, denied union protections, and redlined into generational poverty.
His refusal to lift immigration quotas for Jews fleeing the Holocaust directly condemned tens of thousands to Nazi death camps. The MS St. Louis, carrying over 900 Jewish refugees, was denied entry in 1939 — a majority later perished in Europe. Internally, Executive Order 9066 authorized the mass incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans — U.S. citizens — stripped of rights, property, and dignity based solely on ancestry.
And then there's the Manhattan Project. Authorized under his administration, this unleashed the nuclear arms race without public knowledge or ethical review. FDR built the framework of American empire — intelligence, surveillance, and atomic infrastructure — and did so while preaching liberty.
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"We have nothing to fear but fear itself."
Unless you're a refugee, a Japanese-American citizen, or anyone outside the white New Deal umbrella — then you had the U.S. government to fear.
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Harry S. Truman is the only human in history to order the use of nuclear weapons in warfare — not once, but twice. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not military strikes; they were acts of mass civilian extermination. Over 200,000 people — men, women, children — vaporized, burned alive, or condemned to die slow, radiated deaths. Japan was already seeking surrender. Truman's bombings were a geopolitical message to Stalin, not a military necessity.
He then ignited the Cold War: constructing a permanent war economy, birthing the CIA, and drafting the Truman Doctrine — a blank check for propping up authoritarian regimes under the guise of "anti-communism." Greece, Turkey, Italy — all became early Cold War battlegrounds soaked in blood with U.S. backing. He militarized containment, enforced global obedience through economic and covert warfare, and backed political repression at home and abroad.
Domestically, he lit the fuse for McCarthyism with Executive Order 9835, initiating loyalty oaths, purges, and ideological witch hunts that destroyed lives for suspicion alone.
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"The buck stops here."
But the fallout carried across continents — from incinerated schoolchildren in Hiroshima to CIA black sites in decades to come.
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Eisenhower publicly warned of the "military-industrial complex" — but only after he spent eight years feeding it like a beast. His presidency normalized covert regime change as a tool of U.S. policy. Under his direction, the CIA toppled democratically elected governments in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), installing authoritarian regimes that went on to massacre their own citizens with U.S. weapons, training, and funding.
In Southeast Asia, Eisenhower backed French colonial forces in Vietnam and later installed the corrupt Diem regime, laying the foundation for the Vietnam War. His support for colonial powers, brutal anticommunist allies, and paramilitary death squads would ripple for decades, directly causing hundreds of thousands of deaths.
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"Beware the military-industrial complex."
Said the man who built it and handed over the keys.
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Kennedy is the Camelot myth — polished, photogenic, and celebrated. The reality is messier. He inherited Eisenhower's Cuba disaster and made it worse with the Bay of Pigs invasion, a CIA-backed catastrophe that killed hundreds of Cuban exiles and deepened Cold War hostility. He then nearly ended the world during the Cuban Missile Crisis — a crisis that U.S. foreign policy helped create.
He escalated military involvement in Vietnam, increasing advisors from 900 to over 16,000 and authorizing napalm use and strategic hamlet programs that displaced millions of Vietnamese civilians. He greenlit Operation Mongoose — a CIA assassination and sabotage campaign against Cuba — and authorized wiretapping of civil rights leaders, including MLK, at Hoover's request.
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"Ask not what your country can do for you."
Ask instead what your country is doing to everyone else when the cameras are off.
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LBJ is the great American contradiction: the man who signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act — genuine legislative milestones — while simultaneously lying the country into the most catastrophic foreign policy disaster of the 20th century. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was a fraud. He knew it. His advisors knew it. Congress didn't.
The Vietnam War under LBJ consumed over 58,000 American lives and an estimated 2 million Vietnamese civilians. He authorized napalm, Agent Orange, free-fire zones, and search-and-destroy missions that amounted to systematic war crimes. He escalated from 16,000 advisors to 540,000 troops — all while privately acknowledging the war was unwinnable.
Domestically, he authorized COINTELPRO expansion, wiretapped MLK, and used the FBI as a tool of political repression against civil rights leaders he publicly praised. The man who said he'd "lose the South for a generation" with civil rights legislation turned around and bombed Southeast Asia back to the Stone Age to avoid looking weak.
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"We're not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home…"
Then he sent 540,000. Many never came back. Many more never had homes again.
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Richard Nixon intentionally sabotaged peace talks in 1968 to help him win the presidency, costing hundreds of thousands of lives before the war finally ended in 1975. Once in office, he expanded the war into Cambodia and Laos, launching Operation Menu, a secret bombing campaign that dropped more explosives than were used in all of World War II — without congressional approval or public knowledge.
The invasion destabilized Cambodia, creating the perfect storm for the rise of the Khmer Rouge, who would go on to murder 2 million people. That blood is on Nixon's hands too — not just from bombs, but from consequences.
Meanwhile, he backed CIA coups across Latin America. Most notorious: Chile, 1973. The U.S. overthrew democratically elected President Salvador Allende, installing Augusto Pinochet, who tortured and murdered thousands. Domestically, Nixon's "War on Drugs" was weaponized to criminalize Black Americans and antiwar protesters.
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"If the President does it, that means it's not illegal."
The Constitution wept. Then bled.
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Ford's presidency is remembered as a healing moment after Watergate — but that healing came through institutional amnesia. His first major act was to pardon Richard Nixon, wiping the slate clean for war crimes, corruption, and authoritarian overreach. That decision didn't just let Nixon walk — it set a permanent precedent: presidents are above the law.
While Ford posed as a stabilizing figure, he quietly greenlit military and economic support for genocidal regimes, including Indonesia's brutal invasion of East Timor in 1975. Just hours after meeting with Suharto, Ford and Kissinger gave the nod — and Indonesia launched a full-scale assault that left over 100,000 Timorese dead. U.S. weapons were used. U.S. aid kept flowing.
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"Our long national nightmare is over."
No, it was just classified and airmailed to Jakarta.
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Carter is the closest thing to a conscience this list has — which is a pretty low bar, but here we are. He brokered the Camp David Accords, pushed human rights as an actual foreign policy consideration (not just rhetoric), normalized relations with China, and returned the Panama Canal. He was genuinely uncomfortable with the imperial playbook.
But he wasn't clean. He authorized Operation Cyclone — arming the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet Union — a decision that helped birth the Taliban and al-Qaeda. He also backed the Shah of Iran despite well-documented human rights abuses, then fumbled the hostage crisis. His administration began the process of deregulation that Reagan would weaponize.
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The bar for decency in this office is subterranean. Carter at least tried to dig upward instead of deeper.
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Reagan is the smiling face of American imperial decline — a man who turned cruelty into policy and wrapped it in a flag. He systematically armed, funded, and protected some of the most brutal regimes and paramilitary death squads of the 20th century, all in the name of "freedom" and anti-communism.
In Central America, he backed death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala, funded and trained the Nicaraguan Contras (who raped, murdered, and terrorized civilian populations), and ignored Congressional prohibitions on aid through the Iran-Contra scheme. Approximately 300,000 people died in these proxy wars. He also armed Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War — including providing intelligence used to target Iranian positions with chemical weapons.
Domestically, the AIDS epidemic killed tens of thousands while Reagan refused to even say the word publicly for six years. His administration treated gay men as acceptable losses. His War on Drugs imprisoned a generation of Black and brown Americans while crack cocaine flooded inner cities — with substantial evidence of CIA complicity in the supply chain.
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"Morning in America."
Unless you were Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, gay, Black, poor, or any combination of the above. Then it was still very much night.
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Bush Sr. is the "respectable" imperialist — competent, measured, and deadly in ways that didn't make for good TV. As CIA Director, he oversaw the continuation of covert programs across Latin America and the Middle East. As president, he invaded Panama to arrest Noriega (a former CIA asset), killing thousands of civilians in the process, then lied about the body count.
The Gulf War was more defensible than most — Kuwait was invaded, and the coalition response had genuine international backing. But Bush authorized carpet bombing of Iraqi infrastructure, targeting water treatment plants and civilian facilities in ways that violated international law and caused massive post-war mortality. He encouraged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam, then abandoned them when they did. The Shia and Kurdish uprisings that followed were crushed with U.S. weapons while Bush watched.
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"A thousand points of light."
Mostly from the burning oil fields and the infrastructure you bombed.
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Clinton is the smooth-talking architect of benign-seeming catastrophe. He presided over the Rwanda genocide without lifting a finger — 800,000 people were hacked to death in 100 days while his administration deliberately avoided using the word "genocide" to dodge legal obligations to intervene. His administration later admitted this was a moral failure. That admission didn't bring anyone back.
His sanctions on Iraq — maintaining and expanding what Bush started — killed an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children through preventable disease and malnutrition. When Secretary of State Albright was asked if the price was worth it, she said yes. Clinton said nothing. He also signed the 1994 Crime Bill, which supercharged mass incarceration and destroyed communities for a generation.
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"I feel your pain."
Not enough to do anything about it, but he definitely felt it.
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George W. Bush launched two of the longest, most expensive, most deadly wars in American history on the basis of fabricated intelligence, deliberate deception, and institutional cowardice from a Congress that didn't read the fine print. The Iraq War — built on the lie of WMDs — killed an estimated 500,000+ people, displaced millions, destroyed a functioning (if brutal) state, and created the power vacuum that spawned ISIS.
He authorized a global torture program. Waterboarding. Stress positions. Sleep deprivation. Rendition to black sites in countries where the torture could be deniable. All of it illegal under international law. All of it authorized at the highest levels. He then created the surveillance apparatus — the NSA bulk collection programs exposed by Snowden — that permanently shredded the 4th Amendment.
Afghanistan was more defensible in its initial premise but collapsed into two decades of occupation, nation-building theater, and systematic corruption that enriched contractors and warlords while accomplishing nothing of lasting value. The Taliban had the country back within weeks of U.S. withdrawal.
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"Mission accomplished."
The mission was lies, the accomplishment was catastrophe, and the banner was hung over a war that lasted 20 more years.
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Obama is the Shitbird paradox: charming, articulate, the best communicator to hold the office in modern history — and a man who personally approved weekly drone kill lists, bombed seven countries, and deported more people than any president in U.S. history while being celebrated as a progressive. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded while he was actively escalating wars. That's not irony, that's a verdict on the Nobel committee.
His drone program killed an estimated 5,000+ people — including hundreds of civilians — in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, and Syria. He launched or expanded operations in all seven. He bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. He authorized the assassination of a U.S. citizen (Anwar al-Awlaki) without trial, then killed his 16-year-old son in a separate strike two weeks later. Neither received due process.
He also chose not to prosecute a single Bush-era official for torture, wiretapping, or war crimes — protecting the precedent that presidents are legally untouchable. His Libya intervention toppled Gaddafi and produced a failed state and open slave markets. He deported 3 million people. He prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all prior presidents combined.
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"Yes we can."
We could bomb seven countries, deport 3 million people, and protect torturers — all while making it look dignified. And we did.
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Trump's presidency was a masterclass in deliberate cruelty — a feature, not a bug. His COVID-19 response killed people through conscious choice: downplaying the pandemic, undermining public health guidance, politicizing masks and vaccines, and allowing a disinformation ecosystem to metastasize while Americans died at 4,000 a day. An estimated 400,000 of the 800,000 U.S. COVID deaths under his watch are considered avoidable.
His family separation policy deliberately traumatized thousands of children as a deterrent. He withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, ratcheted up tensions across the Middle East, and cosigned the Saudi war in Yemen — one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 21st century. He used federal agents on domestic protesters in Portland and DC. He incited an insurrection to prevent the transfer of power.
Domestically, he gutted environmental protections, rolled back over 100 regulations, and accelerated the climate crisis. He deregulated everything, stacked courts, fired inspectors general, and turned the federal government into a grift machine.
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"I alone can fix it."
Bro, you broke the steering wheel of the bus and then pissed on the wreckage.
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Joe Biden campaigned on a promise to restore America's soul. What he delivered was technocratic continuity with better manners — and the blood never stopped flowing.
He entered office during a global pandemic and failed to ensure timely vaccine distribution to the Global South, allowing hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths as rich nations hoarded doses. His foreign policy turned deadly in Gaza, where his unconditional support for Israel's 2023–2024 military campaign enabled the slaughter of over 30,000 Palestinians — the majority women and children. Despite global condemnation, Biden vetoed UN ceasefire resolutions, accelerated weapons shipments, and used diplomatic cover to shield war crimes. He didn't just stand by — he funded it, armed it, and defended it.
He also executed the Afghanistan withdrawal in August 2021 — a mission he didn't design, but botched catastrophically. The Taliban swept Kabul in days, U.S. allies were left behind, and 13 U.S. troops and 170+ civilians died in a suicide bombing during the chaotic evacuation. Then Biden froze $7 billion in Afghan national funds, triggering a humanitarian disaster where millions starved and children died in hospitals.
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"America is back."
Back to bombing Gaza, abandoning allies, starving nations, and calling it leadership.