Trump Skips Dignified Transfer After Everyone Trashed His Hat

Donald Trump opted not to attend the dignified transfer for the seventh U.S. service member killed during the war with Iran.

Several prominent Trump officials attended Sergeant Benjamin N. Pennington’s funeral procession at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Monday, including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine. But Trump—who earlier this week was lambasted for wearing a self-aggrandizing baseball cap to another dignified transfer—was noticeably absent.

Instead, Trump was at his golf club in Doral, Florida, with lawmakers for the House Republicans’ annual policy retreat. His schedule indicated that he was flying back to Washington at the time of the procession.

Pennington died Sunday after sustaining injuries earlier this month at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. He was the seventh U.S. military member to die amid the current Middle East conflict. Six other slain troops were transferred to U.S. soil on Sunday, though the honorary service was overshadowed by Trump’s fashion choices, which included wearing a Trump-branded, white-and-gold baseball cap that he kept on even as the flag-covered coffins passed by.

The president has not been shy about his casual and callous disregard for America’s troops. He has requested that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades; refused to visit a World War II graveyard; derided deceased soldiers as “suckers” and “losers”; and claimed that the Presidential Medal of Freedom he awarded to one of his billionaire donors was “much better” than the nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor. Trump doesn’t have any military experience of his own thanks to a conveniently timed bone spur diagnosis that helped him skirt the Vietnam War draft in 1968.

Meanwhile, the president is privately warming to the idea of deploying U.S. troops on the ground in Iran, showing “serious interest” in the possibility of keeping a small contingent there for “specific strategic purposes,” NBC News reported. Trump’s vision for Iran involves controlling the government, securing its uranium, and leeching off its oil supply, similar to how the White House infiltrated Venezuela in January, according to internal sources that spoke with NBC.

The U.S. could have had the schematics for Iran’s Shahed drones, but the Trump administration said no.

Roughly seven months ago, Ukrainian officials tried to sell the White House the technology to destroy Iran’s inexpensive, low-flying drones, going so far as to compile a PowerPoint presentation to sway the admin. The intel was battle-proven: Ukraine has more experience fighting Shaheds than practically any other country, downing the same design under Russia’s flag (Russia rebranded the military tech as “Geran drones”).

The decision to snub the offer is now being discussed as one of the biggest miscalculations thus far in the Iran war.

“If there’s a tactical error or a mistake we made leading up to this [war in Iran], this was it,” a U.S. official told Axios Tuesday.

Ukraine developed its own home-grown, low-cost interceptor drone to combat the design, along with air defense systems and sensors. At a closed-door White House meeting on August 18, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy offered the defense tech to Donald Trump. It was extended in an act of good will—an attempt to strengthen ties with the U.S. amid increasing tension over Russia’s invasion. Trump was reportedly interested and “asked his team to work on it, but they have done nothing,” an unnamed Ukrainian official told Axios.

The Shahed drones are capable of flying low and slow, a facet of their design that has made them difficult targets for U.S. air defenses, particularly as the U.S. and its allies run low on interceptor munitions.

Military officials have stressed since last weekend that fighting Iran has drastically depleted America’s missile defense systems. In a closed-door meeting with lawmakers on March 3, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine reportedly said that Iran’s Shahed attack drones had proved a more difficult problem than initially predicted.

In the days since, European Union defense officials have warned that the U.S. is no longer capable of supplying missiles to its allies amid its war with Iran, stressing that the continent would need to develop its own missile manufacturing sector in order to adequately fill its supply without Washington’s help.

One source told CNN that the U.S. has been “burning” through long-range precision-guided missiles in order to fend off the drones.

President Donald Trump was caught in an obvious lie about the military strike on a girls’ primary school in Iran that killed 175 people, many of them children. 

Speaking at a news conference Monday evening, Trump floundered when asked whether the United States would accept responsibility for the deadly strike after it was reported that the strike was conducted with a Tomahawk missile—a weapon primarily used by the U.S. military. 

Trump said that Tomahawk missiles were “one of the most powerful weapons around” but were also a “generic” weapon that the U.S. sold to many countries. Iran was in possession of some, and an investigation would reveal “whether it’s Iran, or somebody else,” he said.  

“Mr. President, you just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war,” asked New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh. “You’re the only person in your government saying this. Even your defense secretary wouldn’t say that when he was asked, standing over your shoulder on your plane on Saturday. Why are you the only person saying this?”

The president struggled to back up his claim for even a moment. 

“Because I just don’t know enough about it,” Trump said. “I think it’s something that I was told is under investigation. But Tomahawks are used by others, as you know. Numerous other nations have Tomahawks, they buy ’em from us. But I will, certainly whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with that report.”

Trump said Saturday that it was his “opinion” that the strike was done by Iran. “They’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions,” he said. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who stood lurking behind the president, had done his best to dodge the question, saying that the strike was under investigation, “but the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”

Jen Griffin, Fox News’s chief national security correspondent, said Monday it was “highly unlikely” that Iran fired at its own school. Tomahawks have to be fired by submarines or warships, she explained. Other militaries in possession of Tomahawk missiles are the British, Australian, and Japanese militaries. Not Iran.

“I think the president knows that, he just knows that this is a, certainly a mistake, a big mistake. And it’s being investigated, but he’s trying to muddy the waters by talking about the Tomahawks,” Griffin said. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s old congressional seat in Georgia could flip to the Democrats in a special election Tuesday.

Since Greene’s resignation took effect at the beginning of the year, the special election in Georgia’s 14th congressional district has Republicans and Democrats running on the same ballot. And with a crowded field in the normally safe Republican district, a Democrat could benefit. In all, there are 12 Republicans, three Democrats, one libertarian, and one independent on the ballot, and if none of the candidates receive a majority of the votes, a runoff election would be held on April 7.

Donald Trump has endorsed Clay Fuller, a district attorney, but his chief Republican opponent is Colton Moore, a former state senator and staunch opponent of Trump’s indictment for election fraud in the state with broader support from the far right. The leading Democrat in the race is Shawn Harris, a cattle farmer and retired brigadier general, but he’ll have a tall order in what the nonpartisan Cook Report considers the most Republican-leaning district in Georgia, which went for Trump by 37 points in 2024.

Trump’s endorsements do not have a good track record in the state. In 2022, he endorsed former NFL player Herschel Walker for the Senate, who ended up losing to Democrat Raphael Warnock. His pick for governor that year, David Perdue, left the Senate to take on Republican gubernatorial incumbent Brian Kemp and lost. Likewise, Trump’s choices for attorney general and secretary of state, John Gordon and former Representative Jody Hice, respectively, lost to Republican incumbents Chris Carr and Brad Raffensperger.

Greene, who became a strong critic of Trump last year before resigning, has refused to endorse anyone in the race “out of respect to my district.”

“I truly support the wonderful people of Georgia 14 and want them to pick their Representative,” she said in a post on X in November. “So anyone claiming they have my endorsement would not be telling the truth.”

Harris will hope to replicate the upset wins of other Democrats during Trump’s second term, many of which took place in areas that lean heavily Republican. With fewer Democrats in this race, he has pretty good odds of making it to the April 7 runoff. If Trump and the GOP’s approval ratings are still abysmal by November, he could pull off a massive upset.

President Donald Trump told America that there were dead people walking around with no arms or legs during his Monday evening speech at a GOP retreat in Florida.

Trump made the perplexing statement while blaming the Iranian regime for violence against American troops, as multiple Western countries have accused Iran for years of supplying their Middle East allies with improvised explosive devices.

“We think they should put a president in or the head of the country that’s going to be able to do something peacefully for a change. They’ve been doing this for 47 years, killing people for 47 years. Whether it’s the barracks or even the SS Cole where they were involved, very strongly, they always denied it,” Trump said. “But they were very strongly involved and all of the people that died through the roadside bombs died and are right now walking around with no legs, no arms. A face that’s been so badly damaged.”

On the one hand, this obviously doesn’t make sense. How could dead people be walking around “right now”? While we can decipher what he meant, we shouldn’t have to. He’s the president, and yet every speech turns into some spaced-out tangent. And while there was a lot of attention on former President Joe Biden’s mental acuity (rightfully so), moments like these deserve as much scrutiny, as they happen constantly.

“This man has access to the nuclear codes,” reporter Jonathan Pie quipped.

As for the attacks Trump references—Western media has long positioned Iran as the kingpin of the so-called “axis of evil,” accusing it of funding Hezbollah and Hamas, and teaching insurgents how to make IEDs in Iraq, among other things. Of course, this leaves out the suffering—both via sanctions and bombings—that the U.S. has caused throughout the entire region, and certainly does not justify this current regime-change war that Trump is touting as a massive success.

“But Israeli pager bombs and all the terrorist attacks they have been involved with are fine. Mass murdering civilians and kids in Gaza with US weapons is also fine. Bombing civilians in Iran is perfectly justified,” author David Icke asked. “It’s only when Iran does it that we have to respond and forget all the stunning numbers that our deadly-duo of the US and Israel have killed and maimed for life. This includes schools and hospitals in Iran and Gaza. Dead school children? Collateral damage, eh?”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth decided to quote scripture to eulogize yet another U.S. soldier who died for no good reason in retaliatory strikes from Iran at his press conference Tuesday morning.

“Having just returned from Dover [Delaware] last night, our troops and their families and the enormous sacrifice that they make is certainly heavy on my mind. So I’ll close with Scripture, drawing strength from Psalm 144.

“Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle. He is my loving God, and my fortress. My stronghold and my deliverer, my shield in whom I take refuge,” he continued, ending the verse before switching to his own prayer.

While it’s a lovely verse traditionally attributed to King David, it does not accurately portray the reality of the situation whatsoever. The United States is the Goliath of this story, along with Israel. The countries’ joint attacks of aggression have killed over 1,200 Iranians, many of them young schoolgirls. Iranian fuel depots were hit so hard that oil rained from the sky in Tehran on Sunday. Seven American service members have died because a president who promised peace sent them to war for money and regime change, not liberation. Listening to Hegseth read Psalm 144 feels like an ominous justification for further aggression rather than a comforting message.

“May the Lord grant unyielding strength and refuge to our warriors, unbreakable protection to them in our homeland, and total victory over those who seek to harm them,” Hegseth concluded. “Amen.”

Donald Trump doesn’t appear to be on the same page as his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth when it comes to a timetable on the Iran war. 

On Monday evening during a press conference, a reporter asked Trump about his comments earlier Monday stating that the war is “very complete,” in contrast to Hegseth, who said, “This is only just the beginning” on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday. 

“So which is it, and how long should Americans be—” the reporter continued before Trump cut in with his answer.

“Well, I think you could say both. The beginning, it’s the beginning of building a new country. But they certainly, they have no navy, they have no air force. They have no anti-aircraft equipment. It’s all been blown up. They have no radar. They have no telecommunications, and they have no leadership. It’s all gone,” Trump responded. “So you know, you could look at that statement, we could, we could call it a tremendous success right now as we leave here, I could call it, or we could go further, and we’re going to go further.”

On the surface, it looks like Trump wants to downplay ongoing military action while others in the administration like Hegseth, and perhaps Israel, are being somewhat more realistic. The president seems to be trying to put a positive spin on further action, suggesting that the U.S. could also  stabilize oil prices by moving on the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf.

“I will not allow a terrorist regime to hold the world hostage and attempt to stop the globe’s oil supply,” Trump said Monday. “And if Iran does anything to do that, they’ll get hit at a much, much harder level.”

He reiterated that threat in a Truth Social post, saying that if Iran stops the flow of oil in the strait, “they will be hit by the United States of America TWENTY TIMES HARDER than they have been hit thus far.” Trump may be trying to keep international markets stable and the price of gasoline from spiking further, as the war continues to cause wild fluctuations.

Ultimately, though, it’s not the words of Trump, Hegseth, or anyone else that will determine the economic impact of the war. It’s going to be what actually happens on the ground, and whether oil installations keep getting attacked from all sides of this reckless war. 

The Pentagon spent more money in September—the end of the 2025 fiscal year—than it had in any other year since 2008. But a good chunk of the budget wasn’t used for anything that could be considered a pertinent military expense.

The Defense Department burned through $93 billion that month alone, signing checks left and right in order to dry up its congressionally allocated budget, according to a recent analysis by the government watchdog Open the Books.

There is pressure to spend: If federal agencies don’t use the entirety of their budgets by the end of the fiscal year, then they lose access to that cash forever, potentially putting themselves in a situation where they have to request a reduced budget the following year. But the Pentagon’s long list of luxuries is hardly defensible.

Some of the frivolous September purchases made under Secretary Pete Hegseth’s stewardship include a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail. (Lobster tail is apparently a favorite of Hegseth’s Pentagon—the department spent more than $7.4 million total on the luxury item in March, May, June, and October.)

In other pricey food purchases, the government decided to drop $15.1 million for ribeye steak (again, just in September), $124,000 for ice cream machines, and $139,224 on 272 orders of doughnuts.

Weeks later, millions of Americans would lose their SNAP benefits amid the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. More still stand to lose eligibility to the food assistance program thanks to a Republican crusade that added stricter work requirements to the program, piling on paperwork and documentation mandates.

One of the largest bulk expenditures was just for furniture, for which the Pentagon decided to shell out $225 million. That included $12,000 for fruit basket stands, and checks totaling more than $60,000 for Herman Miller recliners. All in all, the agency spent more on furniture in 2025 than it had in over a decade.

In the last five days of September alone, the department blew through $50.1 billion on just grants and contracts. For context, only nine other countries spend that much on the entirety of their defense budget per year. It’s also more than the total military budgets of Canada and Mexico combined.

The federal government had a $1.8 trillion deficit in 2025. Ultimately, the military’s massive expenditures offered up more evidence that the Trump administration has not put any meaningful effort into cracking down on needless government spending, a pledge that Donald Trump has wielded on the campaign trail since 2015.

“Under Secretary Hegseth, the Pentagon has consistently said its mission is to refocus on warfighting and lethality,” Open the Books CEO John Hart said. “Last year, we highlighted the problem of wasteful use-it-or-lose-it year-end spending. We noted that this reform is fully within the secretary’s control and is a historic opportunity to make good on that promise.”

Do Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner actually understand nuclear energy enough to describe Iran’s capabilities to Donald Trump, let alone negotiate a nonproliferation agreement with Tehran?

Several nuclear experts have raised questions about the disastrous duo’s technical understanding of uranium enrichment after they presented an assessment of Iran’s Research Reactor that made no sense, MS NOW reported Monday.

For the uninitiated, here’s a crash course in nuclear energy: Most nuclear reactors that produce electricity only require uranium that is enriched to between 3 percent and 5 percent. Highly enriched uranium is anything above 20 percent, and weapons-grade uranium is enriched above 90 percent, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

Tehran’s Research Reactor is a 60-year old facility designed to use less than 20 percent enriched uranium, not intended for use outside of research and producing medicine. The Trump administration has claimed, without providing any evidence, that the facility was being used to covertly stockpile uranium that would become weapons-grade. Nuclear experts aren’t buying it.

“An [active] operating reactor cannot be used as storage. I am not aware of this ever having happened,” Claus Montonen, a retired nuclear physicist and board member of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility, told MS NOW.

Elena Sokova, the executive director of the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, told MS NOW that the administration’s “confusing and misleading” assessment of the reactor was laden with “technical errors.”

“It mixes up different elements of the nuclear program and their potential proliferation capabilities,” Sokova said. “Research reactors are not capable of doing enrichment of uranium, whether for civil or military purposes.”

Witkoff and Kushner chose not to have nuclear technical experts present during negotiations in Geneva, a senior Middle East diplomat with knowledge of the talks told MS NOW. The United States then chose to skip out on technical talks scheduled for last Monday in Vienna.

Last week, Witkoff offered this defense of his credentials: “I wouldn’t tell you I’m an expert in nuclear, but I’ve learned quite a bit, and I’ve studied it and have read quite a bit about it, and I’m competent to sit at the table and discuss it, and Jared [Kushner] is as well.”

Ahead of Trump’s military campaign in the Middle East, Witkoff claimed that Iran had amassed 460 kilograms of uranium at 60 percent enrichment, enough to potentially make 11 bombs within a few weeks. The Wall Street Journal reported Iran had enough uranium to make 12.

However, during negotiations, Iranians offered to turn over that uranium, the Middle East diplomat told MS NOW. The Iranians told Witkoff and Kushner that they’d only started enriching uranium after Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018.

A senior Trump official had confirmed that Iranians “talked about turning over material to us.” But talks ended abruptly when the United States launched a joint attack with Israel.

A federal judge has rejected President Trump’s new appointees to the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office, ruling that the president is illegally trying to get around Senate confirmation.

Chief U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann ruled Monday that the three-prosecutor team running the office is leading “unlawfully,” as the Trump administration tries to cite “enormous grants of executive power hidden in the vagaries and silences of the code.”

“Why does the fate of thousands of criminal prosecutions in this district potentially rest on the legitimacy of an unprecedented and byzantine leadership structure?” Brann wrote in his ruling. “The government tells us: The president doesn’t like that he cannot simply appoint whomever he wants.”

Several criminal cases in the district could be thrown out, with “scores of dangerous criminals” possibly able to escape punishment, Brann wrote, because the Trump administration doesn’t want to appoint U.S. attorneys legally—not just in New Jersey, but all around the country.

“The Office of the United States Attorney for at least five other Districts is currently vacant and in each case it appears that the Government is running the office through a delegation of authority to an individual of the Attorney General and President’s unilateral choice,” Brann wrote, noting that in two cases, judges used their legal power to appoint an attorney to fill the vacancy, and Trump fired their picks too.

“In both cases the President fired their selection within hours and [Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche] made combative (and legally incomplete) posts clearly indicating that the Department of Justice would not permit anyone to hold any United States Attorney’s office if that person was not handpicked by the President,” Brann continued.

The whole reason that the New Jersey office was being run by three attorneys was because Trump’s appointment of his personal lawyer, Alina Habba, as U.S. attorney was found to be illegal. Habba, who was set to lose her nomination vote in the Senate, unlawfully stayed past her interim term. She now works for the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., and called Monday’s ruling “ridiculous” on X.

“Judges may continue to try and stop President Trump from carrying out what the American people voted for, but we will not be deterred,” Habba wrote. “The unconstitutionality of this complete overreach into the Executive Branch, time and time again, will not succeed. They would rather have no U.S. Attorney than safety for the people of NJ.”

Ridiculous or not, absent the Senate, Trump’s handpicked prosecutors are going to keep getting rejected by federal judges. Unless the president starts appointing them legally, every federal prosecution is going to be in jeopardy.