Trump’s Boat Strikes Just Cost the U.S. Key Intel From a Top Ally

The United Kingdom isn’t playing about President Donald Trump’s extrajudicial military strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats—it’s cutting him off from the intelligence apparatus used to track boats, CNN reported Tuesday.  

The U.K., which controls some territories in the Caribbean, operates an intelligence network in the area. The top ally has long assisted the United States in monitoring alleged drug trafficking in the Caribbean, sharing its intelligence with the Joint Interagency Task Force South. 

Typically, the boats would be stopped, boarded, and searched. But recently, Trump has opted to just blow them up, killing dozens of crew members, violating international law. 

In a major break between longtime allies, the U.K. stopped sharing this intelligence with the U.S. government after it grew concerned that the Pentagon was using the information to carry out its extrajudicial executions, sources told CNN.

The Trump administration has claimed that its military strikes have targeted “unlawful combatants” who are part of foreign cartels it argues are “nonstate armed groups.” To assert its authority to make the strikes, the U.S. government claims the transport of drugs constitutes “an armed attack against the United States.”

But a closer look at some of the men killed in these strikes revealed that they were not so-called “narco-terrorists” or members of criminal gangs or cartels. Many of them weren’t even heading for the U.S. And, crucially, they were smuggling cocaine, not synthetic opioids responsible for killing tens of thousands of Americans every year. 

Officials in the U.K. aren’t the only ones skeptical of the Trump administration’s ratcheting-up military campaign. During a tense meeting last month, Admiral Alvin Holsey, who has served as commander of the U.S. Southern Command for only a year, offered to resign from his position after he questioned the strikes’ legality, sources told CNN. He is expected to leave his post in December. 

A Utah judge rejected a Republican-drawn congressional map on Monday, choosing instead a map that would create the first Democratic-leaning district in the state in 25 years.

Judge Dianna Gibson found that the map submitted by Utah’s Republican-controlled legislature violated Utah law because it was “drawn with the purpose to favor Republicans.”

While states across the country mount gerrymandering offensives, Utah has been knee-deep in its own redistricting battle: Voters passed Proposition 4 in 2018, which created an independent redistricting committee to draw new state maps and prohibited maps that considered partisan data. But Utah Republican legislators couldn’t tolerate that and repealed the proposition in 2020, creating a new, Republican-favored map.

That caused the organizers behind Prop 4—the League of Women Voters of Utah and Mormon Women for Ethical Government—to sue in 2022.

Gibson ruled in favor of a Prop 4–compliant map submitted by the plaintiffs, deeming it independently and correctly structured, without partisan influence. Gibson’s ruling could give the Democrats another coveted seat as they head into the midterms.

Utah joins states like Texas, North Carolina, and California that have passed new maps ahead of the midterms—but unlike Texas or California, where the party in power is creating more seats for itself, Utah Republicans’ efforts to do the same thing have brutally backfired.

Eight Senate Democrats didn’t just give up on affordable health care by agreeing to a shutdown deal—they also gave the GOP a clear path to take revenge on former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith.

Bloomberg Law has reported that the very end of the Senate-approved shutdown deal contains a hidden provision that essentially allows Republican senators to sue Smith for millions of dollars in damages after their phone records were seized during his investigation into the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The legislation allows any senator who has been searched without their knowledge to be awarded at least $500,000, so long as they weren’t the target of the investigation.

While the provision does not mention Smith by name, it is retroactive to January 1, 2022. That date was just a few months before Smith and the FBI began to request electronic communications from eight GOP senators as part of the January 6 investigation.

“Any Senator whose Senate data, or the Senate data of whose Senate office, has been acquired, subpoenaed, searched, accessed, or disclosed in violation of this section may bring a civil action against the United States if the violation was committed by an officer, employee, or agent of the United States or of any Federal department or agency,” the provision reads. That would certainly include Smith.

Smith has yet to release a statement in response to the news.

The former special counsel has been seen as an enemy of the administration ever since his dual criminal investigations into Trump for illegal possession of classified documents and his role in January 6. Trump pleaded not guilty on all charges before they were dropped altogether after the 2024 election due to convenient Justice Department policy that prevents the prosecution of a sitting president. Smith has maintained both his innocence and the validity of his investigation.

The full Senate-approved funding bill can be read here.

President Donald Trump unveiled his plan to remake the health care system—and it’s a doozy.

As the government shutdown begins to wind down, with some Democrats backing off their bid to extend subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, the president has started waxing on about his own vision for a new system of American health care. 

“I want instead of going to the insurance companies, I want the money to go into an account for people, where the people buy their own health insurance. It’s so good. The insurance will be better. It’ll cost less. Everybody’s gonna be happy. They’re gonna feel like entrepreneurs,”  Trump said during a Fox News interview Monday night. “They’re actually gonna be able to go out and negotiate their own health insurance. And they can use it only for that reason, that’s the beauty—only for that purpose.

“Call it Trumpcare, call it whatever you want to call it. Anything but Obamacare. Obamacare is a disaster, just like he was as a president,” he added. 

Over the weekend, Trump repeatedly floated this model in a series of posts on Truth Social, where he bid Senate Republicans to draft a bill that would distribute the funds directly to Americans in an effort to increase competition and drive down costs. 

While Trump has claimed his plan would help lower premiums, critics say that Trump’s idea is plainly worse than Obamacare.

The Affordable Care Act created a marketplace where consumers could use government subsidies to help purchase private-sector plans. It’s not clear that Trump’s plan involves any such marketplace, and would plunge consumers into a state of nature.

Democrats have sought to extend subsidies to make insurance plans more affordable, while Republicans claim Democrats are just lining insurers’ pockets while premiums steadily increase. Crucially, as Republicans ensure that enhanced ACA subsidies lapse, insurance premiums are set to skyrocket starting in January, and premiums for individuals will increase by as much as double. 

“This is, unsurprisingly, nonsensical. Is he suggesting eliminating health insurance and giving people a few thousand dollars instead? And then when they get a cancer diagnosis they just go bankrupt?” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy wrote on X Sunday.

Currently, Obamacare enrollees never see the funds from their tax credits, which instead are sent directly to insurers. Trump figures that consumers would rather see the money themselves, what little of it there is. His plan purports to take the burden of negotiating insurance rates away from health care providers and large companies, and place it on individuals. 

While it could be a fun foray for Americans who fancy themselves “entrepreneurs,” there is no reason to think the average Americans would ever want to negotiate, or have the tool kit or information to do so in their best interest. Brian S. King, an insurance claims attorney and chair of the Utah Democrats, wrote on X Monday that Trump’s plan would be like “sending lambs to the slaughter.”

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders chimed in to remind Republicans that there was another way. “Oh, Trump and the Republicans can’t stand how the big, bad insurance companies are ripping off Americans. Really? Are you serious? Then I welcome your support for Medicare for All. Let’s end the greed of the insurance industry & make healthcare a human right, not a privilege,” Sanders wrote on X Sunday. 

Meanwhile, Republicans celebrated Trump’s “simply brilliant” plan. Florida Senator Rick Scott, who committed massive health care fraud as a CEO, claimed Sunday that he was already working on a bill to make Trump’s dream a reality. 

Donald Trump’s latest excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act: commercial real estate vacancy in downtown Chicago.

“The Miracle Mile Shopping Center in Chicago, once considered our Nation’s BEST, now has a more than 28 percent vacancy factor, and is ready to call it quits unless something is done about the murder and crime, which is prevalent throughout the City,” Trump posted on Truth Social after midnight Tuesday, misnaming Chicago’s Magnificent Mile shopping district.

“CALL IN THE TROOPS, FAST, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE! ‘Just the News,’” the real estate mogul added.

The nineteenth-century law would let Trump utilize the military for domestic purposes, allowing troops to police and arrest citizens. If Trump invokes it, he would be able to deploy active-duty forces in order to enact his agenda, which involves federalizing the law enforcement agencies of Democratic-led cities.

Trump has floated the idea of leveraging the Insurrection Act for years, though it has picked up steam since his inauguration earlier this year.

Late last month, Trump told U.S. troops stationed in Japan that he was prepared to send “more than the National Guard” to American cities to safeguard and enforce his presidential agenda—a threat that he said could involve any branch of America’s armed forces.

“And I’d be allowed to do whatever I want, but we haven’t chosen to do that,” Trump said at the time. “And the courts wouldn’t get involved. Nobody would get involved. And I can send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. I can send anybody I wanted.”

The legal loophole has been used by 17 presidents but has not been invoked since 1992, when President George H.W. Bush used it to subdue riots in Los Angeles after the local police force brutalized Rodney King.

In an apparent bid to justify the legal grounds, Trump and his associates have tried to fabricate a fictitious bedlam that they claim has taken over Democratic cities. Instead, they seem to be the ones instigating the chaos.

The state-sanctioned violence has been nearly nonstop in Chicago over the last few months. Last month, agents used tear gas in residential areas “multiple times without audible warnings,” court documents said, surprising families with the painful chemical irritant. A couple of weeks later, federal agents allegedly tear-gassed a group of school-age children on their way to a Halloween parade, in a residential Chicago neighborhood.

Meanwhile, Trump’s most militant supporters are ready and willing to thrust themselves into his violent fray as soon as he gives the signal: Stewart Rhodes said Sunday that he’s “relaunching” and “rebuilding” the Oath Keepers, the armed white supremacist organization that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.