Fueling wars and ignoring suffering at home

The Iran-Contra scandal honestly still blows my mind - Reagan’s White House literally ignored Congress and, behind everyone’s backs, sold weapons to Iran (which was officially an enemy at the time). Then they took that money and funneled it to right-wing rebels, the Contras, in Nicaragua. All of this was going down in the mid-1980s, right as the US was also pumping weapons and support into Iraq during its insanely bloody war with Iran. So the US was secretly fueling both sides of a brutal conflict, and to a lot of people in the Middle East, it just looked like America was in it for chaos and death, not “freedom” or any of that. That kind of double-crossing definitely helped fuel the resentment and distrust that would explode later in things like 9/11. And don’t even get me started on Reagan’s absolute indifference to the AIDS crisis in the US. While thousands were dying, his administration basically did nothing - just sat on their hands and pretended it wasn’t their problem. It’s honestly hard to imagine a more heartless or inhuman response from a president.