Trump’s Trash Defense Secretary Is Ready to Go to War With U.S. Allies

After marketing himself as the peacemaker president, Donald Trump sure seems set on starting some new wars. 

During an interview on Fox News’s Jesse Watters Primetime Wednesday night, Trump’s unqualified Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth spoke about the president’s outlandish designs to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal—leaving the door open for military intervention in both cases.  

“Is the Defense Department ready for Panama, because it seems like Panama is not really playing ball?” Watters asked. “Do you have a message for the Panamanians?”

“We’ll see,” Hegseth replied. “The president has been clear about the fact that there’s a neutrality treaty as it pertains to the Panama Canal, and if they don’t allow for free and unfettered access that can’t be shut down by other countries, then we have the right—we retain the right—to do what is necessary to make sure there is free navigation in the Panama Canal.

“President Trump has said that will be the case. The Defense Department is prepared—so I don’t want to get ahead of what we may or may not do. Strategic uncertainty is an important thing,” Hegseth said. “But we will have freedom of navigation in the Panama Canal, whether that involves the Defense Department or not.”

As Hegseth spoke, the Fox News chyron read, “‘All Options on the Table’ to Take Panama Canal.”

Hegseth had a similarly vague answer when asked about Trump’s plans for Greenland, but this one was so effusive about the president that it ended up just sounding like nonsense.

“We’re hearing rumors that Denmark’s now spending $2 billion on additional defense and France is considering sending troops,” Watters said. “Are our allies really going to do that?”

“I don’t think so, Jesse,” Hegseth said. “The president recognizes how strategically significant Greenland is, even if other people didn’t for a very long time! So now, those countries who were supposed to be charged with protecting it, making sure Chinese interests aren’t there, are suddenly flocking of interest because President Trump, as he has across the globe, has reshaped the game. 

“So, we’ll end up seeing what happens there. We understand how critical it is to the Arctic, how much the Chinese would love access to the minerals. So, stand by to stand by. We’re watching it, and we’ll see what happens.”

During his confirmation hearing earlier this month, when asked whether he would follow Trump’s outlandish orders to invade Greenland or Panama, Hegseth replied, “I will emphasize that President Trump received 77 million votes to be the lawful commander,” and declined to give details on “what orders the president would give to me in any context.”

“That sounds to me that you would contemplate such an order to basically invade Greenland, and take over the Panama Canal,” replied Senator Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii. 

Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order that would defund schools that teach kids about “critical race theory” or gender.

The executive order “prohibits federal funding of the indoctrination of children which includes radical gender ideology and critical race theory in the classroom.” 

“On day one, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children,” Trump said on the campaign trail.  

Critical race theory is a basic historical analysis of the social dynamics of this country, and has been part of educational curriculums for years. Republicans have recently latched on to it as a touchstone in their culture war, alleging that it only serves to make white students feel sad and uncomfortable when presented with facts.

It is unclear how the Education Department will go about determining which public schools are CRT schools and which aren’t. 

Trump also goes after gender in his order, stating that local and federal officials should “file actions against teachers and school officials who sexually exploit minors or practice medicine without a license through ‘social transition’ practices.” 

The president has ordered all this before his education secretary and former WWE executive, Linda McMahon, has even had a confirmation hearing.

Last week, just days after his inauguration, Donald Trump eliminated the membership of a key committee that handles aviation security. And on Wednesday night,  a passenger plane collided with a military helicopter in the Washington, D.C., area. 

On Tuesday, January 22, the Aviation Security Advisory Committee’s members received a memo from the Trump administration saying that the Department of Homeland Security was getting rid of the membership of all advisory committees in a “commitment to eliminating the misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security.” At the same time, Trump also fired the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard.

Congress mandated the aviation committee in 1988, after the PanAm Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. After Trump’s move, the committee technically continues to exist but has no members to examine safety issues in airlines and airports. Its membership consisted of key groups in the aviation industry, from major unions to representatives from major airlines, as well as a group associated with victims of the PanAm bombing. 

Throughout its existence, the committee’s recommendations were adopted into air travel procedure. It was out of commission for more than a week until Wednesday’s disaster. No survivors were reported in the crash between American Eagle Flight 5342 heading to D.C. from Wichita, Kansas, and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter. 

The D.C. fire chief has said that recovery is now underway, as bodies are pulled out of the Potomac River. With many of Trump’s executive orders and policy memos disrupting the normal function of government, could this disaster have been prevented by a competent administration? 

House Republicans are fielding threats from their party whip: Bend to Donald Trump’s agenda, or risk losing your seat.

In an interview with NOTUS on Tuesday, Majority Whip Tom Emmer candidly shared his strategy for getting legislative outliers to fall into place.

“Do you really want the president going to your district and telling your voters that you are the one that is preventing him from doing what he was elected to do? I don’t think so,” Emmer told NOTUS.

Trump has a tough path ahead of him when it comes to advancing his agenda through the 119th Congress. Republicans have just enough lawmakers in the House to constitute a simple majority—but they won’t be able to lose any votes on items that Democrats rally against. Meanwhile, Republicans have a slightly more comfortable lead in the Senate, where the conservative party holds 53 seats compared to Democrats’ 45.

But should GOP lawmakers find problems in any legislation advanced by Trump’s MAGA acolytes in the House, Emmer believes that they’ll come to discover that the sacrifice of compromising on their ideals in order to aid Trump will all be worth it.

“Are they all going to be happy with everything? I seriously doubt it,” Emmer told NOTUS. “But at the end of the day, when that final product is ready, they’re all going to vote for it.”

Emmer’s statement is a signal that Trump’s expectation of total loyalty has crept from the White House and seeped into another branch of government.

That common denominator carried more weight than practically any other quality as the forty-seventh president selected dozens of nominees to lead different agencies, nearly all of whom had previously lent a hand to Trump in his criminal trials, donated money to his political campaign, or helped build out one of his presidential transition playbooks, such as Project 2025.

They have, in turn, consistently yielded to the president’s demands and expectations throughout their confirmation hearings over the last two weeks. When asked if he would obey the Impoundment Control Act, Trump’s nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget (and Project 2025 architect) Russell Vought claimed that the law was unconstitutional and that he would defer to the Trump administration as to whether his office would act in accordance with the law.

U.S. attorney general nominee (and former Trump attorney) Pam Bondi weaseled her way out of answering whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump’s confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wouldn’t commit to not cutting Medicaid. (Project 2025, the fiscal year 2025 Republican Study Committee budget plan, and the fiscal year 2025 House budget all propose sweeping cuts to the wildly popular program that provides comprehensive health insurance to some 72 million Americans.)

In October, transition team co-chair Howard Lutnick promised that a government equipped with total allegiance to the chief Republican was on its way.

While explaining how Trump’s last administration buckled under the weight of staff turnover due to disagreements in “vision,” Lutnick said that the new agenda was to eradicate any internal hostility to the Republican’s plans.

“They’re all going to be on the same side, and they’re all going to understand the policies, and we’re going to give people the role based on their capacity—and their fidelity and loyalty to the policy, as well as to the man,” the Wall Street billionaire said at the time.

Donald Trump will sign an executive order Wednesday that goes after the specter of antisemitism, giving the federal agencies powers to identify, punish, and deport foreign nationals allegedly prejudiced against Judaism and Jewish people.

The order’s language places an emphasis on “pro-Hamas aliens and left-wing radicals,” as well as “leftist, anti-American colleges and universities,” The Forward reports. The order calls for the deportation of foreign nationals who are “Hamas sympathizers on college campuses,” a clear threat to international students who have participated in pro-Palestine protests.

The order additionally calls for the United States to “ensure that admitted aliens and aliens otherwise already present in the United States” do not “support designated foreign terrorists,” which is vague enough to justify severe action from the Trump administration. The order places particular emphasis on what it calls “the explosion of antisemitism on our campuses and streets” since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, which sparked the more than year-long brutal war on Gaza.

In October, Republicans in Congress floated punishing universities and colleges allowing pro-Palestine protests by revoking their accreditation and jeopardizing their federal funding. Trump has already taken aim at higher education institutions in his deluge of executive orders with one provision that would investigate diversity, equity, and inclusion “discrimination” at “institutions of higher education with endowments over $1 billion,” which could be used against racial and religious groups on campuses that support Palestinian rights and protest against Israel.

Many of Trump’s executive orders directly align with goals outlined in the conservative Project 2025 manifesto, and some of the same right-wing minds behind the manifesto at the Heritage Foundation have also crafted “Project Esther” to target pro-Palestine activists.

Project Esther specifically calls for deporting foreign students if they take part in pro-Palestinian activism, and during his campaign, Trump pledged to “deport pro-Hamas radicals” to end protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Most protesters, however, are U.S. citizens. This latest executive order is straight from the Project Esther playbook, and could be the first of many to blatantly violate First Amendment rights to free speech and freedom of assembly.

Donald Trump’s federal funding freeze has somehow become even more of a fiasco—and he has his press secretary to thank.

Twenty-three state attorneys general appeared in federal court in Rhode Island Wednesday to oppose the Office of Management and Budget’s memo freezing federal funding for grants and loans that Congress had already approved and passed.

Ahead of the hearing, the OMB issued a memo rescinding its original memo about the freeze. White House aides said that the decision to rescind the memorandum was not intended as a way to back off the funding freeze, but rather to sidestep another court’s injunction that was issued Tuesday night, according to CBS News’s Jennifer Jacobs.

Unfortunately for the White House, press secretary Karoline Leavitt seems to have undermined their gambit by giving up the game in a statement posted to X.

“This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze. It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo,” Leavitt wrote Wednesday. “Why? To end any confusion created by the court’s injunction. The President’s EO’s on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.”

Hours later, the states were able to introduce Leavitt’s confused and confusing statement during the hearing as evidence that their lawsuit should continue despite the fact that the memo had been rescinded.

Chief U.S. District Judge John McConnell agreed to grant a restraining order on the freeze, saying that “based on comments by the president’s secretary,” the rescission of the “hugely ambiguous” OMB memo was merely a linguistic distinction and hadn’t actually blocked the freeze at all, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

While the Trump administration insisted that certain programs, such as Medicaid and Head Start, would not be affected by the directive, every single state experienced issues accessing these programs on Tuesday, leading to a national outcry from citizens and Democratic lawmakers.

In a separate case brought forward by nonprofits, a district judge issued a brief administrative stay before the memo was expected to go into effect Tuesday evening.

Trump wants to send 30,000 undocumented immigrants to Guantánamo Bay.

The president announced Wednesday that he will sign an executive order to transform the former detention camp for military prisoners into another detention camp for immigrants.

“I’m signing an executive order to instruct the departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantánamo Bay, most people don’t even know about it,” Trump told reporters, while signing into law the Laken Riley Act, which would allow federal authorities to detain any immigrant accused of a crime.

“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people, some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back. So we’re gonna send them out to Guantánamo. This will double our capacity immediately, and tough, that’s a tough place to get out of. Today’s signing brings us one step closer to eradicating the scourge of migrant crime in our communities once and for all.”

Guantánamo is infamous for the rampant torture and abuse that U.S. interrogators inflicted on prisoners since the camp opened in 2002. There are currently 15 people still being detained there.

Donald Trump signed the Laken Riley Act, one of the most extreme anti-immigration bills in recent memory, into law Wednesday.

This is the first piece of legislation that Trump has signed in his second term—and it sets the tone for what’s to come. The law will allow law enforcement to detain and deport undocumented immigrants on the mere suspicion of committing a crime, with no conviction necessary. It does not include protections for children or DACA recipients. Twelve Democrats in the Senate and 46 Democrats in the House joined every Republican in Congress to pass the bill.

The new law will make it easier for Trump to pursue his goal of mass deportations, which have already begun in earnest around the country. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have set the heavy goal of 1,200 to 1,500 deportations a day, in the process, innocent people have been detained, such as Native members of the Navajo Nation and several Puerto Ricans, including a child and a U.S. military veteran.

The stepped-up immigration raids have already a negative effect on the food industry, but have also been met with opposition from many Americans. Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan complained on Tuesday that people in Chicago are hampering detention efforts because “they’ve been educated how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE.”

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security was sued on Monday by multiple Quaker religious groups from across the country for lifting a restriction on immigration raids in places of worship. Trump and his right-wing allies are using every existing tool in their arsenal and passing new laws to boost their deportation efforts, but the process has been chaotic and negligent.

This story has been updated.

Mike Pence is pulling out receipts to lobby senators against confirming Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health and human services secretary.

The former vice president posted a minute-long compilation of clips showing President Trump disparaging RFK Jr., mostly while they were each on the campaign trail last year.

“President Trump was right the first time.… Senators, Vote No on RFK. Jr.,” the video is captioned.

“RFK Jr is a Democrat plant, a radical left liberal,” one clip from May showed Trump saying. “He makes the ‘Green New Scammers’ look very conservative by comparison, and he’s anti-military and he’s anti-vet.… I’d even take Biden over Junior.”

The clip ends with inviting viewers to visit “RFKQuestions.com,” which redirects to a letter from conservative PAC Advancing American Freedom urging the Senate not to confirm RFK Jr. on the grounds that he is pro-abortion.

The video was posted on the eve of RFK Jr.’s first confirmation hearing Wednesday, during which the Trump nominee crumbled when questioned about his own past comments.

Donald Trump’s administration has made its calamitous freeze on federal grants and loans even worse.

In a brief memo Wednesday, the Office for Management and Budget announced that it would be withdrawing its order to pause funding for review.

“OMB Memorandum M-25-13 is rescinded. If you have any questions about implementing the President’s Executive Orders please contact your agency General Counsel,” the memo stated.

But then, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt just made things even messier.

“This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze. It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo,” she wrote on X. “Why? To end any confusion created by the court’s injunction. The President’s EO’s on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.”

The freeze was originally intended to go into effect at 5 p.m. on Tuesday. But all day, state officials and lawmakers reported having issues accessing essential government services such as Medicaid and Head Start, despite subsequent assurances from OMB that these programs would not be affected by the freeze. These issues and widespread confusion led to a public outcry, as many feared that their health care access was in jeopardy.

Democratic leaders called it a “constitutional crisis,” as Trump’s administration was clearly preventing funds from being allocated as Congress had decided. To resecure funding, these organizations would have had to report to OMB on whether they promote ideas such as environmental justice, “gender ideology,” and diversity, equity, and inclusion. They would also have to say whether they provide services to undocumented immigrants.

Tuesday night, a district judge ordered a brief administrative stay on the freeze, delaying it from going into effect until February 3. This means that Leavitt’s claim the executive orders are “in full force and effect” is false.

“Thanks. This clarifies nothing,” Minnesota Senator Tina Smith tweeted in response, speaking for all of us.

Virginia Senator Tim Kaine warned that “this battle is just beginning.”

“I don’t know that they know what they’re doing. I think all they know is they got a backlash they didn’t expect, and so we’re not assuming the rescission is to be taken as a resolution,” he told reporters. “So we’re going to be on the floor tonight raising hell about this.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James warned that “this is just more confusion and chaos. We will be in court this afternoon.”

James is part of a coalition of Democratic attorneys general who have sued the Trump administration over the funding freeze.

This first major fiasco by the Trump administration promises only more chaos to come.

This story has been updated.