Pete Hegseth’s Extreme Plan on Where to Send Boat Survivors Exposed

The Department of Defense didn’t have a plan to deal with survivors after launching its boat bombing campaign in the waters around central America.

The New York Times reports that after a mid-October strike in the Caribbean Sea left two survivors in U.S. military custody, Pentagon lawyers asked their legal counterparts at the State Department if the pair could be sent to the infamous Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador, where the Trump administration had already sent numerous immigrants on shaky legal grounds.

Alarmed State Department lawyers quickly rejected that idea, and the two survivors ended up being sent to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia. Later, on October 29, the Pentagon spoke with diplomats in the region regarding survivors from another strike, and decided that any that were rescued had to be sent back to their home countries or to a third county, but definitely not the U.S.

Why? The DoD wanted to avoid having any survivors in the U.S. legal system, because Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other U.S. officials would have to present evidence in court to justify the bombings. The Pentagon has already admitted that it doesn’t know who is on the alleged drug boats they are bombing, which is why they haven’t tried to prosecute any survivors.

At least some of the people on those boats have been identified as fishermen, and defense officials have not convinced many members of Congress of the legality and justifications for the strikes. Republicans and Democrats alike have criticized them, especially after the revelation that the military bombed survivors of the first boat strike back in September, a possible war crime. Now, it seems that Hegseth and the rest of the DoD want to avoid any legal responsibility.

As President Trump recoils at the very mention of affordability, bemoaning it as a Democratic scam (still unclear what that means exactly), over half of the country is struggling to pay for basic necessities—and blaming Trump for it. 

New polling from Politico and Public First shows that nearly half of respondents find it hard to pay for their groceries, and 55 percent of them hold the Trump administration responsible. 

Twenty-seven  percent of Americans have skipped a doctor’s appointment or checkup in the last two years because it was too expensive, and 23 percent rejected a prescription for similar reasons. Overall, nearly half of respondents are finding it difficult to afford health care. 

Meanwhile, only 36 percent of Trump’s own voters think that the tariffs will work out in the end. 

The majority of voters blaming their affordability issues on Trump means that his disinformation campaign—doing everything but taking responsibility for the state of the economy—isn’t working on most people. 

Trump went from running on affordability to rejecting the notion entirely. If this polling holds true, that should spell danger for the GOP ahead of the 2026 midterms. 

View the full polling here.  

Republicans are taking credit for Representative Jasmine Crockett’s last-minute decision to run for the United States Senate, as part of their efforts to recruit “very vulnerable Democrats” to run for office, NOTUS reported. 

Crockett’s surprise announcement last week reportedly threw the Democrats’ political calculus into flux—but seems to have delighted the Republicans who’d been secretly working to get her in the race.

Crockett has made a name for herself being a particularly outspoken critic of Trump and his cronies, infuriating MAGA and marking her as a controversial figure in her own party.

A source familiar with the process told NOTUS that GOP machinations to prop up Crockett’s run first began in June, when Texas Democrats met to discuss 2026 midterm elections—and the firebrand Democrat wasn’t invited, or included in any initial polls.  

In July, the National Republican Senatorial Committee published a poll that found that Crockett was the preferred candidate among Democratic voters. “When we saw the results, we were like, ‘OK, we got to disseminate this far and wide,’” the source told NOTUS.

After the NRSC included Crockett’s name in their poll, other surveys started to include her too. The source told NOTUS that those polls were then aggressively seeded into progressive digital spaces by NRSC allies to “orchestrate the pile on” of promising polling numbers and drive the narrative that support for Crockett was “surging.”

The source dubbed the system of trying to pull in a weaker candidate who would lose to the Republican challenger as an “AstroTurf recruitment process.” 

Incumbent Senator John Cornyn, who is running for reelection, dismissed Crockett as “radical, theatrical, and ineffective.” 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a close ally of President Donald Trump who is currently leading the Republican primary polls, claimed that “everyone knows” Crockett will “be soundly defeated.” Previous polls had indicated that Paxton would fare far worse against state Representative James Talarico, the other Democratic primary candidate, or Collin Allred, who dropped his bid shortly before Crockett jumped into the race. 

Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania Tuesday was supposed to be about affordability. Instead, it devolved into him bashing immigrants and using an epithet that he’s previously denied saying.

In Mount Pocono, Trump related to the crowd a meeting in which he said, “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries? Right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let’s have a few. From Denmark, do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, do you mind?

“But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships,” Trump added.

Trump was reported to have made the “shithole countries” remark way back in 2018 during his first term to refer to Haiti and unnamed African countries, but he vehemently denied the reports at the time. Back then, he even kicked out a reporter from the Oval Office for asking whether Trump meant he wanted immigrants from European or predominantly white countries.

Now it seems that the mask is off. For years, Trump has criticized immigrants from nonwhite countries, infamously accusing Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating cats and dogs, during his 2024 presidential campaign. But he’s always denied using slurs to describe them until now.

Recently, Trump has described Somali immigrants as “garbage” and launched an immigration crackdown in Minnesota, home to the largest Somali community in the United States. It seems that the president thinks that he can fall back on racism to distract from the fact that the country’s economic problems are his fault.

More good news for Democrats headed into the midterms: Liberal candidates saw unexpected wins in two Southern states Tuesday night.

Miami residents just elected their first Democratic mayor in almost 30 years. Eileen Higgins, a former Miami-Dade county commissioner, beat Donald Trump–endorsed Republican Emilio González. Higgins won 59 percent of the vote compared to González’s 41 percent.

Both candidates appealed to residents’ economic woes but used different tactics: Higgins emphasized her experience on the County Commission with building infrastructure, streamlining city processes, and building affordable housing. González argued that he would fight overdevelopment and get rid of property taxes. Higgins also loudly criticized Trump’s mass deportation campaign, whereas González pleaded the Fifth, saying he had no control over national policy.

In neighboring Georgia, a special election for a state House seat saw a changed district. Democrat Eric Gisler flipped the previously red seat blue, eking out a win over Republican Mack Guest in a close race.

It’s a major upset: Trump won the district last year by 12 points. Gisler had run for the seat last year and at the time won just 39 percent of the vote. But Tuesday night, he won 51 percent.

Gisler ran on a platform of increasing access to health care, affordable housing, and voting rights. He told the Associated Press that he was grateful for “Democratic enthusiasm” but that he also credited his win to Republicans looking for a change. “A lot of what I would call traditional conservatives held their nose and voted Republican last year on the promise of low prices and whatever else they were selling,” Gisler said. “But they hadn’t received that.”

President Donald Trump is convinced Black people “love” him because “they know a scam better than anybody.”

These peculiar comments came Tuesday night at a rally-style event in Pennsylvania.

“Lemme tell ya. Black people love Trump. I got the biggest vote,” he said, before raising his voice even louder in the microphone. “I got the biggest vote with Black people, they know a scam better than anybody! They know what it is to be scammed.”

It’s difficult to parse whether he’s attributing Black people’s knowledge of scams to antiquated racist tropes or making an allusion to the slavery and history of economic discrimination they have endured in America (perhaps the latter is much too generous). Either way, the jury is still very much out on just how much Black people like him.

After Trump made notable gains with the Black vote in 2024, any momentum that he may have had with them since defeating Vice President Kamala Harris last year seem to have evaporated.

“Either the racial realignment never happened, or it already ended. And what I mean by that is, there was a lot of talk after 2024 and the run-up to it about Black voters—particularly Black men and Latino men—and also voters under 30 moving to the right,” The New Republic’s Perry Bacon said on his podcast last month. “That suggests maybe The New York Times and everyone else interviewing every Black man that voted for Trump was a bit of a mistake and an overreaction in the last election.”

Black joblessness—and all joblessness—is up. The shutdown, his anti-DEI crusade, funding cuts to health care, and his antagonistic approach to any federal content that focuses on racism or slavery all bring his proclaimed love for Black people into question. This is a man who just decided to stop offering free national park access on MLK day and Juneteenth, instead making free access on his birthday.

He signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to erase any information that could be misconstrued as a “corrosive ideology,” which of course included anything relating to race relations, LGBTQ rights, and sexism. He also removed a picture of Harriet Tubman from the National Park Service page on the Underground Railroad, and changed the words “enslaved African Americans” to “enslaved workers” while removing a section that discussed Benjamin Franklin being a slave owner.

He’s been sued for racial discrimination in housing, still thinks the Central Park 5 are guilty, and did the whole birtherism thing with the country’s first Black president. This does not seem like someone who has a genuine love and respect for Black people and culture—even if he believes we know a scam.

President Donald Trump seems to think that having to take more cognitive tests than his predecessors is a good thing.

In a furious, lengthy rant on Truth Social Tuesday night, Trump attempted to defend himself against recent reporting that he has been showing signs of aging and fatigue. He bragged about everything he’s gotten done while in office—including his visits to the doctor’s office.

“I go out of my way to do long, thorough, and very boring Medical Examinations at the Great Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, seen and supervised by top doctors, all of whom have given me PERFECT Marks—Some have even said they have never seen such Strong Results,” Trump wrote. “I do these Tests because I owe it to our Country.”

Trump claimed that in addition to medical examinations, he had taken at least three cognitive exams “and I ACED all three of them in front of large numbers of doctors and experts, most of whom I do not know.”

“I have been told that few people have been able to ‘ace’ this Examination and, in fact, most do very poorly, which is why many other Presidents have decided not to take it at all,” he wrote. 

It’s not clear why the mere fact of having to sit for multiple cognitive examinations—without releasing results to the public—would exonerate Trump from reports he’s in mental decline.

Trump seemed to specifically take issue with The New York Times, which reported last month that the president’s public schedule shows he has shorter days than he used to, and that his public appearances indicate a dwindling battery life, as he’s taken to sitting or even keeping his eyes closed during press conferences.

“After all of the work I have done with Medical Exams, Cognitive Exams, and everything else, I actually believe it’s seditious, perhaps even treasonous, for The New York Times, and others, to consistently do FAKE reports in order to libel and demean  ‘THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES,’ Trump wrote. “They are true Enemies of the People, and we should do something about it.”

While Trump calling the press the “enemy of the people” is unfortunately not new, his assertion that reporting on his shortcomings and failures is tantamount to sedition is unquestionably totalitarian.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor torched a lawyer Tuesday for suggesting that Elon Musk didn’t buy his way into the White House.

While hearing oral arguments in a case on campaign finance law, Sotomayor warned that if the Supreme Court removed the limits on coordinated expenditures, then there would be “no control” over how much one donor could give to a presidential campaign—opening the door for blatant corruption.

“So, with all respect your honor, I don’t have a problem with the various statistics you just cited in the absence of any evidence or any suggestion it was tied to quid pro quo corruption,” replied Noel Francisco, the attorney for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

“You mean to suggest that the fact that one major donor to the current president—the most major donor to the current president—got a very lucrative job immediately upon election from the new administration does not give the appearance of quid pro quo?” Sotomayor pressed. She was clearly referring to Elon Musk, who was appointed as head of the Department of Government Efficiency after donating a whopping $288 million to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Prior to bringing up Musk, Sotomayor also cited Hillary Clinton’s 2016 joint victory fund with the DNC, “which allowed a single donor to give up to $356,000” just to show it wasn’t a solely Trumpian problem.

Francisco tried to dismiss Sotomayor, saying that Musk’s meager salary was not “an effective quid pro quo bribery, which may be why nobody has even remotely suggested that.”

Actually, a lot of people have suggested that—and it has nothing to do with his salary as a special government employee. It’s no secret that Musk used his time as DOGE czar working to dismantle the very agencies that regulate his companies, clearing the way for the richest man in the world to amass even more money.

Musk also used his proximity to Donald Trump to boost his many businesses in foreign countries. In some cases, the administration even pressured foreign governments into approving his products. Not to mention that Musk was the biggest individual winner when Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs, sending Tesla stock shooting up 23 percent.

Just because their plan didn’t work perfectly—and Musk ended up losing twice as much as he cut in government spending—doesn’t mean it wasn’t still corrupt.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is taking aim at the Trump administration’s violent and excessive immigration actions.

On Tuesday, Pritzker signed a bill that makes it easier for Illinois residents to sue federal immigration agents for up to $10,000 if they believe their rights have been violated, and also restricts those agents from enforcement outside courthouses. The bill also requires hospitals to safeguard patient access, and prohibits schools from disclosing the immigration status of students, employees, and contractors unless required by law.

Democratic lawmakers passed the bill in October in the midst of Operation Midway Blitz, the Trump administration’s attempt to crack down on illegal immigration in the Chicago area. The initiative was met with protests and a violent crackdown from federal agents including ICE and Border Patrol.

“Residents should be able to go to court, take their kid to day care and have access to the university they attend without fear they will be kidnapped off the street,” said state Representative Lilian Jiménez, who represents parts of Chicago, in a statement at the time.

Pritzker has sharply criticized President Trump and his federal actions in Illinois. Last month, he called out Border Patrol agents for mocking a neighborhood they had tear-gassed while staging a photo op in front of the Chicago art installation The Bean.

“Making fun of our neighborhoods and communities is disgusting,” Pritzker posted online at the time. “Greg Bovino and his masked agents are not here to make Chicago safer. As children are tear gassed and U.S. citizens detained, they are posing for photo ops and producing reality TV moments.”

Pritzker again called out the Trump administration after signing the bill on Tuesday.

“After what our communities have experienced, we understood that our response needed to be deep and comprehensive to counter the Trump administration’s depravity,” Pritzker said.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division are pretending to care about prisoners’ human rights in an apparent effort to get conspiracy theorist, former state official, and convicted 2020 election fraudster Tina Peters out of a Colorado jail.

“Under my direction, @CivilRights has opened an investigation into the entire Colorado prison system following multiple reports of unconstitutional and legally insufficient carceral conditions. Prisoners have civil rights,” Dhillon wrote Tuesday afternoon.

Dhillion’s letter is addressed to Colorado Governor Jared Polis, and accuses the Colorado prison system of “failing to provide adequate medical care and safe sanitary physical conditions of confinement,” and will determine if the state violates prisoners’ rights by “housing biological males in units designated for females.”

On Monday, a federal judge refused to release Peters, who is Trump’s only 2020 ally still behind bars. Trump can’t just pardon her like he’s done with virtually everyone else who’s committed felonies in his name, since she is being held on state charges, not federal—so instead, the administration has to use this “prisoners’ rights” loophole.

Those on both the left and the right acknowledged that Dhillon’s move is part of a larger plan to free the woman who committed seven felonies in Colorado for Trump.

“PLEASE focus on @realtinapeters,” one supporter wrote. “She is a victim of the system.”

“They’re going to get Tina out?” said another, attaching prayer hand emojis.

“New Trump pressure on Colorado to release election conspiracy theorist Tina Peters—who Trump can’t pardon because she’s imprisoned on state charges,” The Bulwark’s Will Sommer chimed in.

Right-wingers have been doing the “Free Tina” thing for some time now. Peters is currently serving nine years in jail for granting unauthorized access to Colorado voting machines and being charged with three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, two counts of conspiracy to commit attempting to influence a public servant, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty, failing to comply with the secretary of state, obstruction, contempt of court, criminal impersonation, and identity theft.

The right, of course, views Peters as a political prisoner rather than someone who blatantly tried to use her power to swing the 2020 election in Trump’s favor. Her lawyers and MAGA-sphere supporters have alleged that her health is declining and that she was temporarily placed in solitary confinement last month.

“FREE TINA PETERS, a brave and innocent Patriot who has been tortured by Crooked Colorado politicians, including the big Mail-In Ballot supporting the governor of the State,” Trump posted on Truth Social back in August. “Let Tina Peters out of jail, RIGHT NOW. She did nothing wrong, except catching the Democrats cheat in the Election. She is an old woman, and very sick. If she is not released, I am going to take harsh measures!!!”

Trump called to free Peters last week too.

“The SLEAZEBAG Governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, refuses to allow an elderly woman, Tina Peters, who was unfairly convicted of what the Democrats do, cheating on Elections, out of jail! She was convicted for trying to stop Democrats from stealing Colorado Votes in the Election,” he wrote. “She was preserving Election Records, which she was obligated to do under Federal Law.”

Prisoners’ rights probably are being violated in Colorado, as they are in most prisons in this country. But it’s obvious that the Trump administration is more concerned with gaming the system than it is with prison conditions of any kind.