Pete Hegseth

Financial Times: ‘Hegseth’s broker looked to buy defense fund before Iran attack.’

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

April 20, 2026

Late Saturday evening, Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was so unstable and angry after learning on April 3 that Iranians had shot down an American jet that his aides kept him out of the room as they received updates, simply telling him what was going on at important moments.

The journalists describe an erratic president who entered the war after Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu convinced him the Iranian people would support such strikes and after his successful extraction of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores convinced him the military could pull off another quick victory. He seemed to believe that if his gamble worked, he would be saving the world.

But while the strikes did indeed kill Iran’s top leaders and badly damage its military, the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz. Trump did not foresee this outcome, although he was warned of it. He told his team that the Iranian government would give up before it closed the strait and, if it did manage to close the strait, the U.S. military would handle it. The journalists report Trump has “marveled at the ease with which the strait was closed.”

Once the strait was closed, the president flipped back and forth between demanding other countries help reopen it and insisting the U.S. didn’t need any help, between wanting to fight and calling for negotiations. On April 5, Easter morning, after the recovery of the second airman, he turned to trying to scare Iranian leaders into reopening the strait and ending the conflict, warning: “Open the F*ckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.”

He added an Islamic prayer to be as insulting as possible, he later told senior administration officials. That, like his threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” was “improvisational,” officials told Dawsey and Linskey.

Seemingly unable to figure out how to find a way out of the war, Trump has told aides he wants to focus on other topics, and shifted his attention to fundraising events for the midterms or details for his ballroom. Clara Ence Morse and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post offered proof of Trump’s growing enthusiasm for his ballroom, noting that he has called public attention to it on about a third of the days this year, mentioning it less than tariffs or Iran but more than healthcare insurance or affordability. And his focus on it has increased as the year has progressed.

On Friday, April 17, after Israel and the government of Lebanon agreed to a ceasefire, Iran opened the Strait of Hormuz to commercial—but not military—vessels. Trump declared the strait was “completely open and ready for business” and that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including “never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” But Iran’s chief negotiator posted on social media that Trump had made seven claims in an hour and that all seven of them were false. Iranians said that if the U.S. continued its blockade of Iranian ports, as Trump said it would, they would close the strait again.

On Saturday, they did, firing on a tanker and two other vessels, all of which left the encounters safely. Yesterday Trump announced on social media that the USS Spruance intercepted an Iranian-flagged cargo ship, the Touska, as it tried to pass the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports. According to Trump, the U.S. Navy “stopped them right in the tracks by blowing a hole in the engineroom” and then took control of the vessel. Trump posted: “We have full custody of the ship, and are seeing what’s on board!”

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “We are spending billions to keep our entire navy in the Strait to fecklessly fail to open a waterway that wasn’t closed until Trump’s pointless war of choice closed it. He’s just burning your tax money.”

The two-week ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran, begun on April 7, expires on Wednesday, April 22. On Friday, Trump said: “Maybe I won’t extend it, but the blockade is going to remain. But maybe I won’t extend it, so you have a blockade, and unfortunately, we’ll have to start dropping bombs again.”

Today Nick March of the BBC explained the fact pattern behind the general suspicion that someone is engaging in insider trading over Trump’s war announcements. After matching the president’s market-moving statements to the trade volume on a number of financial markets, March found “a consistent pattern of spikes just hours, or sometimes minutes, before a social media post or media interview was made public.” Marsh notes a similar spike over Trump’s announcement of his “Liberation Day” tariffs of last April.

A new NBC News Decision Desk Poll out yesterday showed that 63% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s job performance, while only 37% approve. Fifty percent say they disapprove strongly, a sign that they will be highly motivated to vote in the midterms. Sixty-seven percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran, including 54% who strongly disapprove.

This morning, Trump’s social media account responded to the bad news of the weekend, including the Wall Street Journal story, by dismissing it. “Israel never talked me into the war with Iran,” the account posted. “[T]he results of Oct[ober] 7th, added to my lifelong opinion that IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON, did. I watch and read the FAKE NEWS Pundits and Polls in total disbelief. 90% of what they say are lies and made up stories, and the polls are rigged, much as the 2020 Presidential Election was rigged. Just like the results in Venezuela, which the media doesn’t like talking about, the results in Iran will be amazing—And if Iran’s new leaders (Regime Change!) are smart, Iran can have a great and prosperous future! President DJT”

Over the weekend, David S. Cloud, Alexander Saeedy, and Nick Timiraos of the Wall Street Journal reported that officials from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Treasury and Federal Reserve officials if the U.S. will provide a financial backstop for the UAE if the Iran war continues to damage its economy.

Meanwhile, over the weekend, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) reminded an audience that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is “on the Saudi payroll for $2 billion,” a reference to the $2 billion a Saudi sovereign wealth fund controlled by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has invested in Kushner’s private equity firm.

“And now he’s leading American diplomacy in the Middle East. Apparently, while at the very same time, asking princes and sheikhs across the Arab world to give him billions more. If you’re watching this online, don’t take my word for it. Look it up for yourself.

“Can you imagine…a normal sitting U.S. ambassador just hitting up Saudi Grand Prince Mohammed bin Salman for billions of dollars? But he’s a Trump. A royal. A princeling. The rules are for us, not for them.

“And it’s not just Jared getting in on the action. A company owned in part by Eric and Don Jr. has been pitching Gulf kingdoms on its drone interceptors during this war. The Financial Times reported: ‘Pete Hegseth’s broker looked to buy defense fund before Iran attack.’

“I tell you what, never before have we seen so little effort to hide so much corruption. The Mar-a-Lago Mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights.”

This afternoon, Trump’s account posted: “I’m winning a War, BY A LOT, things are going very well.”

But things were not going very well. On Friday, Sarah Fitzpatrick published an article in The Atlantic that portrayed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Kash Patel as a poor manager who is terrified he is going to lose his job and whose overuse of alcohol, tendency to disappear, and purges of FBI agents who had investigated Trump endanger our national security.

After Patel’s behavior in the locker room of the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team, during which he was filmed shouting and chugging a beer, Ryan J. Reilly, Gordon Lubold, and Katherine Doyle of NBC News reported that Trump was unhappy with Patel over the incident. Shortly afterward, Patel directed the FBI to fire at least half a dozen FBI employees who had been connected to the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, the Trump Organization’s property in Florida, where Trump was storing classified documents he retained after his first term.

Over the weekend, Patel seemed to try again to curry favor with the president. He told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that the Department of Justice is about to make arrests related to the 2020 presidential election that Trump insists—falsely—was rigged. “We have the information that backs President Trump’s claim,” Patel said.

This morning, Patel sued The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for $250 million for publishing “a sweeping, malicious, and defamatory hit piece,” full of “obviously fabricated allegations.” The suit says “Director Patel does not drink to excess…, and this has not, and has never been, a source of concern across the government.”

The Atlantic says: “We stand by our reporting on Kash Patel, and we will vigorously defend The Atlantic and our journalists against this meritless lawsuit.” Scott MacFarlane of MeidasTouch notes that the discovery phase of this defamation lawsuit, during which parties testify under oath, “could be quite something.”

And yet at the end of the day, it was Trump’s secretary of labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who abruptly resigned after accusations that she has abused her position, drinks on the job, and has had an affair with a subordinate. An investigation into her conduct was nearing its completion. She is the third person to leave Trump’s cabinet: all are women.

When asked about Patel’s fitness for office, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said: “Kash Patel is deeply unqualified, deeply unserious, and his behavior is deeply un-American. And he should no longer be the FBI director. That shouldn’t surprise anyone that I hold that view because he never should have been confirmed to begin with. And we have to stop putting all the blame on the people who nominated this incompetent, toxic, malignant individual. What about the people who confirmed him? And it’s extraordinary to me that Senate Republicans confirmed people like Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., and Kash Patel. All of them. Deeply unserious and deeply unqualified. And now the country is paying the price because of the individuals that Donald Trump chose to nominate as part of the Trump cartel that’s now doing great damage to the nation, and the fact that Senate Republicans, like helpless sheep, went along with it all.”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Hegseth’s “theology of war, of violence”

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As Christians around the world prepare to celebrate Easter Sunday, we go to Palestine to speak to Reverend Munther Isaac, pastor of the Lutheran Church in Ramallah and director of the Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice, located in the city of Jesus Christ’s birth. This year’s Easter preparations come against the backdrop of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, which many Christian nationalists in the U.S., including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, are framing in extremist religious terms. Reverend Isaac calls the Christian Zionism espoused by Hegseth and others “a theology of war, of violence” and highlights the efforts of Pope Leo XIV, the U.S.-born head of the Catholic Church who has come out stridently against both the war and Hegseth’s rhetoric, to promote peace in the region.

Isaac also comments on Israeli authorities’ recent attempt to prevent the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday due to Israel’s ban on gatherings at religious sites during the war. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly granted access to the church following global backlash. But, “do we really need permission from an occupying authority?” asks Isaac. “Israel does not have sovereignty over, should not have sovereignty over Jerusalem. … We have been worshiping here for centuries, uninterrupted.”

Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream at democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET.

From “Entitlement junkies” to “Kill everybody”

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

December 2, 2025

The news of last Friday, November 28, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a Joint Special Operations commander overseeing an attack on a small vessel carrying 11 people on September 2 to “kill everybody” is shaping up to be a fight over control of the United States government.

A missile strike shattered the boat and set it afire, but two men survived. A second strike fulfilled Hegseth’s order. According to Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post, the commander, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, said “the survivors were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.” In a report, the Joint Special Operations Command said the second strike was not to kill survivors, but to remove a navigation hazard.

There had already been significant pushback in the first place over the strikes, which legal experts say are unlawful. But the so-called double tap is illegal and a war crime even under the Trump administration’s flimsy justification for the strikes.

Lawmakers of both parties have pushed back on what Senator Angus King (I-ME) yesterday called “a stone cold war crime.” The Republican chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL) and Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), have vowed to launch investigations of the incident, as well as of the larger operation.

Yesterday, Hegseth and President Donald Trump began to distance themselves from the strike. Last night, Hegseth pinned the blame for the order on Admiral Bradley, posting: “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since.”

Today, at a televised meeting, Trump’s Cabinet officers rallied around the president, telling him he is brilliant and a miracle worker, and Trump threw his support behind Hegseth. Clearly, the president intends to stand by the weekend Fox News Channel host he installed in one of the most important positions in the United States government.

Shortly after the meeting, PBS NewsHour journalist Nick Schifrin reported that a U.S. official told him “[t]he US military struck the boat on September 2_four_times: twice to kill the 11 people who were on board, and twice more to sink the boat.”

Trump is slipping. After he drew attention by posting wildly on social media last night, today’s meeting was clearly designed to demonstrate that the president is alert, active, and on top of things. But this made-for-television photo opportunity was anything but a display of competence: Trump could not stay awake while his Cabinet members were praising him, and so we had the wild visual of Secretary of State Marco Rubio praising Trump as the only man who could end Russia’s war in Ukraine, gesturing at the president sitting next to him, who was, to all appearances, sound asleep.

At the Cabinet meeting today, Trump announced that “the word ‘affordability’ is a Democrat scam,” insisting falsely that his economic policies were bringing down costs. Trump won the 2024 election in large part by promising to bring down inflation, but prices have risen under him at the same time that the economy is slowing.

G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers pointed out today that Americans’ concerns about affordability are not just about costs, though. They are concerns about social mobility, economic inequality, and fairness, values that run opposite of Trump’s focus on funneling contracts and privileges to well-connected billionaires. People are unlikely to change their minds about the unreasonable power of that “Epstein class” as the deadline for the release of the Epstein files gets closer.

Now Trump’s defense secretary, already in trouble for sharing classified information about a strike on Yemen’s Houthis over a non-secure messaging app on which a reporter had been included, is tangled up in a war crime. Today, libertarian conservative writer George Will noted in the Washington Post: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.” Will went on to refer to the Trump administration as a “moral slum.”

On Sunday, Miranda Devine of the New York Post reported on a leaked document written for congressional leadership by retired and active-duty FBI agents and analysts of the first six months of Kash Patel’s leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They said Patel is “in over his head” and that deputy FBI director Dan Bongino is “something of a clown.” Both Patel and Bongino are arrogant, the report says, and have an “unfortunate obsession with social media.” Under Patel, they say, the FBI is a “rudderless ship” and “all f*cked up.”

Trump made it clear during the Cabinet meeting that he has embraced the white nationalism of Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who reject the nation’s longstanding principle of welcoming immigrants and have vowed to purge the nation of them, concentrating on those who are Brown and Black. Yesterday, Noem called them “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”

“I hear…Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars, billions,” Trump said of Minnesota. “Every year, billions of dollars, and they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88%, they contribute nothing. I don’t want ‘em in our country, I’ll be honest with you, okay. Somebody would say, ‘Oh, that’s not politically correct.’ I don’t care. I don’t want ‘em in our country. Their country’s no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don’t want ‘em in our country. I can say that about other countries, too. I can say it about other countries, too. We don’t want them the hell, we gotta—we have to rebuild our country.”

Trump embraced the idea, popular with white nationalists and the neo-Nazi right wing, that the U.S. must reject the multiculturalism of our entire history or perish. “You know, our country’s at a tipping point,” he said. “We could go bad. We’re at a tipping point. I don’t know [if] people mind me saying that, but I’m saying it. We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”

Then he turned on an elected representative, using dehumanizing rhetoric historically associated with violence against a people. “Ilhan Omar [D-MN] is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people that work, these aren’t people that say, ‘Let’s go. Come on, let’s make this place great.’ These are people that do nothing but complain. They complain, and from where they came from, they got nothing. You know, if they came from Paradise, and they said, ‘This isn’t Paradise.’ But when they come from hell, and they complain and do nothing but b*tch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.”

The Cabinet appeared to applaud, although it is not clear whether they were agreeing or hoping to stop him from talking like a Nazi.

Tonight the administration put Miller and Noem’s policy into place, pausing all immigration applications from 19 countries and halting the processing of green cards and citizenship applications. Federal authorities say they will target Somali immigrants in Minneapolis–St. Paul in an upcoming sweep, although Jaylani Hussain, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says about 95% of the Somalis in Minnesota are already U.S. citizens and that about 50% were born in the U.S.

According to Mike Balsamo and Steve Karnowski of the Associated Press, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey says Trump’s attack on Somalis “violates the moral fabric of what we stand by in this country as Americans. They have started businesses and created jobs. They have added to the cultural fabric of what Minneapolis is.” Minneapolis police—many of them Somali—will not work with federal officials in the sweep.

Also tonight, Trump announced that because former president Joe Biden used an autopen, “[a]ny and all Documents, Proclamations, Executive Orders, Memorandums, or Contracts,” pardons, and commutations he signed are “invalid.” This is bonkers, of course. All modern presidents have used autopens, including Trump himself, and there is no mechanism in the Constitution for erasing the actions of a previous president by fiat.

More to the point, as Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket pointed out, Trump himself said he had no idea who crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao was after having pardoned him. And in March, Trump told reporters he had not signed the proclamation invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, although his signature appears on the proclamation in the Federal Register.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

The Grift Bubble

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A Political Theory of American Collapse

By Timothy Snyder

How does a country burst? To answer this questions, it helps to see matters as do the president and the vice-president: from inside a grift bubble.

As I traveled around the United States these last few weeks — Columbus, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, DC, Boston, Chicago — , I tried to explain that I worry more about the disintegration of the United States than about a regime change in which Donald Trump exercises autocratic power from coast to coast.

Tom Nichols
Timothy Snyder

The effort to create authoritarianism is more likely to lead to a breakup of the state than to a total regime change.

This end of the United States is possible, in part, because our president and vice-president think that it is impossible. Because they are inside a grift bubble, they push for authoritarianism in their own interest, without reckoning with the possibility that their actions can wreck the country. For them, America is a limitless passive resource.

Your perspective is probably different than theirs. To help us understand this risk, it helps to try to see the world from inside a grift bubble.

Imagine that you are a first-rate grifter: the president of the United States, say. Your grift is that you pretend to be a successful businessman, and use that supposed expertise to make your case for the presidency, which office you then use to make money. Or imagine instead that you are the vice-president. Your grift is that you claim to understand poor people, whose problems, you say, are the fault of gays, immigrants, and billionaires; and then you rise to power thanks to the money and support of a gay immigrant billionaire.

Given that these are their shticks, and that they have worked, you can see how Trump and Vance might conclude that Americans are gullible and that all things are possible.

The initial claim, the wild lie, is like the air the gets a balloon started: Trump is a rich person; Vance cares about the poor people. The big lies work! And then there is more lying, more hot air, a growing space, a sense of comfort, a safe space for fascist oligarchy.

You grift on and you grift on, and the bubble just gets bigger. It seems like you know everything that you need to know, and that the grift, the graft, and the gruffety-gruff can go on forever. When you have lived for a long time inside a grift bubble, you think you have seen it all, but this is not the case. From inside a grift bubble, you do not see the outside.How does a country burst? To answer this questions, it helps to see matters as do the president and the vice-president: from inside a grift bubble.

As I traveled around the United States these last few weeks — Columbus, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, DC, Boston, Chicago — , I tried to explain that I worry more about the disintegration of the United States than about a regime change in which Donald Trump exercises autocratic power from coast to coast.

The effort to create authoritarianism is more likely to lead to a breakup of the state than to a total regime change.

This end of the United States is possible, in part, because our president and vice-president think that it is impossible. Because they are inside a grift bubble, they push for authoritarianism in their own interest, without reckoning with the possibility that their actions can wreck the country. For them, America is a limitless passive resource.

Your perspective is probably different than theirs. To help us understand this risk, it helps to try to see the world from inside a grift bubble.

Imagine that you are a first-rate grifter: the president of the United States, say. Your grift is that you pretend to be a successful businessman, and use that supposed expertise to make your case for the presidency, which office you then use to make money. Or imagine instead that you are the vice-president. Your grift is that you claim to understand poor people, whose problems, you say, are the fault of gays, immigrants, and billionaires; and then you rise to power thanks to the money and support of a gay immigrant billionaire.

Given that these are their shticks, and that they have worked, you can see how Trump and Vance might conclude that Americans are gullible and that all things are possible.

The initial claim, the wild lie, is like the air the gets a balloon started: Trump is a rich person; Vance cares about the poor people. The big lies work! And then there is more lying, more hot air, a growing space, a sense of comfort, a safe space for fascist oligarchy.

You grift on and you grift on, and the bubble just gets bigger. It seems like you know everything that you need to know, and that the grift, the graft, and the gruffety-gruff can go on forever. When you have lived for a long time inside a grift bubble, you think you have seen it all, but this is not the case. From inside a grift bubble, you do not see the outside.

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