Tom Cotton Says He Didn’t See Proof of Trump’s Big Claim on Drug Boats

At least one Republican is encouraging the Defense Department to blow up boats in the Carribbean—even if the ships have no apparent plans to enter U.S. waters.

New reports indicate that before the Pentagon double-tapped a boat on September 2, mercilessly killing a pair of survivors that clung to the flotsam, officials knew that the small watercraft was headed to Suriname and then to Europe or Africa—not America.

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton told NBC News’s Kristin Welker Sunday that he wasn’t just “comfortable” that the military had bombed a ship in international waters that had no intention of arriving in the U.S., but that he would actually like the government to “continue” the practice.

“Is there any hard evidence that shows this particular boat was headed to the United States?” asked Welker.

“That didn’t come up in my briefing,” Cotton said. “But again, there’s very reliable, multiple sources of intelligence that tells us this boat had drugs on it, that everyone on this boat is associated with these designated foreign terrorist organizations that are trying to kill American children.”

“Are you comfortable having the United States target a boat in which you have not seen evidence that it’s actually heading to the United States?” Welker pressed.

“I’m not just comfortable with it, I want to continue it,” Cotton said.

Since early September, the U.S. has conducted at least 22 strikes on small boats traversing the Caribbean that Trump administration officials have deemed—without an investigation or interdiction—were smuggling drugs. At least 86 people have been killed in the attacks.

The White House has defended the violence, chalking it up to allegedly necessary efforts to thwart the pipeline of fentanyl into the country. But Donald Trump has simultaneously leveraged the aggression to try to shove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power, something that he tried and failed to do in 2019.

“How is a boat that’s not heading to the United States an imminent threat to this country, senator?” Welker said at another point in the interview.

“Well, that’s one possibility,” Cotton said, explaining that he’s heard reports that some smaller watercraft “link up” with larger boats to pass drugs into the country. “I didn’t hear that specifically from Admiral [Frank “Mitch”] Bradley in my briefing, but what we know is that these drug cartels … are trafficking drugs to our shores.”

Other lawmakers that were briefed on the September 2 double-tap left the meeting appalled by the country’s actions, relaying to members of the media that they were “deeply disturbed” by the barbarity of the killings.

“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Thursday. “You have two individuals [in] clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, [who] were killed by the United States.”

President and former slumlord Donald Trump appears to have spent years committing the same kind of mortgage fraud that he’s been accusing his political enemies of.

ProPublica has reported that in 1993, Trump signed mortgages for two lavish homes right next to his Mar-a-Lago estate—one for $525,000 and one for $1,200,000. Like any standard mortgage, the agreement (ushered by Merril Lynch) required Trump to reside in those homes within 60 days and actually live there for at least 365 days.  

Yet ProPublica’s investigation confirmed that Trump never lived in either of those residences for enough time, maintaining his actual personal address as Trump Tower in Manhattan. He bragged to Vanity Fair in 1994 about splitting time between Manhattan and Mar-a-Lago proper, but not either of the other two large properties. 

In reality, Trump wasn’t completely truthful about his plans to reside in the residences and instead rented them out to people.

This is absurdly ironic if true. Trump has baselessly accused New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook, Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell, and Senator Adam Schiff—all enemies of his in one way or another—of mortgage fraud. 

The White House profusely defended Trump. 

“President Trump’s two mortgages you are referencing are from the same lender. There was no defraudation. It is illogical to believe that the same lender would agree to defraud itself,” a spokesperson told ProPublica. “This is yet another desperate attempt by the Left wing media to disparage President Trump with false allegations,” they said, adding, “President Trump has never, or will ever, break the law.”

While Trump’s decision to obtain multiple mortgages for more than one primary residence goes unprosecuted, it certainly meets the paltry standards of fraud that his administration has set for anyone Trump wants to get revenge on. 

“Given Trump’s position on situations like this, he’s going to either need to fire himself or refer himself to the Department of Justice,” Suffolk University law professor and mortgage finance expert Kathleen Engel told ProPublica. “Trump has deemed that this type of misrepresentation is sufficient to preclude someone from serving the country.”

President Donald Trump’s attempt to pay tribute to the honorees at the Kennedy Center Sunday night was marred by the president’s verbal diarrhea.

While discussing the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors, Trump made a strange verbal detour into gushing about a round of golf he’d played with Gary Player.

“They have talent. They have talent. The great Gary Player, he hits shots. He’s 90 years old. He still plays good. Shot a 70 with me the other day. He’s 90. We’re playing pretty far back too. He’s incredible. You think [Joe] Biden could do that? I don’t think so. Can’t, can’t lift the club,” Trump said.

Trump, who has a tendency to repeat his own jokes and stories, previously bragged about Player shooting a 70 in late October. This time, the president claimed they’d been playing with another person who kept getting stuck in sand traps.

“It was sad to watch. And, and Gary says, ‘You don’t understand. Just—’ And he dropped five balls, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping!” Trump said, employing one of his time-honored verbal gaffes.

So, what exactly was the point of Trump’s story? A truly inspirational message for us all.

“[Player] said, ‘Well, here’s the problem. I’ve got talent and you don’t.’ And that’s, and that’s what that’s true about you. You have talent,” Trump said, adding his own thoughts: “If you don’t have talent, there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

Throughout Trump’s speech Sunday, the president repeatedly struggled to stay on topic, bragging about renovations he’d made to the supposedly crumbling Kennedy Center, lying about young women thanking him for lowering the crime rate in D.C., and weirdly ranking the Supreme Court, Senate, and NFL owners committee as having the “hottest boards.”

Republicans had zero respect for Donald Trump until they realized he was about to reenter power.

In a sit-down interview with 60 Minutes Sunday, outbound Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene explained that the conservative caucus speaks very differently about the president behind closed doors, telling host Lesley Stahl that the reality of the GOP’s opinion on Trump would “shock people.”

“I watched many of my colleagues go from making fun of him, making fun of how he talks, making fun of me constantly for supporting him, to when he won the primary in 2024 they all started to—excuse my language, Lesley—kissing his ass and decided to put on a MAGA hat for the first time,” Greene said.

“I think they’re terrified to step out of line and get a nasty Truth Social post on them,” she added.

Greene went on to chastise Trump for focusing his second-term agenda on crypto billionaires, aiding and abetting Israel’s war crimes, and assisting Big Pharma.

“He didn’t take away the COVID vaccines that we want to see taken away,” Greene told the news magazine show. “So those are the areas that are still getting everything they want while the people—we’re still out here saying, ‘We want to see action on areas for the American people, not for the major industries and the big donors.’”

Greene announced last month that her time in Congress would abruptly come to a close in January, preemptively ending her term. In a statement, Greene wrote that she had “too much self respect and dignity” to “have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms.”

After many loyal years spent sycophantically supporting the president, Greene publicly broke favor with him after he attempted to undermine the release of the Epstein files.

“I am withdrawing my support and Endorsement of ‘Congresswoman’ Marjorie Taylor Greene, of the Great State of Georgia,” Trump posted on Truth Social in November. “All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!”

Greene, who won her district in 2020 without the president’s endorsement, has differed from her once “favorite president” on a range of issues. She has openly split from Trump and the rest of her party on artificial intelligence and the government shutdown, was one of the few Republicans to describe Israel’s actions in Palestine as a “genocide,” and has sparred with the White House over its handling of the Russia-Ukraine war.

The White House this weekend gloated about the Kennedy Center Honors medals—historically designed by a local business in Washington, D.C.—being redesigned by a multinational luxury brand.

Since his inauguration, President Donald Trump has sought to use the power of the presidency to mold American culture to his will, including at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where he was elected chairman in February after purging the board of trustees.

On Sunday evening, Trump will host the center’s annual honors gala, becoming the first president to do so. He claims to have been “very involved” in selecting the honorees, who were recognized at a medallion ceremony on Saturday.

Since 1978, those medallions were crafted by local artisan James Baturin, who, along with his wife and children, have made more than 250 awards—large, multicolored ribbons with gold name plates—as a family business over the years, according to WUSA9.

That is, until this year.  

On Tuesday, the Kennedy Center unveiled new medallions, created by Tiffany & Co. Somewhat less distinctive than the previous design, the new one features a gold disc hanging from a navy-blue ribbon.

Prior to Saturday’s ceremony, the White House fired off a tweet slighting the mom-and-pop operation that was jilted for a luxury-goods giant. The post celebrated the “new, far more classy design” as a “MASSIVE upgrade from the tacky rainbow sash design of medallions past.”

When a reporter pointed out the storied history of the awards described so sneeringly by Trump’s White House, one social media user quipped: “Taking work from a small family business and outsourcing it to a large corporation? That adds up, yep.”

Donald Trump Jr. weighed in on the Russia-Ukraine war this weekend with this ominous message: No one should bet on his father, the president of the United States, to stand by Ukraine.

As Politico reported Sunday, the president’s eldest son made several comments at the Doha Forum, a gathering of politicians and international figures, that cast Ukraine in a negative light, and President Donald Trump’s position as a changeable, unpredictable thing.

In response to a question about whether his father might walk away from the embattled country, Trump Jr. said, “I think he may.”

The president’s son also shared thoughts about corruption in Ukraine, and criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, calling him “one of the great marketers of all times.” He said that Zelenskiy had become “a borderline deity, especially to the left, where he could do no wrong, he was beyond reproach.”

Trump Jr. remarked that his father’s mercurial nature was actually a positive trait, and one of the things that made him unique. “The fact that he’s not predictable … forces everyone to actually deal in an intellectually honest capacity,” he said, per Politico.

Trump Jr.’s comments in Qatar about his father’s shiftiness and lack of predictability come at a particularly fraught time. The U.S. president has been pressuring Russia and Ukraine to sign a peace deal, but negotiations have dragged on, with no clear end in sight. Many people have also criticized the plan that Trump recently put forth, saying it favors Russia.

Meanwhile, Moscow warmly welcomed President Trump’s newly issued “National Security Strategy” this weekend, saying that it coincides with their political view of the world.

And against a backdrop of ongoing peace talks, Russia is ramping up the aggression.

The country carried out a huge aerial attack on Ukraine this weekend, targeting the country’s infrastructure and energy facilities, and wounding at least eight people.

Republican Senator John Curtis of Utah on Sunday offered a mealymouthed excuse for President Donald Trump’s xenophobic attacks on the Somali community.

“We don’t want ’em in our country,” Trump said of Somali immigrants at a Tuesday Cabinet meeting. “Let ’em go back to where they came from.”

Asked about the remarks on CNN, Curtis refused to criticize them. “I can’t control anybody but me, right?” the senator said.

Rather than address the president’s comments head-on, Curtis took a philosophical detour, urging every American to live as a positive role model for others—to “wake up every morning, look in the mirror,” and ask yourself what you will do “to make all of our immigrants feel more welcome.”

In such a world, Curtis mused, “it would matter less what individuals said.” But, as CNN’s Dana Bash pointed out, Trump is no random individual; “he’s the president of the United States, calling an entire community garbage.”

In response, Curtis deflected again. American voters, he said, “knew very well what we were electing [in 2024]. The country wanted a disrupter.” While acknowledging that such “disruption” can be “painful,” he suggested it was necessary: “You have to remember the reason, I think, the country went that direction is they were very uncomfortable with a number of things we were doing in this country, and we wanted a disruptor.”

Apparently, Curtis’s professed belief in making a daily, personal effort to make “all of our immigrants feel more welcome” did not compel him to provide even the slightest pushback against the president’s bigotry.

Struggling to afford basic necessities? Perhaps you only think you’re feeling the pinch, due to media bias against President Donald Trump—or at least, that’s what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested during a Sunday talk show appearance.

On CBS News’s Face the Nation, host Margaret Brennan asked Bessent about Trump’s recent controversial description of “affordability” as a Democrat-spun “con job.”

Considering that public opinion polls show Americans are widely concerned about cost-of-living and largely disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, Brennan wondered if this sentiment would resonate with voters. “Don’t you need to show that you feel the pain?” she asked.

Bessent began: “I think the president’s frustrated by the media coverage of what’s going on—”

“This is the polling of average Americans,” Brennan cut in.

“Yeah, but I think the average Americans are hearing a lot of it from media coverage,” Bessent replied.

The cost-of-living crisis has bedeviled the Trump administration and GOP of late. As recent elections and polls signal widespread public dissatisfaction with the economy under the Republican-run government, some conservative politicians and strategists have urged their party to radically change course, adopting an agenda that would actually address voters’ material concerns.

Another, seemingly less fruitful, option for the party would be to simply insist, as Bessent did, that Americans’ financial hardships are the result of media influence.

Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, seems unfazed by recent viral examples of federal agents targeting American citizens.

Over the past week, at least two videos circulated widely online and in the media showing immigration agents detaining or pursuing women as they cried out that they were U.S. citizens.

In Louisiana on Thursday, a 23-year-old mother was chased by agents while walking home from a corner store. She repeatedly told them, “I’m a U.S.-born citizen. I was born and raised here. This is my home. My baby’s waiting for me.”

And in Florida on Wednesday, a health care worker was detained during a traffic stop on her way to work. Despite intending to comply, she was threatened and forcibly removed from her car, she said. Footage captured by a Miami Herald reporter shows her being detained, yelling: “I’m a U.S. citizen. Please help me! This is unfair. Why are you doing this to me?”

On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, host Dana Bash confronted Homan with these two incidents.

“I can’t tell you how many times an illegal alien claims to be a U.S. citizen,” the border czar said, appearing comfortable with agents inflicting traumatic experiences on citizens as collateral damage in Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

Homan went on to confess that he does not think “there’s been zero U.S. citizens that have been detained for questioning because reasonable suspicion said they may be in the country illegally.” However, he claimed, “as soon as that questioning’s over, if they’re a U.S. citizen, they’d be released.”

A recent ProPublica investigation identified more than 170 U.S. citizens who were detained by federal immigration agents. About 24 of them were reportedly held for more than a day, unable to call lawyers or their friends and family.

President Donald Trump woke up Sunday morning full of anger and regret, it seems.

In a morning post on Truth Social, the president ranted against a man he had recently pardoned—Democratic Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas—for not having the common decency to switch parties after Trump did him a favor.

Cuellar, a moderate Democrat, and his wife, Imelda, were charged in 2024 with accepting bribes from foreign entities. Trump, out of the kindness of his heart, as he narrated it, saw fit to pardon them. Then, however, things took a turn.

“Only a short time after signing the Pardon, Congressman Henry Cuellar announced that he will be ‘running’ for Congress again, in the Great State of Texas (a State where I received the highest number of votes ever recorded!), as a Democrat, continuing to work with the same Radical Left Scum that just weeks before wanted him and his wife to spend the rest of their lives in Prison - And probably still do!” the president wrote.

He apparently was not expecting this.

“Such a lack of LOYALTY,” Trump went on, lamenting his decision. “Oh’ well, next time, no more Mr. Nice guy!”

The implication of all of this is clear, people took to social media to point out: that Trump was hoping, with his presidential power, to procure another house seat for Republicans. That his bid failed has made him extremely angry. And he doesn’t mind that the world knows it.