Pete Hegseth's Bad Week

 Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.

The DOD Inspector General report on Signalgate:

 The Secretary sent information identifying the quantity and strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory over an unapproved, unsecure network approximately 2 to 4 hours before the execution of those strikes.  Although the Secretary wrote in his July 25 statement to the DoD OIG that “there were no details that would endanger our troops or the mission,” if this information had fallen into the hands of U.S. adversaries, Houthi forces might have been able to counter U.S. forces or reposition personnel and assets to avoid planned U.S. strikes.  Even though these events did not ultimately occur, the Secretary’s actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.  

 Katie Bo Lillis, Natasha Bertrand, and Haley Britzky at CNN:

The two men killed as they floated holding onto their capsized boat in a secondary strike against a suspected drug vessel in early September did not appear to have radio or other communications devices, the top military official overseeing the strike told lawmakers on Thursday, according to three sources with direct knowledge of his congressional briefings.

As far back as September, defense officials have been quietly pushing back on criticism that killing the two survivors amounted to a war crime by arguing, in part, that they were legitimate targets because they appeared to be radioing for help or backup — reinforcements that, if they had received it, could have theoretically allowed them to continue to traffic the drugs aboard their sinking ship.

Defense officials made that claim in at least one briefing in September for congressional staff, according to a source familiar with the session, and several media outlets cited officials repeating that justification in the last week.

But Thursday, Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley acknowledged that the two survivors of the military’s initial strike were in no position to make a distress call in his briefings to lawmakers. Bradley was in charge of Joint Special Operations Command at the time of the strike and was the top military officer directing the attack.

...

Ultimately, Bradley told lawmakers, he ordered a second strike to destroy the remains of the vessel, killing the two survivors, on the grounds that it appeared that part of the vessel remained afloat because it still held cocaine, according to one of the sources. The survivors could hypothetically have floated to safety, been rescued, and carried on with trafficking the drugs, the logic went.

The other source with direct knowledge of the briefing called that rationale “f**king insane.”

 

.@KFILE reports: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told an audience in a previously unreported 2016 video that the U.S. military “won’t follow unlawful orders from their commander in chief,” and described the refusal of illegal commands as a part of the military’s ethos and…

— Matt Marshall (@_Matt_Marshall) December 2, 2025

Mike Johnson's Bad Week

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. 

Annie Karni at NYT:

Representative Elise Stefanik of New York called Speaker Mike Johnson a habitual liar.

Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina has told people she is so frustrated with the Louisiana Republican and sick of the way he has run the House — particularly how women are treated there — that she is planning to huddle with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia next week to discuss following her lead and retiring early from Congress.

Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida has gone around Mr. Johnson in a bid to force a vote he has declined to schedule on a bill to ban members of Congress from stock trading.

Less than a year out from midterm elections in which Republicans’ vanishingly small majority is at stake, Mr. Johnson’s grasp on his gavel appears weaker than ever, as members from all corners of his conference openly complain about his leadership. Some predict that he may not last as the speaker for the rest of this term.

...

Ms. Stefanik told The Wall Street Journal in an interview that Mr. Johnson would not have the support to remain speaker if a vote were held tomorrow, adding that disaffection with him among Republicans was “that widespread.”

Ms. Stefanik declined to speak on the record for this article.

Mr. Johnson declined to comment, as well. But a senior Republican congressional aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of prolonging an intraparty feud, said that after Mr. Johnson had provided Ms. Stefanik with office space and a budget for what the aide described as “a fake job and a fake title,” he would have expected her to be more gracious.

 Kate Santaliz and Hans Nichols at Axios:

President Trump didn't tell Speaker Mike Johnson that he was granting a "full and unconditional PARDON" to Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) before announcing it on Truth Social this morning, Johnson told Axios.

Why it matters: Trump's pardon boosts one of House Republicans' top political targets — and could hamper GOP efforts to protect their razor-thin majority in next year's midterms.

"I didn't know anything about it," Johnson told Axios Wednesday afternoon.
Asked if he was surprised by Trump's pardon, Johnson said: "I think he had talked about that since last spring. It shouldn't be a huge surprise to anyone. But no, I didn't discuss it with him."

National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Richard Hudson (N.C.) told Axios that he found out about Trump's pardon on X.The pardon "certainly makes it tougher" for the GOP to flip Cuellar's South Texas seat, Hudson said.


Driving the news: Trump not only pardoned Cuellar — he praised him, calling the Texas Democrat "highly respected" and "beloved."

Shane Goldmacher at NYT:

President Trump and Republicans got a win on Tuesday night — and it set off alarm bells for the party.

Just like every other congressional contest held this year, the Tennessee special election for the House tilted sharply in the Democratic Party’s direction compared with the 2024 election. The Trump-backed Republican candidate, Matt Van Epps, won by nine percentage points in a ruby-red seat that Mr. Trump had romped through a year earlier by 22 points.

That 13-point swing to the left — if it continues into 2026 — threatens to be an undertow strong enough to subsume a range of Republicans in less lopsidedly red seats and deliver Democrats a comfortable House majority next year.

Note: the D candidate was too liberal for the district.  A moderate would have done even better.

 

Trump's Racist Rant

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Shawn McCreesh  at NYT:

President Trump unleashed a xenophobic tirade against Somali immigrants on Tuesday, calling them “garbage” he does not want in the United States in an outburst that captured the raw nativism that has animated his approach to immigration.

Even for Mr. Trump — who has a long history of insulting Black people, particularly those from African countries — his outburst was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry. And it comes as he started a new ICE operation targeting Somalis in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region.

...

“When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it,” Mr. Trump added as Vice President JD Vance banged the table in encouragement.

Transcript: 

But no, I think that Walz is a grossly incompetent man. There's something wrong with him, OK? There's something wrong with him. And when you look at what he's done with Somalia, which is barely a country, they have no anything, they just run around killing each other. There's no structure. And when I see somebody like Ilhan Omar, who I don't know at all, but I always watch her.

For years, I've watched her complain about our Constitution, how she's being treated badly. Our Constitution, the United States of America is a bad place. It hates everybody, hates Jewish people, hates everybody. And I think she's an incompetent person. She's a real terrible person. But when I watch what is happening in Minnesota, the land of a thousand lakes or however many lakes they have -- they've got a lot of lakes, but this beautiful place.

And I see these people ripping it off and now I'm understanding and you're going to look into that, Scott. I hear they ripped off -- Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars, billions. Every year, billions of dollars and they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88 percent. They contribute nothing.

I don't want them in our country, I'll be honest with you, OK? Somebody would say, oh, that's not politically correct. I don't care. I don't want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stinks and we don't want them in our country. I can say that about other countries too.

I can say it about other countries too. We don't want them -- the hell -- we have to rebuild our country. You know, our country is at a tipping point. We could go bad; we're at a tipping point. I don't know if people mind me saying that, but I'm saying it. We could go one way or the other and we're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.

Ilhan Omar is garbage, she's garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren't people that work. These aren't people that say let's go, come on, let's make this place great. These are people that do nothing but complain. They complain, and from where they came from, they've got nothing. You know, if they came from Paradise and they said this isn't Paradise.

But when they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch we don't want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Bubble Boy

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.

Jonathan Lemire at The Atlantic:

Every president, of course, deals with being in a bubble, distanced by the demands on his time and the extraordinary security concerns that come with the office. But in his return to the presidency this year, Trump has seldom ventured across the country to anywhere other than his own clubs. He also inhabits something of a news silo, watching far-right cable channels such as One America News and Newsmax along with Fox News. Even his social-media consumption has become narrower: Instead of being on the app formerly known as Twitter, where he’d occasionally encounter contrary views, he now posts solely on Truth Social, which he owns and where he is surrounded by sycophants. And his own White House staff, this time largely populated by true believers and yes-men (and a few yes-women), only adds to the echo chamber.

...

“People voted for him to lower prices, to bring manufacturing back, to stand up to those taking advantage of them,” a close Trump ally told me on the condition of anonymity so as not to antagonize the president. “They didn’t vote for him to build a damn gilded ballroom. He’s not hearing them.”

The Cabinet makes the bubble thicker and darker.  Jack Blanchard and Dash Burns at Politico:

SHOW TIME: It’s a strange place, Washington in 2025, but rarely stranger than when the president assembles his Cabinet for the TV cameras. This town is well acquainted with long, pointless meetings packed full of boastful claims, but these truly bizarre White House events stand out even in such a crowded field.

So once again this morning, we’ll see some of America’s most successful business leaders, politicians, war veterans and legal minds crowd into a room at the White House to pay homage to their boss.

In case you weren’t watching: At the last meeting in October, we were treated to Marco Rubio — a two-term United States senator — telling Trump that no president in modern history could have pulled off a ceasefire deal in the Middle East. Pete Hegseth, a proud war veteran, told Trump it was “a personal honor” to “witness the way you lead.” Doug Burgum — a billionaire businessman and former state governor — told the president he’d delivered “a masterclass in peace through strength.” The previous meeting in August went even further, dragging on for more than three hours as Trump’s team took lengthy turns to out-do one another. Does anyone actually talk to their boss like this?

It’s not entirely clear what the purpose of all this actually is. No other democracy in the Western world showcases its officials paying homage like this to their leader. And how many people are even watching a three-hour Cabinet meeting on live TV? But beyond the wild claims and the flattery, we should actually get some interesting moments today — not least because this will likely be the first public outing for Hegseth since that Washington Post story on Caribbean missile strikes was published Friday afternoon.

 

Cui Bono?

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Its corruption is unprecedented.  Qatar's gift of a jet is just one example. His memecoin is another. Its corruption is unprecedented.  Qatar's gift of a jet is just one example. His memecoin is another. The Ukraine sellout is a third.

Tom Burgis at The Guardian:

The Trumps’ income in the first half of this year increased 17-fold, from $51m 12 months earlier to $864m, Reuters calculates. Of that, more than 90% came not from real estate but from cryptocurrency. The Trumps’ representatives have questioned those numbers but it is clear that this new frontier is proving remarkably lucrative for them.

When Trump launched World Liberty Financial two months before his re-election, he claimed it would help make “America the crypto capital of the world”. Three of his sons – Don Jr and Eric along with Barron, aged 19, net worth about $150m – are named as co-founders, as was Trump himself until he was sworn in.

Four months into Trump’s second term, World Liberty announced that its USD1 digital currency had been selected for a gigantic transaction. Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange, was selling a stake to a United Arab Emirates state-owned fund called MGX. The $2bn price could have been paid in dollars. Instead, Binance would receive 2m freshly minted USD1.

Because USD1 is a stablecoin – crypto pegged to a real currency – World Liberty holds one dollar for each token it issues. It makes money from the interest and investment returns on these reserves. The $2bn jump in the reserves from this one deal could end up making the Trumps’ company tens of millions annually.

Around the same time, Binance’s stratospherically wealthy Chinese-born founder, Changpeng Zhao, asked Trump for something. He had served a four-month sentence in a California prison for violating US laws against money laundering. Prosecutors said that allowing sanctioned Russians, al-Qaida and assorted others to move illicit funds over Binance – which paid a $4bn fine – had caused “significant harm to US national security”.

Upon his release, CZ, as he is known, went home to the UAE. His criminal record looked like an obstacle to re-establishing Binance in the US. He applied for a pardon in May, just as it emerged that the $2bn deal was done with USD1. On 23 October, Zhao posted on X: “Deeply grateful for today’s pardon and to President Trump for upholding America’s commitment to fairness, innovation, and justice.”

David Sacks is a South African-American who chairs the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.  Cecilia Kang et al. at NYT:

Since January, Mr. Sacks, 53, has occupied one of the most advantageous moonlighting roles in the federal government, influencing policy for Silicon Valley in Washington while simultaneously working in Silicon Valley as an investor. Among his actions as the White House’s artificial intelligence and crypto czar:

• Mr. Sacks has offered astonishing White House access to his tech industry compatriots and pushed to eliminate government obstacles facing A.I. companies. That has set up giants like Nvidia to reap an estimate of as much as $200 billion in new sales.
• Mr. Sacks has recommended A.I. policies that have sometimes run counter to national security recommendations, alarming some of his White House colleagues and raising questions about his priorities.
• Mr. Sacks has positioned himself to personally benefit. He has 708 tech investments, including at least 449 stakes in companies with ties to artificial intelligence that could be aided directly or indirectly by his policies, according to a New York Times analysis of his financial disclosures.
• His public filings designate 438 of his tech investments as software or hardware companies, even though the firms promote themselves as A.I. enterprises, offer A.I. services or have A.I. in their names, The Times found.
• Mr. Sacks has raised the profile of his weekly podcast, “All-In,” through his government role, and expanded its business.

 

Selling Out Ukraine

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.

Drew Hinshaw et al. at WSJ:

Three powerful businessmen—two Americans and a Russian—hunched over a laptop in Miami Beach last month, ostensibly to draw up a plan to end Russia’s long and deadly war with Ukraine.

But the full scope of their project went much further, according to people familiar with the talks. They were privately charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold—with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends.

At his waterfront estate, billionaire developer-turned-special envoy Steve Witkoff was hosting Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and Vladimir Putin’s handpicked negotiator, who had largely shaped the document they were revising on the screen. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had arrived from his nearby home on an island known as the “Billionaire Bunker.”

Dmitriev was pushing a plan for U.S. companies to tap the roughly $300 billion of Russian central bank assets, frozen in Europe, for U.S.-Russian investment projects and a U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine. U.S. and Russian companies could join to exploit the vast mineral wealth in the Arctic. There were no limits to what two longtime adversaries could achieve, Dmitriev had argued for months: Their rival space industries, which raced one another during the Cold War, could even pursue a joint mission to Mars with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity, according to Western security officials. By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.

Pete Hegseth and War Crimes

 Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.

Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima at WP:

The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.

The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.

Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.

Trump has a history of condoning war crimes.  Steve Benen reported in 2018:

On his first full day as president, Donald Trump traveled to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, spoke in front of a memorial wall, and delivered one of the strangest presidential speeches I’ve ever seen.

Trump attacked journalists, lied about the size of his inaugural crowd, assured those in attendance about how impressed he was with his intellect, reflected on the number of instances in which he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and speculated about taking Iraqi oil.

But the Washington Post reported this week on something else that happened when the president visited the CIA and “was ushered up to the agency’s drone operations floor.”

Trump urged the CIA to start arming its drones in Syria. “If you can do it in 10 days, get it done,” he said, according to two former officials familiar with the meeting.

Later, when the agency’s head of drone operations explained that the CIA had developed special munitions to limit civilian casualties, the president seemed unimpressed. Watching a previously recorded strike in which the agency held off on firing until the target had wandered away from a house with his family inside, Trump asked, “Why did you wait?” one participant in the meeting recalled.

For those with a moral compass, such a comment is obviously jarring, especially coming from a president. But for those who’ve covered Trump’s public positions, this isn’t too surprising.

In December 2015, near the height of the race for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, then-candidate Trump endorsed torturing detainees — even “if it doesn’t work” in producing valuable intelligence — simply because he saw it as a worthwhile thing to do.

He added soon after, “[T]he other thing is with the terrorists, you have to take out their families. When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. But they say they don’t care about their lives. You have to take out their families.”