Secretary of War Crimes and the Ministry of Poisoned Air

Hegseth’s kill orders, Trump’s anti-climate crusade, billionaire baby bonds, and the CDC’s anti-vax makeover, your daily tour through America’s authoritarian renovation project.

Good morning! If yesterday felt like we were inching toward the cliff, today we’re accelerating, coffee in hand, Franklin the Turtle strapped to the hood, and Pete Hegseth waving a flamethrower out the passenger window while Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rewrites the childhood vaccine schedule in the backseat. Trump, naturally, is driving, insisting the road is smoother than it’s ever been and that if we hit a pedestrian, it’s because California communists sabotaged the car.

We begin with the Hegseth crisis, because while most administrations try to hide their scandals, this one keeps releasing extended surveillance footage. The heat on Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Fox News host turned wartime decider, late-night-comedian-christened “Secretary of War Crimes”, is rising fast, and not just from Democrats. Republicans, normally so allergic to criticizing one of their own that they break out in ideological hives at the mere suggestion, are finally tightening the screws.

The classified briefings have become so chaotic that even Rep. Mike Rogers, no one’s idea of a Biden nostalgist, found himself openly irritated. Rogers reportedly told Pentagon officials, in a line that should be chiseled into the wall of this era: “We got more information out of the Pentagon under the Biden administration than we’re getting out of you now.” It was the congressional equivalent of a parent saying, “Your brother was never like this,” and you could practically hear the temperature in the room drop ten degrees.

In the latest boat-strike briefing, the Pentagon didn’t bother to send any legal experts at all, leaving lawmakers to ask the questions one usually expects from poorly supervised toddlers. What was the strategy? What was the scope? Why are we doing this? Who ordered the second strike? And why is the Secretary of Defense behaving like a man reading a Wikipedia summary of “war crimes” for the first time?

We now have confirmation, not rumor, not inference, not Hegseth’s shifting post hoc justifications, that before the Secretary of War Crimes began shoving Adm. Frank Bradley under the nearest bus, he personally issued the spoken order that no one aboard the vessel should remain alive. This isn’t speculation from anonymous malcontents. It comes from multiple U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the mission, as reported by The Washington Post, which broke the story in a deeply sourced piece that sent shockwaves through both Armed Services Committees.

The Post’s reporting makes the chain of responsibility unmistakable. The “no survivors” directive did not originate with some rogue admiral improvising on a satellite feed. It came from Hegseth himself, explicit, verbal, and issued before the first missile was launched. When two survivors were spotted clinging to the burnt wreckage of their boat, the second strike wasn’t the fog-of-war panic Hegseth’s defenders now imply. It was the admiral following orders, orders that The Post says were repeated and understood as a clear instruction to “eliminate” all occupants.

The Post’s sources go further: Bradley directed the second strike specifically to comply with Hegseth’s kill-everyone command. And Bradley, whose testimony will soon be in front of lawmakers, is expected to defend this by arguing that the survivors were still “viable targets,” not shipwrecked civilians in need of rescue, a reinterpretation of the law of war that would make a first-year JAG student scream into a laminated copy of the Geneva Conventions.

Just to make sure no one misunderstands where loyalty flows in this administration, Hegseth appeared beside Trump at the White House this week and declared, calmly, unapologetically, obscenely, that the killings were “the correct decision.” He said it with the breezy indifference of someone selecting extra legroom on a flight, not someone defending a decision that could land an entire chain of command in The Hague.

The Post’s reporting paints a Pentagon in full institutional collapse: internally dissenting officers, congressional committees investigating their own Secretary of Defense, and a growing sense among Republicans that Hegseth may survive the scandal but not the job. The Secretary himself is already trying to pivot from “warrior king” to “who, me?” and it is failing with comedic speed.

Even Canada has weighed in, courtesy of Charlie Angus, who delivered a blistering monologue from the frozen north. Angus reminds us that Canada has a century-long memory when it comes to massacres at sea, beginning with the 1918 sinking of the Llandovery Castle and the machine-gunning of its helpless survivors. Angus places the Sept. 2 strike squarely in that lineage: the deliberate killing of shipwrecked, wounded people is not a gray area, it is the textbook definition of a war crime. And that Hegseth celebrated it using a doctored Canadian children’s cartoon, turning Franklin the Turtle into a smiling, gun-toting executioner, is not just grotesque but historically resonant. When an administration begins meme-ifying murder, Angus says, it’s not just the law that collapses, it’s public conscience. His larger point is chilling: cruelty can be normalized far faster than decency can be rebuilt, and the age of “gangster governance”, Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, the whole gallery of strongmen, is united not by ideology but by a shared conviction that human life is disposable and accountability is optional.

From the Pentagon’s casual experimentation in maritime homicide, we turn to the White House’s domestic project of quietly torching what’s left of U.S. climate policy while insisting the flames are actually a warm, patriotic glow. Trump’s latest announcement, a gleeful rollback of CAFE fuel-efficiency standards, was billed as a press conference about “affordability.” What he delivered was a 90-minute monologue about restoring America’s God-given right to burn gasoline like it’s a moral sacrament, all while automakers stood behind him with the pained, frozen smiles of hostages forced to applaud their kidnapper’s karaoke.

“We’re killing the Green New Scam,” Trump crowed, because nothing says stewardship of the planet like calling environmental standards “the greatest scam other than Russia, Russia, Russia,” as though we’re all gathered around a campfire of diesel fumes, roasting EV charging stations over an open flame.

Trump is terminating the Biden-era CAFE standards, the very rules designed to make cars cleaner, safer, and less expensive to fuel, and replacing them with, well… nothing. Instead, the administration is proudly restoring the era of gas-guzzling giants, insisting this is what the struggling American consumer wants most: vehicles that cost more to operate, pollute more, and rely on oil markets about as stable as Trump’s Scotland press conferences.

And then came the pièce de résistance: Trump’s promise to “approve those cute little Japanese cars”, the kei cars, which he described as if he’d just discovered them on a late-night TikTok scroll. The administration claims it will rewrite decades of auto safety rules to allow minicars on American highways, a move that absolutely no one asked for and that will likely go nowhere. In Trumpworld, the mere announcement counts as reform.

The throughline, of course, isn’t consumer choice or affordability or even the auto industry’s fake enthusiasm. It’s the dismantling of climate policy under the banner of populist theater. Trump offered no emissions strategy, no transition plan, no economic modeling, just a long list of grievances, dubious statistics about tariffs “stopping wars,” and one deranged brag that gas is now “$1.99 in parts of the country,” which is news to every economist, gas station owner, and person with eyes.

But the goal is obvious: undo everything the Biden administration accomplished, force the country back onto a fossil-fueled trajectory, and call it freedom.

The climate crisis continues to smolder just outside the camera frame. But in a presidency this committed to performative rollback, the only emissions Trump cares about are the ones he can blame on California.

If you were hoping to pivot from war crimes and climate denial to something less bleak, I regret to inform you we have arrived at the economic portion of the program, where Michael and Susan Dell have suddenly emerged with what is being breathlessly described as a $6 billion “gift” to America’s children. Which would be lovely, if the money were going to, say, food banks, public schools, or anything that prevents children from dying in the present tense. But the Dells are instead donating their billions to the federal government to seed “Trump Accounts,” the new infant investment vehicles created by Trump’s one big beautiful bill. Every child will get $1,000 in an auto-generated account, plus the Dells’ $250 kicker, which, with 18 years of compounding and the miracle of inflation, will produce the life-altering sum of about $1,400 in real spending power.

If you detect the faint aroma of privatization, congratulations: your nose is still functioning. The accounts can only be invested in a single stock index fund, managed by the same financial institutions that brought you the Great Recession, meme stocks, and whatever the hell crypto was supposed to be. The true beneficiaries here are not the babies, it’s Wall Street, which now enjoys a federally guaranteed pipeline of long-term investment capital and management fees. Scott Bessent, the hedge-fund punchline now running the Treasury, said the quiet part loudly at a Breitbart event: these accounts, he explained cheerfully, are “a backdoor to privatizing Social Security.” Not “maybe,” not “someday.” A backdoor, opened on purpose.

The comparison to the expanded Child Tax Credit, which actually cut child poverty by nearly half until Democrats inexplicably let it expire, only underscores the cynicism. The CTC gave families immediate cash they could use for food, rent, medical bills, and debt, and it worked. Trump Accounts give families an account they probably won’t remember exists, which they probably can’t afford to contribute to, which will ultimately generate a small payout in 2050 while Goldman and friends quietly siphon off value.

If that wasn’t enough for one day, the CDC has decided to join the institutional demolition derby. Under the influence of RFK Jr., who installed his own slate of advisers on the CDC’s vaccine committee, ACIP is reconvening this week to “reconsider” the childhood vaccine schedule, a phrase that has never once preceded something good. The committee is examining whether newborns really need a hepatitis B shot at birth, despite decades of overwhelming evidence that they do. They are mulling whether to split the MMR vaccine into three separate shots, despite every public health expert on Earth explaining that this will lead directly to missed doses and more outbreaks. They are flirting with the idea of removing aluminum adjuvants from vaccines, even though the adjuvants are part of what makes the vaccines work and there is zero credible evidence they are harmful. And the CDC has already quietly softened its stance on the mythical vaccine-autism link, handing Kennedy and his movement a propaganda victory they will be dining out on for years.

It is sabotage conducted through bureaucratic, slow poisoning: dismantling expertise, eroding trust, creating confusion, elevating fringe figures, then acting shocked when measles, pertussis, and hepatitis B roar back like diseases never heard the word “civilization.”

Put together, today’s stories are facets of the same project: weakening the institutions that protect the vulnerable, elevating the actors who wield cruelty as political currency, and flooding the information space with enough chaos to make accountability feel quaint. Hegseth’s boat strikes, the Dells’ gilded Trojan horse, the CDC’s collapse into Kennedy-ism, Trump’s gleeful arson of the climate rulebook, none of it is accidental. It is governance by demolition, privatization, grievance, and spectacle.

And yet here we are, gathering the pieces, writing them down, and keeping the receipts. Because if they are determined to usher in the age of gangster government, the least we can do is turn on the lights and narrate the whole damn thing while they stumble.