THERE IS NO BOTTOM for President Trump.

 

THERE IS NO BOTTOM for President Trump. In a Cabinet meeting that ran so long Tuesday he dozed off at times, the president: Called an entire community of Americans “garbage” and said, “I don’t want them in our country.” He was talking about Somali immigrants, but this should enrage and frighten all Americans: An unhinged president can take aim at any one of us. Dismissed the public’s concerns about inflation, claiming affordability “doesn’t mean anything to anybody.” He doesn’t care about what Americans care most about: their high cost of living. Lied again about the 2020 election, which he lost but says he won. He hates democracy. It gets in the way of his grab for power, attention, and money. Vowed to continue U.S. military strikes on suspected drug-running boats despite lawmakers in both parties questioning their legality and morality. Trump threatened to attack Latin American countries by land. And he said anyone suspected of manufacturing drugs or “selling it into our country” is subject to U.S. attack. Next we can expect him to call for the executions of American citizens who are suspected — but not charged or convicted of — drug trafficking. AP photo

Hegseth’s Escape Plan Begins. The White House Just Pointed the Finger at Admiral Bradley.

 

Hegseth’s Escape Plan Begins. The White House Just Pointed the Finger at Admiral Bradley.

Congress smells a cover-up. The Pentagon is furious. And the Trump White House just publicly isolated a career Navy SEAL to shield Pete Hegseth from a war crimes inquiry.

The Allen Analysis

Dec 02, 2025

 

The Trump administration has entered the phase every scandal eventually reaches. The walls tighten. Investigators circle. Lawyers whisper. And someone gets positioned to take the fall.

This time, it is Admiral Frank M. Bradley, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command. A man who has spent decades avoiding the spotlight is now being shoved into it by a White House that appears more focused on protecting Pete Hegseth than protecting the truth.

According to new reporting from The Washington Post, the administration did not just attempt to redirect scrutiny. Officials explicitly framed Bradley as the one who carried out the second strike that killed two unarmed survivors in the Caribbean boat attack on September 2. That strike is the center of a growing criminal inquiry on Capitol Hill, and multiple legal experts have already stated that killing defenseless survivors is unlawful under every theory of armed conflict. It meets the textbook definition of a war crime.

Congress knows this. The Pentagon knows this. And now the White House is scrambling.

A Scapegoat is Being Built in Real Time

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Bradley “worked well within his authority” while executing Hegseth’s authorization to conduct the strike. What she did not say, however, was even more telling. She never clarified whether Hegseth’s spoken order to leave no survivors was the catalyst for the second missile.

The White House Just Threw Admiral Frank M. Bradley Under the Bus

The Allen Analysis

Read full story

 

Inside the Pentagon, officials immediately understood what Leavitt was doing. According to the reporting, the reaction was explosive. One senior military official described it as:

“Protect Pete bullsh*t.”

Another warned it was the administration “throwing service members under the bus.” And beneath the surface, there is rising panic among civilian staff who believe Hegseth intends to wash his hands completely and let Bradley absorb every consequence.

It would not be the first time a political appointee tried to outsource blame onto the uniformed military. But doing so here is especially egregious because Hegseth is the one who issued the spoken directive. Bradley executed his chain of command.

This is not speculation. This is the documented timeline.

Congress Is Preparing for a Knife Fight

Senator Roger Wicker, a Republican and chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is not buying the White House’s attempt to reframe the story. Wicker has now requested every video, audio recording, and written order associated with the strike. He has already spoken with Hegseth, General Dan Caine, and intends to interview Bradley directly.

Trump Scrambles to Rewrite the Hegseth Strike Scandal as Republicans Join the Oversight Push

The Allen Analysis

Dec 1

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That step is significant. Lawmakers do not call in a four-star to “talk” unless they suspect something is wrong with the official narrative.

Behind closed doors, House and Senate military committees have already launched parallel inquiries. Staff described the Pentagon’s three-month pattern of stonewalling as “obfuscation,” and said the effort to force transparency is now reaching a tipping point.

Congress understands exactly what this fight is really about. If Hegseth issued an unlawful order, then the chain of command is contaminated from the top.

And that means accountability is not optional. It is required by law.

Legal Experts Are Already Ringing the Alarm Bell

A coalition of former military lawyers and senior commanders issued a public statement that leaves no room for interpretation. In operations like this, defenseless survivors are not combatants. They are protected persons. Killing them is illegal under U.S. military law and under the Geneva Conventions.

Their conclusion is damning:

“There are no other options. These acts are war crimes or murder.”

The Trump administration has attempted to justify the Caribbean campaign by claiming it is a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels. That argument is flimsy on its best day and fraudulent on its worst. Most of the narcotics targeted were cocaine shipments bound for Europe and West Africa, not fentanyl bound for the United States. Even the Pentagon privately admitted this to Congress.

The legal defense collapses under its own weight. Which is why the administration is trying to pivot the blame.

Why Bradley Is the Perfect Patsy

Admiral Frank M. Bradley is a Navy SEAL with decades in black-ops units. He rarely appears in public. He has no political base, no media profile, and no natural allies in Washington’s gladiatorial politics. His life has been operational silence. That makes him the ideal scapegoat.

The White House knows this.

They are betting that if there must be a head on the table, Congress will accept a career operator rather than a Cabinet secretary.

But that calculation is beginning to backfire.

Military officials have rallied around Bradley. Lawmakers are furious at the evasions and contradictions coming from the administration. And even Hegseth’s own civilian appointees are reportedly alarmed enough to consider resigning.

The question is not whether this scandal will escalate. It already has.

The real question is who will be left standing when the truth comes out.

Conclusion

This is the clearest sign yet that the Trump administration recognizes the legal threat closing in around them. The moment the White House publicly isolates a decorated four-star while protecting a political appointee, the cover-up stops being subtle. It becomes visible in broad daylight.

Congress now has the evidence. Investigators have the timeline. Military officials have had enough.

And Hegseth has finally reached the point where every move he makes telegraphs fear.

Admiral Bradley is being positioned to take the fall. The question is whether Washington will let that happen.

Trump to Disaster Victims: Drop Dead

 

Trump to Disaster Victims: Drop Dead

Sorry, but we don’t help the little people

Paul Krugman Dec 3

 

 

The Mississippi flood of 1927 was one of America’s greatest natural disasters. Some 27,000 square miles were inundated, in some cases by 30 feet of water. Hundreds, maybe thousands, died — many of the victims were poor and Black, and their deaths went unrecorded. Around 700,000 people were displaced — equivalent to about 2 million people today, adjusting for population growth.

 

How did America respond? Initially, President Calvin Coolidge was adamantly opposed to any federal role in disaster relief, declaring that “The Government is not an insurer of its citizens against the hazard of the elements.” His refusal to provide aid was, however, deeply unpopular, and he eventually gave in to demands from Congress to deliver government aid.

 

Ever since that catastrophic flood, providing government aid to the victims of natural disasters has been an integral part of the American Way: federal aid to disaster victims became the norm after the Mississippi flood. Yet it was often a haphazard, uncoordinated process until 1979, when the federal response to natural disasters was consolidated under the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

 

Since then FEMA has become a well-established part of the American social safety net, especially in the face of worsening climate catastrophes. Americans have come to rely on FEMA as a first line of support after disasters. And when FEMA was seen to be falling down on the job, as it did after Hurricane Katrina virtually destroyed New Orleans in 2005, Americans were angry. The fact is, they want FEMA to be better, not smaller. In a July poll, only 9 percent of Americans wanted to see FEMA eliminated, and only another 10 percent wanted to see its budget cut.

 

Donald Trump, however, believes that he knows better than the majority of Americans. In June he announced his intention to dismantle FEMA and force the states to assume responsibility for disaster relief. While Trump publicly backed down after an intense public backlash, in practice he is gutting FEMA nonetheless. He is drastically scaling back federal emergency aid, even for communities in which the need for federal assistance is overwhelming.

 

The latest example of Trump’s stiffing those in need is in rural northern Michigan, where the power grid suffered severe damage from an ice storm last March. Rebuilding the power lines will cost thousands of dollars for each household served by the region’s power cooperatives. Without outside help, that cost will have to be paid by the cooperatives’ customers, a huge burden on a relatively poor part of the state. Yet FEMA has turned down the state’s request for aid, in an unprecedented break with past policies.

 

Adding further injury to Michiganders, who – by the way – voted to deliver the presidency to Donald Trump in 2024, the Trump administration has ordered another Michigan utility to keep an aging, unneeded, highly polluting coal-fired power plant operating, at a cost to ratepayers of $113 million so far, and ongoing at $615,000 per day.

 

Trump tried, unsuccessfully, to withhold wildfire aid from California unless it adopted voter ID. He has also tried to divert aid away from states that, in his view, aren’t cooperating with his immigration policies, although the courts stopped him. But the storm-hit areas that he is currently refusing to help are, or plausibly “were”, Trump country. The map on the left shows the areas covered by different Michigan electricity utilities; #3 and #7 are the utilities seeking FEMA aid. The map on the right shows the 2024 presidential vote by county, with deeper red corresponding to a higher Trump share:

Since this is not another case of Trump’s political retribution, what lies behind the denial of aid? I believe that it is a knee-jerk dominance display on Trump’s part. Whenever someone comes to him in need, whether its Volodomyr Zelensky, helpless African children dependent on USAID, or rural Michiganers, his cruelty is activated. And he likes surrounding himself with those of the same ilk: Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, who impeded and slow-walked the emergency response to deadly Texas flooding back in July.

 

But that’s not all: there’s also an ideological component. The pre-Trump typical conservative argument against government aid restricted itself to programs like food stamps. The usual suspects fulminate against those who need help putting food on the table, asserting that it’s because they have chosen to be poor. In the conservative ideology of Ronald Reagan, helping the poor relieves them of individual responsibility and only makes them lazy.

But those old-time conservatives also recognized a difference between being the victim of a natural disaster and being impoverished. In their view, nobody chooses to have an ice storm or a hurricane. And helping to re-build entire communities didn’t, in their view, encourage sloth.

But that was conservatism then and this is Trumpism now. The fact is that disaster relief runs counter to the libertarian ideology embraced by tech bros like Peter Thiel. In the world of the libertarian tech broligarchy, who believe that they should be running things rather than be constrained by democracy, selfishness is a virtue. Hence they don’t believe that their tax dollars should be used to help others, even when those others are victims of circumstances beyond their control. Oh, that is, unless you are a wealthy Silicon Valley type with deposits at the failed Silicon Valley Bank. They apparently had no problem with a federal bailout of SVB.

 

In fact, the libertarian tech broligarchy is opposed to the very impulse to care about other people. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization,” declared Elon Musk last March, “is empathy.”

 

And let’s not forget — because conservatives never do — that there’s a deeper strategy at play: if you want people to despise and hate government, you don’t want them to see the government doing anything that clearly helps people.

So American victims of natural disasters are being abandoned by Trump. That abandonment reflects his personal cruelty and that of those around him, as well as the ideological allegiance to cruelty among the libertarian tech broligarchy. And the resulting message is clear. Trump to disaster victims, wherever they live and whoever they voted for: Drop dead.

Kushner’s Moscow mission wasn’t just corrupt. It was unconstitutional.

 

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Kushner’s Moscow mission wasn’t just corrupt. It was unconstitutional.

Judd Legum Dec 3

Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, has been traveling the world to participate in high-stakes foreign policy negotiations on behalf of the president. On Tuesday, Kushner traveled to Moscow and sat across the table from Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine. The entire United States delegation consisted only of Kushner and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff. Kushner and Witkoff were joined at the table by an interpreter.

Kushner’s participation in the Moscow meeting — and the similar role he played in the Gaza negotiations — likely violates the law.

 

Representing the Trump administration in high-level foreign policy negotiations makes Kushner, at a minimum, a Special Government Employee (SGE). Under the law, an SGE is someone “who is retained, designated, appointed, or employed to perform, with or without compensation, for not to exceed one hundred and thirty days during any period of three hundred and sixty-five consecutive days, temporary duties either on a full-time or intermittent basis.”

 

Trump has not named Kushner an SGE. But a seminal 1977 opinion by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) found “an identifiable act of appointment may not be absolutely essential for an individual to be regarded as an officer or employee in a particular case where the parties omitted it for the purpose of avoiding the application of the conflict-of-interest laws.” In that opinion, the OLC considered the status of an individual who had not been named to any role by the president but “assumed considerable responsibility for coordinating the Administration’s activities in [a] particular area.” The OLC concluded that since the individual was “quite clearly engaging in a governmental function” and is “working under the direction or supervision of the President,” he should be considered an SGE.

 

Here, Kushner is engaged in activities that can only be conducted by government officials. The Logan Act bars private citizens from engaging in negotiations with foreign governments without authorization. Kushner is acting in an authorized capacity, under Trump’s direction, and that creates a host of legal issues.

 

As a de facto SGE with substantial authority, the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution prohibits Kushner from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

 

Since leaving the White House in 2021, Kushner has raised at least $4.8 billion for Affinity Partners, his private equity firm. Nearly 99% of Affinity Partners’ funding comes from foreign sources. The largest investment, $2 billion, came from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia (PIF).

 

The Saudi government pays Kushner 1.25% of its investment, or $25 million annually. Other investors, including the governments of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), pay annual fees of up to 2%. As of September 2024, Affinity Partners had collected $157 million in fees, mainly from Middle Eastern governments.

 

Kushner is continuing to collect these fees as he serves in a top foreign policy role for the Trump administration. This is precisely the kind of behavior the Foreign Emoluments Clause was designed to prevent. Kushner was one of two Americans on Tuesday engaged in high-stakes negotiations with Putin. But as the private equity manager for billions of foreign capital, Kushner has a fiduciary duty to advance the financial interests of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other foreign governments.

In his defense, Kushner might argue he is simply charging Saudi Arabia and other governments “fair market value” for investment services and, therefore, is not accepting an emolument. The OLC and many legal scholars reject this argument, arguing that the Emoluments Clause prohibits payments from foreign governments even if they are part of a “fair market value” transaction.

 

Regardless, there was nothing standard about the multi-billion dollar Saudi investment in a fledgling private equity firm. The PIF committee that screens investments recommended rejecting Kushner’s proposal, citing “the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management” and “excessive” fees. The committee’s recommendation, however, was overruled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who heads PIF’s Board of Directors and with whom Kushner had developed a close relationship.

Draft Kushner peace plan includes key Saudi priority

The 28-point peace plan drafted with Kushner’s assistance includes a key priority of the Saudi government.

 

The Saudi Agricultural and Livestock Investment Company, a PIF subsidiary, owns a major stake in MHP, one of Ukraine’s largest agricultural conglomerates. The Continental Farmers Group, which cultivates nearly 480,000 acres in Western Ukraine, is owned by PIF.

 

As a result, the transport of agricultural goods from Ukraine through the Black Sea is a top Saudi concern. When the parties met in Saudi Arabia in March 2025, the security of Black Sea shipping lanes was a central topic.

 

Point 23 of the peace plan that Kushner helped draft fulfills Saudi’s policy objective: “Russia will not prevent Ukraine from using the Dnieper River for commercial activities, and agreements will be reached on the free transport of grain across the Black Sea.”

Kushner pledged to have no foreign policy role

Prior to Trump’s victory in 2024, Kushner pledged to have no foreign policy or other role in a second Trump administration. He used this promise to wave away concerns about Affinity Partners being used as a vehicle for foreign influence.

In a February 2024 interview with Axios, Kushner stated that he would not resume his role advising his father-in-law if Trump were to win the presidency again. Kushner told Axios’ Dan Primack that he made commitments to run his private equity firm “for the long term” and “my commitment is to my investors, to my firm, to my employees, [and] to my partners.” Pressed by Primack, Kushner said he would not accept a role in the new administration even if asked by Trump.

 

Later in the interview, Primack asked whether, as a result of accepting billions in investments from public investment funds run by the governments of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, it would be “very difficult… to do any sort of foreign policy work” in a second Trump administration. “I’m an investor now,” Kushner replied. “I served in government, and I think my track record is pretty impeccable. Now I’m a private investor.”