Trump’s Own DEA Wrecks His Victory Claim on “Drug Boat” Strikes

In January, President Trump told the media that his deadly extrajudicial strikes on alleged “drug boats” in the Caribbean had maritime drug flow “down 97 percent.” New reporting from The Washington Post shows that was a lie. After over 60 strikes, more than 200 people are dead with no trial, and the Drug Enforcement Administration has confirmed that the flow of cocaine into the U.S. has not been impeded at all.

Instead of stopping shipments, traffickers have just changed their strategies, taking larger vessels or even planes to circumvent international waters, the DEA found.

“The business is so extraordinarily profitable that the cartels do not mind paying freight costs that are five or even 10 times higher,” one naval intelligence official from Ecuador said. “They know that while the United States may destroy one speedboat, they will successfully get 10 semisubmersibles—or other speedboats that evade detection—through.”

“When you squeeze the balloon on one side, it always expands on the other side,” an anonymous DEA official told the Post. “They always find the weak spots and exploit them.” While DEA officials noted that prices rose after the first two months of strikes, smugglers “adapted to the intensified pressure,” and neither supply nor price had “been noticeably affected.”

“98.2% of Drugs coming into the U.S. by Ocean or Sea have STOPPED!” Trump said in April, just over seven months into the strikes. It’s unclear where he got that number from.

Perhaps most troubling of all is the 221 people killed by the U.S. government without any kind of trial or legal process. There’s no way we even know for sure that they were “narcoterrorists”—these could have very well been innocent people. And if so, they’ve been killed for no reason, serving as fodder for Trump to drum up fear and resentment toward Latin America.

The White House has admitted in court that it deliberately canceled federal grants to states that didn’t vote for President Trump.

In court documents filed last week, and first reported on by The New York Times, Trump administration officials confirmed they terminated $7.5 billion in clean energy grants in October “based solely” on political criteria, focusing on states with Democratic leadership that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. The admission came in a lawsuit filed by California researchers challenging the cancellation of Biden-era funding in multiple federal agencies.

At the time, the White House said it was slashing the grants, passed during the Biden administration, to prevent tax dollars from being wasted. Office of Management and Budget director and Project 2025 architect Russ Vought called the money “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda,” and singled out projects in 16 blue states: “CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA.”

Only one month ago, Energy Secretary Chris Wright angrily insisted to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that the cuts “did not involve politics in the decision-making of our review process,” calling any accusation that the funding cancellations targeted certain states for political reasons “bullshit.”

But last week, a Department of Energy lawyer conceded the obvious.

“With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators,” the attorney wrote in a court filing, confessing that the grants were not terminated “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”

Similar green energy grants in Republican-led states that voted for Trump in 2024 were left untouched, despite the Department of Energy recommending their cancellation, the government said in the filing. The Trump administration is coming clean now, it said, because it wanted to avoid the government having to participate in the discovery process for the lawsuit.

That process could lead to the government having to hand over much more damaging internal documents to the lawyers representing the researchers. It’s not just about clean energy grants. The Trump administration has also held up other federal funding for states that didn’t support the president, such as FEMA disaster aid and childcare funding. While the court’s decision on this lawsuit is still pending, no matter how the judge rules, Trump is not likely to end his belligerent attempts to use federal funding as punishment.

Republicans are urging the president to sidestep negotiations with Tehran and instead pound Iran even harder.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker told The Hill Thursday that he encouraged the president to continue hitting the country through multiple conversations over the course of the week.

“I’ve expressed publicly and privately my approval of finishing the job, and realizing that negotiations were getting us nowhere,” Wicker said. “I’ve made it clear that Iran, in my judgment, has no intention of negotiating in good faith or keeping a promise and that it’s pointless to pretend that they are a trustworthy negotiating party.”

Wicker added that he believed the U.S. could “keep the [Strait of Hormuz] open on our terms” and that the strait is “the key to a successful conclusion of hostilities.”

Texas Representative Ronny Jackson, a close friend of Trump’s who also served as his first-term physician, told The Hill that the military needs to attack Iran “as hard as we possibly can right now.”

“I would do everything I possibly can right now to turn them around. So that’d be my thought,” said Jackson, who has positioned himself to be the next chair of the House Armed Services Committee.

“I just think maximum pressure from the air and maximum security of the strait—anything they have that they could possibly use to cause problems in the strait needs to be destroyed,” Jackson added.

Trump made clear this week that he intends to ramp up the unyielding conflict. In an ominous Truth Social post Thursday, Trump pledged to hold Tehran “responsible” for attacks carried out by Yemen’s Houthis the night before against Saudi Arabian ships. Hours later, Trump told Axios that he was “considering a massive attack.”

“Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it,” the president told the digital outlet.

The unending Iran war has deeply frustrated Trump, according to administration officials who spoke with The Wall Street Journal late Thursday. Trump has tried to find an off-ramp from the conflict in the months since he threatened to obliterate Iran’s “entire civilization,” but he has been repeatedly unsuccessful in doing so.

But while MAGA war hawks urge him on, some of Trump’s advisers are reportedly concerned that the ongoing hostilities could harm Republican election odds in November, a failure that could transform his final two years in office. Trump pursued war against Iran following an unusual Situation Room meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump then went to war without congressional approval, and without formally addressing the American public regarding his intent.

Americans, meanwhile, have suffered. The war has killed at least 18 U.S. service members, and taken an enormous toll on daily life in the U.S., inflaming the cost of practically everything as shipping companies contend with rising oil costs.

Alaska’s effort to appease President Trump’s claims that noncitizens are voting has ended up punishing U.S. citizens.

The Alaska Beacon reported Thursday that the state removed 3,048 people from its active voter list, including many citizens who were accidentally flagged by the Alaska Division of Motor Vehicles and now have to provide extra identification to be able to vote. The director of the Alaska Division of Elections, Carol Beecher, told state legislators on Wednesday that “old data” was the reason for the mistake and that she wasn’t sure why so many Alaska residents were labeled as noncitizens.

When Alaskans apply for a driver’s license, they are asked whether they want to register to vote and if they are a U.S. citizen. State election officials cross-check the DMV’s records with voter rolls each year, and according to Beecher, “more like 200 names” are typically tagged for extra scrutiny.

The latest check found “a lot more names than we were expecting,” Beecher said.

“We believe that when we did the match, that a lot of old data was picked up somehow. So we’re still ferreting through that,” Beecher said, adding that although the number of flagged names was “very concerning,” the state has to take them seriously.

“It is not disenfranchising the individual from being able to vote, but it’s a measure the division has to take to make sure that we only have citizens voting.”

Beecher said that those who were flagged will receive a letter asking if they are citizens, and that they merely need to contact the state Division of Elections by email, phone, or regular mail, and state they are a citizen. “We don’t require paperwork. We’re not requiring documentation. Nothing like that,” she added.

Eligible U.S. citizens who were removed from the voter rolls disagree.

Chris Waigl, who got her driver’s license in 2019 and became a U.S. citizen in 2025, was alarmed to check her registration status last weekend and find that she was listed as “inactive—non citizen.”

“They were able to correct it there and then after I sent in copies of my naturalization certificate with a date before my voter registration date,” she told the Beacon via email. “It’s just ridiculous.”

Waigl said she reached out to four others who became citizens at the same time as her, and three of them were removed from the voter rolls. One of them told the Beacon by phone that they were removed despite registering in person at a DMV office and presenting citizenship information.

Some people told the Beacon that they haven’t been able to reach the Division of Elections by phone, and that mailboxes are full.

Alaska’s primary elections are less than a month away on August 18, and the general election is less than two months away in November. The state’s lieutenant governor, Nancy Dahlstrom, is in charge of the elections office and has told state officials to comply with the Trump administration’s requests to turn over copies of Alaska’s voter rolls for a national voter database.

But that national database, run by the Department of Homeland Security, has been found to be full of errors, mistakenly flagging U.S. citizens. One month ago, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan struck it down, saying that the government “haphazardly” created a database of millions of Americans it knew was “inaccurate.”

“States have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information,” Soonam wrote in a 75-page ruling. “All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”

Between the Trump administration and zealous state governments like Alaska’s, thousands of U.S. citizens may not be able to vote in this year’s midterms.

President Donald Trump is suddenly reneging on the terms of the Gordie Howe Bridge project after he claimed Ottawa “disinvited” U.S. officials from the Michigan–Ontario crossing’s grand opening.

“Canada disinvited the United States of America to the opening of the Gordie Howe Bridge, which is fine, considering they are paying substantial TARIFFS to the United States, but the original Deal on the Bridge, which was terribly negotiated by a previous Administration, no longer stands,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday. “We changed the terms of the Deal so that the United States of America now gets 50 percent of the Profit.”

The Gordie Howe Bridge was the creation of a very different period in U.S.-Canadian relations. The international bridge was first proposed in the early 2000s and agreed upon by the two nations in 2012. Under the terms of that agreement, Canada would fully pay for the bridge to get the project moving forward and only share toll revenue once it had recovered its initial costs.

At the time, President Barack Obama was revered by America’s northern neighbors, and diplomatic relations between the two countries were good. But Trump has worked hard to undo that long-standing goodwill. Over the last year and a half, the U.S. president has repeatedly attacked Canada, punishing its people with enormous tariffs, baselessly accosting its government, and even threatening to invade its land to make another U.S. state.

The latest insult came earlier this week, when Trump announced 50 percent tariffs on a wide range of Canadian products worth $20 billion. Canada rescinded its invitations to U.S. officials for the bridge’s grand opening ceremony shortly thereafter, and moved the ribbon-cutting ceremony from the international border line at the center of the bridge to a nearby inspection plaza.

“In light of trade action threatened by the United States earlier this week, it would be inappropriate to proceed with a celebratory event between the two countries,” the office of Canada’s infrastructure minister said, in a statement obtained by The New York Times. “The Gordie Howe International Bridge remains a vital infrastructure project that reflects years of hard work and will be a major economic driver.”

Now Trump is threatening the bridge by claiming that the two countries will split the revenue 50-50, which was not what was agreed upon nearly 15 years ago.

It’s not the first time that Trump has meddled with the bridge. In February, Trump promised that he would block the grand opening unless Canada “fully compensated” the U.S. “for everything” and give him “at least half” ownership of the bridge.

It was not clear, even then, what Canada needed to compensate Washington for. Canada footed the bill for the Gordie Howe International Bridge. The project created new American labor and was constructed with U.S. supplies to boot.

Trump’s take was an unexpected backtrack from how he felt about the bridge during his first term: Trump seemed to wholeheartedly support the endeavor in a joint statement issued in 2017 by himself and former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, claiming at the time that the bridge would “serve as a vital economic link” between the two countries.