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
