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Pete Hegseth Committed A(nother) Crime But We Can’t Throw Him in Prison

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In a just United States, yesterday’s ruling from Judge Charles Breyer that the government violated the Posse Comitatus Act by invading Los Angeles would result in Whiskey Pete Hegseth landing in prison for two years. That’s the punishment for committing the crime of violating the PCA. And Breyer’s opinion clearly implicates Hegseth, personally, in breaking the law in two ways.

First, the training given to deployed troops claimed there were four exceptions to prohibited law enforcement activities that — Breyer found — were incompatible with the PCA. According to trial testimony, those exceptions came “all the way from the top.”

But Major General Sherman’s instructions were not absolute. For instance, the Task Force 51 training materials specified the law enforcement functions prohibited by the Posse Comitatus Act:

Task Force 51 Training Slides at 6. Although the training materials list twelve prohibited functions, Task Force 51 troops were orally instructed that the four functions listed in red—security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, and riot control—were subject to a so-called constitutional exception to the Posse Comitatus Act. Id.; Trial Tr. Vol. II (dkt. 163) at 236:25–238:11; Trial Tr. Vol. I at 60:12–63:12, 63:17–25. This instruction came “all the way from the top of [the Department of Defense] down to Task Force 51.”1

1 Defendants objected to this testimony as privileged. Trial Tr. Vol. II at 280:12–13. By introducing evidence regarding legal advice given by Department of Defense lawyers, however, Defendants waived any assertion of privilege. E.g., id. at 244:19–245:12; see Weil v. Inv./Indicators, Rsch. & Mgmt., Inc., 647 F.2d 18, 25 (9th Cir. 1981).

And Hegseth, by name, ordered an invasion of MacArthur Park that served no purpose other than invading MacArthur Park.

Nor was Task Force 51 deployed only in support of federal enforcement actions. On July 7, approximately 80 Task Force 51 troops participated in a DHS operation, titled Operation Excalibur,3 at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. Id. at 35:3–24, 99:21–24; Operation Excalibur Slides (Trial Ex. 28). This was DHS’s third attempt at the operation, and Secretary Hegseth himself approved it. 4 Trial Tr. Vol. I at 35:8–14, 103:19–24; Trial Tr. Vol. II at 261:24–262:3. Operation Excalibur involved federal law enforcement officials marching across MacArthur Park while Task Force 51 remained stationed on the outside of the park in military vehicles—Humvees and tactical vehicles—including at two traffic control points to prevent vehicular traffic along a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard. Operation Excalibur Slides at 5; Trial Tr. Vol. I at 35:25–36:1. DHS’s mission in executing Operation Excalibur was “to demonstrate, through a show of presence, the capacity and freedom of maneuver of federal law enforcement within the Los Angeles Joint Operations Area.” Operation Excalibur Slides at 4. And the operation’s purpose was to “enable and protect the execution of joint federal law enforcement missions in a high-visibility urban environment, while preserving public safety and demonstrating federal reach and presence.”

3 Excalibur is, of course, a reference to the legendary sword of King Arthur, which symbolizes his divine sovereignty as king.

4 Initially, Operation Excalibur was planned to take place on Father’s Day and to have Task Force 51 military vehicles stationed on the section of Wilshire Boulevard that runs through MacArthur Park. Trial Tr. Vol. I at 99:25–100:7. Major General Sherman objected to that request for assistance, expressing concern that (1) there would be a large number of people in the park for Father’s Day, (2) Wilshire Boulevard was in the middle of the Park (the operation’s law enforcement area), and (3) the initial proposal to use helicopters would attract large crowds in opposition to the operation. Id. at 100:8–10; Trial Tr. Vol. II at 263:22–264:15. Chief Bovino of the Department of Homeland Security criticized Major General Sherman for his opposition to the initial plan, questioning Sherman’s loyalty to the country. Trial Tr. Vol. I at 103:5–8. This is relevant because Chief Bovino’s accusations of disloyalty go to the state of mind of decisionmakers who are tasked with ensuring that the Posse Comitatus Act is followed.

These were both included in Breyer’s language finding that the intent of the invasion was to use military troops to conduct law enforcement.

In fact, these violations were part of a top-down, systemic effort by Defendants to use military troops to execute various sectors of federal law (the drug laws and the immigration laws at least) across hundreds of miles and over the course of several months—and counting. The instructions to train Task Force 51 on the purported constitutional exception and thereby excuse unlawful military conduct came “all the way from the top” of the Department of Defense. Trial Tr. Vol. II at 283:1–3. And as Major General Sherman testified at trial, federal law enforcement agencies “always wanted military there, and we had plenty of capacity to do that.” Trial Tr. Vol. I at 137:23–25. Accordingly, Secretary Hegseth himself ordered troops to MacArthur Park as a “show of presence” and to “demonstrat[e] federal reach and presence.” Id. at 103:24; Operation Excalibur Slides at 4. Troops drove over a hundred miles to Mecca, where they significantly outnumbered federal law enforcement agents, to support a drug enforcement operation. Trial Tr. Vol. I at 32:9–33:4, 80:19–23; Mecca Storyboard. Troops also drove nearly a hundred miles in a different direction to Carpinteria to set up traffic control points so that federal law enforcement agents could more efficiently execute their search warrant of a cannabis farm. Trial Tr. Vol. I at 84:7–20.24

23 By contrast, some individual examples of Task Force 51’s conduct, like the detention of a veteran at the Wilshire Federal Building, are too isolated to violate the Posse Comitatus Act. The Marines stationed at the Wilshire Building minimized their interaction with the veteran, turning him over to law enforcement authorities at the first possible occasion. Moreover, the record does not indicate that the military’s presence at federal buildings in Los Angeles involved any impermissible law enforcement activity.

24 Even if there is a “constitutional exception” that authorizes the military to engage in law enforcement anywhere in the field under the label of “protection,” these activities would not fall under such an exception. Troops do not serve a protective function when they act as a force multiplier at a “show of presence” (as in MacArthur Park), when they outnumber federal personnel by 100 at a remote location with a low risk of resistance (as in Mecca), or when they are deployed merely to speed up federal operations (as in Carpinteria).

So if the PCA means anything, some entity should throw Hegseth’s sorry ass in prison.

The impossibility of that happening, the impossibility of even considering that happening (Breyer instead went through some hoops to enjoin further violations, treating it civilly) is a testament to how inapt the laws designed to prevent just this kind of invasion are to the moment. Even if there were an entity not subject to federal funding who could arrest Hegseth, even if there were a prison to put him in, Trump would simply pardon his Defense Secretary (as he has floated doing in the past), and Hegseth would be back in charge to illegally invade some other blue state again.

And all that’s before you consider how a law criminalizing using the military to invade states intersects with SCOTUS’ decision in Trump v US, which would give Trump absolute immunity for ordering the military to violate the Posse Comitatus Act. It is a crime to do what Trump did in Los Angeles, but last year SCOTUS made it not a crime. And SCOTUS will soon have to figure out whether things like laws upholding federalism matter at all anymore.

So while Breyer’s opinion is welcome and may give Trump pause, however brief, as he tests other legal theories under which to invade Chicago and Baltimore, the opinion is better understood as an opinion documenting how inapt all these tools are.

Indeed, the opinion is most interesting where Breyer pointed out the ridiculous implications of the Ninth Circuit opinion reversing his earlier order, which adopted a highly deferential standard to Trump’s claims that he needed the Guard to help enforce Federal law.

The impact of Defendants’ argument is largely due to the Ninth Circuit’s reading of § 12406(3) in its order staying this Court’s temporary restraining order pending appeal. In that order, the Ninth Circuit held that courts can review the President’s invocation of § 12406 only to determine (1) if it has a colorable basis and (2) if it is made in good faith. Newsom, 141 F.4th at 1050–51.11 The Ninth Circuit did not clarify these standards further. For example, it did not explain how a plaintiff could challenge—or how a district court could evaluate, especially on an expedited basis in proceedings for preliminary injunctive relief—a presidential invocation of § 12406 for lack of a colorable basis or good faith. Nor does the Ninth Circuit suggest that courts are well positioned to evaluate whether the President acted in good faith, rather than as pretext for federalizing the National Guard.12 The Ninth Circuit also suggested that the President can invoke § 12406(3) if his ability to execute federal law has been “significantly impeded,” rather than the stricter statutory requirement that he be “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws.” Id. at 1052. Thus, under the Ninth Circuit’s test, the President could federalize the National Guard in any number of cases:

  • The President, relying upon IRS data showing that a sizeable percentage of corporations and individuals are using tax shelters to avoid paying taxes, could claim that he is unable to execute the tax laws.13
  • The President, relying upon EPA studies showing that pollution in a river cannot definitively be traced back to a specific manufacturing plant, could claim that he is unable to execute the Clean Water Act.
  • The President, relying upon health data showing the number of individuals who present to hospitals with narcotic-related symptoms, could claim that he is unable to execute the federal drug laws.
  • The President, relying upon anecdotes from state election officials that voting machines are glitching, or that fraud exists, could claim that he is unable to execute the election laws.

In each instance above, the President would have asserted a colorable, good-faith claim. Under the Ninth Circuit’s test, that is all he would need in order to call the National Guard into federal service—and then, under Defendants’ urged interpretation of § 12406(3), use those troops to execute domestic law. Though Defendants initially did not disclose the implications of reading § 12406(3) as a grant of significant presidential discretion (those implications being Defendants’ current position that § 12406(3) is an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act), they have now fully fleshed out their views. In doing so, they make plain the consequences of the Ninth Circuit’s highly deferential reading of the statute

11 This standard purportedly comes from the Supreme Court’s decision in Sterling v. Constantin. Id. (citing 287 U.S. 378, 399–400 (1932)). In Sterling, the Court determined that the governor of Texas had acted lawfully when he restricted oil production across the state. 287 U.S. at 387. Though the Court found that the governor had acted in good faith, it did not set forth any actual test for evaluating executive discretion. Id. at 399–400. Rather, it relied on earlier cases holding that the Executive has inherent discretion by virtue of his role as Commander-in-Chief and his obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Id. (citing Martin v. Mott, 25 U.S. (12 Wheat.) 19, 29–32 (1827), and Luther v. Borden, 48 U.S. (7 How.) 1, 44–45 (1849)). Neither of those cases instructed courts to evaluate whether the Executive had a colorable basis for his actions or whether he acted in good faith. Martin, 25 U.S. at 31; Luther, 48 U.S. at 43–44. Furthermore, as explained below, Martin, Luther, and Sterling’s reliance on the Commander-in-Chief and Take Care Clauses conflicts with the Supreme Court’s more recent interpretation of those Clauses in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952).

12 For instance, the Ninth Circuit’s test would likely enable a President to use federal law enforcement agents to stoke tensions and then use any resistance as justification to call forth the National Guard. As long as the President actually believed that the resistance significantly impeded his ability to execute federal law, it is hard to see how a court could find that he acted in bad faith, especially under the Ninth Circuit’s deferential standard of review. See Good Faith, Black’s Law Dictionary (12th ed. 2024).

13 Incidentally, when Congress debated the Militia Act of 1792—a distant predecessor to § 12406—Representative Abraham Clark posited in opposition that the law would make it “so that if an old woman was to strike an excise officer with her broomstick, forsooth the military is to be called out to suppress an insurrection.” 3 Annal of Cong. at 575 (1792).

Yesterday, a judge ruled that evidence presented at trial showed that Pete Hegseth broke the law in ordering troops to take actions that amount to law enforcement. He criminally ordered troops to help invade MacArthur Park — and tried to ruin Father’s Day as part of the plan!

But the only way in which that law will mean anything is if SCOTUS stops permitting presidents, this President, to invent any bullshit excuse in the service of fascism.

Opinions

Original Breyer opinion

Ninth Circuit opinion

New Breyer opinion

Trump v US opinion

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A Tale of Two Governors: Confronting versus Dick-Wagging

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In a column on an imagined split in the Democratic party over the word “distraction,” Ron Brownstein linked to this Molly Jong Fast interview with Gavin Newsom in support of his argument that Newsom was criticizing a focus on affordability.

In a recent interview with podcaster Molly Jong-Fast, Newsom implicitly criticized the instinct of other Democratic leaders to pivot back to economic issues whenever possible.

But Brownstein was misrepresenting the jist of the conversation with Newsom and Jong-Fast, and in so doing, wildly misunderstanding Newsom’s pivot. He’s not alone in missing the point. Brownstein’s column is among many from pundits who belatedly discovered Newsom’s trolling but wildly misunderstand it to be exclusively about a willingness to directly confront Trump.

The primary focus of Jong-Fast’s interview with Newsom was about him breaking through the news cycle. From the very start, she dated his breakthrough to two weeks earlier (so around August 9), while he described the shift in his messaging strategy first to Trump and Elon Musk’s disinformation during the fires,

Those first few days they were winning the messaging battle.

But as Newsom described, his state of mind changed when Trump invaded Los Angeles, back when I first profiled his trolling efforts.

And my state of mind radically changed at that moment. And our media shift [sic] changed. Our research, our clarity, the conditions changed, so we had to change. And we were no longer apologetic about things. I wasn’t trying to play nice.

And I know a lot of good people play nice. Talk about what you really focused on every day. And people will pay attention to your ten point plan on affordability. And talk about kitchen table issues. Well we’ve been doing that every damn day for years and years and years, with all due respect.

And that doesn’t get picked up. And then we’re chasing lies and misrepresentations and untruths.

And so about a few weeks ago, as it relates to redistricting, we decided yeah, we’re going to punch him back, and we’re going to put a mirror up to the absurdity that is Donald Trump.

Newsom’s comment was not about content — that ten point plan (indeed, he went on to lay out policies he dubbed progressive later in the interview).

It was about attention. That ten point plan “doesn’t get picked up,” which leaves you “chasing lies and misrepresentations and untruths.”

The import of attention can best be shown by Brownstein’s own invocation of JB Pritzker’s firey speech last week just before he invoked Newsom.

Pritzker has been unsparing in denouncing Trump as a “wannabe dictator,” as he put in a fiery news conference last week decrying the president’s threats to deploy the National Guard to Chicago. Surrounded by local business, religious and civic leaders, Pritzker struck a conspicuously more urgent tone than the party’s Congressional leadership. “If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm,” Pritzker insisted, before describing the prospect of troops on Chicago streets as “unprecedented, unwarranted, illegal, unconstitutional, un-American.”

Pritzker’s speech — as well as an appearance on Face the Nation — was precisely what Democrats want to see. It laid out how Trump is harming efforts to address crime and accused Trump of illicit motives for the invasion. But even though he implored the press not to both sides his comments about Trump’s invasion, many did (and by asking five questions about the 2028 presidential election, CBS’ Ed O’Keefe situated this as a 2028 conflict). Politico even did a story on how Pritzker is losing weight and Trump is taking notice.

And contrary to the claims of pundits who want this — a unified, firey press conference — to be enough, thus far it has achieved nothing more than Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson’s own comments about their success in fighting crime: a renewed request from the White House that he ask for help.

Indeed, every single day, Trump focuses on Chicago, raising the political stakes for Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.

The misunderstanding about Newsom’s success derives from the point I made here. Liberals and journalists understand language differently than fascists do. Liberals want to argue about truth, which Pritzker did exceptionally well. He laid out crime rates, he laid out how IL has addressed it, he laid out policy issues.

But right wingers want to grab and hold attention and mobilize emotion.

Compare how the two approaches work. In both his presser…

So in case there was any doubt as to the motivation behind Trump’s military occupations, take note: 13 of the top 20 cities in homicide rate have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago.

Eight of the top 10 states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.

Memphis, Tennessee; Hattiesburg, Mississippi have higher crime rates than Chicago, and yet Donald Trump is sending troops here and not there? Ask yourself why.

And on Face the Nation, Pritzker factually described that Trump is focused on blue states when red states have worse crime.

Notice he never talks about where the most violent crime is occurring, which is in red states. Illinois is not even in the bottom half of states in terms of violent crime. Indeed, we’re in the best half of the states so- but do you hear him talking about Florida, where he is now from. No, you don’t hear him talking about that, or Texas. Their violent crime rates are much worse in other places, and we’re very proud of the work that we’ve done.

Newsom, by contrast, has relentlessly called out Republicans on Xitter every time they focus on blue state crime.

Often, when he calls out those Republicans, he treats their focus on blue states as a confession of their own ignorance, a dick wag that will drive engagement. He accuses Lankford of being stupid because he doesn’t know (or, just as likely, won’t admit) that murder in Oklahoma is higher than in California.

But a more remarkable intervention is this press conference he did last week.

The first seven minutes or so focused on new teams focused on policing — that was the focus of straight news reports like this one and this one.

For the next several minutes, Newsom reminded that we’re still waiting on the decision on Posse comitatus from Judge Charles Breyer, a decision that will be appealed and will determine the course of invasions for some time. He laid out the stakes of this (a point he returned to).

Newsom then had his top law enforcement officials speak, for about seven minutes; Newsom nodded to the support from communities for the law enforcement efforts.

Newsom then took questions. The first question was about whether this announcement was a response to Trump’s threats to deploy the National Guard. Newsom noted that Trump is doing things to people, not with people (and nodded again to the upcoming Breyer decision).

At 17:50 — this is the part that has been picked up nationally — Newsom then moved to trolling.

But I should note, just on that, if he is to invest in crime suppression, I hope that the President of the United States would look at the facts. Just consider Speaker Johnson’s state. Just look at the murder rate that’s nearly four times higher than Californian’s, in Louisiana. This is Speaker Johnson. 4-ex. Higher. I’m just offering — again, you’ll not see this on Fox News so the President may not be familiar with these facts. So I want to present some facts to the President of the United States. I imagine this is alarming to the President, to learn these facts, particularly Speaker Johnson, he’s been such a strong partner, and ally, in these efforts, so the carnage in Louisiana is well defined.

Newsom then turned to Mississippi, “Murder rate’s out of control, carnage,” again presenting it in terms of interest to the President (and in the same emotional language that Stephen Miller uses to address crime). He focused on Missouri, Arkansas.

Again, these are just, not just observations. They’re stone cold facts. And the fact remains that if the President is sincere about the issue of crime and violence, there’s no question in my mind that he’ll likely be sending the troops into Louisiana, Mississippi, to address the unconscionable wave of violence that continues to plague those states.

Not only did Newsom’s serial focus — with props — on right wing states get picked up by influencers and state Democratic parties, it baited Fox News, which asked Johnson about the stat in a live appearance (though without including the bit where Newsom said Fox would never cover it!), which Newsom then used for two more viral posts, one reiterating that Louisiana has a higher crime rate, another laughing at Johnson’s word salad.

Back to the press conference, in response to the next question, Newsom talked about the assault on America, especially racial profiling.  He addressed how he was mirroring Trump’s grift and hypocrisy to raise a mirror to it.

The next question raised Trump’s alternative facts. Newsom focused on the chatbots on Fox News. He returned to the comparison of state crimes.

Where’s the President of the United States. These are the folks — these are his states that voted for him. His state of mind doesn’t seem to be focused on the issue of crime and violence. It’s about expression of authoritarianism. He reflects and waxes, two out of the last three days, about being a dictator.

He was asked if he was mimicking the Oval Office by holding the presser in his office, which he dodged.

In response to a late question, Newsom then noted that CA’s cops had to protect the Guard Trump deployed.

I want to also compliment the Commissioner. It was the CHP working with LAPD that were protecting the National Guard and the military in LA. I want to thank them for that. The LAPD, in partnership with the CHP, had to protect the Federalized Guard and the United States military after Donald Trump federalized them.

The last question attempted to bait Newsom into saying that crime wasn’t a problem. He repeated, again, that he was working with others, rather than doing to.

JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom said, effectively, precisely the same thing. Both said they were addressing crime in their states, with positive outcomes, and so didn’t need any further intervention from Trump. Both noted that other states — red states — needed Trump’s help more. Both suggested that Trump was focusing on blue states out of an authoritarian plan.

But Newsom’s intervention worked differently for several reasons. Perhaps most importantly, Newsom focused the pressure on others, flipping the political script, on Speaker Johnson’s complicity in ignoring his own states to enable Trump’s invasions. When addressing Trump, Pritzker assumed a common understanding of factual data, simply stating that crime was higher in Florida and Texas. But Newsom pitched his discussion of variable crime rates on the presumption that Trump would have no idea of anything he didn’t see on Fox News (and for whatever reason, baited Fox into covering precisely that data). Newsom also appealed to tribalism, suggesting that Trump was neglecting the states that voted for him. As noted, Newsom also adopted the alarmist language used by Miller — but he did so to describe right wing states.

A big part of the difference, in my opinion, is audience. Pritkzer seemed to address the press or Democrats. Even while Newsom provided a news hook for local coverage, he also aimed to address Trump and right wing politicians and audiences — even baiting Fox News!! — in the kind of dick-wagging power language that is meaningful to them.

Not all of it worked. I haven’t seen anyone pick up the detail that the LAPD had to defend the Guard (that may be one reason the Guard in DC is armed).

But it used the idea of a press conference (albeit seemingly mocking Trump’s Cabinet Meetings) to provide different points of access for the straight press, for lefty influencers, and for right wing media.

This isn’t just about confrontation, which his what many pundits think it is. Both Pritzker and Newsom were confronting Trump directly. Brownstein misunderstands virtually everything that is going on (not to mention misunderstanding that members of Congress necessarily play a different role here).

This is about confronting Trump in a way that undercuts his basis of power, even while embarrassing the press of all stripes to stop normalizing Trump’s authoritarianism.

Update: Judge Breyer just enjoined Trump from violating the Posse comitatus act.

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Constitutional Cope in the Time of Texas Hold’em

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There’s a coping mechanism I often see that involves stating we will get justice against the perpetrators of fascism once we “win.” It goes something like, “when we win we’ll hold all of these ICE goons accountable.”

I get the urge: you’re feeling outraged and helpless right now and one way to feel better — one way to affirm justice — is to imagine a more just time in the future. I get the import of accountability.

I say it’s a coping mechanism for several reasons. Making the statement is an act of obscuring how difficult or, in this case, almost impossible delivering justice to these particular people are. Those ICE goons? Most of what they’re doing is currently legal or at least covered by qualified immunity. To the extent we ever held torturers accountable, they were low-level schlubs and not the architects who successfully hid behind legal advice. So if you want to hold the ICE goons accountable, you’re going to have to figure out how to do something far bigger than just winning an election.

And making the statement often serves as a substitute for doing the work — any work — to actually win.

If the ICE goons make you feel helpless — which after all is the intent — why not search out one of the efforts to resist, like the ones Michelle Goldberg described here?

[I]f Los Angeles is a testing ground for mass deportation, it’s also a place to see how the resistance is evolving. Though there have been some big anti-Trump marches this year, many of those most horrified by this administration are looking for more immediate, tangible ways to thwart it. The movement against ICE in Los Angeles — one that is starting to take root, in different forms, in cities like New York — is part of a growing shift from symbolic protest to direct action.

It may be no match for the Trumpian leviathan. But it can protect a few people who might otherwise get swept into the black hole of the administration’s deportation machine. And in the most optimistic scenario, it could be a foundation for a new, nationwide opposition movement.

[snip]

With ICE increasingly seen as the front line of a growing police state, people all over the country are looking for ways to stand up to it. In New York, ICE arrests seem to be concentrated in immigration courts, where agents have been snatching people after their asylum hearings, even when judges ask them to come back for further proceedings. Activists, in turn, are showing up at the courts to try to provide whatever support to immigrants they can. They hand out fliers — languages include Spanish, French, Urdu, Punjabi and Mandarin — informing immigrants of the few rights they have. They collect emergency contacts and immigration ID numbers so that when people are arrested, someone can inform their loved ones and track them through the detention system.

When the hearings are over, the volunteers try, often in vain, to escort the immigrants past intimidating groups of masked, armed ICE agents to the elevators and onto the street. That’s what New York City’s comptroller, Brad Lander, was doing when he was arrested in June.

As Goldberg notes, that way to stop feeling helpless about your neighbor being kidnapped can also build the kind of network that we need in order to win, a network that not coincidentally is not conceived in terms of political party.

There’s another version of this that involves writing entire columns akin to the comment about the ICE goons: What will Democrats do, will they do it, if we win?

With little consideration of how we win or what a win is.

Two examples from yesterday demonstrate the type — but also point to where the discussion could be, and why.

After reviewing two of the horrible events of the last day — the frivolous attack on James Boasberg and the confirmation of Emil Bove — JV Last inexplicably pitches an entire post that assumes Dems are feckless but also imagines what we should do if those feckless Dems manage to win in spite of their fecklessness.

I have some questions for Democrats, and for you, that I hope you’ll discuss in the comments. I want a real conversation about wisdom because it’s possible that I’m a few degrees too hot on this stuff.

  • Should the next Democratic president fire FBI Director Kash Patel, even if there is no immediate pretext? Why or why not?
  • Should a Democratic Congress attempt to remove Bove from the bench since he apparently perjured himself during his confirmation hearing?
  • Should a Democratic president pressure universities to adopt policies friendly to liberalism and punish universities that caved to the Trump administration, in order to establish that collaboration comes with a cost?
  • Should a future Democratic administration pursue all available modes of accountability for federal agents who broke the law under the Trump administration by—just as a for-instance—filing false charges against innocent civilians?

Or should Democrats who gain power in the future decide that it’s better to focus on kitchen-table issues. To work with Republicans to pass bipartisan legislation that impacts Real People’s Lives.

Offering advice for a potential 2026 candidate, and so imagining how not to be feckless as a candidate, Dan Froomkin adopts a more optimistic stance, offering a 10-point plan of what to do if Dems do win.

Someone I know who is thinking about working for a primary campaign in the fall asked me the other day what I would want to see in a 2026 congressional candidate.

And from my perspective covering the resistance, my answer was clear: I want to see some fight.

My view is that if Democrats want to harness the energy of the resistance in the 2026 elections, they need to start talking now about how to stymie Trump as much as possible in the short term and how to undo the damage he has wrought in the long term.

I’m honestly not so clear myself on the short term. As long as Trump is president, given his veto power, it seems to me it will be impossible to pursue a positive legislative agenda even if Democrats win both chambers. And if Trump is willing to hold the country hostage, which he is, Democrats might even have to make some concessions simply to keep the government functioning at all. Does anyone have any thoughts about the best course? Please share them with me.

I do know that a Democratic House majority starting in 2027 could aggressively use subpoena power to fully investigate the many abuses committed by this administration, setting the stage for reforms to come. Every candidate ought to make that a solemn vow.

As for the long term, candidates should enthusiastically address the need to restore sanity and good government to the country after Trump is gone.

I’d like to see people campaign on something along the lines of a 10-point plan. And my first draft is something like this:

  1. Restore the rule of law. This includes rebuilding a devastated and defiled Justice Department, prosecuting the rampant law-breaking of the Trump era, and expanding the Supreme Court.
  2. Stop mass deportations. That includes defunding ICE, closing concentration camps, restoring temporary protected status, respecting asylum claims, ending to the harassment of people on visas, and welcoming more international students.
  3. Revive the civil service. That means hiring back tens of thousands of workers who were driven out, undoing organizational changes, reestablishing the tradition of a nonpartisan bureaucracy.

I read these, and then I read the Texas gerrymander plans that aim to turn Democrats into a permanent minority, and wonder, what the fuck are we doing here, people?

You need to find a way to ensure there will be some kind of real representation left, you need to find some way to ensure martial law like Trump tested in Los Angeles doesn’t disrupt elections, you need to figure out what the fuck DOJ is doing by demanding election rolls from every state before you can even think about what we do if Democrats win in 2026.

Even the question of retaliating against the Texas gerrymander — which would involve rolling back efforts that have made states more democratic — for short term survival is not an easy one (as Semafor lays out).

Beyond the difficult political problems, gerrymandering is at the core of partisan and racial polarization that is Trump’s magic sauce. This is a fight not just about whether Republicans can insulate themselves from accountability for the wildly unpopular policies they’ve rubber stamped in service of their liege Donald Trump. It’s a fight over whether Americans can find common ground with their neighbors.

Without that — without finding some way to break through the polarization that Republicans use to demonize Democrats and people of color and in so doing blinding their followers to the pain they’re imposing on them, the followers — you will not defeat fascism.

Which is why I think Last and Froomkin aren’t thinking big enough, and in the process aren’t really addressing the problem.

Fire Kash? No brainer. But the problem isn’t Kash, per se. It’s that in the zero sum game of polarization, right wingers are wielding “justice” as a political tool, all the while duping their rubes into believing Democrats did that, because they tried to hold a privileged white billionaire accountable for his actions. Jim Comey did stupid things because he was afraid right wing FBI agents would leak and make him — make FBI — look bad. Chris Wray refused to defend what happened before he arrived, making it easy to spin conspiracy theories about how Donald Trump was the one unfairly treated during an 2016 election in which FBI may have decisively hurt Hillary. At least Kash’s rabid partisanship has the potential of backfiring — certainly it has so far on Epstein — because he’ll never be able to deliver on the promise of children’s books.

Ending mass deportations, restoring civil service? Of course. But why conceive of that as a simple reversal, a restoration of the protections that right wingers easily hijacked? What would it take to provide real job security for the weather forecasters and cancer researchers if we ever get to bring them back? And should we purge FBI and ICE of all those leakers and goons first, or is there a review of Trump’s abuses provides a way to fix past problems? What does “restoring rule of law” mean when right wingers have embraced a mafia state? How do you restore faith in rule of law from both right and left, especially when the norms that provide the necessary foundation are gone?

There are a list of things that need to happen to address this: Dramatically curtail the Presidential pardon. Establish a way — a replacement for the failed experiment with Special Counsels — to hold the political accountable that is insulated from partisan chain of command. Eliminate the abuse of informants. We have barely begun to conceive of how much Trump has thrown out all rules prohibiting domestic spying, which provides an opportunity to rethink how to protect privacy in the age of dragnets (and how to safely disaggregate the data Trump is accumulating on one place). Why not take Trump’s debasement of FBI and supercharge of ICE as an impetus to rethink Federal law enforcement entirely and take all of it out of DHS, where it has far fewer rules? And yes, you’d have to do something about SCOTUS, but why stop at expanding SCOTUS instead of reconceiving of it, finding away to make it something other than the zero sum fight it has been for three decades?

Trump has destroyed the justice system — Trump has stolen rule of law from ordinary people, whether they’re Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, victims of his fraudster buddies he let off scot free, or American taxpayers whose shared national interest he has converted for political gain. He has replaced it with a spoils system that rewards loyalty. That makes the task of restoring it far harder, but it also provides an opportunity to show the cost of Trump’s corruption, and to pitch this as a fight against corruption, not Trump per se.

I’m not saying you’d be able to do this immediately with a House majority in 2026 or the White House in 2028. You wouldn’t, unless Trump precipitated a collapse so major that America is rebuilding as it struggles to feed its people, not at all an impossibility. But the reason Joe Biden, a man who enacted historic legislation with the thinnest of margins, failed is because the rising flood of fascism wiped all that away within weeks, even though Biden anticipated some of the means (like the attack on civil servants) Trump used to do that.

There are really better ways to fight fascism than focusing on what magical ponies we’ll ride if we “win.” But if you’re going to do that, consider what would need to happen to actually reverse the tide.

Update: As if on cue, The American Prospect has a thoughtful piece on what kind of reforms we could impose in the wake of Trump that might fix things. It focuses closely on the post-Watergate reforms.

A post-Trump legislative agenda could begin by reinforcing the post-Watergate laws and reaffirming the public purposes that motivated them. Congress could strengthen the enforcement provisions of the Impoundment Control Act. In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling about the president’s power to remove executive branch officials, Congress could put inspectors general out of the president’s reach and under its own protection as part of the Government Accountability Office, a congressional agency (although Trump has tried to control congressional agencies too).

Congress could also enact a new National Emergencies Act that would limit the ability of presidents to declare forever emergencies. In 1983, the Supreme Court struck down the provisions in the 1976 act that enabled a single chamber of Congress to withhold consent for an emergency’s continuance. Under the Court’s decision, Congress now must have a two-thirds majority in each house to overcome a presidential veto and end an emergency. As Josh Chafetz of Georgetown Law School suggested recently in an unpublished paper, a new Emergencies Act could—like the original 1976 act—terminate all existing emergencies and end lurking emergency powers in statutes that Congress no longer thinks necessary. Most important, it could establish new sunset provisions. Emergencies would end within a short period (perhaps 60 days) and be nonrenewable unless approved under expedited procedures by a joint resolution of Congress. Those provisions, as Chafetz argues, would afford presidents short-term powers in genuine emergencies but ensure that Congress retains the power to make lasting policy.

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Gavin Newsom’s Troll Wars as a Check against “Usurpation or Wanton Tyranny”

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The Ninth Circuit — a panel of two Trump judges, Mark Bennett and Eric Miller, and one Biden one, Jennifer Sung — has unanimously overturned Judge Charles Breyer’s order enjoining Trump from using the National Guard to protect Federal personnel and property from anti-ICE protests. The decision affirms the court’s jurisdiction to review Trump’s decision (and holds out the possibility that things may change — for example, in how Trump is using the military or the urgency with which California needs its firefighting Guardsmen — that could change the outcome). But for now, Trump continues his invasion of California with the blessing of the Circuit Court.

The judges had all, including Sung, telegraphed at the hearing earlier this week that they would do so . Moreover, the decision itself is unsurprising; a number of legal commentators warned that Governor Newsom was likely to lose this case.

That’s partly because of an 1827 case, Martin v. Mott, that said even if the President abused such decision, the remedy was political. Here’s how the Ninth invoked it for to hold that it must give Trump deference on this decision.

[W]e are not writing on a blank slate. The history of Congress’s statutory delegations of its calling forth power, and a line of cases beginning with Martin v. Mott, 25 U.S. (12 Wheat.) 19 (1827), interpreting those delegations,strongly suggest that our review of the President’s determinations in this context is especially deferential.

[snip]

The Court further explained that although the power delegated to the President under the Milita Act is “susceptible of abuse,” the “remedy for this” is political: “in addition to the high qualities which the Executive must be presumed to possess, of public virtue, and honest devotion to the public interests,” it is “the frequency of elections, and the watchfulness of the representatives of the nation” that “carry with them all the checks which can be useful to guard against usurpation or wanton tyranny.”

Jack Goldsmith has been pointing to the import of that passage all week.

This won’t be the end of things. In its assessment of the harm, the court noted that violations of the Posse Comitatus Act were not before it (the state is now arguing it in their motion for a preliminary injunction), nor was an emergency (like a wildfire) for which California could claim it had immediate need of the Guardsmen. Having affirmed its authority to rule, Newsom might fare better at such a time. And in any case the state has added a slew of new facts below in its motion for a preliminary injunction.

But in the meantime, we would do well to take that lesson from Martin to heart: Politics remains a remedy. Not just a remedy, a necessary part of winning on this issue and on defeating fascism more generally.

And, increasingly, it’s a winning issue. Polls show — even a Fox News poll that has Trump screaming — that Trump is losing the battle to make this dragnet popular.

Certainly Newsom has been focused on that.

There’s been so much else going on, I’ve seen no focused commentary on the media campaign Newsom has been pursuing, even as he attempted to block the invasion in courts. Newsom has been conducting the kind of media campaign that the most realistic assessments of last year’s election loss say Democrats need to learn to do (admittedly, Newsom already took steps in this direction when he started a podcast).

Newsom’s prime time speech last week — widely applauded by those whining about so much else — has drawn a lot of attention.

 

Newsom repeated much of that same content in a column published at Fox, taking his argument to Trump’s base.

Over the past two weeks, federal agents conducted large-scale workplace raids around Southern California. They jumped out of unmarked vans, indiscriminately grabbing people off the street, chasing people in agricultural fields. A woman, 9 months pregnant, was arrested in LA; she had to be hospitalized after being released. A family with three children, including a three-year-old, was held for two days in an office basement without sufficient food or water.

Several people taken in the raids were deported the same day they were arrested, raising serious due process concerns. U.S. citizens have been harassed and detained. And we know that ICE is increasingly detaining thousands of people with no other criminal charges or convictions: Those arrested with no other criminal charges or convictions rose from about 860 in January to 7,800 this month – a more than 800% increase. Meanwhile, those arrested and detained with criminal charges or convictions rose at the much lower rate of 91%. Trump is lying about focusing on “the worst of the worst.”

While California is no stranger to immigration enforcement, what we’re seeing is a dangerous ploy for headlines by an administration that believes in cruelty and intimidation. Instead of focusing on undocumented immigrants with serious criminal records and border security – a strategy both parties have long supported – the Trump administration is pushing mass deportations, targeting hardworking immigrant families, regardless of their roots or risk, in order to meet quotas.

He started a Substack the other day, describing it as an effort to “flood the zone and continue to cut through the right wing disinformation machine.”

He has done interviews with (best as I can tall, all male) influencers in his emergency response room over and over.

But the response by which I’ve been most fascinated is his trolling on Xitter — the import of which I discussed with LOLGOP earlier this week.

Between his personal account and a press account, Newsom has been supplementing more serious messaging with both  important political points and trolling.

The former focuses on the stature of California’s economy, the role migrants play in it, and the likely risk of Trump stealing California’s full-time Guard firefighters. In the likely event something will go catastrophically wrong — whether via economic collapse or natural disaster — thanks to Trump’s jihad against migrants, Newsom has made the case that Trump is responsible, in advance.

Some of that includes building pressure against Republicans applauding Trump’s invasion.

Newsom has long called out the higher crime rates under right wingers. He has called out Mike Johnson, Jason Smith, Tommy Tuberville, Markwayne Mullin, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders for their states’ higher murder rate than California.

The trolling mocks Trump’s aides, including Kristi Noem, Pete Hegeseth, Steven Cheung, and Karoline Leavitt, as when he contrasted how the Guard were left without a place to stay when while Whiskey Pete boasted about going to a ballgame.

But Newsom has focused his closest attention Stephen Miller.

Newsom has been mocking Stephen Miller’s total control over the Administration.

Relentlessly.

That builds on a number of personal spats with Miller directly, as when Newsom raised Trump’s pardon of Jan6ers to debunk claims anyone but him supports insurrectionists.

And when he called out how Miller is undermining efforts to disrupt fentanyl trafficking.

The personal focus on Miller extends to Newsom’s Press Office account, which has been calling out Miller’s bullshit.

Correcting Miller on the legal posture of sanctuary cities.

Pushing back on Miller’s complaints about Sanctuary cities.

Newsom’s Press Office has pushed other peoples’ memes.

And pushing a TikTok video of Miller’s early racism.

But the trolling from the Press Office itself gets more creative. I’ve already mentioned the sustained play on Star Wars.

And pop culture references, like Lord of the Rings.

The Press Office has found many ways to call Miller Voldemort.

Amid Trump’s flip flops on whether to exclude farmworkers from the raids, the Press Office account has adopted right wing styled memes.

And as Newsom also is, the Press Office account is mocking Trump’s capitulation to Miller on targeting farmworkers.

Also tracking Miller’s ability to override Donny.

As I discussed with LOLGOP, this trolling is structured in a productive way. Not only does it play on Trump’s own weakness (in recent days, rebranding Trump’s MAGA with that weakness), but it sets Miller up as the easy fall guy when shit starts hitting the fan. It does a lot of fact-checking, but frames this battle as much about ego and dick-wagging — the currency of the far right — as rational persuasion.

Stephen Miller’s gulag is not even backed by everyone in the Trump Administration. And that’s before the full effects of it — in higher housing costs, empty produce sections, and restaurant closures — are being felt. And Newsom has been making this about him, an easy target in the same way Musk is.

There are two ways to get the Guard restored to California: A legal win. Or making it a big enough political liability that Trump relents. Newsom is actually pursuing both.

There are problems with Newsom’s efforts. As mentioned, his outreach has been a veritable sausage fest, with a focus almost exclusively on outreach to male influencers. Sure. Trump won with the young male vote and young men are the ones pushing the disinformation. But there has to be a role for outreach to women.

I really wish Newsom had picked some other platform than Substack, which platforms Nazis.

And obviously, Newsom needs to replicate some of this on Bluesky, which Newsom has ignored since he got a personal account; his official account is staid. Newsom just got a Bluesky Press account, which replicates some of the trolling from Xitter, but thus far the trolling of Miller — which would be most important to go viral — has not shown up there.

But everyone needs to approach these battles using all three tools we have: legal, legislative, and political.

You don’t have to like Newsom to recognize that this trolling attempts the kind of messaging Democrats need to do more of. Indeed, his dickish personality and the long-standing bad blood with Trump may make this more effective.

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“The Answer Is Zero:” When Fragile White Supremacists Discover … They Aren’t

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There’s a line in Kerry Howley’s entertaining profile of Whiskey Pete Hegseth’s incompetence that, along with the URL title — “Could these be Pete Hegseth’s last days in the Pentagon?” — made me wonder whether she and her editors rushed to publish it in fear that it was about to be Overtaken By Events.

To illustrate her best quote, describing that Whiskey Pete is only playing at Defense Secretary, Howley used the (apparently paraphrased) hypothetical crisis, Israel bombing Iran, to explain what nearly led a longtime Pentagon employee to cry when contemplating how poorly Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon would function.

“Pete is playing secretary,” a source says. “He’s not being secretary.” In crisis — an unplanned evacuation, Israel bombing Iran, China moving on Taiwan — there will be no one with experience to lead. “For any sustained operations, we’re screwed. There’s nobody in the SecDef’s office at this point that has any … they’re not heavyweights. They don’t have the sophistication. They don’t have the experience.” One source described a longtime Pentagon employee discussing the lack of readiness in the office, “close to tears,” saying “the department is so fucked.”

Having spent months crafting a great story about Trump’s woefully incompetent Defense Secretary (though before she had gotten the full story; for example, she didn’t describe the suspected role of DOGE implant Justin Fulcher in fabricating a claim about NSA intercepts), she published it before it became irrelevant.

And here we are, Israel is bombing Iran and Iran is returning fire, and there are probably people crying at the Pentagon and they’re not alone.

Israel’s attack on Iran is not even the biggest risk of having someone as unhinged as Whiskey Pete in charge: the Los Angeles invasion is.

Indeed, over the course of a long week of disastrous Congressional appearances for Whiskey Pete, it became fairly clear he knows fuckall about the invasion of California he has personally authorized. And that is dangerous — inconceivably dangerous — not least because Whiskey Pete also spent the week facing his own inadequacy.

As things (and not just Whiskey Pete’s things) begin to spiral out of control, it’s time we talk about the problems created when people who believe they — a Christian white man with an addiction problem — are supreme, face the kind of public humiliation that destroys the core of their identity.

Whiskey Pete knows fuckall about the Los Angeles deployment

Let’s start with the risk.

Friday, Reuters reported on the first known temporary detention carried out by Marines deployed to Los Angeles. As the shocking video portrays, there were at one point at least five heavily-armed men engaged in detaining Army veteran Marcus Leao.

Leao, who is brown-skinned, was a veteran on his way to the VA office.

Speaking to reporters after he was released, the civilian identified himself as Marcos Leao, 27. Leao said he was an Army veteran on his way to an office of the Department of Veterans Affairs when he crossed a yellow tape boundary and was asked to stop.

Leao, who gained his U.S. citizenship through military service, said he was treated “very fairly.”

“They’re just doing their job,” said Leao, who is of Angolan and Portuguese descent.

[snip]

The troops are authorized to detain people who pose a threat to federal personnel or property, but only until police can arrest them. Military officials are not allowed to carry out arrests themselves.

There’s no hint of what probable cause they had to detain him, at all.

He was going to the VA office.

Imagine what’s going to happen when the target is actually doing something that an itchy trigger might view as a real threat?

Meanwhile, the Secretary of Defense has repeatedly confessed he doesn’t know what is going on with the deployment.

On June 9, for example, the Secretary of Defense claimed the deployed Marines were coming from Camp Pendleton.

There was, to be fair, some as yet unexplained uncertainty whence DOD was deploying 700 Marines, from Pendleton or Twentynine Palms. But within hours of this tweet, the Marines were deploying from the latter base, not the former (where protests against the deployment had already been staged, which is on the edge of San Diego’s suburbs). The Secretary of Defense’s tweet, posted hours before the deployment, ended up being inexplicably wrong.

The next day, Whiskey Pete appeared before the first of three appropriations hearings this week. Pete Aguilar asked some basic questions: Why were the Guard sent without housing or food? How much will it cost? Where is the money coming from?

Each time, Whiskey Pete answered with bluster rather than facts (the Acting Comptroller, Bryn MacDonnell, did an exceptional job all week, and in in this case revealed the deployment would cost $134 million, mostly TDY costs, which would be paid out of contingency funds).

Then Aguilar asked Hegseth what the legal justification was. Hegseth again blustered.

Aguilar pointed to the statute: 10 USC 12406 — the statute cited in Trump’s Executive Order mandating the deployment, and asked which of the three justifications was triggered.

The Secretary of Defense said he didn’t know.

I don’t know. You just read it yourself. And people can listen themselves. But it sounds like all three to me. If you’ve got millions of illegals and you don’t know where they’re coming from, they’re waving flags from foreign countries and assaulting police officers, that’s a problem. The government of California is unable to execute the laws of the United States. The Governor of the [sic] California has failed to protect his people along with the Mayor of Los Angeles and so President Trump has said he will protect our agents and our Guard and Marines are proud to do it.

This was the statute Hegseth had already relied on in the two memos he issued to deploy the Guard — the first dated June 7, the second dated June 9.

And yet days after deploying the Guard, Hegseth confessed that he had no fucking idea which of those three clauses justified the deployment.

Fully 15 pages of Judge Charles Breyer’s opinion enjoining the use of the National Guard addresses this issue and Breyer even scolds DOJ for attempting to retcon their justification, precisely what Hegesth himself tried to do in the hearing.

It is concerning, to say the least, to imagine that the federal executive could unilaterally exercise military force in a domestic context and then be allowed to backfill justifications for doing so, especially considering how wary courts are of after-the-fact justifications even where the stakes are lower.

Hegseth had relied on the law, without any sense of how or why (he claimed) it applied, just as Breyer found DOJ itself had done.

Hegseth had another Appropriations hearing on Wednesday, this time before the Senate. In response to a question from Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Jack Reed whether the troops would use drones and detain Americans, Hegseth refused to answer.

Since then, the military has indeed deployed drones and (as noted) detained at least one American citizen. Reed was correct: The answer Hegseth refused to give was, yes.

Hegseth also stated that both the Guard and the Marines were on the streets.

Only, the Marines weren’t, yet. They hadn’t finished the scant training they were being given.

Some of these gaffes — announcing the wrong base whence Marines would deploy, claiming they were deployed when they weren’t, yet — may represent confusion or DOD changing its mind, which is interesting enough, given the artificial claim of an emergency. But Hegseth disclaimed even knowing the legal basis on which he had deployed 4,700 service members.

Whiskey Pete’s humiliation snowballs

Meanwhile, even as Hegseth is presiding over an invasion of a blue city, even as Howley’s profile was in the works, even as DOD’s Inspector General finalizes a report expected to rebut Hegseth’s claim that he didn’t share classified information on a Signal chat, on the third day of testimony (the Appropriations hearing with Aguilar was Tuesday, the Senate Appropriations hearing with Reed was Wednesday, he had a hearing before the full House Armed Services Committee on Thursday), things got worse.

Here, Democrats, and several Republicans, were far less interested in appropriations; they were teeing up on Hegseth’s manifest incompetence.

Three key exchanges went straight to Hegseth’s incompetence.

Early in the hearing, as many others did and would, Seth Moulton hammered Hegseth on his Signal scandal. As many others did and would, Moulton asked Hegseth to take some accountability for his actions.

But when Hegseth answered (as he did elsewhere) that it didn’t matter if he shared classified information in a Signal chat, that it didn’t matter because the operation itself was successful, Moulton mocked that claim.

Moulton: You talked about the success of the Houthi operation. About how much did it cost? How much money did you spend on missiles, shooting at the Houthis?

Hegseth: Well, you’d have to compare that with what it cost —

Moulton: I’m just asking how much did it cost?

Hegseth: — to divert our shipping lanes.

Moulton: I’m told it’s several hundred million dollars, maybe close to a billion dollars. How many US-flagged commercial ships have transitted the Red Sea since your so-called successful operation?

Hegseth: Well, thankfully, unlike the previous Admin —

Moulton: The answer is zero.

Hegseth: Military vessels transitt–

Moulton: No I didn’t ask you about military vessels.

Hegseth: Which would be the precursor for —

Moulton: How many commercial vessels? It has been several weeks. How many commercial vessels, US-flagged, have transitted —

Hegseth: Well, would you, Mr. Congressman, put civilian ships–

Moulton: The questions are not to me, Mr. Secretary, they’re to you. The answer is zero.

“The answer is zero.” Hegseth tried to cover up the utter pointlessness of the failed operation kicked off on that Signal chat with boasts that two military vessels had sailed through the Red Sea unscathed. But zero US commercial vehicles have, the very opportunity cost Hegseth had tried to use to dismiss the cost of the operation. That’s what success looks like for a guy like Pete Hegseth.

About halfway through the hearing, it was Mikie Sherrill’s turn, fresh off her win in the NJ gubernatorial primary. She started by observing how Hegseth had been using Fox News tactics to try to cover up his incompetence.

Mr. Secretary, your testimony over the last several days before Congress — I’ve heard you speak about all your supposed accomplishments from your time at the Pentagon. I have to say, your training at Fox News has let you spin months of dangerous dysfunction and incompetence into catchy phrases, like “restoring the warrior ethos” and “increasing lethality,” but the truth is it’s really been chaos at the Pentagon under your leadership. You’ve clearly shown you’re unable to manage the Department of Defense but what I’m most concerned about are three specific areas: Your operational incompetence, your managerial incompetence, and your budgetary incompetence.

She then walked through individual incidents substantiating those three kinds of incompetence:

  • Operational: How Hegseth mistakenly believed Trump wanted to cut off all aid to Ukraine. Hegseth said it was a fake news headline, a Fox News tactic.
  • Managerial: Why Hegseth fired CJCS CQ Brown and the Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti without cause — Sherrill said it seemed like it was because Brown is Black and Franchetti is a woman — and when Hegseth would get around to replacing Franchetti. Sherrill asked if qualified Admirals keep turning offers down. Hegseth again claimed it was fake news, but had no answer for why he hadn’t yet replaced Franchetti.
  • Budgetary: Why Hegseth is blowing money on vanity projects for President Trump — Sherill listed the Qatari plane, the parade, the Houthi campaign, and the Los Angeles invasion — and what priorities he has cut funding for to pay for them. Again, no asnwer.

Each time, Hegseth dodged Sherrill’s questions, and she restated the question — the last time, in a sing-song voice like she was speaking to a surly toddler.

On top of the substantive issues, the exchange proved that, yes, Hegseth is treating oversight questions like they’re Fox News games.

Eugene Vindman (Alexander’s brother, and like him ousted after blowing the whistle on Trump), almost the last questioner, chose a different approach to demonstrate Hegseth’s manifest incompetence.

He quizzed him.

 

He set it up by explaining that,

Many believe you are unqualified — underqualified — for this role. You’ve been Secretary of Defense for four and a half months now, for the sake of the American people and our service members, I hope you’ve done your homework since.

Then, like the questions Tammy Duckworth posed at his confirmation hearing, Vindman asked about topics that demonstrate several American vulnerabilities: China’s growing naval superiority, a key bottleneck that could cut the Baltics off from land reinforcements, and the rise of sight-directed small drones.

  • What year can the US fight a war with China?
  • How many ships does China have?
  • How many ships does the US have?
  • How many ships will China field by 2030?
  • What is the name of a corridor central to NATO reinforcements of the Baltic?
  • What heavily militarized Russian territory, connected to the Suwalki gap, containing nuclear capable missiles, it threatens all of NATO — it’s right there in the middle of Eastern Europe?
  • What percentage of frontline Ukrainian casualties are caused by FPV drones?
  • Which US service has written doctrine or standardized procurement of FPV drones?

Hegseth’s attempt to cover up his ignorance about the specifics of these vulnerabilities adopted similar tactics — those Fox News tactics Sherrill had raised — each time.

First, give a pat answer.

Then, falsely claim the answer is classified.

Then, use a political talking point answering a different question.

Then give up.

The one answer he thought he knew — that the Army had a written doctrine on FPVs — was wrong (to be fair, it was a trick question).

That’s when Vindman shifted to the same topic that Moulton had raised: Hegseth’s refusal to take accountability for placing attack information on a Signal chat. Only Vindman had a twist: He conveyed the opinion and request of the mother of one of the men who had piloted that first attack.

She believes that you need to resign. She also had several questions but one thing: she said she would appreciate an apology, an apology for putting classified information — her son couldn’t even tell her where the Truman was going — into the Houthi PC Small Group Signal chat that risked her son’s life and the mission. Mr. Secretary, yes or no, do you think you owe her an apology?

Hours after Moulton demonstrated that the mission accomplished nothing, Hegseth still resorted to the same ploy that failed with Moulton, claiming “it was an incredibly successful mission, and her son did great work, and thankfully the Houthi campaign was successful. … I don’t apologize for success.”

He doesn’t have to exercise any personal accountability because a mission that failed to achieve its stated objective was a great success.

Perhaps because the House Armed Services Committee is so big — the full hearing went on over seven hours, perhaps because a chunk of Republicans didn’t bother to show up to defend Hegseth (as noted, several joined the fun in thwacking the Secretary), perhaps it was because Whiskey Pete had no answer for his own actions, for DOD’s budget, and still, for how to keep the US safe. But the very process of the hearing showed that there’s no there there, under Hegseth’s non-stop politicization and Fox News answers.

We always knew he was an empty suit. This hearing exposed that.

Turns out you’re not supreme at all!

And that’s what has me worried.

Kerry Howley seems to think Whiskey Pete may be finished, and she’s not alone. The NBC story on the White House difficulties finding Hegseth babysitters — which is, substantively, far more damning than the Howley profile — ends with a prediction that the Inspector General will issue findings adverse to Hegseth. Two days after WSJ dedicated an entire story to that topic, it published a story describing what a failure the Houthi campaign was.

It’s not just Democrats and some Republicans in Congress who have lost patience with Hegseth. It appears most of the Pentagon has, which is why (as both Sherrill and the NBC story point out) people aren’t applying for key jobs. (Some people speculate it’s why some of the soldiers marching in yesterday’s parade couldn’t be fucked to march in lockstep.)

I’m not so sure. Politically, Trump should fire Hegseth, to minimize the surface area of easy attacks on himself, including from Republicans. Operationally, there’s no question that Hegseth’s continued tenure makes the US far less safe (and just as importantly, mucks up the finely tuned bureaucracy of the Pentagon).

Trump could even use the dud of yesterday’s military parade as an excuse. His Fox News hire couldn’t even make Trump’s long-sought military parade into rousing propaganda.

But Trump just invaded California relying on the authority of a guy who couldn’t be bothered to figure out why he was invading.

To carry out his (or Stephen Miller’s) attempt to pursue a reverse Reconstruction, he needs cabinet members like Kristi Noem and Hegseth who don’t care about the legal niceties but are happy to parrot lines about liberating the largest state, and the world’s fourth largest economy, from its elected leaders.

Without that, Trump himself, the entire project, becomes vulnerable.

If I were Hegseth I might resign on my own, to avoid any further public humiliation like I experienced this week. You had Democrats, women, Latinos (Salud Carbajal’s contempt for Hegseth was particularly scathing), Black people, and LGBT people, all looking smarter than Hegseth, hour after hour, a tremendous advertisement for the proposition that diversity is our strength, which Whiskey Pete loathes so much.

Over the course of seven hours, the contrast between the prepared members and Hegseth’s evasions dismantled Hegseth’s claims to Christian white male superiority. And that’s before he had no answer to Jason Crow’s question about what distinguishes the US from al Qaeda or ISIS.

All Hegseth had to fall back on were Fox News evasions.

It will never get better for Pete Hegseth.

Whiskey Pete will never catch up on mastery of these facts. Worse still, a masterful Howley euphemism suggests the stress of trying to do so has allowed his demons to take hold again.

Hegseth was different after Signalgate, according to six people in a position to know. He was more prone to anger and less likely to be clean-shaven in the morning.

This is a man who is failing because he came in without qualifications, quickly proved an easy mark for political infighting, and as a result keeps making decisions that threaten greater and greater catastrophe.

Whiskey Pete Hegseth has become a perfect advertisement for the lie of white supremacy. Couching your decisions in some claimed inherent superiority, over and over, doesn’t work in a bureaucracy like the Pentagon.

More importantly, for the same reasons he can’t accept accountability for Signalgate, I don’t know how Hegseth could, emotionally, quit. He can’t do so because Trump would turn on him (which Trump will eventually do anyway). He can’t do so because it would cause permanent psychic damage.

If he admits Mikie Sherrill is right, it will destroy him, because his assumed superiority is the core of his identity.

Escalation is no off-ramp

It turns out, freed from the guidance of adults counseling his decisions, that Trump is discovering he was wrong, over and over. In the weeks before Israel started what could be a catastrophic escalation, Trump was pitching what was basically the JPCOA he had overturned eight years earlier. In light of Israel’s attack, Voice of America ordered all its Farsi workers to return to work, just months after Trump ordered the entire service disbanded.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media told employees placed on administrative leave to immediately return to their roles providing counter-programming to Iranian state media as the conflict between the two nations escalated Friday, according to an email seen by POLITICO and three people familiar with the situation.

“Effective immediately, you are recalled from administrative leave,” said the email from USAGM’s human resources department. “You are expected to report to your duty station immediately.”

There are 75 full time employees within VOA’s Persian wing — the language predominantly spoken in Iran — and it’s believed most, if not all, have now been brought back after being put on administrative leave for three months.

In recent days, Trump discovered that Stephen Miller’s immigration jihad is too costly for powerful lobbying interests, so he is reversing course on part of that, too.

In another immigration gulag failure, Kristi Noem thought a smart way to deal with Newark’s concerns about Delaney Hall’s use as an immigration facility was to arrest Newark’s Mayor. Then they changed their mind and charged Congressman LaMonica McIver, instead. In the very same week they indicted McIver, four people (two accused of burglary, the other two accused of more violent crimes) in Delaney Hall escaped through a “drywall with a mesh interior”  wall leading into a parking lot after days of unrest because GEO had repurposed the cafeteria to manage detainee movements and so not fed detainees sufficiently. Admittedly, DHS has not yet admitted that they can’t use this facility, but they certainly substantiated Newark’s concerns about its fitness to hold detainees, some of them dangerous.

The problem is, even as Trump is — with his actions — proving that the experts, Barack Obama, and Kamala Harris were right after all, he cannot admit they were right, because his entire political identity is based on a claim that they’re wrong or (in the case of Black politicians) inferior.

At least in Whiskey Pete Hegseth’s case, being confronted with his incompetence only caused him to double down.

The only sign of this disastrous seven-hour hearing on Whiskey Pete’s Xitter timeline, below his pinned “Never back down” tweet, and now sandwiched among the inaccurate claim he was deploying Marines from Pendleton, an RT of a DOD Rapid Response attack showing his refusal to respond to Pete Aguilar, both a DOD Rapid Response and a Rapid Response 47 celebration of his contempt in response to questions from Ranking Appropriations member Betty McCollum about the LA deployment, eight [!!!] posts from the politicized rally at Fort Bragg (about which, Hegseth would claim in the HASC hearing, not to know DOD had imposed political litmus tests on the attendees), various false claims about Los Angeles, various false claims about US involvement in Iran, and various claims to a recruiting bonanza partly debunked in this WaPo article, the only sign of the seven hours of Whiskey Pete’s life when he was publicly and repeatedly exposed as an incompetent hack was this DOD Rapid Response attack on Sara Jacobs’ questioning of him, edited to focus on Hegseth’s response.

The full exchange is rather instructive.

Jacobs starts by noting that she represents the largest military community in the country and noting it was National Women’s Veterans Day. She sandbagged him, getting him to first reiterate his prior statements hailing the service of women. “With your focus on and emphasis on merit, standards, I wanted to tell you about three incredible women.” She then described the most recent performance evaluation of three women described as exceptional. (She didn’t name them, but they might be Erica Vandal, Emily Shilling, and Kate Cole.)

Jacobs: Given their stellar qualifications and accomplishments, and their record of surpassing standards, I assume that you agree that the Pentagon and the Services should do everything they can to retain women like these, correct?

Hegseth: I would commend the Major, the Aviator, and the Instructor for their service.

Jacobs: Great. I’m glad you agree because I also believe we should be recruiting and retaining the very best and brightest to serve in the military. And yet, you’re actually kicking out these three highly qualified solely because of their identity. These are trans women. And you are using the very same arguments used against desegregating the military or allowing women to serve or allowing gay people to serve. And in all those cases, those arguments were wrong. So I think it’s clear that this is actually not about standards or — I’m quoting you again — “an equal, unwavering, gender-neutral merit-based system,” because if it were you would be keeping these women in. Instead, you’re the one injecting culture wars into the military. And it’s at the detriment of our readiness and national security.

What DOD’s Rapid Response thought made Whiskey Pete look good was where he interrupted Jacobs’ next question, to label these women as, “Men who think they’re women.” Hegseth’s own propagandists had to censor the part where Jacobs described the excellence of trans women that Hegseth has ejected from the military, claiming they pose a threat to national security.

It was just another feeble Fox talking point, one that affirmatively buried the actual facts.

The problem with exposing the inadequacy of someone like Hegseth is the logical response — his suppression of the proof of excellence in favor of his forceful Fox redefinition of what excellence among trans servicemembers really is.

The same thing is happening with his Los Angeles invasion. Not only did Hegseth himself tweet false claims about the extent of the violence in Los Angeles, but as Gavin Newsom’s press team exposed, his Rapid Response account has started posting disinformation — old riot footage — as part of its campaign to support the Los Angeles invasion.

Pete Hegseth’s DOD is disseminating Russian-style disinformation to justify their invasion of Los Angeles (as Newsom’s staff noted, DHS has started doing the same).

Whiskey Pete’s response to being exposed as incompetent, DOD’s response to launching an invasion with no basis, has been the same: To double down on the lies, to double down on the dehumanization.

Sure, Whiskey Pete may soon be gone. Blaming him for the failed birthday party would be the easy way to do it.

But he remains particularly dangerous unless and until then, not least because he has ordered the military to be something they are not, and to do so based on his transparently false claims about what America is.

Because Pete Hegseth cannot admit who he is — and more importantly, what he is not — he is demanding that the men and women who serve under him be something they are not.

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Three Data Points from the Padilla Assault

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I want to call out three data points regarding the assault of Senator Alex Padilla yesterday.

First, in media appearances and on this video, Senator Padilla explained that he was in the Federal building for a scheduled briefing on the Federal response in Los Angeles. There was a delay so he asked to go to the presser. As he describes it, a Guard and an FBI Agent escorted him to the presser.

While I was waiting for the briefing, I learned that just down the hall from where I was, Secretary Noem from the Department of Homeland Security was having a press conference, Now Secretary Noem and the Department — we have been calling on and we have been sending letters to since the beginning of the year requesting more information as to what and why they are doing, with little to no response. And so I thought let me go over there, listen in on the press conference, maybe they’re sharing some important information. And while I did that, escorted over there by a National Guardsman and an FBI agent, …

This makes Dan Bongino’s description of the event entirely deceptive.

If the FBI brought him to the presser, it doesn’t matter whether he had his Senate pin. The FBI knew his identity. And yet an FBI agent was involved in the assault on Padilla regardless.

Secondly, in a presser, Gavin Newsom returned to comments about his call, last Friday night, with Donald Trump.

Oh, I would love to share the readout but I revere the office of presidency so I’ll keep it in confidence. He has quite literally made up components of that conversation. Um, he’s been a stone cold liar about what he said we talked about. He never discussed the National Guard, period, full stop. I would love to share with you what we actually talked about. That would send shivers up your spine.

[snip]

We discussed for a nanosecond Los Angeles and he immediately zigged and zagged to seven or eight other topics. Some extraordinarily familiar. And some extraordinarily remarkable considering the world we’re living in.

Again, after a hearing before Charles Breyer on the lawsuit, at which the substance of that call — whether Trump actually raised the Guard — was an issue, Newsom accused Trump of making up components of the conversation and then said the actual content of the call “would send shivers up your spine” but he wasn’t sharing it because “I revere the office of the presidency.”

I don’t doubt that some deference to the Office of the President is one reason Newsom hasn’t told us what Trump said. After all, he no doubt still harbors ambitions to one day occupy that office. The tenor of the lawsuit challenging Trump adopts a sober legal approach, avoiding some things — like Whiskey Pete’s apparent ignorance of basic facts about the deployment (such as whether the Marines would come from Camp Pendleton or, as is the case, Twentynine Palms and when they finished training for the deployment) — that would be great politically but shift the focus away from Trump and onto Hegseth’s incompetence. In the lawsuit (as distinct from his public messaging, including this presser) Newsom has been making a constitutional argument, not a political one.

The government seems to understand it is vulnerable to Newsom’s claim that Trump fabricated parts of the conversation. As I noted, in their response to the lawsuit they relied on an erroneous Fox News report on the timing of the call, not the readout of the call that the White House presumably has.

At approximately 10:23pm PT that night, President Trump called Governor Newsom. The President informed Governor Newsom of the dangers that federal personnel and property were being subjected to and directed him to take action to stop the violence.4

4
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-brings-receipts-he-called-newsom-amid-la-riots-california-gov-claims-wasnt-even-voicemail.amp; see also https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/06/09/watch-governor-newsom-discusses-donald-trumps-mess-inlos-angeles/ (Governor Newsom concurring that the call took place)

They do not include any other source to substantiate the claim that “the President informed Governor Newsom,” and in the hearing yesterday DOJ did not back the specific claims Trump and Steve Cheung made to Fox (though Brett Shumate did claim that something about the call led Trump to conclude the laws were not being executed, one basis DOJ relied on to claim the usurpation was legal).

And so, Newsom hinted at more, but claimed he couldn’t share it — as if threatening to share the real content of the call would damage Trump (or make his depravity clear).

I mean, it’s clear Trump said something. After all, before the call, Trump threatened to cut off all funding to CA (a threat that has not yet manifested, even though it was presented as imminent). After the call, Newsom came out with two messages: Trump is a “Stone cold liar” and “there’s no working with the President. There’s only working for him. And I will never work for Donald Trump.”

I suspect Newsom is daring Trump to make him share the content of the call (and, likely, testing to see what kind of records Trump is willing to show). I suspect Newsom that call is important not just because of what Trump didn’t say, about the Guard deployment, but what he did say before he invaded California.

I suspect Trump tried to make a deal. Trump tried to get Newsom to work for him. And when Newsom refused, Trump invaded.

Which brings me to the last data point. In one clip of the NBC footage from the Padilla assault — which, of course, came just as Kristi Noem claimed she was going to liberate Los Angeles  from government by their duly elected Governor and Mayor — Peter Hamby spied Corey Lewandowski overseeing the aftermath of the assault.

Lewandowski, of course, has a history of assaulting people as he removed them from Trump events.

What gets made of the Padilla assault remains very much contested. Right wing propagandists — from Noem and her staffers to Bongino to members of Congress — are trying to claim that a Latino man obviously couldn’t be assumed to be a Senator elected by 6.6 million Californians, not even if an FBI agent escorted him into that room. That response gives up the game, of course: this was Trump’s racist Administration treating one of the most powerful Latino’s in the country just like they’re treating the day laborers and farmworkers they’re chasing down fields.

But it comes amid a larger context — the context in which Gavin Newsom and Donald Trump are directly combatting whether Trump may be king.

Update: Corrected the timing of Newsom’s comment. It happened after Breyer issued his ruling.

Update: NYT quotes Padilla claiming Lewandowski came running down the hall telling people to let him go.

On the videos, Mr. Padilla appeared stunned but repeatedly said he was a U.S. senator. In an interview hours later, Mr. Padilla said that he had demanded to know why he had been detained and where he was being escorted “when of all people, Corey Lewandowski” — a combative former Trump campaign aide and adviser to Ms. Noem — “comes running down the hall and he starts yelling, ‘Let him go! Let him go!’”

Update: In response to James Comer and Clay Higgins’ excitement about targeting Newsom and Karen Bass for investigation, Newsom’s office promises, “some highly unusual communications from the White House” and then, in the next tweet, highlighs Newsom’s comment.

So, yeah, he was hoping someone would force him to turn this over and two of the dumbest members of Congress complied.

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Snake Guys: Trump’s Invasion of California Risks a Literal Firestorm in California [Updated]

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In Jimmy Kimmel’s attack on Trump’s authoritarian interference in California last night, he recalled how, earlier this year, Trump claimed California had so many fires because they don’t sweep its forest floors.

It was a funny dig. Except it is also dead serious.

As laid out in California’s bid for an emergency Temporary Restraining Order filed Tuesday, among the problems with Trump’s federalization of the California National Guard is not just that Trump usurped Gavin Newsom’s authority to command the Guard and incited further unrest.

It also steals resources that California relies on to combat forest fires (and fentanyl trafficking).

Defendants’ unlawful federalization of 4,000 California National Guard members, over the repeated objections of Governor Newsom, diverts necessary state resources. See Eck Dec. ¶ 32 (noting the California Military Department has “has identified and committed 4,600 service members to achieve state specific missions, which is 38% of the available strength”); id. ¶ 33 (“In 2025, there have already been 3,332 services members activated for 89,061 duty days, indicating the state will need every available service member to meet the State’s operational needs.”). Most members of the California National Guard serve in a reserve capacity, meaning they work in civilian roles when not serving as part-time militia forces, often in specialized positions. Eck Dec. ¶¶ 21, 37. As one pertinent example, 2,500 California National Guard members were activated in response to some of the most destructive fires in Los Angeles County that occurred in early January 2025. Eck Dec. ¶¶ 35-36. Likewise, the federalized force includes elements of the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team that serve in Taskforce Rattlesnake, the State’s specialized fire combat unit. Eck Dec. ¶¶ 14, 39-40. The 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team also includes Counterdrug Taskforce members that specialize in providing support to stop the trafficking of fentanyl at the U.S.-Mexico Border. Id. ¶¶ 15, 42-43. Members of the California National Guard also serve key roles in a variety of functions, from defending the state from cyber threats to conducting emergency traffic control. Id. ¶¶ 44-46. In short, Defendants’ federalization of the California National Guard jeopardizes vital resources on which the State depends to protect itself from emergencies, including the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team’s specialized fire suppression and drug interdiction teams. Id. ¶¶ 47-50.

In short, Defendants’ unlawful federalization of a significant subset of the California National Guard for 60 days at the expense of state resources jeopardizes the safety and welfare of the state’s citizens on two fronts: first, it removes these servicemembers from their vital roles combating drug trafficking in California’s border zones and fighting wildfires and second, their deployment risks inflaming an unstable and dangerous situation of Defendants’ own making, putting property and countless lives at unnecessary risk. See id. ¶¶ 13-16. [emphasis original]

The Deputy General Counsel in California’s Military Department, Paul Eck, described the specialized roles the Guard plays in combatting fires in a declaration accompanying the TRO request. There are 14 Task Force Rattlesnake crews that focus full-time on wildfire prevention (the kind of mitigation Trump demanded in January) and response.

38. For example, the California National Guard operates FireGuard, a wildfire satellite detection mission. During the last 18 months, FireGuard activated at least fire Emergency State Active-Duty Force Packages, consisting of 360 personnel total, in support of the Bridge Fire, Line Fire, and Park Fire in California. One hundred-forty additional Emergency State Active-Duty Military Police Soldiers were also activated to operate and augment Traffic Control Points at the Line Fire and Bridge Fire.

39. The California National Guard also operates Joint Task Force Rattlesnake, a joint taskforce with CalFire to mitigate and prevent fires through fuels mitigation projects and direct fire suppression. Task Force Rattlesnake provides 14 full-time, year-round Type I Hand Crews to reduce fuels and respond to fire incidents and other emergencies across the State. Each Task Force Rattlesnake crewmember is trained to Firefighter 1C standards, which require at least 540 hours of training. Each of California’s 14 Crews are staffed with a minimum of 22 California National Guard personnel and maintain a minimum of 22 Firefighter 1C trained crewmembers (308 personnel in total).

40. Over the past 18 months, Task Force Rattlesnake responded to at least 738 wildland firefighting response missions, covering 10,243 acres of land. [my emphasis]

Best as I can tell, those filings were submitted around 11AM on Tuesday.

Around 1:30PM, a wildfire in Apple Valley was reported. The now-4,200 acre fire is currently just 10% contained.

Having predicted that Trump’s usurpation of control over California’s National Guard might deprive the state other other emergency response resources on Tuesday, yesterday at 9AM (my screen cap is Irish time, so ET+5 and PT+8), Newsom pointed to the way Trump’s federalization of the Guard has depleted those dedicated fire response Guardsmen.

Trump’s bozo-the-clown response to the TRO request (which forgot to include its Table of Authorities and cited a Fox News story that misrepresents when Newsom and Trump spoke, all the while hiding that Trump can’t even remember when that happened) mentions fires or fireworks nine times — claiming at one point that protestors “lit fires in dumpsters and trans bins,” whatever “trans bins” are. (Whatever they are, they don’t seem like the kind of federal property to which Whiskey Pete Hegseth can assign Guardsmen and Marines.)

But Trump’s response doesn’t address how he’ll undermine efforts to combat fentanyl trafficking and wildfires. Trump’s response doesn’t address how his actions will make California less safe.

In January, Trump lectured California about preventing fires; then he manufactured an emergency to steal the personnel who perform that role.

In January, Trump declared emergencies because (he claims) Mexico, Canada, and China aren’t doing enough to combat fentanyl trafficking. Then he manufactured a different emergency via which he stole some of the personnel California uses to respond to that threat.

Even on Trump’s own terms, Trump is making California less safe.

Update: Paul Eck filed an updated declaration to accompany the state’s reply. He describes over half of the specialized firefighting members.

6. Task Force Rattlesnake, California’s highly trained fire mitigation and ‘ prevention and direct fire suppression unit, lost 190 out of its total 340 members to the Title 10 federal activation. A reduction of 55.88% of California National Guard’s fire prevention and fighting force.

7. The negative impacts of the reduction in force to Task Force Rattlesnake are imminent.

8. Prior to the Title 10 Federal activation of California National Guard forces, Task Force Rattlesnake (Rattlesnake) maintained Fourteen (14) Type 1 Wildfire Handcrews. Post the mobilization, Rattlesnake has been whittled down to Nine (9) Type 1 crews.

9. The reduction in the number of Rattlesnake Type 1 crews has limited the CMD’s, and consequently Cal Fire’s, ability to conduct ground fuels reduction missions, and more importantly, it has negatively impacted CMD’s ability to respond to wildfires.

10. The consequences may be felt soon. As of June 11 there are 13 fires over 10 acres burning in California, including the Ranch Fire in San Bernardino which has consumed over 4,200 acres. If it continues to grow at its current rate of spread, it would necessitate the use of Rattlesnake. [emphasis mine]

He also described that 31% of CA’s drug interdiction team has been affected.

Docket Newsom v. Trump

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Stone Cold Liar: Trump Incited Riot after Threatening to Cancel Funding for CA

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Gavin Newsom is doing a fair amount of press as he monitors the response to the protests and conflict in Los Angeles. In a number of those interviews, including this MSNBC one, Newsom accused Trump of lying when he claimed the two discussed deploying the National Guard on Friday.

Gavin Newsom: We talked for almost twenty minutes. And he barely — this issue never came up. I kept trying to talk about LA, he wanted to talk about all these other issues. We had a very decent conversation.

Jacob Soboroff: When was this?

Newsom: This was late Friday night. About 1:30 plus, his time.

Soboroff: After the protests had started?

Newsom: After the protests. And he never once brought up the National Guard. He’s a Stone Cold Liar. He said he did. Stone Cold Liar. Never did. It was a very civil conversation. I’ve always wanted to approach engagement with the President of the United States in a respectful and responsible way. But there’s no working with the President. There’s only working for him. And I will never work for Donald Trump.

Soboroff: Did you mention to him in that phone call on Friday night the types of raids that were happening in your state on Friday. There were reports that and video of enforcement operations in ways that they haven’t traditionally. ICE officers [went] to Home Depots around Los Angeles and picking off day laborers. Did you bring that up with him?

Newsom: The conversation started with the frame of what’s happening in LA, he immediately pivoted to other things and other interests.

He went on to correct Soboroff’s comment that this was about immigration. After putting it in context with all of Trump’s other attacks on the Constitution, Newsom described, “It is a serious moment under the guise of immigration. but it’s much deeper than that.”

Newsom is giving these interviews in advance of suing Trump to end the National Guard deployment (by the time he sues, some Marines that Pete Hegseth is readying may already be deployed). We may learn more specifics about the time and content of the conversation the two men had on Friday night via that lawsuit.

But as he describes it, Newsom spoke to Trump — in an attempt to talk about LA — in the wake of reports, relying on White House sources, that Trump was threatening to cut funding from CA.

The Trump administration is preparing to cancel a large swath of federal funding for California, an effort that could begin as soon as Friday, according to multiple sources.

Agencies are being told to start identifying grants the administration can withhold from California. Sources said the administration is specifically considering a full termination of federal grant funding for the University of California and California State University systems.

“No taxpayer should be forced to fund the demise of our country,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement Friday afternoon, criticizing California for its energy, immigration and other policies. “No final decisions, however, on any potential future action by the Administration have been made, and any discussion suggesting otherwise should be considered pure speculation.”

Newsom spoke to Trump late on Friday, wanting to talk about LA. Trump kept pivoting to “other things and other interests.”

And out of that, Newsom stated, “there’s no working with the President. There’s only working for him. And I will never work for Donald Trump.”

Obviously, Newsom is right: As I noted the other day, Stephen Miller loves the racism, but immigration is also one tool of his authoritarianism. The defunding makes clear that the pretext of antisemitism is another.

But this assault on California is an expansion of a pattern.

Trump asked law firms to work for him. Some capitulated, and they’re increasingly paying a price. Others refused and, thus far at least, have survived.

Trump asked Ivy League universities to work for him. Columbia capitulated, and they’re paying a price. Harvard refused and, thus far at least, has survived.

Trump is now seeking to bring California to heel using some of the same tools used with law firms and universities.

California’s governor refused.

And then Trump sent in the Armed Forces.

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