Kill Orders, Narco Pardons, and the $300 Million Mulligan

From blown-up fishermen to deported freshmen to Trump’s autopen meltdown, the anatomy of a regime in free fall.

Good morning! If the country feels like it’s being run by a man frantically slapping at the dashboard of a burning car while insisting he’s “never been more in control,” that’s because it is. The Trump regime is in full panic mode, legally, politically, psychologically, and every moving part of the machine is reacting with the same knee-jerk, shoot-first, think-never ethos that now defines his presidency.

We begin in the Southern Caribbean, where the Washington Post dropped a bomb that has left the Pentagon, Congress, and every military lawyer in America staring into the middle distance like characters in a prestige drama who just realized they’ve been working for the villain. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the self-styled “Secretary of War,” Rambo cosplayer, and part-time social-media tough guy, issued a spoken directive on September 2nd that SEAL Team 6 was to “kill everybody” on a suspected drug boat. Not capture, kill, everybody.

The first strike hit the vessel. Two survivors clung to the smoking hull. There is drone footage of this. They were injured, unarmed, defenseless, human beings in the exact condition the Geneva Conventions were written for. And yet, in compliance with Hegseth’s order, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley ordered a second strike to finish them off. Bradley has since been promoted. Admiral Alvin Holsey, the four-star commander who apparently wanted nothing to do with this criminal madness, abruptly resigned two years before his term was up. Suddenly his timing makes sense.

This was an execution, a textbook war crime, in the words of multiple law professors, former White House ethics lawyers, and JAG officers. The United States has literally executed Nazi U-boat captains for less. And now the man at the center of it all is tweeting “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists,” as though worrying aloud about illegal orders is the real crime, not the part where he turned the U.S. military into a cartel hit squad with taxpayer-funded air support.

Because the only thing this regime manages consistently is hypocrisy, Trump, who claims all this slaughter is necessary to fight drug traffickers, spent the weekend promising to pardon Honduran ex-president Juan Orlando Hernández, the man federal prosecutors described as the architect of one of the largest state-sponsored narcotics conspiracies in modern history. Four hundred tons of cocaine moved into the U.S. under Hernández’s protection, and Trump calls him “treated unfairly.” Meanwhile, anonymous men clinging to wreckage get blown apart without trial, evidence, or even identification.

It’s almost elegant, in the way a sinkhole swallowing a bus is elegant. Trump orders the deaths of alleged mules while offering presidential salvation to the kingpin who built the narco-state. Rather than fighting the drug trade, it would appear he’s trying to run it.

While Trump is busy pardoning narco-presidents and imagining autopen conspiracies, the deportation machine beneath him continues to grind through innocent people with the precision of a wood chipper. The most damning example arrived this week, when a 19-year-old Babson College freshman, Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, tried to board a flight from Boston to Texas to surprise her family for Thanksgiving, and instead found herself deported to Honduras, a country she hasn’t lived in since she was seven.

Lopez Belloza had cleared TSA. She was minutes from boarding. Then officials told her there was an “issue” with her boarding pass, the kind of bureaucratic euphemism that always precedes something terrible, and within hours she was detained by ICE. Within two days she was put on a plane to Texas and then forcibly removed from the United States entirely.

All of this happened after a federal judge issued an emergency order prohibiting ICE from moving her out of Massachusetts, let alone the country. ICE ignored it. They didn’t notify counsel. They simply accelerated the deportation, as though the court system were an optional suggestion and not, theoretically, one of the three branches of government.

The supposed basis for the deportation? An alleged removal order from 2015 that Lopez Belloza had never heard of and which her lawyer still cannot locate. The only documented record he’s found indicates her case was closed in 2017.

So a teenager with a valid student visa, a spotless record, earning straight As, and an entire life in the United States is now sitting in Honduras with her grandparents, telling the Boston Globe that her dream, business school, her first semester, her plans, has been shattered. “I’m losing everything,” she said. And she is.

Perhaps the clearest sign that the regime is cracking under the pressure is the president himself, who spent the weekend spiraling through one of the most unhinged series of posts of his political life, which is saying something. Trump, apparently stung by the fact that MAGA is hemorrhaging supporters, has begun calling his remaining base “Trumpublicans,” as though rebranding will fix the stench. He’s begging them to fill out emails asking, “Do you love me?”.

The new Gallup poll certainly explains the desperation: Trump’s disapproval has hit 60 percent, his worst ever. Even Republicans are peeling away. One Indiana GOP senator, a reliable MAGA vote until yesterday, walked out after Trump used the R-word to attack Minnesota governor Tim Walz. The senator’s daughter has Down syndrome, and he finally saw the man for what he has always been: a cruel, degrading bully who will never stop punching down.

How does a collapsing authoritarian calm himself? With conspiracy theories, naturally. Trump announced that he is “hereby cancelling” every Biden executive order he believes was signed with an autopen, a completely legal device used by presidents of both parties for decades. He fabricated a statistic that “92 percent” of Biden’s orders were autopenned, declared them void, and threatened to prosecute Biden for perjury if he denies Trump’s fantasy. It is a 100% imaginary scandal, but that’s what happens when your brain folds under the weight of its own grievances.

From there, the unraveling accelerated. Trump blasted out “Black Friday deals” to his shrinking “Trumpublicans,” offering ornaments and calendars at special reduced prices that turned out to be higher than the normal website price. Eric Trump re-launched Trump Vodka because every collapsing authoritarian regime needs a branded liquor line. Even Gavin Newsom’s “invasive species” nickname for the family suddenly feels more like a zoological classification than an insult.

All of this flailing is taking place while Trump continues to order the U.S. military to blow up alleged drug boats in the Caribbean under an illegal no-quarter directive, no survivors, no evidence, no accountability, even as he pardons the actual drug kingpins and meddles in the Honduran election to help a right-wing puppet take power.

And because the cruelty and corruption are never quite enough, the week also brought fresh confirmation that Trump is bleeding the Treasury dry one golf trip at a time. He has spent $71 million in taxpayer money on golf travel just this year, with his habit on pace to hit $300 million by the end of his term. This is the same man who promised in 2016 that he would “work his ass off” and never see Turnberry or Doral again. Instead, he’s spent more time on his courses than any modern president, and he even cited his golf “wins” as proof of physical fitness in his official health report, a document that reads like it was typed by a caddie under duress.

Mar-a-Lago alone costs the taxpayers over $3.4 million per trip due to the security infrastructure required to keep a president safe on a golf cart. A single jaunt to his Scottish course cost nearly $10 million. And in one of the purest distillations of Trumpism yet, he spent $115,000 of public money just to take a helicopter tour over a course he refuses to play because it isn’t branded with his name.

So here we are. A president bragging about killing unknown men on the open sea. A defense secretary posting kill-count memes like an unwell teenager. A regime pardoning narco-presidents while deporting college freshmen with active court protection orders. An autopen conspiracy theory. A poll collapse. A begging-for-love email blast. A vodka launch. And the knowledge that the bill for Trump’s self-indulgence will cross a third of a billion dollars before he’s done.

If there’s a theme to this moment, it’s this: the Trump presidency is no longer simply corrupt, cruel, or incompetent. It is coming apart. And the people running it seem to understand that the only thing left to do is scream louder, hit harder, and hope the wreckage doesn’t land on them before January.

With that, I’m going to take the hint from Marz, who has patiently tolerated my muttering and swearing through this entire parade of horrors but is now giving me the worried side-eye reserved for truly deranged mornings. So before I start yelling at the coffee maker or drafting subpoenas for household appliances, we’re going outside. A little fresh air, a brisk walk, and a good romp are sorely needed.