“Where Did You Smell War?”: DHS Nominee Crashes Out on Stolen Valor

Senator Markwayne Mullin tripped over himself Wednesday while explaining his alleged combat experience during his Senate committee confirmation hearing to become the new secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Michigan Senator Gary Peters questioned Mullin about his several “confusing” public statements suggesting he was involved in combat overseas despite never having enlisted, including his recent remark on the “smell of war.”

“Before your time in Congress, other than on vacations with your family, have you ever travelled to a foreign country?” Peters asked.

“No,” Mullin replied.

“You’ve never travelled to a foreign country?” Peters asked.

“Outside of vacation, or mission work? No,” Mullin said.

“Your FBI report does show some travel,” Peters said, claiming Mullin had marked trips to Georgia and Azerbaijan that were not for tourism purposes.

Mullin explained that it was “well documented” that in August of 2021, he traveled abroad to “go get the Americans out of Afghanistan.” It should come as no surprise that this mission was a complete failure. Mullin attempted to enter Afghanistan by way of Greece and Tajikistan, but was reportedly denied access. At the time, Mullin said that he was asked to accompany “Delta [Force] guys,” despite his lack of military training.

“So, you have travelled overseas, despite your previous comment,” Peters said.

Mullin offered to clear up the misunderstanding, and began to describe an official—and classified—trip he took in 2015 while he was a member of Congress.

“I was asked to train with a very small contingency and go to a certain area, which was scheduled for 2016. During that time I was asked to go through, had to meet certain training qualifications,” he said, adding: “I have spoke in general about my experiences, but I have never spoken specifically on details, on dates, or on the mission.”

(Of course, it seems he has alluded to it more than once.)

Mullin claimed that a letter from Peters requesting information about his travel had specifically stated he did not have to claim any official trips he’d taken as a member of Congress.

Peters pressed him on where he’d been sent, but Mullin refused to say.

“In the FBI report I asked, ‘Is there anything in that report that is classified?’ That you are involved in any kind of classified operation at all. And there is none,” the Michigan Democrat said.

“It also said ‘excluding official duties,’” Mullin said, refusing again to answer.

“So, where did you smell war?” Peters asked.

“Sir, I just said that this was classified. And the dates, locations, and mission, I’ve never spoken specifically details about.”

“Well, we can get that information,” Peters replied, insisting he would determine whether Mullin was portraying himself truthfully.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sold a “fucked up” house to Chelsea Handler, the comedian said on her Dear Chelsea podcast.

Handler purchased the $5.9 million Los Angeles home five years ago but said she has yet to move in due to the various toxicities of the property.

“I still have not lived in this house,” Handler said. “That’s how fucked up this house was.”

She claimed that inspectors she hired had warned her the house was uninhabitable.

“The idea that this guy is in charge of the health of our country, when he didn’t even have a proper foundation at his house. And when [inspectors] opened up the house, they were like, ‘This house is the most toxic environment. You cannot live here for at least two years,’” Handler continued. “I’m not exaggerating. It was a disaster and I didn’t know it going in because everything was under wraps.”

But the house wasn’t the only part of the estate that needed work done. Outside, Kennedy had erected an illegal outdoor storage unit that Handler claimed her inspectors told her had to go.

“There’s a unit he has—a little outdoor storage unit—that’s been there since I bought the property. And they’re like, ‘This is illegal,’” she said. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’ So now we have to remove his illegal bullshit from my property and I’m like, ‘How did they not find this upon the first inspection?’”

Handler said she was not aware that Kennedy and his wife Cheryl Hines were the previous owners at the time she purchased it, noting that the sale was “all private” and coordinated through a trust. But that changed when she discovered a note inside the house from Hines.

“They had the audacity to leave me a note! Cheryl Hines left me a note saying, ‘Let us know if there’s anything we can do for you, Chelsea.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, how about a fucking foundation?’ That’s something you could do for me,” she said. “Anyway, I’m not angry about it or anything. I’m totally over it.”

A cluttered space is a cluttered mind: Kennedy has been running DHS with practically zero relevant experience. He has not worked in medicine, public health, or the government—rather, he is guided only by a pocketful of conspiracies that America’s foremost health experts have already thoroughly debunked, and his off-the-wall notions about health have thus far proved disastrous for the agency.

The fallout has been so bad that the Trump administration has reportedly been trying to rein in Kennedy’s influence—and his notoriously bad press—ahead of the midterm elections.

The pro-Israel lobbying organization AIPAC gloated on social media Tuesday night, after its spending efforts paid off in the Illinois congressional primaries.

While AIPAC lamented that its preferred candidate in the 9th congressional district, Laura Fine, finished third, the organization still celebrated the fact that Palestinian American former journalist Kat Abughazaleh, a progressive, finished second to Daniel Biss, the mayor of Evanston.

Biss was preferable to Abughazaleh to AIPAC as the grandson of Holocaust survivors and child of an Israeli mother, even though he has accused the group of having an agenda guided by “no-strings-attached military aid to the current Israeli government, no matter what they do in Gaza or the West Bank” and called it “toxically unpopular.”

AIPAC also celebrated wins in the Illinois 8th congressional district, where progressive Junaid Ahmed, who has called Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide, lost to former Representative Melissa Bean, thanks to the lobbying organization’s astroturfed group Elect Chicago Women. AIPAC also backed winner Donna Miller in the 2nd congressional district.

Still, the organization had to spend millions of dollars in the state and attempted to hide its involvement due to how unpopular it is among Democratic voters. Polls now show that more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than with Israel. AIPAC may celebrate now, but if Democrats successfully recapture the House in November, they will be under pressure to overhaul the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Donald Trump’s so-called Golden Age continues to steer the U.S. economy toward stagflation.

The producer price index, or PPI, in February reached 3.4 percent year-over-year, the biggest jump in producer prices in a year, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report released Wednesday. 

“These numbers are much hotter than expected, guys,” said reporter Sheryl Casone on Fox Business’s Mornings With Maria.  

Casone explained that February’s inflation numbers had exceeded all of Wall Street’s estimates. PPI was 0.7 percent month-over-month, which was 0.5 percent higher than estimated. The year-over-year PPI was also 0.5 percent higher than estimated. 

These high inflation numbers follow a period of dismal job creation and weakened growth for the U.S. economy. The combination of high unemployment, stagnant growth, and rising inflation typically means one thing: stagflation is coming—if it’s not here already. 

“Yeah, this is not good,” said Joel Shulman, financial analyst and founder of ERShares, an asset management company. Shulman said that this would likely prevent the Federal Reserve from cutting rates for at least a couple of months. 

“This is probably gonna be negative for the markets, and we’re gonna see, we’re probably gonna see the markets ticking down even further in the next couple days,” he told Fox. “So this is not good news.”

Over on CNBC, the hosts didn’t mince words about how bad February’s PPI numbers were.

“It’s almost the worst of both worlds. I guess stagflation would come close to describing the situation,” contributor Rick Santelli said. 

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, Trump claimed that his administration had “defeated” inflation and that the U.S. had “virtually no inflation.” It wasn’t true at the time, and it certainly isn’t true now. 

Since he started his war on Iran, President Trump has gone from not needing help to begging for it regarding the Strait of Hormuz passageway. Now on Wednesday he’s threatening—in a typo-laden post—to abandon the key trading route entirely.

“I wonder what would happen if we ‘finished off’ what’s left of the Iranian Terror State, and let the Countries that use it, we don’t, be responsible for the so called ‘Straight?’” Trump wrote early Wednesday morning (before reposting with the correct spelling). “That would get some of our non-responsive ‘Allies’ in gear, and fast!!! President DJT.”

It seems clear that the president expected his attack on Iran to be similar to that on Venezuela—in and out, while picking the country’s next leader. That couldn’t be further from the case here. Now, after killing more than 1,200 Iranian civilians to take out a nuclear program he claimed was destroyed months ago, Trump is left with no victory, no solution, and skyrocketing gas prices as Iran retaliates by blockading the Strait of Hormuz.

The European allies he asked for help rebuffed him, and now—like a petulant child—he is threatening to flip the whole board game over and leave the rest of the world to clean up the mess.

You want to know how Donald Trump’s disastrous war in Iran is going? One of the president’s own supporters just called him a “worthless pile of shit.”

During a segment about the response to rising gas prices on NBC’s Meet the Press NOW Tuesday, politics reporter Jonathan Allen spoke to Pennsylvania resident Amanda Robbins at a gas station in Millersburg.

“If you could say something to President Trump and he was gonna hear you right now, what would it be?” Allen asked.

“You are a worthless pile of shit,” Robbins said.

“And you voted for him how many times?”

“Three times. That was my bad, apparently I’m an idiot,” she said.

Allen spoke to three other Trump voters who said they were willing to pay slightly higher gas prices, either because they believed in the cause of the war or they trusted Trump. Millersburg is located in a swing district in a swing state that Trump won in 2024. In Pennsylvania, the price of gas Monday was $3.76, up more than 60 cents from a month ago.

As Trump’s supporters have turned on him, the president is lashing out against his critics.

“THEY ARE NOT MAGA, I AM, and MAGA includes not allowing Iran, a Sick, Demented, and Violent Terrorist Regime, to have a Nuclear Weapon to blow up the United States of America, the Middle East and, ultimately, the rest of the World,” Trump wrote in a lengthy rant on Truth Social Sunday. “MAGA is about stopping them cold, and that is exactly what we are doing.”

Of course, Trump ran on a promise of no more wars and America First—before launching an increasingly expensive military campaign in Iran at Israel’s bidding. Is it any surprise that people are saying MAGA is dead?

The White House was completely blindsided by ex–National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent’s political resignation.

The top counterterrorism official alerted the White House Monday that he would be leaving his post over the war with Iran, claiming that Tehran “posed no imminent threat to our nation” and that America’s ongoing involvement was due to “pressure” from Israel and its U.S. lobby.

Kent’s resignation sparked a maelstrom across Washington, where top Republicans and Trump officials spent the better part of Tuesday disparaging Kent and his work, branding the Trump appointee a “crazed egomaniac.”

But the backlash was, in large part, due to the fact that Kent’s abrupt exit was announced online and on government letterhead—which caught the president and his staff completely off guard, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Key Republicans ripped Kent apart over the span of 24 hours, including the likes of House Speaker Mike Johnson, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and former White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich, who uniformly attacked Kent’s credibility and his influence in the government.

But the message wasn’t just for Kent. Instead, the size and scope of their reaction was a message to other Trump officials, warning them of the fallout if they publicly criticize the war.

Senior administration officials told The Guardian that prior to his exit, Kent was suspected of leaking information to the press, a suspicion that got him booted from both the presidential daily brief process and deliberations over Iran.

So far, 13 U.S. soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. More than 1,400 Iranian civilians have been killed, including dozens of children at a girls’ school in the country’s south. Some 3.2 million people have been displaced, as the U.S.-Israeli strikes have damaged more than 42,000 civilian sites—such as homes, hospitals, and schools—across Iran, according to Iranian government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani.

Trump told reporters Tuesday that he would withdraw from the war “in the very near future” but that he wasn’t ready to leave yet. Leaving may not be a feasible option anytime soon, however. The president’s allies have recently noticed a shift in power, warning that while the early days of the war may have indicated an immediate victory, prolonged U.S. involvement in the conflict has dramatically increased the likelihood of boots on the ground. The changing tide has fueled concern that Trump could draw the country into yet another open-ended Middle East conflict.

The University of Florida kicked its College Republicans chapter off of campus over the weekend over a photo of a member performing a Nazi salute, and now the organization is suing the university.

The UF College Republicans filed a lawsuit in federal court Monday, alleging that their First Amendment rights were violated. The salute photo had circulated on social media, along with photos of the group’s members with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and far-right podcaster Myron Gaines.

In a statement, the university’s interim president Donald Landry said that the Florida Federation of College Republicans, which oversees campus GOP groups in the state, told the university that it had disbanded the UF chapter. Landry said that UF then moved to deactivate them.

“The University of Florida has emphatically supported its Jewish community and remains committed to preventing and addressing antisemitism and other forms of discrimination and harassment that are threatening and disruptive to our students,” Landry said in his statement.

The chapter is being represented in court by Anthony Sabatini, who alleged to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel that the Nazi photo was the “final straw” for the university, and the“edgy” student group felt they had been targeted for some time. Sabatini, a conservative Lake County commissioner, also claimed the chapter was really shut down because it hosted Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate James Fishback on March 11.

Fishback has repeatedly called his GOP rival, Representative Byron Daniels, a “slave.” Daniels is Black. Sabatini said that event was used to deactivate the group and replace it with more “vanilla” conservatives.

Young Republicans across the country seem to have a racism and antisemitism problem. Earlier this month, a Republican group chat of Florida International University students leaked online and showed dozens of its members engaging in racist, antisemitic, and depraved language. Last year, a leaked Young Republicans group chat comprising members from across the country showed members being similarly racist and antisemitic, while casually throwing around rape jokes.

Earlier this month, the national College Republicans named a far-right associate of Fuentes, Kai Schwemmer, as its national political director, showing that this rot is only increasing. White supremacy appears to be the future of the Republican Party.

A federal judge ejected a top prosecutor from the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office out of his courtroom Tuesday, accusing the government of “operating unlawfully” in light of recent reports that Alina Habba, a former personal lawyer to Donald Trump, was still illegally involved in the office’s functions.

U.S. District Court Judge Zahid Quraishi was markedly frustrated as soon as Tuesday’s proceeding began, grilling the office’s head of appeals, Mark Coyne, for failing to provide proper documentation prior to his appearance before the court. As a result, Quraishi ordered Coyne not to speak, though he allowed Coyne to remain in the room “for moral support.”

But Coyne would not comply with the mute order—particularly as Quraishi’s conversation with Coyne’s more junior colleague, Daniel Rosenblum, turned to the office’s current triumvirate leadership structure and Habba’s rumored involvement.

Habba resigned from her position atop the office in December, when a federal appeals court ruled that her appointment was unlawful. Last week, the office’s trio of replacement leaders were also found to be occupying their positions unlawfully. Habba has since been serving as a senior adviser to Attorney General Pam Bondi, overseeing myriad U.S. attorneys’ offices and reportedly stepping back into the New Jersey office.

Rosenblum, the line prosecutor on the case, told Quraishi that he had been with the office for just two and a half years and that he was “not aware of” Habba’s involvement in the office’s operations—but that response was not as clear cut as the judge wanted.

“All right. So she could be operating the office?” he asked.

That’s when Coyne could no longer stay silent.

“She is not,” Coyne said, which Rosenblum repeated.

“Sit down, Mr. Coyne. If you speak again, I’m going to have you removed. I already told you not to speak,” Quraishi said.

Coyne then started to speak again, though Quraishi cut him off.

“You didn’t file a notice of appearance. You don’t get to blindside the court and do whatever it is you guys want to do. So if you continue to speak, you can leave,” Quraishi stated.

As Coyne continued to interrupt, Quraishi ordered the guards.

“I’m directing the court security officers to remove Mr. Coyne,” Quraishi said. “Mr. Coyne, I told you not to address this court. You didn’t file a notice of appearance. You don’t get to blindside this court. I’m going to ask you to leave … or I’ll have you removed.”

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday called for an end to “personal hostility” toward judges, a not-so-subtle message that came just two days after President Trump went on a long diatribe about courts ruling against him.

“It does come with the territory.… When any of us issue an opinion, it’s often a dissent,” Roberts said when asked how he handled criticism at a Baker Institute for Public Policy panel. “It’s important that our decisions are subjected to scrutiny, and they are. The problem sometimes is that the criticism can move from a focus on legal analysis to personalities. And you see—from all over, not just any one political perspective on it—that it’s more directed in a personal way. And that, frankly, can be actually quite dangerous.”

“Judges around the country work very hard to get it right. And if they don’t, their opinions are subject to criticism,” Roberts continued. But personally directed hostility is dangerous, and it’s got to stop.”

On Sunday night, Trump raged against “the courts,” including the Supreme Court, for ruling against his tariffs. He also took time to personally attack Judge James Boasberg—who axed his attack on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell last week.

“They openly disrespect the Presidents who nominate them to the highest position in the Land, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and go out of their way, with bad and wrongful rulings and intentions, to prove how ‘honest,’ ‘independent,’ and ‘legitimate’ they are,” Trump wrote about the Supreme Court. “The Democrat Justices just vote Democrat—They always stick together! Our Country was unnecessarily RANSACKED by the United States Supreme Court, which has become little more than a weaponized and unjust Political Organization.”

He then went on to attack Boasberg with similarly inflammatory language:

The Courts treat Republicans, and me, so unfairly, always seeming to protect those who should not be protected. They are highly politicized. Cases don’t matter, the Judge does! As an example, how is this absolutely terrible Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell, not even allowed to be investigated for the horrible job he does? I strongly criticized Jerome ‘Too Late’ for his horrible performance throughout his tenure, which is either gross incompetence, total dishonesty, or both, and, in return for this well justified criticism, get viciously and wrongfully blamed by, as usual, a Wacky, Nasty, Crooked, and totally Out of Control Judge, named James Boasberg, a man who suffers from the highest level of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), and has been ‘after’ my people, and me, for years.

Trump has long singled out judges who deliver rulings he doesn’t like. Just last month, Trump called Roberts, as well as Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Comey Barrett, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor, “FOOLS and ‘LAPDOGS’ for the RINOS and Radical Left Democrats” for striking down his “Liberation Day” tariffs.