Pete Hegseth Just Fired a Top General Who Pissed Off Trump

Inconvenient truths don’t go unpunished in the Trump administration.

It’s a lesson that Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse learned the hard way on Friday, as The Washington Post reported that he’s been fired from his position as chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

The DIA under Kruse was responsible for the classified preliminary report about America’s June strike on Iran, which gave President Donald Trump much grief once it leaked to the press, as it painted a starkly different picture of the attack than his administration had.

Though the report expressly acknowledged its preliminary nature, its findings—that the strike set Iran’s alleged nuclear program back by only a few months, at most—put a damper on Hegseth’s and Trump’s insistence that they had totally decimated their targets. The president had referred to the attack as “one of the most successful military strikes in history,” comparable to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hegseth axed Kruse for “loss of confidence,” per the Post.

The ouster is just the latest example of the Trump administration shooting the messenger. After the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a troubling July jobs report, the president fired BLS chief Erika McEntarfer, appointing in her place a MAGA partisan who just happened to have been at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

If another country were to bomb an American-owned factory on foreign soil, one might expect—at the very least—harsh condemnation from the sitting U.S. president.

The anticipated response from a president who enjoys a reputation as both a champion of American business and a tough guy on the world stage would be even fiercer.

But President Donald Trump fell far short of such expectations on Friday, when he was asked about Russia’s strike on the Ukrainian branch of the American electronics manufacturer Flex.

The president mustered only five words—and none very forceful.

“I told [Putin], ‘I’m not happy about it,’” the president said, before immediately changing the subject. “I’m not happy about anything having to do with that war.”

Overnight, Russia hit the factory with two missiles, injuring at least 15, according to Ukraine. About 600 workers had reportedly been at work but took cover prior to impact as air raid sirens sounded. An estimated third of the plant burned down, per the Ukrainian military.

In a statement on X, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia had “practically burned down an American company producing electronics—home appliances, nothing military. The Russians knew exactly where they lobbed the missiles. We believe this was a deliberate attack against American property and investments in Ukraine.”

Andy Hunter, the president of the Ukrainian affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, described the strike as “not only an attack on Ukraine” but “an attack on American business,” which he said is being “destroy[ed] and humiliat[ed]” by Russia.

As Trump quickly changed the subject Friday, he resorted to his oft-repeated lie about having ended several wars during his second term. The president had previously said he ended six of them. Recently, he added a mysterious seventh conflict to that claim.

“I settled seven wars,” Trump continued Friday, before loosening the criteria for the tally in order to bolster the figure. “Actually, if you think about pre-wars, add three more, so it would be 10.”

President Donald Trump doesn’t just want federal control of Washington, D.C., he wants aesthetic control as well—and knowing the president’s garish style, it probably won’t be pretty.

On Friday, Trump said the administration was “looking at doing something very exciting” to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a part of the White House campus that was constructed in the late 1800s. “It’s such a beautiful building, but it doesn’t look it,” Trump said. “I think it’s just incredible, but you have to get past the color, because the stone they used was a really bad color.”

And it won’t stop at the White House: Trump also said that he’s giving out a contract to “beautify” the city, repaving streets and updating lampposts within a three-mile radius of the Capitol Building. “It’s gonna be beautiful, all those lightbulbs—you see the poles, they’re rusting and they’ve got different lenses on top, if you look.… We’re going to have this place beautified,” he said.

This redecoration would require about $2 billion from Congress, according to the president.

Meanwhile, House Republicans still haven’t restored the $1 billion in city funding they blocked earlier this year, holding taxpayer dollars hostage unless the new bill prohibits D.C. residents from spending their own money on things that don’t align with the conservative agenda, like abortion services or reparations.

But gold lampposts (which, if the past is any evidence, could conceivably be part of Trump’s plan) are definitely worth the money! On Thursday, as well, Trump said he wants D.C.’s parks to look like his golf courses.

“I’m very good at grass because I have a lot of golf courses all over the place,” he bragged. “I know more about grass than any human being, I think, anywhere in the world, and we’re going to be re-grassing all of your parks … it’ll look like Augusta. It’ll look like, more importantly, Trump National Golf Club—that’s even better,” he said, referring to Augusta, Georgia, where the Masters Tournament is held.

It seems that the president won’t stop until the whole District has been transformed into Mar-a-Lago.

The Justice Department released transcripts of its interviews with Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell on Friday, the Associated Press reported.

The DOJ interviewed Maxwell as part of its scramble to regain the public’s trust after botching the rollout of the Epstein files. After Attorney General Pam Bondi promised the release of Epstein’s so-called “client list,” she then went on to say the list did not exist.

In the interview, Maxwell reportedly recalled meeting Donald Trump in the early 1990s, when her father, Robert Maxwell, owned the New York Daily News.

“I may have met Donald Trump at that time, because my father was friendly with him and liked him very much,” Maxwell said, according to the transcript.

In the interview, Maxwell did not incriminate anyone, including former President Bill Clinton, Trump, or any other high-level officials. She also maintained that Epstein’s so-called “client list” did not exist.

“There is no list. We’ll start with that,” Maxwell said.

Maxwell’s interview aligns with what Bondi and the Trump administration have claimed about the list, but may disappoint those who expected a bombshell about Epstein’s supposed ties to influential politicians and decision-makers.

Maxwell also took the opportunity to heap praise on Trump. “President Trump was always very cordial and kind to me,” she said. “I just want to say that I find—I admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the president now. And I like him, and I’ve liked him.”

She also said she “loved going” to Mar-a-Lago.

Of Trump’s relationship with Epstein, she described it as mainly a social one, saying she’d never seen Trump at Epstein’s home or in a private setting. And certainly not getting a massage.

“I actually never saw the president in any sort of massage setting. I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody,” she said.

Maxwell also said she had never recruited a masseuse from Mar-a-Lago, contrary to what Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s accusers, said about how she was trafficked by Maxwell in 2000. At 16, Giuffre worked as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago, where she was approached by Maxwell to work as a traveling masseuse, which led to her abuse by Epstein, Maxwell, and their associates, she said. Giuffre died by suicide this year.

Trump, however, has told a different story. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One last month, Trump claimed that Epstein “stole” several of the president’s underage resort employees—including Giuffre.

Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for helping Epstein traffic underage girls, isn’t necessarily the most trustworthy of sources. She’s angling for a pardon from the president and so would have every reason to downplay any ties between Trump and Epstein, who had a documented multidecade relationship.

It’s yet to be seen whether the transcripts will quiet MAGA’s uproar about the administration’s lack of transparency on the infamous sex trafficker.

This story has been updated.

In Portland, Oregon, Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s use of chemical weapons has chased away a K-8 school just weeks before the start of the academic year, Rolling Stone reports.

The Cottonwood School, a publicly funded charter school, was, until this month, located adjacent to the city’s ICE facility. But in recent months, as protests against Trump’s mass deportations ramped up around the facility, ICE agents began to deploy tear gas against demonstrators.

According to the school’s executive director, Laura Cartwright, chemical munitions began to stray onto school grounds.

“At the end of the school year, we started noticing more activity at the ICE building, and there were chemicals being used on a regular basis and munitions being found on our playground,” she told local NBC affiliate KGW.

Cartwright also told Portland’s ABC affiliate that they were finding the munitions on a daily basis.“We were getting footage in the evenings of green gases, and gases being used near our gardens and enveloping our area,” she said.

As Rolling Stone reported, in June, the fence of the school’s play area displayed a laminated message. Its reported content, which matches a statement Cottonwood posted to Facebook, denounced the “harm being inflicted on our neighbors, ecosystem, students and school” and called on ICE to cease using weapons such as tear gas, “‘green’ gas, pepper balls, and rubber bullets reported near our campus.”

This isn’t the first time they’ve experienced this, Cartwright told Rolling Stone. The school, after all, weathered protests against police brutality in Portland in 2020. (Per KGW, the school emerged from that summer relatively unscathed.)

Historically, the Cottonwood School has operated “harmoniously with the protesters,” Cartwright explained to Rolling Stone. “Our issue is the chemical weapons being used against them that were impacting our space.… We can’t have children picking up a plastic tear-gas ball that’s going to pop.”

As enrollment began to take a hit and it became clear that remaining in place was untenable, the school ultimately decamped to another Portland neighborhood.

Alina Habba is whining that federal judges aren’t respecting the president after one ruled that she’d been unlawfully serving as acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey for over a month.

“I am the pick of the president, I am the pick of Pam Bondi our attorney general, and I will serve this country like I have for the last several years in any capacity,” Habba said about the challenges to her appointment during an appearance on Fox News Thursday night.

“It’s disturbing what we’re seeing. It’s not surprising, but it’s disturbing,” she continued. “They think they have a voice for five minutes, they try to be activists.

“And Pam Bondi called it like it is. The attorney general said it today: We will not fall to rogue judges. We will not fall to people trying to be political when they should just be doing their job, respecting the president,” Trump’s former lawyer said.

But what Habba and Bondi don’t seem to get is that a judge’s job is to uphold the law, not bend to the president’s every whim.

Last month, New Jersey federal judges ousted Habba, refusing to vote to extend her 120-day appointment as U.S. attorney for New Jersey. But the Trump administration found a loophole to keep its thoughtless foot soldier in place without Senate confirmation. After Bondi fired the first assistant U.S. attorney who was approved to replace her, and then appointed Habba to that position, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer found herself as acting U.S. attorney once again.

A federal judge Thursday ruled that Habba had been illegally serving as U.S. attorney for New Jersey since July 1 and blocked her from prosecuting two criminal cases where defendants had challenged her appointment.

The combination of tariff-driven inflation and a downturn in hiring has posed a “challenging situation” for the U.S. economy, according to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Delivering an annual address in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Friday morning, Powell underscored that the economy was engaged in a “curious kind of balance” from a slowdown in both the supply and demand for workers.

“This unusual situation suggests that downside risks to employment are rising. And if those risks materialize, they can do so quickly in the form of sharply higher layoffs and rising unemployment,” Powell warned.

Powell pointed to the July jobs report, which revised employment data from the previous two months. The updated numbers moved the three-month growth average to 35,000, the lowest three-month period since 2010 (other than the pandemic). It was a stark contrast from the growth felt during 2024, when the measure showed an increase of 168,000 jobs per month. The July report’s downsizing also suggested that while some sectors, such as health care and social assistance, gained jobs, the vast majority of the market lost employment.

“This slowdown is much larger than assessed just a month ago, as the earlier figures for May and June were revised down substantially,” Powell continued. “But it does not appear that the slowdown in job growth has opened up a large margin of slack in the labor market—an outcome we want to avoid.

“Indeed, labor force growth has slowed considerably this year with the sharp falloff in immigration, and the labor force participation rate has edged down in recent months,” Powell said.

The Federal Reserve chair also noted that the effects of Trump’s tariffs on consumer prices are “now clearly visible,” and that the country’s central bank expects the price increases to “accumulate over the coming months.”

On Friday, President Donald Trump delivered a series of confusing comments about that morning’s FBI raid on the home of his onetime national security adviser John Bolton.

The president told reporters that he was not yet briefed on the raid on the Maryland residence of Bolton, who is a vocal critic of the president’s decision-making, character, and mental acuity.

“I saw it on television this morning,” Trump said, quickly adding: “I’m not a fan of John Bolton. He’s a real, sort of a low life.… He’s not a smart guy. He could be a very unpatriotic guy.”

Since his contentious 17-month stint in Trump’s first administration, Bolton has repeatedly drawn his former boss’s ire—including for publishing a 2020 tell-all, In the Room Where It Happened, which described Trump as incompetent and unfit for office. Trump’s first-term Justice Department investigated Bolton over the book, claiming it contained classified information. Similarly, Friday’s raid, per NBC, was part of a “national security investigation in search of classified records.”

During his remarks about Bolton, Trump also made a point to assert that he “could” have hypothetically been the one who ordered the search but insisted this was done by Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department.

In doing so, the president sounded not unlike a Mafia boss describing how he insulates himself from misdeeds.

“I tell Pam [Bondi], and I tell the group, ‘I don’t want to know, but just—you have to do what you have to do.’ I don’t want to know about it. It’s not necessary,” Trump said, adding, “I could know about it. I could be the one starting it. I’m actually the chief law enforcement officer, but I feel that it’s better this way.”

Here, Trump all but admitted to borrowing a page from England’s King Henry II, who is said to have uttered, regarding the archbishop of Canterbury, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”—and thereby enjoyed plausible deniability when his underlings killed the man vexing him.

It’s not the first time Trump has sounded like a mob boss or a monarch. And it surely won’t be the last time the administration seemingly wields the government against those deemed guilty of lèse-majesté against him.

Far-right influencer Laura Loomer complained to State Secretary Marco Rubio about U.S. support for injured Gazan children. Then the aid stopped.

The self-appointed “loyalty enforcer” has had enormous success influencing the Trump administration from the safety of her X account: At least 16 individuals have been fired from the federal government after Loomer singled them out as covert Democratic agents. But the unelected provocateur’s reach apparently extends far beyond snipping federal payrolls and into crafting and implementing foreign policy.

Over the last several weeks, Loomer had become fixated on a small number of injured Palestinian children who had arrived in the United States by way of a charity called Heal Palestine for medical treatment related to their injuries of war. The wounded kids suffered from missing limbs, severe burns, and other dire medical needs, but the McCarthy-esque agitator was unsympathetic.

Loomer openly vilified them on social media, referring to the children as “Islamic invaders” and their presence in the U.S. as a “national security threat.” She called on the White House to fire the State Department employee who authorized the children’s visas.

Last Friday, Loomer claimed that she had elevated her concerns to the agency by speaking directly with Rubio. The next day, the State Department paused all visitor visas from Gaza.

“All visitor visas for individuals from Gaza are being stopped while we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days,” the agency’s official X account announced.

Rubio defended the decision the following day.

“First of all, it’s not just kids,” Rubio told CBS News’s Margaret Brennan. “It’s a bunch of adults that are accompanying them. Second, we had outreach from multiple congressional offices asking questions about it, and so we’re going to reevaluate how those visas are being granted.”

Loomer, an apparently proud bigot, has often used her social media influence to flaunt and advance her racist and Islamaphobic viewpoints. But her recent proximity to Donald Trump—which she describes as a “friendship”—has hoisted her intolerant and hateful ideologies into the throng of the federal government, contorting critical national and international decisions as little more than a private citizen.

It’s been almost a year since President Donald Trump targeted Springfield, Ohio, with racist lies that Haitian immigrants had begun eating their neighbors’ pets in order to stir up his voter base. Now, the city’s Haitian immigrants, who helped revive Springfield’s struggling economy, are being chased out by Trump’s anti-immigrant policies.

Springfield is currently home to an estimated 10,000-15,000 Haitian immigrants, but The New York Times reported Friday that dozens have already fled the city—and more are sure to follow.

The wave of Haitian immigration had helped Springfield, a town of just 60,000, rebound, the Times reported. Now, all that could go away.

The Trump administration has already ended some humanitarian programs that allowed Haitians to live and work legally in the United States, leaving local employers with no choice but to dismiss scores of workers. A nearby Amazon warehouse, a major employer in the area, was forced to dismiss hundreds of employees in June. The Times reported that a local food pantry at the local nonprofit St. Vincent de Paul had received twice as many Haitians families as usual on a recent Tuesday.

Thousands more Haitians are expected to lose work in February 2026, when the administration plans to end Temporary Protected Status, which prevents their deportation.

And the more Haitian immigrants are forced to lean on social services, or fill up emergency rooms because they lack access to health insurance, the more likely it is that politicians will use these changes to stoke the same issues that Trump preyed upon: scarcity and sickness.

Vice President JD Vance pushed rumors on the campaign trail that the city’s new arrivals had contributed to the spread of communicable diseases, though local health officials said there had been no discernable increase in those illnesses.

In July, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, who’d refuted but refused to condemn Trump’s racist lies last year, said that “suddenly losing a large number” of workers would have a “significant impact” on businesses. “It’s not going to be good,” he said.

Now, Haitian immigrants face three options. They could go back to Haiti, which is still plagued by widespread violence, or attempt to gain asylum elsewhere, such as Canada. Or they could remain without lawful status, facing steep economic hurdles, as targets for Trump’s massive deportation scheme.