The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

hightor wrote:

Trump Hints at Next Targets After Shocking Invasion

The president warned the Colombian president that he needs to “watch his a--.”

Seems as though it's Cuba's turn after all

‘No more oil or money will go to Cuba – zero!’ Donald Trump sets his sights on the next country. He can well imagine that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will soon be ‘President of Cuba’.

Trump muses about Rubio running Cuba, tells Havana to ‘make a deal’ before it’s too late

Walter Hinteler wrote:

hightor wrote:

Trump Hints at Next Targets After Shocking Invasion

The president warned the Colombian president that he needs to “watch his a--.”

Seems as though it's Cuba's turn after all

‘No more oil or money will go to Cuba – zero!’ Donald Trump sets his sights on the next country. He can well imagine that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will soon be ‘President of Cuba’.

Trump muses about Rubio running Cuba, tells Havana to ‘make a deal’ before it’s too late

When will "enough" be "enough" for the Trumpers in the U. S.?

How can we have enough people willing to allow this disgusting behavior to go one...that we essentially cannot stop it?

WE MUST STOP IT.

THE CONGRESS MUST GROW ENOUGH SPINE TO PROTECT OUR NATION...AND THE REST OF THE PLANET FROM WHAT THIS DISGUSTING TURD, TRUMP, IS WILLING TO DO.

You live where this happened not too long ago, Walter. Do you have any suggestions for how we get ourselves back on track?

I know it is OUR problem, but we need help.

Jan 11 - Nordic diplomats rejected U.S. President Donald Trump's claims of Russian and Chinese vessels operating near Greenland, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

There have been no signs of Russian or Chinese ships or submarines around Greenland in recent years, the FT said, citing two senior Nordic diplomats with access to NATO intelligence briefings.

Sign up here.Reuters could not immediately verify the report. The White House and NATO did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.

“It is simply not true that the Chinese and Russians are there. I have seen the intelligence. There are no ships, no submarines,” the FT quoted one senior diplomat as saying.

Another Nordic diplomat said claims that waters around Greenland were “crawling” with Russian and Chinese vessels were unfounded, adding that such activity was on the Russian side of the Arctic.

Trump has repeatedly said Russian and Chinese vessels are operating near Greenland, a claim Denmark disputes. He has not provided evidence to support it.

Trump said on Friday the U.S. must own Greenland, an autonomous part of the Kingdom of Denmark, to prevent Russia or China from occupying the strategically located and mineral-rich territory.

"The image that's being painted of Russian and Chinese ships right inside the Nuuk fjord and massive Chinese investments being made is not correct," Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said earlier this week.
Vessel tracking data from MarineTraffic and LSEG show no Chinese or Russian ship presence near Greenland.

Greenland's assembly said late on Friday it would bring forward a meeting to discuss its response to U.S. threats to take control of the island.
Trump's renewed push for Greenland, after U.S. military intervention in Venezuela, worries many of the island's 57,000 inhabitants, whose widely held goal is to eventually become an independent nation.

The news has seemed to move more and more quickly in the last week.

The story underlying all others is that the United States Congress passed a law requiring the Department of Justice to release all the Epstein files—the files from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigation into the activities of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein—no later than December 19, and it has not done so.

Epstein and President Donald J. Trump were close friends for many years, and the material the Department of Justice (DOJ) has released suggests that Trump was more closely tied to Epstein’s activities than Trump has acknowledged. Although Trump ran in 2024 on the promise of releasing the Epstein files, suggesting those files would incriminate Democrats, his loyalists in the administration are now openly flouting the law to keep them hidden.

Despite the clear requirement of the Epstein Files Transparency Act that they release all the files by December 19, to date they have released less than 1% of the material.

Another part of the backstory of the past week is that the Supreme Court on December 23, 2025, rejected the Trump administration’s argument that it had the power to deploy federalized National Guard troops in and around Chicago, a decision that seemed to limit Trump’s power to use military forces within the United States.

Yet another part of the backstory is that on New Year’s Eve, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee released a 255-page transcript of former special counsel Jack Smith’s December 17 closed-door testimony before the committee. In that testimony—under oath—Smith said that his office had “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power. Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a ballroom and a bathroom. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.”

With pressure building over the Epstein files and Jack Smith’s testimony, and with the Supreme Court having taken away Trump’s ability to use troops within the United States, the administration went on the offensive.

Only a week ago, on January 3, the military captured Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. After months of suggesting that he was determined to end what he called “narco-traffickers,” Trump made it clear as soon as Maduro was in hand that he wanted control of Venezuela’s oil.

Then, on January 6, the fifth anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters determined to keep Trump in office despite Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s majority of 7 million votes, Trump’s White House rewrote the history of January 6, 2021, claiming that the rioters were “peaceful patriotic protesters” and blaming the Democrats for the insurrection.

That same day, after the Supreme Court had cut off the administration’s ability to federalize National Guard soldiers and send them to Democratic-led cities, the administration surged 2,000 federal agents to Minneapolis in the largest federal immigration enforcement operation ever launched.

The next morning, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good, and the administration responded by calling Good a domestic terrorist.

On Thursday, January 8, as protests broke out across the country, Republicans in both chambers of Congress began to push back against the administration. In the House, Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), the leading sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, asked U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer to appoint “a Special Master and an Independent Monitor to compel” the DOJ to produce the Epstein files as the law requires. The House also passed a measure to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits for three years.

The Senate advanced a bill to stop the Trump administration from additional attacks on Venezuela without congressional approval. And, just two days after Trump had reversed the victims and offenders in the January 6, 2021, insurrection, suggesting that Capitol Police officers had been among the offenders, the Senate unanimously agreed to hang a plaque honoring the police who protected the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Congress passed a law in March 2022 mandating that the plaque be hung, but Republicans until now had prevented its installation.

Friday was a busy day at the White House.

On Friday, Trump threatened Greenland, saying that he was “going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.”

Trump’s threat against a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally has had American lawmakers and foreign allies scrambling ever since. In a joint statement, the leaders of Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom said that “Greenland belongs to its people.” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) released a video explaining that “what you are essentially talking about here is the United States going to war with NATO, the United States going to war with Europe. You’re talking about the U.S. and France being at war with each other over Greenland.”

Trump’s threats against Greenland came at a meeting with oil executives. When he attacked Venezuela to capture Maduro, Trump told reporters that United States oil companies would spend billions of dollars to fix the badly broken infrastructure of oil extraction in that country. But apparently the oil companies had not gotten the memo. They have said that they are not currently interested in investing in Venezuela because they have no idea how badly oil infrastructure there has degraded and no sense of who will run the country in the future.

What oil executives did suggest to Trump on Friday was that they would quite like to be repaid for their losses from the 2007 nationalization of their companies from the sale of Venezuelan oil Trump has promised to control. ConocoPhillips, for example, claims it is owed about $12 billion. “We’re not going to look at what people lost in the past, because that was their fault,” Trump told them. “That was a different president. You’re going to make a lot of money, but we’re not going to go back.”

Yesterday the government made public an executive order President Donald J. Trump signed on Friday, declaring yet another national emergency—his tenth in this term, by my count—and saying that any use of the revenue from the sale of Venezuelan oil to repay the billions of dollars owed to oil companies “will materially harm the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

Specifically, the executive order says, such repayment would “interfere with our critical efforts to ensure economic and political stability in Venezuela” and, by extension, jeopardize U.S. foreign policy objectives including “ending the dangerous influx of illegal immigrants and the flood of illicit narcotics;…protecting American interests against malign actors such as Iran and Hezbollah; and bringing peace, prosperity, and stability to the Venezuelan people and to the Western Hemisphere more generally.” So, it appears, Trump wants to retain control of the money from the sale of Venezuelan oil.

Tonight Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said he is under federal criminal investigation related to his congressional testimony about a $2.5 billion renovation of historic Federal Reserve buildings. On Friday the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve grand jury subpoenas.

Powell, whom Trump appointed, released a video noting that he has kept Congress in the loop on the renovation project and saying that complaints about renovations are pretexts. Trump is threatening criminal charges against Powell because the Fed didn’t lower interest rates as fast as Trump wanted, instead working in the interest of the American people. “This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.” Powell vowed to “continue to do the job the Senate confirmed me to do, with integrity and a commitment to serving the American people.”

The Federal Reserve is designed to be independent of presidents to avoid exactly what Trump is trying to do. The attempt to replace Powell with a loyalist who will give Trump control over the nation’s financial system profoundly threatens the stability of the country. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, appeared to have had enough. He posted that “if there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none. It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question.” He said he would “oppose the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed—including the upcoming Fed Chair vacancy—until this legal matter is fully resolved.”

Kyle Cheney of Politico observed that it is “[h]ard to overstate what a remarkable statement this is from a Republican senator…accusing the Trump White House of weaponizing DOJ to control the Fed.”

Over a picture of the demolished East Wing of the White House, conservative lawyer George Conway noted: “I also must say that it’s a bit rich that Trump and his DOJ think it’s a good idea to gin up a bullshit investigation about supposed illegalities in....{checks notes}…renovating a federal building.”

On social media tonight, Trump posted a portrait of himself with the title: “Acting President of Venezuela.”

Tulsi Gabbard, a combat veteran who detests military intervention, joined the MAGA coalition full of hope that Donald Trump shared her beliefs. Gabbard especially despises—or at least despised—the notion of meddling in Venezuela, a once far-fetched idea that she had denounced many, many times.

But it turns out that President Trump’s foreign-policy doctrine is not actually isolationist. Although he doesn’t care about defending allies or toppling dictatorships to spread democracy, he’s perfectly happy to intervene overseas to steal resources or simply to show other countries who’s boss.

Gabbard has had to swallow her principles, first when Trump bombed Iran, and then when he did the very thing she had accused the neocons of plotting: invading Venezuela to take its oil. As director of national intelligence, she is stuck issuing rote endorsements of the administration’s position. “Kudos to our servicemen and women and intelligence operators for their flawless execution of President Trump’s order to deliver on his promise thru Operation Absolute Resolve,” she wrote on X on Tuesday. Poor Tulsi Gabbard never thought the leopards would eat Nicolás Maduro’s face.

There’s good reason for Gabbard to toe the party line—resigning would do nothing to advance either her policy agenda or her employment prospects. But millions of people who voted for Trump for reasons similar to Gabbard’s, but didn’t bet their whole career on supporting him, have no such dilemma. They can simply drift away from his coalition. By all accounts, this is exactly what’s happening. Trump is bleeding support, notably among his newfound constituencies: young people, minorities, and populists who distrust the system.

Trump has expressed bewilderment that his approval ratings could be so low given the breadth of change he has enacted. “I wish you could explain to me what the hell is going on with the mind of the public,” he complained at a recent gathering of House Republicans. “We’ve had the most successful first year of any president in history, and it should be a positive.”

In the president’s mind, he is living his best, Trumpiest life, and the public ought to be rewarding him for it. What he seems not to grasp is that he is losing support in no small part because he is accomplishing so many of his goals.

Winning national elections requires building big coalitions, including with groups that disagree with one another. Trump has a rare and underestimated talent for finessing these internal fissures. His rhetorical style is rambling, dishonest, and inconsistent, which makes it hard to pin him down on specific commitments. As a result, voters often see in him what they want to see.

During the campaign, Trump generally linked immigration with crime, leading many voters to believe that his plan was to focus on deporting criminals. This enabled him to make huge gains in Latino communities, which often bore the burden of accommodating the migrant surge during the Biden administration. Many of those voters have been surprised to learn that Trump’s immigration policy is actually inspired by the belief that the entire immigration pattern of the past half century was a catastrophic, civilization-threatening error, and that Trump intends to roll it back by unleashing a massive enforcement army that detains people who simply look like undocumented immigrants, with scant attention to due process.

Likewise, Trump performed well with low-income voters, many of whom expected or hoped that as president he would spare the social benefits they rely on. Indeed, Trump did not run on any promise to cut Medicaid or food stamps, and he discussed health care only rarely and in vague terms. But he has carried out the largest upward redistribution of wealth in American history, and he is taking health insurance from millions of Americans.

Those reversals might have been predictable to people who had been paying close attention to policy. What has been more surprising is Trump’s alienation of voters who are sometimes described as being “anti-system”—people who distrust authority and often gravitate toward conspiracy theories. Those voters are disproportionately young and male, and they get their news from mostly untraditional sources, such as Joe Rogan and Nick Fuentes. Their embrace of Trump had appeared to signal a durable expansion of the Republican coalition.

Trump, however, has squandered their trust. These anti-establishment voters wanted the Epstein files released, and they believed the promises of FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi that they would be. Trump has instead engaged in a clumsy cover-up, insisting that the files are both a fantastical hoax devised by his enemies and also too boring to even merit discussion.

The president also purported to champion free speech. Trump is no civil libertarian, yet he managed to present a contrast to a scolding moralism that had spread through much of American culture, especially schools and Hollywood. His willingness to offend the sensibilities of liberal elites gave him a sort of outlaw appeal.

In office, though, Trump has relentlessly cracked down on the speech that he opposes, hunting down students who criticized Israel and targeting anyone who failed to discuss Charlie Kirk’s death in sufficiently reverent terms. Voters have noticed this hypocrisy, and polling has shown that a majority believed that Trump had restricted free speech.

Trump’s embrace of a neo-imperialist foreign policy is likely to further alienate those anti-system voters. People like Gabbard, who served in Iraq and Kuwait, saw overseas conflicts as costly distractions from domestic problems, and viewed American military power with deep cynicism. Trump’s moves to bomb Iran, invade Venezuela, and threaten Greenland—his policy of speaking very loudly and carrying a big stick—make it hard to convince his supporters that he’s focusing on domestic concerns.

A through line connects these apparent reversals. Trump is alienating anti-system voters because he now controls the system. His appeal lay in his opposition to established power, but now that he has it, he is flexing it gleefully. He is the warmonger, the censor, the face of the Epstein cover-up.

It is hard to remain an outsider while holding the world’s most powerful job. But Trump seems not to have anticipated this, in part because he had far less trouble maintaining his anti-establishment identity in his first term. He managed this because that term consisted mainly of failures. Some of these failures were traditional legislative setbacks, such as the defeat of his bid to repeal Obamacare and his inability to pass the infrastructure bill that he had promised. But Trump also suffered an unusual inability to direct his own executive branch. He publicly entertained a stream of wild-sounding ideas, such as firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller and taking foreign oil, that he could not see through. His presidency ended in humiliation when he could not persuade Mike Pence to reject the election results.

These setbacks not only spared the country the full brunt of Trumpism; they also positioned Trump as a kind of outsider within his own presidency. Trump’s bond with anti-system voters remained intact because he was constantly expressing his anger that the system was working to undermine him. He fought the law and the law won.

Trump is no longer making this complaint about the established forces working against him, because he has solved this problem. His presidency is filled with loyalists. He has largely overcome any reluctance that officials might have had in carrying out his most unethical or illegal demands. He can’t present himself as anti-system, because he has become the system.

Trump relishes this power and glories in making it as visible as possible. He has duly torn down a section of the White House, staged an Army parade on his birthday, put his name on the Kennedy Center, and so on. It is as if he wakes up every morning with a new plan for getting across the idea I’m in charge now.

Trump seems to assume that voters share his own worship of power. His most intense fans may revel in his displays of dominance, but his least attached supporters—the ones who turned him from a loser in 2020 to a winner in 2024—are recoiling.

No matter what you think about the wisdom of the operation to snatch Nicolás Maduro, it was logistically audacious and technically impressive, an emphatic demonstration of American military prowess. It was President Trump flexing more than he has ever flexed before.

But when, later that morning, he stood before television cameras at Mar-a-Lago to take his victory lap, it was more a victory wobble. He looked spent. He spoke in a mumbling, meandering fashion. He wasn’t President George W. Bush landing on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit in 2003 to deliver a speech prematurely declaring America’s interventions in Iraq a success; he was the same old Trump in the same old duds droning on in the same old way, only he sounded older.

Granted, the 79-year-old president had been up all night or almost all night, a fact evident in part because he took a 4:30 a.m. call on his mobile phone from my Times colleague Tyler Pager. Anyone in Trump’s dress shoes would be exhausted. But his bearing and his cadence suggested something more than a mere sleep deficit, as did his inability to sound triumphant as he claimed another triumph, to flash much color as he peacocked. At a moment like that, you’d expect there to be enough adrenaline pumping through him for a pumped-up performance. Instead he delivered a wound-down one.

It illustrated a potentially dangerous collision of dynamics that’s one of my great concerns about the span of time between now and the November midterms — which, as Trump well knows, could bring a comeuppance and then restraints that he doesn’t currently face. Will diminished vigor and a ticking clock yield expanded ambitions and compensatory displays of strength? Will his hunger — for more ostensible victories, for more recognition, for just plain more — intensify along with the prospect of political enfeeblement?

I watch and listen to him and get the sense of a man stuffing himself at the buffet before it’s taken away. A man bellowing, or trying to bellow, about his superiority as his voice weakens. “Dominance,” “dominance,” “dominance” — he returned repeatedly to that word during his Mar-a-Lago news conference, a tic that was just as much a tell.

Also telling was the show he staged for Pager and three other Times reporters — Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Katie Rogers and David E. Sanger — on Wednesday evening, when he welcomed them into the Oval Office for a two-hour interview whose duration was part of its point, as Trump himself made clear.

“Two hours,” he said to the reporters as the interview concluded. “I could go nine hours.”

With the reporters present, he took a phone call from Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia. The call’s contents were off the record, but its length — “the better part of an hour,” as the reporters described it — was something Trump seemed to want noted. He asked them, “Do you think Biden could do that?”

Rogers wrote that Trump sought to “present himself as indefatigable, projecting stamina and energy for a news organization he has accused of seditious behavior for reporting about his health and age.”

And Trump said unabashedly that the only limits to his power were his “own morality.” Which, to my ears, means no limits at all. I’ve never observed in Trump anything approaching a conventional moral code, a set of ethical bearings that circumscribe his conduct. I’ve beheld gripes, grudges, whims and wants — so very, very many wants.

For months now, he has been acting with a rapacity remarkable even for someone so famously given to greed. He’s creating an ostentatious White House ballroom in a new East Wing as tall as the main White House building. He’s attempting to stamp his visage on both sides of a $1 coin to commemorate the country’s 250th birthday. He’s constructing a whole new monument — a gaudy arch — for the occasion, too.

He announced the building of a “golden fleet” of “Trump class” warships. He put his name on the Kennedy Center and on the U.S. Institute of Peace. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff, or no one remembers you,” he reportedly said during his first term in the presidency. In this second term, he’s in “don’t you dare forget me” mode, and the infinity of directions in which that impulse could sprawl is terrifying.

Could it spread to Greenland? That’s a buffet item he’s eyeing. To Canada? He has salivated over it. He’s lavish with threats. He’s brimming with need. He wants more affirmation. He bristles when it’s not immediately forthcoming.

“I wish you could explain to me what the hell’s going on with the mind of the public,” Trump told Republican members of the House at a party gathering last week, alluding to polls that portray an unhappy, restive electorate. “Because we have — we have the right policy.” Those pesky voters! So unappreciative.

Trump warned the lawmakers that they’ve “got to win the midterms” because if they don’t, “I’ll get impeached.”

That’s the statement of a man who is keenly aware of his power’s mortality — and who seems to be combating and quelling his anxiety by taking an ever more extravagant power trip.

If you look at the video from the guard's cell phone, he falls down when the car hits him and had to be taken to a hospital.

Today, Democratic senator Mark Kelly of Arizona sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Defense Department, Navy Secretary John Phelan, and the Navy Department for violating his First Amendment rights, the Speech and Debate Clause of the U.S. Constitution, the separation of powers, due process, the law that establishes ranks for retired commissioned officers (10 USC 1370), and the Administrative Procedure Act that establishes the ways in which agencies can make regulations.

While this sounds complicated, at its heart it’s about the attempt of the Donald J. Trump administration to trample Congress and create a military loyal to Trump alone.

Defense Secretary Hegseth came to his position from his job as a weekend host on the Fox News Channel. Before that, he served in the Army Reserve and the National Guard but, as Kelly and Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) noted in a Military Times op-ed questioning Hegseth’s fitness for the position, he never rose to a command position and his “track record falls short of military standards.” He is the least-experienced defense secretary in U.S. history.

His attack on Kelly, who is a retired Navy officer and astronaut, began after Kelly and five other Democrats in Congress—Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), and Representatives Chris Deluzio (D-PA), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), and Jason Crow (D-CO)—all of whom are veterans, released a video on November 18, 2025, in which they warned members of the military and the intelligence community that the administration was “pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens.”

“Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution,” the video continued. “Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home. Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders; you must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution. We know this is hard and that it’s a difficult time to be a public servant. But whether you’re serving in the CIA, the Army, our Navy, the Air Force, your vigilance is critical.”

The lawmakers concluded: “Know that we have your back, because now, more than ever, the American people need you. We need you to stand up for our laws, our Constitution, and who we are as Americans.”

The video simply reiterated the law, but White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller promptly posted on social media, “Democrat lawmakers are now openly calling for insurrection,” and by the next day, Trump was reposting comments that called for the lawmakers to be arrested, “thrown out of their offices,” “frog marched out of their homes at 3:00 AM with FOX News cameras filming the whole thing,” and “charged with sedition.” He reposted “Insurrection. TREASON!” and a message from a user who wrote: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!!”

On November 24, the “Department of War” posted on social media that it was investigating Kelly, after “serious allegations of misconduct.” It suggested that Kelly could be recalled to active duty “for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures.”

Over a photograph of the medals on his uniform, Kelly responded on social media: “When I was 22 years old, I commissioned as an Ensign in the United States Navy and swore an oath to the Constitution. I upheld that oath through flight school, multiple deployments on the USS Midway, 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm, test pilot school, four space shuttle flights at NASA, and every day since I retired—which I did after my wife Gabby was shot in the head while serving her constituents.

“In combat, I had a missile blow up next to my jet and flew through anti-aircraft fire to drop bombs on enemy targets. At NASA, I launched on a rocket, commanded the space shuttle, and was part of the recovery mission that brought home the bodies of my astronaut classmates who died on Columbia. I did all of this in service to this country that I love and has given me so much.

“Secretary Hegseth’s tweet is the first I heard of this. I also saw the President’s posts saying I should be arrested, hanged, and put to death.

“If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work. I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution.”

Charlotte Clymer, who writes Charlotte’s Web Thoughts, walked readers through Kelly’s citations. They include the Navy Pilot Astronaut Badge, earned by fewer than 200 service members, and the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. As Clymer notes, the NASA Distinguished Service Medal is “the highest award bestowed by NASA and one of the rarest awards in the federal government.” Since the medal was created in 1959, it has been awarded fewer than 400 times.

On January 5, Hegseth issued a formal censure of Kelly, saying Kelly’s call for military personnel to refuse unlawful orders “undermines the chain of command,” “counsels disobedience,” “creates confusion about duty,” “brings discredit upon the armed forces,” and “is conduct unbecoming an officer.” Hegseth said he was directing the secretary of the Navy to look into reducing Kelly’s retirement grade.

Kelly responded: “Over twenty-five years in the U.S. Navy, thirty-nine combat missions, and four missions to space, I risked my life for this country and to defend our Constitution—including the First Amendment rights of every American to speak out. I never expected that the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense would attack me for doing exactly that.

“My rank and retirement are things that I earned through my service and sacrifice for this country. I got shot at. I missed holidays and birthdays. I commanded a space shuttle mission while my wife Gabby recovered from a gunshot wound to the head—all while proudly wearing the American flag on my shoulder. Generations of servicemembers have made these same patriotic sacrifices for this country, earning the respect, appreciation, and rank they deserve.

“Pete Hegseth wants to send the message to every single retired servicemember that if they say something he or Donald Trump doesn’t like, they will come after them the same way. It’s outrageous and it is wrong. There is nothing more un-American than that.

“If Pete Hegseth, the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in our country’s history, thinks he can intimidate me with a censure or threats to demote me or prosecute me, he still doesn’t get it. I will fight this with everything I’ve got—not for myself, but to send a message back that Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump don’t get to decide what Americans in this country get to say about their government.”

Kelly’s lawsuit notes that the First Amendment prohibits the government from retaliating against those engaging in protected speech and that the Constitution’s protection of the speech and debate of lawmakers provides additional safeguards. Indeed, the lawsuit says, “never in our nation’s history has the Executive Branch imposed military sanctions on a Member of Congress for engaging in disfavored political speech.”

If the court permits that unprecedented step, the lawsuit argues, it would allow the executive branch to punish members of Congress for engaging in their duty of congressional oversight.

Kelly asked the court “to declare the censure letter, reopening determination, retirement grade determination proceedings, and related actions unlawful and unconstitutional; to vacate those actions; to enjoin their enforcement; and to preserve the status of a coequal Congress and an apolitical military.”

The warning Kelly and the other five Democratic lawmakers offered to military personnel that they must refuse illegal orders took on renewed meaning this evening. Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, John Ismay, Julian E. Barnes, Riley Mellen, and Christiaan Triebert of the New York Times reported that when the U.S. military attacked a small boat apparently coming from Venezuela on September 2, 2025, the first such attack of what now number at least 35, it used a secret aircraft that had been disguised to look like a civilian plane.

The journalists report that disguising a military aircraft to look like a civilian plane is a war crime called “perfidy.” “Shielding your identity is an element of perfidy,” former deputy judge advocate general of the U.S. Air Force retired Major General Steven J. Lepper told the reporters. “If the aircraft flying above is not identifiable as a combatant aircraft, it should not be engaged in combatant activity.” The Defense Department manual concerning the law of war explains that combatants must distinguish themselves from the civilian population and may not “kill or wound the enemy by resort to perfidy.”

It explicitly prohibits “feigning civilian status and then attacking.”