Trump, 79, Repeatedly Falls Asleep in His Own Cabinet Meeting

President Trump once again appeared to struggle to stay awake and alert during his own Cabinet meeting.

The president leaned forward, leaned back, twiddled his thumbs, and did everything in between as his eyelids grew heavy in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon Cabinet meeting. As each of his Cabinet members gave him an update on how great everything is going, the president looked more and more exhausted, his eyes fully closed at several points.

This most recent on-camera nap comes just over a week after The New York Times reported on what appears to be a serious drop in Trump’s energy and activity compared to his first term. The president has been pissed about the story ever since.

It’s clear to anyone watching that the president has issues staying up while sitting in long meetings, like many old men do. Trump has dozed off in other meetings, including during a briefing with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in May. This all only adds fuel to the narrative that the man who will end his term as the oldest president in U.S. history is not as mentally or physically fit as he claims to be.

Republican leadership is tiring of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Top conservatives have started to publicly voice their discontent with Trump’s appointed war chief, as reports circulate about a Pentagon decision to mercilessly kill survivors of a drone strike in the Caribbean on September 2.

Republicans have been practically mute as Hegseth’s careless, monthslong killing spree has claimed the lives of at least 83 people. But GOP-led panels in the House and Senate are dialing up their scrutiny of the Pentagon, demanding a full account of the September boat strikes.

The Republican chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services committees are both demanding audio and video of the incident. “We’re going to conduct oversight, and we’re going to try to get to the facts,” vowed Senator Roger Wicker.

Senator Thom Tillis told CNN that he was still trying to understand whether Hegseth had ordered the second strike that day, killing a couple of survivors that clung to the wreckage left by the initial attack.

“Obviously, if it can be substantiated by facts, it’s a violation of both ethical and possibly legal requirements,” Tillis said. “If it is substantiated, whoever made that order needs to get the hell out of Washington.”

The North Carolina lawmaker was not the only conservative in Washington irate over the events. Senator Lindsey Graham said that he was still working out “the facts” but suggested that the attack could have run afoul of the law.

“It’s a long-held rule that survivors of the ship attack are no longer combatants, and an air crew member in a parachute is no longer a combatant. You’re out of the fight,” Graham told CNN. “I don’t know what the facts are, but that’s general law. We’ll see what the facts are.”

Before he knew that the White House had confirmed the Pentagon struck the boat twice, West Virginia Senator Jim Justice told the network that a second attack seemed “way over the edge.”

“I don’t see how that’s acceptable,” he added.

Ultimately, Hegseth’s long string of scandals appear to be adding up, pushing his potential congressional allies further and further away.

Representative Don Bacon, who serves on the House Committee on Armed Services, told CNN’s Manu Raju that Hegseth should be forced out of government—if he’s deemed responsible for the second strike.

“I felt that way under Signalgate,” Bacon said, referring to an incident in March when Trump administration officials accidentally added The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat regarding sensitive details of a plan to bomb Houthis in Yemen. “He should’ve taken responsibility then, and he didn’t.”

“I’ve seen enough that I don’t think he’s the right leader,” Bacon told Raju.

The White House has repeatedly insisted the violence is justified, broadly accusing the boats of trafficking narcotics to the U.S. from Venezuela and Colombia, though U.S. lawmakers have been more than skeptical—particularly since several of the boats were thousands of miles away in international waters, and since the attacks were conducted without prior investigations or interdiction. Pentagon officials reportedly haven’t been concerned with identifying the people on the boats before attacking.

President Donald Trump is all in on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s plan to exploit the shooting of two National Guard members in order to expand one of the Trump administration’s most racist policies: the travel ban.

Multiple U.S. officials told CBS News Tuesday that Trump’s travel ban would be expanded to roughly 30 countries, up from 19. The Department of Homeland Security also released a statement promising that it would announce a slate of new additions to Trump’s travel ban “soon.”

This announcement comes just days after an Afghan refugee was accused of shooting two guardsmen just blocks away from the White House, spurring the Trump administration to pause asylum case decisions for all nationalities and order a full-scale review of green card cases involving immigrants from the 19 countries currently subject to the travel ban.

Not only is it not clear why the alleged actions of one individual would require all citizens of a country to be barred entry to the U.S., but crucially, Afghanistan is already subject to Trump’s travel ban. Trump’s plot to loop in other countries just shows the lengths the administration will go to further his agenda to smear and exclude immigrants.

It seems the idea for this latest blatantly racist backlash originated with Noem, who wrote on X Monday that she’d recommended Trump impose a “full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”

“Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS,” she wrote. “WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

“EVERY DAMN COUNTRY,” wrote the official DHS X account, sharing Noem’s sentiment.

The Trump administration has also halted all visa and immigration processing for Afghan nationals. The alleged shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, served in a paramilitary unit in Afghanistan led by the CIA and trained by U.S. special operations soldiers. He received his asylum and work authorization in April this year. So, despite Noem’s tantrum, it seems that the Trump administration did at one time want these so-called “foreign invaders.”

Trump’s travel ban currently fully bars entry from Afghanistan, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, and partially restricts travel from several other countries, including Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told soldiers under his command in Iraq to ignore legal advice on the rules of engagement in war. 

In his book The War on Warriors, published last year, Hegseth wrote about an instance where he rejected a military judge advocate general’s guidance on the rules of engagement, telling troops, “I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains.”

Hegseth wrote that the judge advocate general “used the example of an identified enemy holding a rocket-propelled grenade” and asked Hegseth’s platoon, “Do you shoot at him?”

The former Fox News host said his fellow soldiers replied, “Hell, yeah, we light him up,” to which  the JAG said, “Wrong answer, men.” 

“You are not authorized to fire at that man, until that RPG becomes a threat. It must be pointed at you with the intent to fire. That makes it a legal and proper engagement,” the officer said, according to Hegseth, who wrote that his platoon mates “sat in silence, stunned.”

Hegseth wrote that he pulled the platoon aside after the briefing and told them, “I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains. Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat. That’s a bullshit rule that’s going to get people killed. And I will have your back—just like our commander. We are coming home, the enemy will not.”

The passage, reported on by The Guardian Tuesday, is one of many instances in Hegseth’s book in which he complains about rules and regulations governing warfare in the U.S. military. In another passage, Hegseth gripes, “If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?! Who cares what other countries think.”

Throughout the book, Hegseth repeatedly praises his own commander, Colonel Michael Steele, whom he calls a “certified badass,” and who was later reprimanded for reportedly ordering soldiers in 2006 in Iraq to “kill all military age males” in a raid.

All of this takes on new meaning with news this week regarding Hegseth’s actions in the Caribbean Sea. On September 2, following a strike on boats suspected of smuggling drugs to the U.S., Hegseth reportedly ordered an immediate follow-up strike to kill two survivors. A Washington Post report found that Hegseth made an order to kill everybody on the boats, which the White House denies, instead placing the blame on Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley. 

Hegseth’s own words from last year on respecting rules of engagement, as well as international treaties and agreements on war, would seem to suggest that he’d have no problem issuing such an order, which would be a war crime. It would also violate the Defense Department’s own Law of War Manual, which prohibits declaring “no quarter” or conducting operations “on the basis that there shall be no survivors.” Does Hegseth disagree with that as well? 

It seems that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Trump administration have decided to throw admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley to the wolves, pinning the order for a second strike on survivors of a boat bombing—which may constitute a war crime—directly on him.

“Let’s make one thing crystal clear: Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since,” Hegseth wrote on X Monday evening, making sure to spell out that it was Bradley who made the decisions. “America is fortunate to have such men protecting us. When this @DeptofWar says we have the back of our warriors—we mean it.”

Hegseth’s cryptic message is the latest installment of the fallout from a September 2 boat bombing that killed nine people. There were two survivors left, and The Washington Post reported that they were bombed after Hegseth gave an order to “kill everybody.” Hegseth and the White House have not denied that the potentially criminal order was given but on Monday began to claim that the order came from Bradley, who was the mission’s commander under Hegseth.

Hegseth’s message reads more like him leading Bradley to the gallows than it does a message of support, and the public noticed.

“Let’s be absolutely clear: I stand behind Admiral Bradley, who made this decision and not me,” one user replied to Hegseth, mockingly. “It was the right decision, it was legal, I agree with it 100 times out of 100 and I cannot emphasize enough I had nothing to do with the decision Bradley made on his own, which I support.”

“Hegseth off-loading responsibility while framing it like he’s a Tough Military Dude ‘backing warriors’ or whatever is peak Hegseth: cowardly, scummy, insecure, smarmy, selfish, and soaked in deeply affected rhetoric lifted from 80s action movies,” wrote another. “A total worm.”

Republican House and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairs Mike Rogers and Roger Wicker—along with congressional Democrats—are currently moving to have Bradley in for a classified briefing to hear his side of the story.

FBI Director Kash Patel was already trying to make jokes Monday about a humiliating report that he wouldn’t get off a plane to investigate the murder of his friend Charlie Kirk because he didn’t have the right outfit.

Patel has once again become the object of ridicule following a leaked report that he refused to deboard a plane until someone got him a medium-size FBI raid jacket. He ended up taking a female agent’s jacket but then began to complain that that jacket didn’t have the proper patches on it. He refused to disembark until SWAT team members lent him their patches.

Patel tried Monday to clap back at a dig from California Representative Eric Swalwell.

“I don’t mind that FBI Director Kash Patel had to wear a women’s (size medium) jacket to cosplay as someone in charge. I just wish he’d focus on stopping the rampant domestic terrorism happening on his watch,” Swalwell wrote on X.

Patel replied: “I was looking for a Youth Large.... Domestic terrorism arrests are UP 30% this year—impressive, considering I spent zero days dating a Chinese spy named Fang Fang, where should I send your women’s medium for date night?”

It’s unclear how a Youth Large is more “alpha male” than a women’s medium, but OK.

Patel’s rather juvenile reply referred to a 2020 report that Swalwell was among a group of prominent Bay Area Democrats who had been targeted by a suspected Chinese spy named Christine Fang. Swalwell reportedly cut all ties with Fang in 2015 after U.S. intelligence officials alerted him to her alleged connection to China’s Ministry of State Security. Conservatives still make racist jokes about their supposed relationship.

The leaked internal report that contained details about Patel’s temper tantrum also offered a damning assessment of his leadership at the FBI. Two separate sources described Patel as “in over his head.” Another source said that Patel was “not very good” and “may be insecure.”

It turns out that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth knows all about the circumstances of the America’s September 2 strike on boats in the Caribbean Sea. 

A clip of Hegseth talking the next day about the strike to Fox News in September resurfaced online Monday night. In the clip, Hegseth said he watched the bombing happen live. 

“I can tell you that was definitely not artificial intelligence. I watched it live. We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented, and that was Tren de Aragua, a narco-terrorist organization designated by the United States, trying to poison our country with illicit drugs,” Hegseth said. 

Hegseth’s words contradict the Trump administration’s statements after details emerged earlier this week that the U.S. conducted a second strike on September 2 to kill survivors from its initial attack. The administration has attempted to shift blame and responsibility from Hegseth to Commander Frank “Mitch” Bradley. Trump himself claimed Sunday he “wouldn’t have wanted that—not a second strike.” 

If indeed the U.S. government conducted a second strike to kill survivors, that would be a war crime—and that’s assuming we are even at war, which Congress has not declared. Will Republicans in Congress demand accountability for these airstrikes and the many that have followed, all of which are legally questionable?  Or will they instead acquiesce to Trump arbitrarily conducting a war? 

The publisher of Franklin the Turtle has completely denounced Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s AI depiction of the children’s character launching missiles at “drug boats,” which made light of his own potential war crime. 

“Franklin the Turtle is a beloved Canadian icon who has inspired generations of children and stands for kindness, empathy, and inclusivity,” Kids Can Press publishing house wrote on X Monday. “We strongly condemn any denigrating, violent, or unauthorized use of Franklin’s name or image, which directly contradicts these values.” 

Hegseth’s post—another installment in the GOP’s AI image fetish—was an imitation of the cover of the Franklin children’s books, and reads “A Classic Franklin Story: Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists.” It shows the turtle in full U.S. military combat gear, launching a missile at brown-skinned men in their boats from a helicopter.  

“For your Christmas wish list …” Hegseth captioned the post.

The Trump administration has killed at least 80 people in its attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea, claiming they are trafficking drugs to the United States. The most recent attack saw someone from the Trump administration order a boat to be bombed off the coast of Trinidad, and then bombed again once it was known that two people had survived—which may constitute a war crime. The White House has recently shifted blame onto Admiral Frank Bradley, but a Washington Post report noted that Hegseth made the initial order to leave no survivors. 

It’s a bleak situation when the administration’s cruelty and lack of seriousness has Franklin the Turtle’s publisher reminding us not to use him in posts about extrajudicial bombings and warfare. 

Donald Trump has officially pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, according to the ex-leader’s attorney. He was released from a federal prison in West Virginia early Tuesday.

Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison for playing a central role in what the Biden administration deemed to be “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.” Though Trump is blaming the conviction on Biden, much of the investigation began during Trump’s first term, with his now Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove acting as one of the lead investigators on the case.

The investigation found that Hernández moved mountains of cocaine between 2004 and 2022, facilitating the influx of more than 400 tons of the highly addictive substance into the U.S.

Under the protection of a machine gun-wielding, grenade launcher-toting gang, Hernández received “millions of dollars of drug money from some of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking organizations in Honduras, Mexico, and elsewhere.” The politico used that money to fuel his political ambitions, pay off bribes, and extend legal protections toward himself and his drug trafficking co-conspirators during his time in office.

The decision to release him comes just days after Hernández penned a sugar-coated letter to the U.S. president in which he claimed to be a victim of “political persecution” by the Biden administration, reported The New York Times.

Trump announced Friday that he planned to grant Hernández a “full and complete pardon,” though a White House official told the Times that the decision had nothing to do with the letter. Trump, at the time, had not seen the appeal, the official said on the condition of anonymity.

“This was a clear Biden over-prosecution,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “He was the president of this country. He was in the opposition party. He was opposed to the values of the previous administration, and they charged him because he was president of Honduras.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s approach to curbing narcoterrorism—which has involved bombing small boats in the Caribbean suspected of smuggling drugs without evidence—has run afoul of international law. It has also placed an outsized target on drug mules, potentially the lowest and least significant participants on the drug trade totem pole.

The decision to wipe Hernández’s record clean appears to be a seismic departure from the Trump administration’s rhetoric on drug trafficking. After celebrating the deaths of several people killed in an airstrike in September, Vice President JD Vance claimed that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.” That rule apparently does not apply to the head honchos of the drug trade—or to the White House.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump’s social media addiction appeared to reach a new level last night.

The president made more than 150  posts to his Truth Social account late Monday night, resharing praise for his deportation agenda, fake news about Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, complaints about California Governor Gavin Newsom, and claims that Nancy Pelosi was the real mastermind behind the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building.

Freelance journalist Yashar Ali shared a screen recording of Trump’s social media binge, documenting the trove of late night posts. The scroll lasts nearly five minutes.

“TRUTH SOCIAL IS THE BEST! There is nothing even close!!!” Trump wrote hours later, after the sun had come up.

That level of social media fixation puts Trump in line with America’s teens, who are spending hours on social media to the detriment of their mental health, according to a 2024 report by the American Psychological Association.

Social media addictions can be a horrible catch-22, feeding anxiety for users when they’re gravitating to the platform to distract from other stressors. But with so many scandals on his plate, it’s not clear which could have been rattling the president late Monday.

Trump is currently playing cover for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who stands accused of violating international human rights law for permitting—or perhaps ordering—a second airstrike on a small Venezuelan boat in early September to kill all survivors. He has also leveraged the attacks to pressure Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power, something that he tried and failed to do in 2019—though in the process he has rallied tens of thousands of Venezuelans against the United States.

On the other side of the planet, Trump still has yet to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine, something that he had promised from the first day he returned to office.

The 79-year-old could also be concerned about his health. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s public appeal for the release of Trump’s medical records appeared to seriously get under the president’s skin late Monday, inciting a wave of insults directed at the onetime vice presidential candidate by way of his keyboard. Still, public concerns prevail that there could be something seriously wrong with Trump, particularly after news broke that he covertly underwent some soft tissue scans.

Beyond all of that, the Epstein files—which reportedly mention Trump’s name numerous times—are on their way.