This week marks 81 years since the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and another on Nagasaki three days later. By the end of that year, an estimated 140,000 people were dead in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki. About 38,000 of the dead were children.

That is the comparison a sitting member of Congress from Michigan reached for when a neighbor asked him about feeding starving people.

What he said

On the morning of March 25, 2024, Tim Walberg held what his office called a "community gathering to meet with constituents" at the village hall in Dundee, in Monroe County. A constituent asked him why American tax dollars were being used to build a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza to get food in faster.

Walberg's answer, as CNN reported:

"We shouldn't be spending a dime on humanitarian aid. It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick."

At the time he said it, the U.N. was warning that famine was imminent in northern Gaza and that most of the people still living there were already going hungry.

He didn't stop there. In the rest of his answer — a portion Michigan Advance verified against a full video of the event and a transcript from his own office — Walberg applied the same logic to Ukraine: "Defeat Putin quick," he said, arguing that instead of most of our aid going to humanitarian purposes, it should go "80%, 100% to wipe out Russian forces."

Two wars. Two answers. Both times, the food is the thing he wanted to cut.

Nobody was supposed to hear it

Here's the part that should bother every voter in Michigan's 5th District, whatever you think about the Middle East.

This wasn't a speech. It wasn't a press conference. It was a small meeting that, according to Michigan Advance, wasn't widely publicized. The only reason anyone outside that room knows what their congressman said is that a man named Pat Ulanowicz walked in, sat down, and hit record. Ulanowicz chairs the 5th District for the Michigan Democratic Party, and he told the Advance he went as a constituent. "All I did was walk in the meeting; hit record; sit down," he said. "He did all the rest."

Another Monroe resident has been helping document Walberg's events since 2017 — because that's what it takes to find out what he tells people when he thinks the room is small.

That's the same pattern his constituents have complained about for years. In March 2025, after they got tired of waiting for a real town hall, Michigan voters held one without him and asked their questions to an empty chair.

"I used a metaphor"

The video went online. The story broke on a Saturday. Walberg's office put out a statement through a spokesman saying the congressman "clearly uses a metaphor." Walberg himself waited more than 18 hours before posting anything, and when he did, he said the same thing:

"In a shortened clip, I used a metaphor to convey the need for both Israel and Ukraine to win their wars as swiftly as possible... My reasoning was the exact opposite of what is being reported."

Read that again. His defense is that he was misunderstood — not that he was wrong. He never took the words back. He never apologized. And the part of his answer that needed no interpretation at all — that the United States "shouldn't be spending a dime" on food and medicine for civilians — he has never walked back either, because he meant it.

You can argue about what a metaphor is. You cannot argue about "not a dime."

What Michigan said back

The reaction in his own state was immediate, and it crossed party lines.

• The Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called it a "clear call to genocide by a member of Congress". Executive Director Dawud Walid said casually calling for what would kill everyone in Gaza "sends the chilling message that Palestinian lives have no value."
• Rep. Elissa Slotkin said it was "a reprehensible thing for anyone to suggest, especially an elected official and someone who considers himself a man of faith," and asked Walberg to put himself in the shoes of "the many Michiganders who see themselves in the casualties in Gaza."
• Rep. Dan Kildee called the comments "horrific and shocking," saying it is indefensible to argue against humanitarian relief "while also calling for the wholesale massacre of the Palestinian people."
• Justin Amash — a Republican, a former Michigan congressman who served alongside Walberg, and a Palestinian American whose own relatives were killed while sheltering in a church in Gaza — said the remarks "evince an utter indifference to human suffering."

Slotkin's line about a "man of faith" lands hard, because Walberg is a former pastor, and he brings his faith into his answers on the hardest questions. In 2017 he told a town hall crowd in Coldwater that as a Christian he believes in a creator "much bigger than us," and that if climate change is a real problem, God "can take care of it". Seven years later, faced with children starving, the answer wasn't mercy. It was "get it over quick."

He hasn't moved an inch since

You could call a bad answer at a small meeting a slip. More than two years of standing by it is a position.

• In November 2023, Walberg voted to censure Rashida Tlaib — Michigan's own representative and the first Palestinian American woman in Congress — over her comments on the war. The resolution passed 234 to 188.
• In August 2025, the U.N.-backed hunger monitor confirmed famine in Gaza, the exact outcome aid workers had been warning about when Walberg said we shouldn't spend a dime preventing it. That same month, days after a strike on one of Gaza's main hospitals killed more than 20 people, Walberg stood at a town hall in Dowagiac and pledged his continued support for Israel. More than 50 people showed up to confront him.

This also isn't the only time Walberg's words overseas have drawn condemnation back home. In October 2023 he flew to Uganda and told that country's leaders to "stand firm" against international criticism of a law that can carry the death penalty for gay people. "Whose side do we want to be on?" he asked. "God's side."

Who he's actually listening to

It's worth asking why a congressman from southern Michigan is this locked in.

Truthout reporter Derek Seidman went through Walberg's donor filings in October 2025 and found that AIPAC's PAC sent $60,656 to Walberg between April 2022 and August 2025 — making it his single biggest donor in both the 2021–2022 and 2023–2024 election cycles. He sits on the House Republican Israel Caucus and the Congressional Israel Allies Caucus.

Nobody in Dundee wrote him a check that size.

The bottom line

Walberg says he'd never advocate using nuclear weapons. Fine. Take him completely at his word on that.

He still, on the record and on tape, told his own constituents that the United States should not spend one dollar feeding starving civilians, and that a war should be finished the way we finished one with two atomic bombs and more than 200,000 dead. He was given every chance to say "that came out wrong." He said it came out fine.

Eighty-one years after Hiroshima, the least we should be able to expect from a member of Congress is that those two cities are not a template. We deserve better.

Source

"GOP congressman appears to suggest dropping bombs on Gaza to end conflict quickly, referring to 'Nagasaki and Hiroshima'" — CNN, March 31, 2024. Photo: Getty Images via CNN.