Hegseth Short-Circuits Trying to Explain How U.S. Is Winning Iran War

The Trump administration is failing to explain how the U.S. is coming out on top in the Iran war.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared before the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday to defend the DOD’s latest budget requests, but he came up incredibly short in providing examples showcasing America’s accomplishments in the current Middle East conflict.

“How much has Iran profited from your administration lifting the sanctions on Iran when you started this war?” asked Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton.

“I can tell you that Iran is financially devastated,” said Hegseth.

That’s partially true. The war has forced more than a million Iranians out of work, devastated the country’s infrastructure, and tanked the value of Iran’s currency. In response, the authoritarian regime running Tehran has raised wages, subsidized basic goods, and provided cash supplements to the poor, leveraging the government’s relative wealth to resist Washington’s pressure campaign.

But weeks into the war, Donald Trump opted to temporarily lift sanctions on 140 million barrels of Iranian oil that were sitting at sea. In doing so, he gave the country a $14 billion windfall that has since bolstered the regime.

“They’ve earned about $14 billion,” Moulton said, citing the figure, though he was cut off by Hegseth.

“They’re at a point where, between the blockade and what we’ve done to them militarily, remember they don’t have a Navy so they can’t contest the blockade,” Hegseth said, adding that Tehran has “very few options.”

“OK,” Moulton continued. “How many Chinese missiles can they buy with $14 billion? Does that sound like winning?”

“Um, they’re not—we’re ensuring that they’re not buying Chinese missiles,” Hegseth said, lowering his voice.

Hegseth tripped over his words in another exchange with Ranking Member Adam Smith, flubbing the Trump administration’s narrative by suggesting that U.S. officials had lied to the public last year when they claimed Iran’s nuclear facilities were completely destroyed during Operation Midnight Hammer.

“Their nuclear facilities have been obliterated, underground—” Hegseth started.

“Woah, woah, woah, woah,” said Smith. “You just said we had to start this war, you just said, 60 days ago because the nuclear weapon was an imminent threat. Now you’re saying that it was completely obliterated?”

“They had not given up their nuclear ambitions,” responded Hegseth.

“So Operation Midnight Hammer accomplished nothing of substance and left us at exactly the same place that we were before,” interpreted Smith. “So much so that we had to start a war.”

Florida’s House of Representatives approved a gerrymandered congressional map drawn by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’s office—less than one hour after the Supreme Court decided to gut the Voting Rights Act.

The legislature voted 83–28 Wednesday morning to approve the new map, which Republicans hope will give the party four new seats in Congress. The map now goes to the Florida Senate, which is expected to approve it later Wednesday before it goes to DeSantis’s desk to be signed into law.

While the session took less than 90 minutes, Democratic state Representative and U.S. Senate candidate Angie Nixon tried to disrupt the vote by shouting that the new map “was out of order,” and fellow Democrats tried to argue that the move would violate the state’s Constitution, which bans drawing districts with “the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent.”

Florida House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell pointed out that the DeSantis staffer who drew the map, Jason Poreda, admitted to using partisan data.

“The man who drew this map testified under oath that he used partisan data to draw up every single district,” Driskell said. “Every single one. And when the governor’s attorney was asked whether Democratic voters were being underrepresented in our congressional delegation, his answer was that ‘this is a normative question.’

“Members, if we vote ‘yes’ on this bill, it’s not just that we’re being misled, we are blessing this mess. The timing tells the rest. The governor announces his intention to redistrict, shortly after the president of the United States asked Republican-led states to do exactly that. There is no neutral explanation for that sequence of events,” Driskell added.

The vote came just an hour after the U.S. Supreme Court destroyed the Voting Rights Act by eliminating a majority-Black district in Louisiana. The Florida House voted down a Democratic proposal to delay the vote by two hours to study the Supreme Court decision’s implications. On Wednesday morning, DeSantis posted on X that the high court’s ruling vindicated his move to redraw the state’s map.

“Called this one months ago,” DeSantis said. “The decision implicates a district in FL—the legal infirmities of which have been corrected in the newly-drawn (and soon to be enacted) map.”

With Republicans polling terribly thanks to President Trump, the new map could backfire, as the new districts are not safe GOP seats. Democratic-run states like California and Virginia are also seeking to redraw their congressional districts, leaving the outcome of November’s midterm elections wide open.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegeth went before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday to defend the mammoth $1.5 trillion budget request submitted by the Department of Defense. But under questioning from Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the Christian nationalist and noted drunkard struggled to provide basic information regarding the DOD’s main money pit: the ongoing Iran war.

Hegseth began by saying the U.S. wants to get Iran “to the table” and get them to give up their nuclear capabilities.

Smith noted that Iran doesn’t appear ready to do that, and that since the war started, Iran’s nuclear arsenal has “not been weakened in any way.”

“Well, their nuclear facilities have been obliterated,” Hegseth said, apparently referring to the Trump administration’s drone strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025.

“Woah, woah, woah,” Smith cut in. “Reclaiming my time for just a quick second here. We had to start this war—you just said 60 days ago—because the nuclear weapon was an imminent threat. Now you’re saying it was completely obliterated?” (Hegseth indeed justified the war back in March by saying Iran was close to having a nuke.)

“They had not given up their nuclear ambitions,” Hegseth said. “They had a conventional shield of thousands of missiles—”

“So Operation Midnight Hammer,” Smith said, referring to the June 2025 drone strikes, “accomplished nothing of substance?“

Hegseth began to waffle: “President Trump saw Iran at its weakest moment, took an action to ensure—in a way that only the United States of America could do, with our Israeli partners—to ensure their conventional shield was brought—”

“Yet they still haven’t given up their nuclear [capabilities],” Smith said.

Hegseth’s flip-flopping over whether Iran was close to nuclear weapons does not give one confidence in the officials managing this unpopular and unauthorized war. Adding financial insult to injury, the Pentagon also announced at the hearing that the Iran war has cost the nation a staggering $25 billion so far.

Pam Bondi may think that being fired as attorney general gets her out of a congressional subpoena, but the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform disagrees.

After missing her scheduled deposition April 14, Bondi will now testify before the committee on May 29, the committee announced Wednesday. At the same time, Democrats on the committee announced that they have filed contempt of Congress charges against Bondi, saying that she has “illegally defied our committee, skipped her deposition, and has refused to cooperate.”

“Bondi has extensive personal knowledge about the Trump Administration’s handling of the Epstein files, and regardless of her job title, her testimony and cooperation are crucial,” the committee’s ranking member, Representative Robert Garcia, said in a statement.

The Republican majority on the committee called the charges “theater and completely unnecessary” in a post on X, but stuck by its order to Bondi to testify.

“They were happy giving the Clintons a free pass for months,” the committee said, although President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have already testified before the committee. “We have secured Bondi’s appearance for May 29. Today, we’re marking up legislation to tackle fraud at the federal level and all Democrats can talk about is Epstein.”

Earlier this month, after President Trump fired Bondi, a spokesperson for the committee said Bondi would not appear for her April 14 deposition “since she is no longer Attorney General and was subpoenaed in her capacity as Attorney General.”

Until Wednesday, Republican Oversight Chair James Comer had drawn the ire of the committee’s Democrats for remaining silent on whether Bondi would testify, as well as for making drastic changes to the hearing process. It seems that he either was putting off the announcement until the last minute or was forced to announce a date after Democrats filed charges.

In either case, Bondi has a lot to answer for considering how the DOJ mishandled its files on Jeffrey Epstein on her watch. The DOJ’s Inspector General’s Office and the Government Accountability Office are both investigating the department’s rollout of the files. On Monday, journalist Katie Phang sued the DOJ for a “brazen, shocking, and ongoing violation” of the Epstein Files Transparency Act by failing to publish all of the government’s files on the convicted sex offender.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 to render the Voting Rights Act obsolete.

Louisiana v. Callais was first brought to the court in 2025 by a group of white voters, who argued that a congressional map drawn to create a Black-majority district in Louisiana was unconstitutional. The conservative judges ruled that while Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act outlaws race-based gerrymandering, Louisiana’s map did not fit the bill, and in fact unnecessarily employed racial statistics when drawing borders.

Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor all dissented. In a scathing 48-page opinion, Kagan, joined by her fellow liberal justices, warned the ruling “demolishes the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity.”

“The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—‘one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history,’” Kagan wrote. “It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it has been repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed—not the Members of this Court.”

Kagan noted the ruling functionally eliminates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and allows legislators to wipe out minority districts whenever they feel like it.

“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Kagan wrote. “Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic. The majority claims only to be ‘updat[ing]’ our Section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks.… But in fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law.”

Kagan continued: “A plaintiff will have to show—contrary to Section 2’s clear text and design—that the legislators were ‘motivated by a discriminatory purpose.’ That, as Section 2’s drafters knew, is well-nigh impossible.”

She concluded: “I dissent because Congress elected otherwise. I dissent because the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote. I dissent because the Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity. I dissent.”

Assistant Secretary of Defense Jules Hurst finally revealed the Pentagon’s estimated price tag for the U.S. military onslaught in Iran—and it’s a doozy.

“We’re spending about $25 billion on Operation Epic Fury,” Hurst said during a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday. “Most of that is in munitions, there’s part of that obviously is [Operations and Maintenance] and equipment replacement.”

Hurst confirmed the Pentagon planned to develop a supplemental funding request through the White House once they had made a “full assessment of the cost of the conflict.” The Department of Defense has previously asked the White House for $200 billion for the war.

Washington state Democrat and Ranking Member Adam Smith, who’d asked the Pentagon representatives to eventually provide an estimate, appeared surprised to get such an immediate response. “I’m glad you’ve answered that question because we’ve been asking for a hell of a long time and no one’s given us that number,” he said.

As Trump’s military campaign in Iran has neared the 60-day mark, the Pentagon has neglected to deliver real cost estimates since it claimed to have spent more than $11.3 billion in the first six days alone. Every dollar spent on Trump’s war has come from American taxpayers, and was spent without congressional approval.

The American Center for Progress previously estimated that the war had reached a $25 billion price tag at the end of March. For context, the group estimated that with that amount of money, the U.S. government could for one entire year pay for Medicare coverage for 3,106,000 people, or provide 29,614,000 children with free school lunches, or shelter 3,147,000 people in Section 8 housing.

Instead, Trump chose to spend it on weapons, all while telling Americans there wasn’t enough money for childcare, Medicaid, or Medicare. For the amount of money the Pentagon has spent on this war, the government could have provided 1,780,000 children with free childcare for a year.

In the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Justice Department attorneys are decamping from the Trump administration, leaving behind an enormous staffing void within the nation’s top law enforcement agency.

Thousands of experienced attorneys and staff have left the DOJ since Donald Trump returned to office, choosing a hasty exit over the possibility of being forced to prosecute unconstitutional cases at the president’s behest.

“What’s happening is long-term prosecutors are resigning because they’re refusing to go along with vindictive prosecutions, which are by their nature unconstitutional,” Stacey Young, an 18-year veteran of the agency, told MeidasTouch’s Scott MacFarlane. “In some cases, when prosecutors say no, they’re fired from their jobs for doing so, illegally.”

“And we’re also seeing people resign because of the culture those types of prosecutions create. So, the effect, the consequences, are devastating. The DOJ is losing countless lawyers because of it, the rule of law is being eroded, and the reputation of the department has really disintegrated,” Young said.

There were an estimated 10,000 attorneys working across the Justice Department before Trump returned to the White House. By September 2025, that number had been nearly halved: Justice Connection, an advocacy group that tracks DOJ departures, estimated that around 5,500 people (not all of them attorneys) had left the department, either by their own volition, by accepting the Trump administration’s buyout, or by being fired.

Just a fraction of those experienced employees have been replaced, causing a massive backlog of work. The immigration court system—which has been placed under tremendous pressure as a high priority within Trump’s second-term agenda—had a backlog of more than 3.3 million cases by the end of February 2026, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. In reality, that means that the lives of more than three million people are effectively on pause as they await legal decisions that determine their future, either in or out of the United States.

The Justice Department’s hard-right shift into the MAGA agenda has sparked concern among those in the legal community, who have argued that the agency’s recent politicization has undermined public confidence in the country’s legal system.

The Supreme Court just threw out Louisiana’s redrawn congressional map in a huge blow to the Voting Rights Act, an essential pillar of the Civil Rights Movement.

In a 6–3 decision along ideological lines, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that Louisiana’s redrawn congressional map, which was redrawn with considerations of race thanks to a group of Black voters who had challenged the state’s original version, was unconstitutional.

“Because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, no compelling interest justified the State’s use of race in creating SB8, and that map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” the court wrote in its decision for Louisiana v. Callais.

Justice Samuel Alito delivered the majority decision, joined by the five other conservative justices, while Justice Elena Kagan filed her dissent, joined by the other two liberal justices.

Following the 2020 census, Louisiana’s state legislature drew a new voting map, which produced one majority Black district. A group of Black voters sued, arguing that the map had violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race. A federal district court sided with the voters, and the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the decision, ordering the state to draw a new map. A new map was created that had two congressional districts that were majority Black.

But then, a group of voters who described themselves as “non-African-American” challenged the new congressional map, arguing that because it had been drawn to consider race, it was unconstitutional gerrymandering, in violation of the equal protections clause of the U.S. Constitution. While a panel of federal judges initially blocked Louisiana from using the new map, the Supreme Court paused that decision, allowing the state to temporarily use it.

The Supreme Court’s decision will not only affect election results in conservative-led Louisiana for years to come, but it has severely undermined the ability of voters to challenge discrimination under the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits “discrimination against the minority group, such as unusually large election districts,” according to a 1982 report from the the Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

This story has been updated.

Republicans are realizing most Americans don’t like President Trump using the Justice Department to persecute those he believes have personally wronged him.

In the midst of a contentious midterm cycle, some on the right have politely suggested the man in the Oval Office focus on the issues that got him elected. But Trump isn’t one to take advice from others. On Tuesday, his administration announced it was filing charges against former FBI Director James Comey and an aide of longtime White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci.

With an unpopular Middle East war, deportations continuing to frighten residents, a poor job market, and high gas prices, Trump’s personal revenge tour is unsurprisingly unpopular. In a March CNN survey, two-thirds of Americans said the president hasn’t paid enough attention to the most important issues facing the country, a sharp increase from the 52 percent CNN reported a year prior.

“No Republican wants to run on ‘I stand with Donald Trump’s retribution tour,’” Barrett Marson, a conservative strategist, told The Washington Post.

Another GOP consultant, longtime Trump critic Whit Ayres, went even further. “[It’s] exactly the opposite of what most Americans would like to see the president and the Department of Justice focused on,” Ayres told the Post. “They’re worried about inflation and the economy, and many of them are worried about how the war in Iran will end.”

Even some Senate Republicans have pushed back against Trump’s allocation of resources. North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, expressed skepticism that the DOJ’s case against Comey held water. The case is built on a photo Comey posted on Instagram last year, in which seashells on a beach are arranged to write out “86 47.” While “86” is a term originally used in the restaurant industry to get rid of or cancel a dish, the DOJ is arguing this constitutes a threat to Trump’s life.

“I’ve used ‘86’ a lot of times,” Tillis told the Post. “I’ve never said it with the intent of killing somebody.”

Tillis also said he would rather see U.S. Attorney W. Ellis Boyle prosecute “drug [and] human traffickers” than go after Comey. “I want to make sure Mr. Boyle, when he gets confirmed, is focusing on that sort of stuff,” he said. “Somebody’s going to have to convince me that this rises to the level of that kind of bad.”

In the latest forecasts, Democrats are heavily favored to reclaim a House majority in November, though redistricting could throw a wrench in that. They have about a 50 percent chance to take the Senate, as well. Republicans need every policy win they can get from the White House, but an ailing Trump isn’t giving them much to work with.

The number of President Donald Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters is dwindling, according to a recent poll.

Only 18 percent of Americans strongly approve of Trump’s job performance, down from 34 percent at the start of his second term, according to an Economist/YouGov poll published Tuesday.

The polls found that just 37 percent of Americans strongly or somewhat approved of Trump’s job handling, while a whopping 59 percent disapproved, matching Trump’s disapproval rating from the beginning of March, which was his highest ever during his second term. Trump’s net approval rating was -22 points, just above the previous low of -23 points at the end of March.

It’s not all that surprising that Trump is falling out of favor as his so-called “Golden Age” falls apart at the seams.

The president’s handling of the economy has left Americans with a historically poor view of the economy. A Gallup poll published Tuesday found that 55 percent of Americans said their finances were getting worse, up 53 percent from the year before and 47 percent from the year before that. While Americans are worried about paying their bills, Trump’s most urgent desire is to construct a gaudy ballroom adjacent to the White House—now using taxpayer dollars.

Gallup found that Americans are also the most concerned about energy prices that they’ve been since 2008, as Trump’s reckless war with Iran has brought global energy trade to a screeching halt. Trump’s extended military campaign in Iran has also proven to be a sticking point for Americans, increasingly so as it nears the 60-day mark.