Unlawful Orders, Unhinged Speeches, Unfinished Blueprints

The Pentagon hunts Mark Kelly, Southern Command uploads explosions, and Trump bulldozes the East Wing in the name of “security.”

Good morning! Welcome back to the daily episode of “What Constitutional Norm Will Collapse Today?” where the coffee is hot, the labor market is cold, and the president is insisting his White House renovation is a national security priority on par with the Cuban Missile Crisis. One day we will look back on this era and marvel that all it took to dismantle American governance was one man, a bulldozer, and a megaphone.

We begin offshore, where the Trump administration continues its shadow maritime war, now tallying at least ninety-five dead across twenty-five boats in the Eastern Pacific. Southern Command announced yesterday that three more allegedly drug-linked vessels were blown to splinters, killing eight men whom officials promptly declared “male narco-terrorists,” as though gender and geography provide the legal authority Congress never granted. They even posted the explosions on social media, a kind of Pentagon TikTok reel for an administration that now treats lethal force like content. These are the sorts of missions that history books later describe as “controversial,” military lawyers describe as “indefensible,” and future tribunals describe as “Exhibit A.” And as pressure mounts from legal scholars, human rights groups, and even uneasy allies to classify these strikes as unlawful uses of military force, one cannot help but imagine a future where the service members carrying them out will wish they had listened to Mark Kelly’s warning, the one the administration is working so hard to criminalize.

And perhaps not by coincidence, as the administration escalates extrajudicial violence abroad, it is simultaneously escalating investigations at home into anyone who dares remind troops that illegal orders do not become legal just because the president is shouting them. The Pentagon has now upgraded its probe into Sen. Mark Kelly, the Navy captain, astronaut, and widely recognized adult in the room, because he appeared in a video stating the literal first clause of military ethics: you do not obey unlawful commands. Trump has called him a traitor, Hegseth wants him court-martialed, and the Defense Department is treating a basic legal reminder like a national-security breach. The danger here isn’t that Kelly said something wrong, it’s that he said something right, and the rightness of it threatens a White House increasingly dependent on the premise that legality is whatever the president needs it to be at that particular moment.

Speaking of incompatible with reality, Trump delivered a sprawling, unspooled monologue at a border-security ceremony yesterday, a speech that managed to drift between imaginary Ukraine peace talks, his claim that he personally wiped out Iran’s nuclear program with a B-2 bomber, a vigorous defense of fentanyl as both poison and medicine, a looming lawsuit against the BBC for “making up words with AI,” and a meandering retelling of his election victory that exists nowhere outside of his neurological architecture. Somewhere within this verbal pinball machine, he also revived a long-retired “Mexican Border Defense Medal,” which he pinned on service members while declaring that “zero illegal aliens” have crossed the border for seven months. One might characterize it as the kind of speech that makes you wonder if perhaps the national security threat is the person giving it.

And then came his reaction to the murder of Rob Reiner, which somehow managed to shock even the crowd most accustomed to Trump’s bloodless cruelty. Instead of offering sympathy for Reiner and his wife, Michele, Trump published a Truth Social screed declaring Reiner “a tortured and struggling” has-been who died from an “incurable affliction” called “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” using a double homicide as a springboard to congratulate himself on ushering in a “Golden Age of America.” It was the rhetorical equivalent of leaving a Yelp review at a funeral, so grotesquely self-centered that even Republicans, veterans of a decade spent marinating in Trumpian contempt, felt obligated to back away. The man cannot respond to tragedy without making himself the main character, and this time the indecency was so bare-faced that the political recoil was, thankfully, almost universal.

Ukraine, a nation led by an adult capable of locating countries on a map, unveiled another evolution in naval warfare with a novel long-range drone strike deep into the Black Sea. It was a reminder that real military innovation comes from people solving strategic problems rather than people blowing up fishing boats to goose domestic polling numbers. While Trump claims a peace plan is materializing through his imaginary phone conversations with Norway, Thailand, and Cambodia, the Ukrainians are using actual technology, actual strategy, and actual courage to reshape the battlefield in ways even Russia now has to take seriously.

The long-delayed jobs report finally arrived after the 43-day Trump-ordered shutdown prevented the Labor Department from collecting October data. And now we know why the administration wasn’t exactly eager to resume publication: the economy gained a tepid 64,000 jobs in November and lost 105,000 in October, sending the unemployment rate to 4.6 percent, the highest in more than four years. Economists describe the labor market as “low-fire, low-hire,” which is a polite way of saying that businesses are freezing expansion because Trump’s tariffs, inflation, immigration crackdown, and general unpredictability have sucked all the oxygen out of the hiring climate. Jerome Powell quietly noted that official numbers may have been overstating job creation by up to 60,000 jobs a month, meaning we may have been losing jobs since April. Which, come to think of it, aligns perfectly with how everything else has been going.

As if on cue, the foreign aid cuts Trump demanded are now producing global humanitarian aftershocks so severe that European allies, the ones he keeps citing as “all agreeing with me privately”, are sounding alarms about destabilization, famine, and renewed militant recruitment. Aid workers describe entire regions collapsing into crisis because the U.S. abruptly withdrew funding that had kept clinics open and children alive. Domestically, those aid cuts are rippling into job losses in rural America, where farmers and medical suppliers relied on predictable federal contracts. It turns out that dismantling global stability is neither politically nor economically beneficial, no matter how often Fox News insists that starving foreigners somehow lowers your grocery bill.

Closer to home, the ACA subsidies cliff is approaching like a slow-moving meteor, and Republicans are now panicking as they discover that millions of the people who will face massive premium hikes live in GOP districts. Trump’s team is torn between the ideologues who think letting subsidies expire will finally kill Obamacare and the pragmatists who can count votes in places like Pennsylvania and Arizona. Some aides are begging Trump not to get involved because his track record of “helping” health care negotiations could generously be described as “kryptonite.” But the math is brutal: a sixty-year-old couple earning $85,000 will see their premiums skyrocket by more than $22,000 if subsidies lapse. Even the poorest enrollees will pay about $1,000 more. There is a reason Democrats rode health care to victory in 2018, and Republicans seem determined to replay the greatest hits.

My already-published “deep dive” into the FBI’s latest “terror plot” in Los Angeles needs no rehashing, but it deserves an honorable mention here, if only to note that the Bureau managed to create yet another case in which the primary terror cell appears to consist of agents, informants, and a suspect nudged into criminality by a series of undercover prompts. It is the eternal law of U.S. counterterrorism: the threats we fabricate are always easier to arrest than the ones we ignore.

Finally, in what may be the most on-brand story of the day, the Trump administration is defending its unilateral demolition of the White House East Wing, already carried out without public input, congressional approval, or statutory review, by insisting that the construction of Trump’s dream ballroom is essential to “national security.” The government has asked the federal judge to accept classified explanations in private, because nothing says “trust us” like a classified justification for why the president needs a 90,000-square-foot event space twice the size of the preexisting White House. The plans aren’t finalized, the reviews weren’t done, and the administration is now arguing simultaneously that the demolition is “moot” and the lawsuit is “unripe.” What is clear is Trump is building a palace extension on public property with all the subtlety of an emperor knocking down a wing of the Forbidden City to make room for a new banquet hall.

This is where we leave you: a country whose economy is quietly cooling, whose president is loudly overheating, and whose legal system is being asked to pretend that a giant ballroom is a counterterrorism asset. Marz and I are out running errands today, but we’ll keep an eye on whatever fresh absurdities tumble out of Washington while we’re gone. In the meantime, I recommend another cup of coffee, maybe two, possibly a nap. The day is young, and the news, tragically, is younger still.