Trump Accidentally Lets Slip Just How Much He Hates JD Vance

Sorry, JD Vance—while ridiculing a former vice presidential candidate Tuesday, President Donald Trump seemed to accidentally admit to having an “incompetent” number two.

After barely being able to keep his eyes open during an hours-long Cabinet meeting, Trump appeared to perk up long enough to deliver an incoherent rant about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

“I think the man’s a grossly incompetent man,” Trump said, referring to Walz. “I thought that from the day I watched JD destroy him in a debate. I was saying, ‘Who was more incompetent? That man or my man?’ I had a man, and he had a man—they were both incompetent.”

Based solely on the structure of Trump’s statement, the president appeared to assert that “that man” and “his man” were “both incompetent.” But surely Trump would go on to clarify what he meant, right? Wrong.

“I had a man and a woman, I thought she was very incompetent too. But now she’s leading the field and I think she’s leading the field in the nomination,” Trump continued.

If reading loathing in Trump’s confused comment feels like a stretch, just take a look at the president’s glowering face when it was finally Vance’s turn to speak. For most of his Cabinet members, Trump merely kept his eyes shut.

Setting Trump’s apparent slight aside, his garbled response is not exactly a promising sign for the commander in chief, who appeared to be struggling to stay awake during the meeting. Trump’s comments were incoherent. Who was “he,” and who was “she”? Was the president even actually conscious while he was speaking?

Earlier in the meeting, Trump joked that “generally speaking,” his Cabinet had many “high IQ” members. “A couple of them I’m a little concerned about,” he said, looking around the table.

Donald Trump’s presidential powers are practically supernatural—at least, according to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who thanked Trump during a Cabinet meeting Tuesday for his apparent ability to ward off hurricanes over the last year.

“Sir, you made it through hurricane season without a hurricane,” Noem said to laughter from the room. “You kept the hurricanes away. We appreciate that.”

While Noem’s comment may have been a joke, the reality is much less funny. Trump has spent months trying to dismantle the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which provides disaster relief for areas severely impacted by natural disasters.

Since he was on the campaign trail, Trump and his allies have spread unfounded conspiracies that the lead emergency response agency had run out of money and that the Biden administration had diverted funds from FEMA to help undocumented immigrants enter the country. (FEMA administrators fervently and repeatedly denied this.) Republicans, at the time, claimed that working with the White House to expedite disaster relief “seemed political” and even conspiratorially suggested that the hurricanes were a government manipulation.

Days after his inauguration, Trump pitched that it would be better to do away with FEMA altogether in favor of handing the money directly to the states, though that plan has not yet come to fruition.

Still, Trump has managed to transform disaster relief into a political issue. In October, the president approved aid for several states that voted for him in the last election, including Alaska, Nebraska, and North Dakota, but denied it to others that did not: Vermont, Illinois, and Maryland.

Meanwhile, FEMA funds have gone to projects that have absolutely nothing to do with disaster relief. In October—days before the longest government shutdown in U.S. history—the Homeland Security Department issued a $608 million FEMA check to Florida to cover costs related to Alligator Alcatraz, the notoriously abusive immigrant detention center that has been roundly torched as a modern-day concentration camp tucked away in the Everglades.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth absolutely lost it Tuesday as he scrambled to shirk responsibility for reportedly murdering the survivors of a September 2 drone strike on an alleged drug trafficking vessel in the Caribbean. 

Sitting beside a drowsy Donald Trump during a lengthy Cabinet meeting, Hegseth claimed that while he had been perfectly happy to take responsibility for the dozen extrajudicial executions of people who the government couldn’t prove were drug traffickers, he wouldn’t dare claim credit for that one Pentagon decision.

Instead, the war chief continued to redirect responsibility for the strike onto Commander Frank “Mitch” Bradley, and even the president himself. 

“I watched that first strike live. As you can imagine at the Department of War we got a lot of things to do, so I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs, so I moved on to my next meeting,” Hegseth said.

“A couple of hours later I learned that that commander had made the—which he had the complete authority to do—and by the way Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat.”

Despite his blatant efforts to throw Bradley under the bus, Hegseth insisted Bradley had made “the right call, we have his back.”

Hegseth claimed he was not aware there were survivors after the first strike, adding that the “fog of war” would’ve made it difficult to determine if anyone had survived. He also noted that he’d written about this in his book last year, in which he complained at length about rules and regulations governing warfare in the U.S. military. In fact, two people were reportedly clinging to the side of the burning vessel after that September 2 strike and were killed in the second strike.

Hegseth then railed against the press and claimed that The Washington Post’s report that he’d instructed his underlings to “kill everybody” was “not based in anything, not based in any truth at all.”

But Hegseth wasn’t done covering his own tracks—and even implicated Trump directly.  

“President Trump has empowered commanders, commanders to do what is necessary, which is dark and difficult things in the dead of night on behalf of the American people,” Hegseth ranted. “We support them, and we will stop the poisoning of the American people.”

Pressed on how long there had been between the first and second strike, Hegseth said: “I couldn’t tell you the exact amount of time.”

Donald Trump is openly threatening Minnesota’s Somali American community and making racist attacks against them.

After the president’s Cabinet meeting Tuesday, Trump told reporters that he heard “Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars. Billions. Every year, billions of dollars. And they contribute nothing. The welfare’s like 88 percent. They contribute nothing. I don’t want ’em in our country, I’ll be honest with you. Somebody would say, ‘Ooh, that’s not politically correct.’ I don’t care.”

Trump’s racist tirade (and attack on Somali American Congresswoman Ilhan Omar) comes after The New York Times reported that his administration plans to launch an immigration crackdown targeting the Somali community in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, purportedly focusing on undocumented immigrants. About 100 federal officers and agents have been sent to the region from around the country, according to the report.

The state’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, criticized the plan on X Tuesday, saying, “We welcome support in investigating and prosecuting crime. But pulling a PR stunt and indiscriminately targeting immigrants is not a real solution to a problem.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey expressed support specifically for the Somali community, saying at a press conference Tuesday, “We love you, and we stand with you. That commitment is rock solid.”

“Minneapolis is proud to be home to the largest Somali community in the entire country. They’ve been here for decades in many instances. They’re entrepreneurs and fathers. They benefit both the culture and the economic resilience of our city,” Frey said. “Targeting Somali people means that due process will be violated. Mistakes will be made. And let’s be clear: It means that American citizens will be detained for no other reason than the fact that they look like they are Somali.”

Frey was backed up at the press conference by Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara, who said the city’s police department would not work with federal agents. He also defended citizens’ right to protest against the Trump administration.

“In moments like this, I know how real the fear is in our community. People are going to want to speak out, protest, and exercise their First Amendment rights. We will absolutely defend people’s right to do just that,” O’Hara said.

President Trump used the last few minutes of his hours-long Cabinet meeting Tuesday to launch a particularly nasty attack on Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar and the entire country of Somalia. 

Trump’s rant was spurred by a leading question about Minnesota governor and former vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s supposed complicity in allowing massive Social Service System fraud in his home state. Trump completely ignored the question, instead opting to personally attack Walz before shifting to Omar unprompted. 

“When you look at what [Walz has] done with Somalia, which is barely a country … they have no anything, they just run around killing each other,” Trump said. “And when I see somebody like Ilhan Omar—who I don’t know at all—but I always watch her, for years I’ve watched her complain about our Constitution, how she’s being treated badly … hates everybody, hates Jewish people, hates everybody. And I think she’s an incompetent person.” 

As an outspoken Black, progressive, Muslim, African, refugee, and woman in office, Omar is someone whom the president—and the rest of the GOP—can cast their slanderous bigotry toward, much to the delight of the MAGA base.

Trump continued to rant against Omar. 

“She’s a real terrible person … I hear [Somalians] ripped off that state for billions of dollars … I don’t want ’em in our country, I’ll be honest with you. Somebody’ll say ‘Ooh that’s not politically correct.’ I don’t care. I don’t want ’em in our country. Their country’s no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don’t want ’em in our country.

“We’re gonna go the wrong way if we keep taking garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. Her friends are garbage.… When they come from hell, and they complain, and do nothing but bitch? We don’t want ’em in our country. Let ’em go back to where they came from and fix it.” 

Trump’s Cabinet members started banging on the table, clapping, and cheering as the meeting concluded on that note. 

Trump entered some sort of racist flow state here. He hit all the points that make his base—from the Groypers to the neocons—foam at the mouths: “I’ll never be politically correct,” “This specific group of immigrants is a problem for us,” and “This woman who opposes me is a stupid and awful person.”