Trump Wanted “Retribution” Against Pro-Palestine Students, Judge Rules

A federal judge used an anonymous pro-Trump threat he received to open his scathing 161-page ruling on how President Trump broke the law with his authoritarian deportations of students for standing against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

“Trump has pardons and tanks,” the scribbled threat to senior U.S. District Judge William Young (a Reagan appointee) read. “What do you have?”

Young responded directly.

“Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, Alone I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, we the people of the United States—you and me—have our magnificent Constitution,” Young replied. “Here’s how that works out in a specific case—”

Young proceeded to explain to Mr. or Ms. Anonymous just how exactly the Trump administration violated the First Amendment rights of students like Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk.

“Secretaries Noem and Rubio … acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target noncitizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment protected political speech. They did so in order to strike fear into similarly situated non-citizen pro-Palestinian individuals, pro-actively (and effectively) curbing lawful pro-Palestinian speech and intentionally denying such individuals (including the plaintiffs here) the freedom of speech that is their right,” Young wrote. “Moreover, the effect of these targeted deportation proceedings continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day.”

He also called out Trump specifically and his obvious “problem” with the First Amendment.

“Where things run off the rails for him is his fixation with ‘retribution.’ ‘I am your retribution’ he thundered famously while on the campaign trail. Yet government retribution for speech (precisely what has happened here) is directly forbidden by the First Amendment.”

While tanks and pardons are quite formidable weapons, as Trump has shown, at least some judges still seem to believe in the power vested in the Constitution and their right to enforce it, even as they receive strange threats from the president himself or his anonymous fans.

“I hope you found this helpful. Thanks for writing. It shows you care. You should. Sincerely & respectfully, Bill Young,” Judge Young concluded in his response to the anonymous threat. “P.S. The next time you’re in Boston [the postmark on the card is from the Philadelphia area] stop in at the Courthouse and watch your fellow citizens, sitting as jurors, reach out for justice. It is here, and in courthouses just like this one, both state and federal, spread throughout our land that our Constitution is most vibrantly alive, for it is well said that ‘Where a jury sits, there burns the lamp of liberty.’”

The Trump administration is appealing to its ideological base to fill vacancies at the Department of Homeland Security.  

White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller announced to his followers on X Monday night that the office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was looking for “homeland defenders” to approve or deny immigration applications.

“Calling all patriots. USCIS is now hiring ‘HOMELAND DEFENDERS,’” Miller wrote. “Your job will be to interview applicants for green cards, work visas and citizenship for approval or denial. Great pay, flexible hours, stay local. Sign up to be a Homeland Defender today!”

It was not immediately clear if “homeland defender” would be a new position at USCIS, or if it would differ in any significant way from the work already done by immigration service officers at the agency. But whether Miller is referring to a new title or an old one, the pay doesn’t seem to be all that he’s chalking it up to be: a batch of new job listings for immigration officers at USCIS describe the starting salary as nearly $35,000. (Job listings for similar roles in other areas of the country pay up to $107,000, according to USCIS’s career website.)

The openings come just weeks before DHS is set to introduce a more rigorous application process for wannabe green card holders. Those changes will go into effect on October 20.

Miller’s coded language paints a vivid picture of exactly who the white nationalist would like to see dictating the demographics of admitted immigrants. The 40-year-old has tasked federal agents with arresting 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day—a quota so astronomical that it has forced the agency to find unconventional subjects of detention, including noncriminal legal residents and even U.S. citizens. The result has been mass, intra-agency dejection: Former employees claim that ICE agents have reportedly never been so miserable.

After sending his state’s National Guard troops to help garden in Washington D.C., Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry is now begging President Donald Trump to deploy more soldiers in his own cities.

In a letter sent to War Secretary Pete Hegseth Monday, Landry urged the Defense Department to deploy 1,000 National Guard troops “to urban centers” throughout Louisiana. “Louisiana currently faces a convergence of elevated violent crime rates in Shreveport, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans coupled with critical personnel shortages within local law enforcement,” Landry wrote.

But in August, Landry approved sending 135 members of the Louisiana National Guard to Washington to assist in Trump’s federal takeover there. After finishing a sweeping crackdown on the city’s poorest, least white areas with high crime rates, service members have since been enlisted to help Trump’s effort to beautify the nation’s capital.

Like many of the Democratic-led cities targeted by Trump’s federal takeovers, Louisiana’s urban centers have majority-Black populations. But unlike those cities, Louisiana actually has a crime problem.

Louisiana’s homicide rate in 2023 was 19.3 per 100,000 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s more than 300 percent higher than the homicide rate of the most recent site of Trump’s federal law enforcement takeover: Oregon, which had a homicide rate of 4.6 per 100,000 people that same year.

Shreveport, which is in House Speaker Mike Johnson’s district, landed at number 25 on Newsweek’s recent list of the 30 U.S. cities (with at least 100,000 residents) that had the highest number of violent crimes against people. In 2024, Baton Rouge had a murder rate of 36 people per 100,000 and New Orleans had a murder rate of 31 per 100,000. Baton Rouge’s murder rate is twice the rate in Washington. Meanwhile, Portland, Oregon, saw a 51 percent decrease in homicides in the first half of 2025.

While appearing on Fox News Monday night, Landry struck a sycophantic tone. “President Trump has amassed the best Cabinet of public servants and folks who really want to fight crime,” he said.

“Why would you not want your citizens to be safe?”

But Landry’s plea doesn’t detract from the lawlessness of Trump’s campaign to intimidate Democratic-led cities, and concerns that Trump’s sweeping crackdown and cuts to crime prevention programs could undermine already decreasing crime rates.

In a rare gathering Tuesday, top military leaders were summoned from across the globe to be lectured by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about new directives meant to uphold a “warrior ethos” in the military.

An issue on which the former Fox News pundit placed particular emphasis was the supposed crisis of “fat troops.”

“It all starts with physical fitness and appearance,” Hegseth told the seasoned commanders, being sure to pat himself on the back in that regard: “If the Secretary of War can do regular hard P.T. [physical training], so can every member of our joint force.”

“Frankly,” he continued, “it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops. Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon, and leading commands around the country and the world. It’s a bad look. It is bad, and it’s not who we are.”

Reacting to the remarks, some social media users poked fun at the weight of the man at the very top of the armed forces’ chain of command: President Trump. Among them was California Governor Gavin Newsom, who frequently trolls the president online—this time posting an unflattering photo of Trump during a 2024 campaign stunt at McDonalds with the caption: “I guess the Commander in Chief needs to go!”

During his address, Hegseth also laid out a bizarre no-beard policy (that will disproportionately affect Black service members): “No more beards, long hair, superficial individual expression. We’re going to cut our hair, shave our beards, and adhere to standards,” he said, adding, “We don’t have a military full of Nordic pagans. At my direction, the era of unprofessional appearance is over. No more beardos.”

President Donald Trump ranted Tuesday that U.S. warships don’t look tough enough anymore.

Speaking in front of a meeting of hundreds of U.S. military officials whom War Secretary Pete Hegseth had summoned to Washington, Trump said that his administration was reviewing the way that the U.S. builds warships.

“It is something we’re considering, the concept of ‘battleship.’ Nice six-inch side, solid steel. Not aluminum, aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. Starts melting as the missile’s about two miles away,” Trump said.

But Trump made it clear that his complaints actually have nothing to do with efficiency or safety. “I am a very aesthetic person. I don’t like some of the ships you’re doing aesthetically,” Trump said. “They say, ‘Oh, it’s stealth.’ That’s not stealth. An ugly ship is not necessary in order to say you’re stealth.”

The U.S. Navy has been a particular sticking point for Trump, as the agency that is consistently behind schedule and over-budget flies in the face of his gestures at efficacy. In June, Navy Secretary John Phelan said Trump’s priorities for the military branch could be summed up as “shipbuilding, shipbuilding, shipbuilding,” a bid that sent defense contractors foaming at the mouth. Shipping experts have said Trump’s dream will likely cost billions of dollars—others say it is destined to fail.

Unfortunately, Trump doesn’t actually know anything about warships. U.S. warships are constructed using some aluminum to reduce weight and improve fuel efficiency, according to Wieland Diversified, a metal supplier. Aluminum is also resistant to corrosion and durable against the ocean waves.

Trump repeated a nonsensical criticism from his executive order that the U.S. once built one ship a day, and now they barely build one a year—which is obviously false. The president has also previously falsely claimed that magnets stop working when placed in water, and therefore were a stupid thing to put on a boat.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House plans to give Americans the chance to buy drugs directly from the government, via a website dubbed “TrumpRx.” Whether the drugs will actually be cheaper or more accessible than Medicare and Medicaid is still very much up in the air.

This announcement is timely, as Trump’s 100 percent tariff on pharmaceutical products is set to hit the market this week, and will very well likely cause the prices of medicine for millions of Americans to skyrocket. This “TrumpRx” scheme seems to be an attempt to offset that.

This also comes just days after Trump declared that he would reduce drug costs by 1,000 percent, a claim as shaky as TrumpRx’s chances of providing a wide enough range of options to actually help Americans with the incoming potential price inflation that his policies have already caused. Pfizer has already pledged to lower its own prices to help Trump, according to sources who spoke with the Journal.

“President Trump is leveraging the power of the federal government to drastically cut drug prices for everyday Americans,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told the paper. “Democrats talked the talk for decades about drug prices, but only President Trump is actually walking the walk.”

Desai brings up an interesting point here. This is essentially Trump exerting state control over the pharmaceutical industry, superseding private business so that the government can sell drugs directly to the people at prices it (supposedly) determines. If a Democrat tried that, or even talked about it, they’d likely be harangued as an anti-American Communist. But it’s Trump, so he gets tough guy points from his base instead.

This week, Senator Bernie Sanders’s office released a report revealing that the prices of nearly 700 prescription drugs have increased during Trump’s second term.

“Can’t wait to hear what GOP leadership thinks of TrumpRx. For years Dems wanted Medicare to be able to negotiate drug prices,” one user wrote on X. “GOP balked and screamed socialism. Now Trump wants to sell drugs via a government-owned website.”

Trump told senior generals and admirals they will be going to “war” on U.S. soil.

In his address Tuesday before a rare gathering of hundreds of military leaders, who were summoned from around the world to Virginia, the president lamented “what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles”—cities where he’s threatened to send troops based on the baseless notion that Democratic officials have allowed crime to run rampant there.

Priming the top brass to conceive of forthcoming military operations in those cities as a “war,” Trump continued, “They’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”

Trump later added that he’s told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military—National Guard, but military. Because we’re going into Chicago very soon.”

The declaration came just after Hegseth—whose department Trump is seeking to rebrand as the “Department of War”—told the group, “War is something you do sparingly, on our own terms, and with clear aims. We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy.

“We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement,” Hegseth added, referring to rules that govern when, how, and to what degree members of the military are permitted to use force against foreign combatants. “We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country.”

Nuclear is the new “n-word,” according to Donald Trump.

The president, sharp as ever, rambled at an assembly of America’s top commanders Tuesday morning about nixing “woke” ideology from the armed services and bringing “battleships” back. 

He also discussed the threat of nuclear war, telling America’s military leadership that the country’s nuclear capabilities were still far ahead of its enemies’. Trump’s rant on nuclear warfare, however, came packaged with an odd detail: that the term nuclear was, to Trump, akin to the “n-word”

“You don’t have to be that good with nuclear. You could have one-twentieth what you have now and still do the damage that would be, you know, that’d be so horrendous,” he told the crowd.

Trump used the hate-speech abbreviation to emphasize how dangerous it is to “throw around” the term nuclear, but the comparison didn’t land.

“I call it the n-word,” Trump said. “There are two n-words, and you can’t use either of them.”

He then attempted to assuage concern of potential fallout by recounting how he recently directed a nuclear submarine to counter Russian threats.

“We were a little bit threatened by Russia recently, and I sent a submarine, nuclear submarine, the most lethal weapon ever made,” Trump said. “Number one, you can’t detect it. There’s no way. We’re 25 years ahead of Russia and China in submarines.”

Trump further claimed that America’s arsenal was vast enough to make it the last man standing in any type of nuclear conflict. Exactly how America’s citizens would fare during such an event, however, was unclear.

“Frankly, if it does get to use, we have more than anybody else,” Trump said. “We have better, we have newer, but it’s something we don’t ever want to even have to think about.”

Nuclear war was at the epicenter of public concern during America’s Cold War face-off with the USSR. Around the height of the conflict in 1983, ABC aired a made-for-TV movie titled The Day After that intended to publicize the potential horrors of nuclear fallout. The fictitious film focused on the Kansas City area, showcasing the body horror and devastation wreaked by nuclear bombs.  

At the time, it was the most viewed television film in history, reaching nearly 39 million households. Its impact on the country—and U.S. foreign policy—was seismic. President Ronald Reagan viewed the film at Camp David, later writing in his journal that it left him “deeply depressed” and keen to reshape American nuclear policy. 

Four years later, the film was also broadcast on Soviet state television, influencing Soviet mindsets while Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev negotiated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

It has been speculated that Trump—a man of television himself—was also deeply influenced by the film. In a June interview with Engelsberg Ideas, former presidential adviser Fiona Hill (who served as a witness during Trump’s first impeachment inquiry) posited that the film could have played a significant role in the MAGA leader’s perception of nuclear armageddon, and how that fear could funnel into a nuclear arms race.

“Trump is very much a man who visualises things and sees everything in a television context,” Hill said. “I’m sure that he would have seen The Day After. I’m sure that such depictions and images, and others like them, left an impression on Trump. These depictions were the result of the War Scare and the standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States over the placement of SS-20 and Pershing missiles in Europe. 

“When all is considered, you get the feeling that this moment, in 1983 to 1984, is a turning point for Trump,” she continued. Trump, according to Hill, made his first visit to the USSR the same year that Reagan signed the nuclear treaty, all in an effort to “try to put himself into that kind of position where he becomes the guy who can negotiate the end of nuclear weapons.”

Republican Senator Roger Marshall was forced to comment on Trump’s vulgar AI video of Democratic congressional leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries—and he brushed it off as a “little boy” playing with a dog.

Trump posted the tacky video on Monday, shortly after meeting with Senator Schumer and Minority Leader Jeffries about the potential government shutdown. In the video, the two men can be seen standing side by side—Jeffries with a sombrero and mustache, a racist reference to Mexican immigrants. Circus music plays in the back.

“Look guys, there’s no way to sugarcoat it. Nobody likes Democrats anymore. We have no voters left because of all of our woke trans bullshit,” AI-Schumer says in the video. “Not even Black people wanna vote for us anymore, even Latinos hate us. So we need new voters. And if we give all these illegal aliens free health care, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us. They can’t even speak English, so they won’t realize we’re just a bunch of woke pieces of shit, you know? At least for a while until they learn English and they realize they hate us too.”

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins questioned Marshall about the clip later that evening. “Is that appropriate in your view?” she asked bluntly.

Marshall immediately started making excuses.

“Look, sometimes the president plays with the press like a little boy and a flashlight, and a dog. And he’s shining the flashlight here, and he’s shining it there. What he’s saying is, this offer from the Democrats is ridiculous,” he said. “One and a half trillion dollars on top of funding that they already agreed to. What they’re asking for is completely ridiculous, it’s disingenuous.”

“But couldn’t the president just say ‘these demands are ridiculous,’ and not post a video with Hakeem Jeffries wearing a sombrero, and putting that voice over Senator Schumer talking about people of color and immigrants?” Collins replied.

“I think he’s said that several times already.... In my estimation, Chuck Schumer wants the government to shut down to settle a political score.”

“Just to be clear, you don’t have any objections to that video the president posted?” Collins asked.

“I think it was said in jest.”

Did Marshall come up with that strange, stupid dog analogy on the spot? These are the same people who are currently trying to fire people and throw people in jail for criticizing Trump or choosing not to memorialize Charlie Kirk. And for what it’s worth, Republican cuts to health care—more of which are in the current bill in question—have directly hurt rural hospitals. And they’ll hurt homeless people and immigrants too, while cashing massive checks to the military. Who knows what kind of Draconian punishment Marshall would be calling for it a Democrat posted a video like that.

Hundreds of Iranians will be deported as part of an agreement reached between Washington and Tehran, per multiple reports. This began Monday, when about 100 Iranians were deported from Louisiana, to arrive in Iran Tuesday by way of Qatar, reports The New York Times, citing unnamed U.S. and Iranian officials.

Hossein Noushabadi of the Iranian Foreign Ministry told Iran’s Tasnim News Agency that the U.S. has “been planning for months to deport around 400 Iranians,” largely those who have entered the country illegally via Mexico. The current wave, he said, includes 120 people.

According to Noushabadi, some of those being deported held valid residency permits. The Times reports that some of the deportees “had volunteered to leave after being in detention centers for months, and some had not.”

In almost every case, the Times’ sources said, “asylum requests had been denied or the people had not yet appeared before a judge for an asylum hearing.”

Little is known about the identities of those impacted by this uncommon instance of the two adversarial governments working in concert. According to the Times, the 100 or so deportees include men, women, and some couples, whose reasons for immigrating to the U.S. were also “not immediately clear.”

The Times called the move among “the starkest efforts yet by the Trump administration to deport migrants no matter the human rights conditions in countries on the receiving end,” citing the persecution of activists, dissidents, journalists, lawyers, and marginalized groups in Iran.

A June proclamation from President Trump banned the issuance of all visas to Iranian nationals.

In July, the National Iranian American Council reported an increase in “racially motivated immigration arrests, deportations, and other Trump efforts to attack the immigration rights of Iranian Americans.” Following U.S. military strikes on Iran in June, arrests of Iranian nationals spiked, with 130 arrested in the week after the attack, according to the NIAC.