Trump Insists He Would Have Won War He Dodged

President Donald Trump claimed Tuesday it would’ve taken him just five months to end a war he refused to fight in.

Speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Trump bragged about how quickly he ended the war in Iran—shortly after threatening to resume attacks if things don’t go his way in the as-yet unstarted peace talks.

“And I just looked at a little chart, World War I, four years and three months. World War II, six years. Korean War, three years. Vietnam, 19 years. Iraq, eight years. I’m five months. OK, five months,” Trump said. “I would have won Vietnam very quickly. I would have, if I were president, I would have won Iraq in the same amount of time that we won because, essentially, we won here.”

The U.S. formal involvement in the Vietnam War wasn’t actually 19 years long—it was more like eight. But how can one expect Trump to know something like that, when he wasn’t actually there? The president, son of a rich real estate mogul, evaded the military draft five times.

And anyway, Trump clearly has loose definitions for what actually constitutes a war. The president seems to believe war starts and ends when he says so, and then starts again and ends again, and so on ad infinitum.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doesn’t think soldiers living and fighting together in close quarters or aboard warships need to take the flu vaccine.

“Under the disastrous Biden administration, this Pentagon waged an unrelenting war on our warriors on many fronts, including when it came to denying them simple medical autonomy, and the freedom to express their religious convictions,” Hegseth said in a video statement posted on Tuesday morning. “Under President Trump … we’re seizing this moment to discard any absurd, overreaching mandates that only weaken our war fighting capabilities. In this case, this includes the universal flue vaccine, and the mandate behind it.”

The announcement was widely criticized by Democrats for the timing, the level of priority attached to it, and the obvious disregard for the history of influenza in the U.S. military. During World War I, an estimated 45,000 U.S. soldiers died from influenza. Now, Hegseth is proudly eschewing a vaccine that is known to be an effective way to avoid getting the flu—something servicemembers, especially those stationed on warships in the Middle East—would likely appreciate.  

“Nothing says military readiness like sick soldiers,” Democratic Representative Rosa DeLauro said. 

This story has been updated.

President Trump is not exactly known for his piousness, but one Bible verse seems to have struck his fancy—probably because it was used by evangelical Christians to sing his praises while they tried to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021.

In the Old Testament, 2 Chronicles 7:11-22 consists of God responding to a prayer from Solomon, a king of ancient Israel. God promises Solomon he will bless his temple as long as he and his people are not idolaters. As is common in the Old Testament, God’s message rings with both love and fury. But verse 14, the most famous bit of the passage, is positive: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

As part of a weeklong “America Reads the Bible” event organized by the White House and the election-denying evangelical group Christians Engaged, a prerecorded video of Trump reading 2 Chronicles 7:11-22 will air at 6 p.m. E.T. Tuesday evening. Remember the separation of church and state? That was nice.

Trump reading the passage will thrill what’s left of the January 6-ers. During the Capitol riot, Couy Griffin—the founder of “Cowboys for Trump,” a fan club that rode on horseback to Trump’s political events—recited verse 14 over the crowd.

According to the Christian Post, Trump’s association with the passage goes back even further, to 2016. After his unlikely election win, evangelist Anne Graham Lotz—Billy Graham’s daughter—used the verse to claim that God had responded to America’s prayers.

MS NOW opinion writer Ja’han Jones called it “predictably Trumpian” that the president is reciting a passage that his supporters have used to heap praise on him. As the passage is over 400 words long, The New Republic would also like to note that it will be interesting to see whether Trump gets bored halfway though and starts talking about something else.

The Southern Poverty Law Center revealed Tuesday that it’s under criminal investigation by the Justice Department for previously using paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups.

The nonprofit public interest group announced that the Trump administration appears to be preparing a case against the organization or some of its employees.

“Although we don’t know all the details, the focus appears to be on the SPLC’s prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups,” CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement obtained by the Associated Press.

Fair said that the SPLC had used informants to monitor the threat of violence inside extremist organizations, and had frequently shared its findings with local and federal law enforcement.

“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”

Fair said the organization “will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.”

The Montgomery-based SPLC was founded in 1971 in order to combat white supremacist groups after the Civil Rights Movement. Yet the nonprofit’s purview has been nationally perceived (at least on the right) as less and less acceptable, in the decades since. Conservative politicians and personalities have railed against the advocacy group, claiming that its work—which includes tracking extremist groups, promoting tolerance, and kneecapping bigotry through litigation—is inherently partisan and overly leftist.

FBI Director Kash Patel announced last year that his agency would sever ties with the SPLC, ending a long-standing research arrangement between the nonprofit and the federal government.

The investigation has reignited concerns that Donald Trump is trying to weaponize the Justice Department during his second term, morphing the agency into his personal law firm in order to harm or attack his dissidents and critics.

The Department of Homeland Security is developing smart glasses that would allow federal agents to identify people using biometric data in real time.

Journalist Ken Klippenstein, citing a budget request from DHS, reports that these devices, slated to be released by September 2027, build on existing smart glasses that include video cameras and heads-up data displays. They would be able to pull from the federal government’s archives of biometric data, including facial recognition, walking gait, and iris patterns.

“The project will deliver innovative hardware, such as operational prototypes of smart glasses, to equip agents with real-time access to information and biometric identification capabilities in the field,” the document states. The project is under the DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate, the agency’s research and development division.

While the budget request says the glasses are necessary for immigration enforcement, a DHS attorney anonymously told Klippenstein that “it might be portrayed as seeking to identify illegal aliens on the streets, but the reality is that a push in this direction affects all Americans, particularly protestors,” adding that the technology behind the glasses has applications for general government surveillance in addition to immigration.

These glasses would give federal agents the Orwellian ability to identify anyone within their line of sight, especially if people are on any of DHS’s many watchlists. The glasses would be only one more addition to the rapidly expanding surveillance state under the Trump administration, which is collecting massive amounts of data on people and organizations in the U.S.

The federal government is gathering this data with the help of contractors like Palantir, a company with a disdainful view of democracy whose apps help Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents map out deportation targets and utilize AI to find them. ICE itself is also putting together a team focused on monitoring social media to find people to deport. Will Congress rein in this infringement on basic freedoms and liberties, or will they remain mostly silent?