Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has largely banned military officials – including the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force – from speaking with Congress unless they coordinate with a centralized office that reports to him.
After dozens of veteran reporters rejected the Defense Department’s prohibitive new press policy, and handed in their media badges this week, the only journalists left with credentials to enter the Pentagon were a mix of freelancers, foreign media members and staffers from MAGA-boosting outlets.
Dozens of print and broadcast journalists walked out of the Pentagon Wednesday in the wake of nearly every American news organization – including Trump-friendly networks Fox News and Newsmax – refusing to follow Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s media restrictions.
These are the suck-ups who signed on to Hegseth’s restrictions. Any so-called “news” from these suck-ups should be treated as Pentagon-approved propaganda:
… only 15 people out of hundreds of credentialed reporters had signed the new press pledge.
Of those signatories, two are from the pro-Trump cable channel, One America News; one is from right-wing website The Federalist; and another is from ultra-conservative newspaper The Epoch Times.
The remaining 11 reporters include freelancers for foreign-based organizations and a couple of little-known independent sites that appear to publish their work solely on social media.
“A reporter for the Turkish newspaper Akşam signed the agreement, as did three individuals from the Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency and two Turkish freelancers,” the Post reported. “Other signers included a reporter for The Australian, a News Corp-owned Australian paper; an Afghan freelancer; and three lesser-known operations, AWPS News, the India Globe and a blog called USA Journal Korea.”
Additionally, two members of the Jordanian TV network Al Taghier signed an older version of the policy, which had been scrapped and revised amid negotiations and pushback from the Pentagon Press Association and other press advocacy groups.
Prior to a swarm of defense reporters symbolically exiting the Pentagon together Wednesday afternoon, after handing in their badges and cleaning out their desks, only one media outlet had publicly agreed to the restrictive pledge – One America News.
Not long after losing his bid to deploy the U.S. military in Illinois at the U.S. Circuit Court level, President Donald Trump asked for help from the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). But he’s already running into difficulty in the form of one of his own appointed justices.
Politico legal correspondent Josh Gerstein reported Friday that while the Court has agreed to hear Trump’s case and has given the State of Illinois a deadline of 5 PM on Monday to respond to Trump, there’s a catch: According to Gerstein, Justice Amy Coney Barrett declined Trump’s request of an administrative stay of a lower court order preventing him from deploying troops in Illinois borders.
In legal parlance, a higher court can “stay” a lower court’s order — meaning pause it while litigation plays out — if a complainant asks for one. However, the 6-3 conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court not granting Trump his stay means that his administration will be unable to have federal troops patrolling the streets of America’s third-largest city.
https://www.alternet.org/trump-supreme-court-justice-2674210358
A federal appeals court on Saturday rejected the Trump administration’s request to immediately allow the deployment of National Guard troops to Illinois, leaving in place a lower court’s order that blocked the mobilization temporarily.
In a brief order, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the federal government remains barred from deploying troops but that any out-of-state Guard members in Illinois do not need to return to their home states for now. The mobilization had included hundreds of soldiers called up from the Texas National Guard.
U.S. District Judge April Perry had issued an order blocking the National Guard deployment on Thursday after expressing skepticism about the administration’s assertions that the soldiers were needed to protect federal agents from violent protesters.
A separate federal judge in Oregon has also blocked President Donald Trump’s effort to send troops to Portland, though another appellate court appeared poised to overrule that decision during arguments earlier this week.
In both cases, the Democratic governors of the states sued Trump, arguing that the administration deliberately miscast mostly peaceful demonstrations as violent to justify further deployments.
Perry’s order is set to remain in effect until at least October 23, though she could extend it.
Trump has threatened to expand his campaign to other Democratic-led cities, after sending Guard troops this year to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., despite objections from their mayors.
A trial court in Los Angeles ruled the deployment of Guard troops there during the summer was illegal, though an appeals court later granted a stay of that ruling while the administration’s appeal is pending.
While the National Guard is part of the U.S. military, during domestic deployments it is usually controlled by governors in response to events such as natural disasters.
President Donald Trump is facing criticism from conservatives after signing an executive order pledging U.S. military protection for Qatar — a Gulf state accused of sheltering Hamas leadership.
The Order
Trump’s executive order states, “Over the years, the United States and the State of Qatar have been bound together by close cooperation, shared interests and the close relationship between our armed forces. … In recognition of this history, and in light of the continuing threats to the State of Qatar posed by foreign aggression, it is the policy of the United States to guarantee the security and territorial integrity of the State of Qatar against external attack.”
‘Threat to Peace’
The order goes a step further, declaring the United States will treat an attack on Qatar as a direct threat. “The United States shall regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty or critical infrastructure of the State of Qatar as a threat to the peace and security of the United States,” it continued.
Outrage
The latest defense agreement has outraged many on the right, who argue that backing Qatar undermines American values. One critic of the decision, Fox News host Mark Levin, expressed his skepticism, referring to “our new protectorate, Qatar.”
Conservative backlash
Levin warned the agreement could drag the U.S. into unnecessary conflict. “If the leadership of Hamas in Qatar is killed by Israel, are we going to war with Israel? Wouldn’t it have been better to condition any military defense of Qatar on some basic requirements? For example: turnover the Hamas leaders; no more funding of terrorists worldwide: no more funding of Marxist-Islamist groups in the United States. This is the bare minimum.” The Fox News host continued his criticism, this time directing it at conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. “I’m sure Qatarlson and the other Qatarites and assorted grifters and bigots will denounce a deal that ostensibly commits our children to fight for Qatar.”
https://knewz.com/conservatives-turn-on-trump-over-pledge-to-defend-qatar
Hundreds of protesters have poured onto Chicago’s streets to condemn President Donald Trump‘s decision to send Texas National Guard troops into the city.
On Wednesday, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Texas National Guard troops were headed to protect the Broadview ICE facility.
Later that evening, a military spokesperson told the Associated Press the Texas National Guard troops who had arrived in Chicago were protecting federal property in the city.
Though the total number of National Guard troops in Chicago is unclear, a mission summary from the U.S. military said there would be 200 soldiers from the Texas National Guard and another 300 from the Illinois National Guard.
Locals responded to the National Guard’s incursion into the city by marching through downtown Chicago. The city’s mayor and the state’s governor have vehemently opposed the Trump administration’s plan to send troops to the Chicago area.
The protest was broadly opposed to Trump’s immigration crackdowns and his decision to send troops into the city.
“We can stand up for people that can’t stand up for themselves,” Jinah Yun-Mitchell, 59, told the Chicago Sun-Times. “The rule of law is falling apart, so we all need to do something to make sure that it doesn’t keep going in this direction.”
Another protester, who declined to share his last name to protect himself and his family, told Block Club Chicago that he was marching for people he personally knows who have been detained by ICE.
“In my community where I teach, there’s kids not coming to school for a month at a time because they’re scared of what can happen to them,” he told the outlet. “I’m overwhelmed with blinding anger and depression for the people who are being affected.”
He said ICE agents “shot my friend in the face” with non-lethal rounds during another demonstration at an ICE facility.
The gathered protesters made their message to Trump and the masked federal agents clear, chanting: “Donald Trump, you stupid clown; ICE ain’t welcome in this town.”
Trump has justified sending troops to Chicago and Portland, Oregon, by insisting that federal immigration agents need protection in the wake of a shooting that killed two detainees at an ICE facility in Dallas. Trump is not sending the National Guard to Dallas, where the shooting actually occurred.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has moved to block the National Guard deployment, and a ruling on that request is scheduled for Thursday.
Pritzker called the military deployments “Trump’s invasion,” and Trump called for Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to be jailed.
“Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect ICE Officers! Governor Pritzker also!” the president wrote on Truth Social.
Johnson said he was “not going anywhere” and that he would “stay firm as the mayor of this amazing city.”
Pritzker wrote on X that Trump was sprinting toward “full-blown authoritarianism.”
“Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power. What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?” he wrote. “Masked agents already are grabbing people off the street, separating children from their parents. Creating fear.”
The president has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act if the courts rule that his use of the National Guard is illegal.
“If I had to enact it, I’d do that,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “If people were being killed, and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that.”
As the decision looms, the National Guard and those opposing Trump in Chicago are taking to the streets.
Earlier on Wednesday, Alderman Jesse Fuentes — who was handcuffed by a federal agent on Friday — spoke to the gathered protesters.
“As your alderperson, not just of the 26th Ward because every Chicagoan matters, I will make sure that we utilize every legislative tool at our disposal to slow ICE down to protect our neighbors,” Fuentes said, according to Block Club Chicago.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “my way or the highway” message to hundreds of generals and admirals at a summit in Virginia last week has sparked fears that some top leaders may choose to bow out of the U.S. military entirely.
The departure of two senior leaders last week stoked those worries, though the Pentagon says they were unrelated to Hegseth’s ultimatum.
“His speech directly attacked the values of many of the senior officers and enlisted members in the audience, and I would expect many of them to demonstrate their disgust by retiring,” Don Christensen, a retired Air Force colonel and former military lawyer who watched the speech, said of Hegseth.
The two senior military leaders to leave were Gen. Thomas Bussiere, the head of Air Force Global Strike Command, and Gen. Bryan Fenton, head of U.S. Special Operations Command based at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla.
Bussiere, who was appointed by President Trump, was previously nominated to serve as the Air Force’s vice chief of staff in August, but his nomination was pulled just weeks later.
In his retirement announcement, posted to Facebook on Tuesday, he cited “personal and family reasons” as the main driver for his departure, noting he had made the “difficult” decision after much reflection.
Fenton’s retirement came after three years in the role. “FWIW, Gen. Fenton was planning on retiring, it was not tied to SecWar’s speech,” Kristina Wong, an adviser to Hegseth, wrote last week on the social platform X.
The high-profile exits came just hours after Hegseth’s speech to hundreds of top admirals and generals in Quantico, Va., in which he outlined his vision of a military void of “woke garbage,” proposing less restrictive rules of engagement and fewer waivers that allow troops to have a beard. He also declared he would curtail whistleblower and inspector general functions, change how the military handles allegations of hazing and other types of abuse, and allow drill sergeants to “put their hands on recruits.”
“If the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign,” Hegseth told the mostly stoic audience.
The comments prompted The New York Times to run an unusual headline last week, in which it invited senior military leaders to speak to the outlet should they indeed decide to resign.
Some Democrats are urging military leaders who disagree with Hegseth to stay where they are.
“If the challenge was ‘get out,’ then I would say to those generals, ‘stay put,’” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), an Air Force veteran, said on CNN last week. “Because we need you. We need you and your experience to counter the message of Mr. Hegseth and frankly the president himself.”
Hegseth also promised to continue firing top brass who did not align with his vision. And Friday, he announced the ouster of Jon Harrison, the chief of staff of the secretary of the Navy, who was an appointee during the first Trump administration.
“As you have seen and the media has obsessed over, I have fired a number of senior officers since taking over,” Hegseth said in his Tuesday speech. “The rationale, for me, has been straightforward: It’s nearly impossible to change a culture with the same people who helped create or even benefited from that culture, even if that culture was created by a previous president and previous secretary.”
Carrie Lee, a senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund, said she would not be surprised to see other retirement announcements following Hegseth’s pointed words.
“Even though [Bussiere’s] nomination for vice chief of staff of the Air Force had been pulled and his successor had been announced — there wasn’t anywhere else for him to really go, right, career-wise — but the fact that the announcement dropped kind of the night of Hegseth’s speech, I think that’s probably not a coincidence,” Lee told The Hill.
“I would not be surprised to see retirements,” she added. “This is already happening at the more kind of lower senior to kind of upper, mid-grade level. So thinking about colonels and one-stars and two-stars, folks who are refusing assignments, choosing to retire rather than stay in the force, making kind of very personal decisions with their families about whether this is an institution that reflects their values or not.”
Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution think tank, said he doubts there will be a mass exodus, but he does sense a “widespread anxiety” among those in the armed forces.
“When I talk to military officers, they have a range of views. Most of them don’t want to pick public fights with Trump. Most of them are not at the point of considering resignation. Some of them even like certain aspects of the administration,” he told The Hill. “You put it all together, there are very few people who are indifferent to these kinds of dramatic events, these kinds of changes.”
He added that he believes there are very few people who are getting ready to resign, “but there are a lot of people who are somewhere between nervous and anxious about where the all-volunteer force is headed, where the country is headed, and for the most part, they’re just trying to roll with the punches and do their jobs as long as they’re not being asked to violate the law or their oath.”
Lee pointed out that in declining to use his speech to focus on several pressing issues within the military, including steadily rising suicide rates among service members and persistent sexual assault rates, and instead harping on the Pentagon’s process for handling complaints and accusations, Hegseth likely alienated his top leaders.
“The Army has been dealing with very high suicide rates. It’s been dealing with a sexual assault crisis. It’s been dealing with a lot of people issues. And so they have made some very necessary, in my opinion, changes to the organization and to organizational culture that it sounds like Hegseth really wants to roll back,” she said.
“For many of the officers who are responsible for formations of troops and watched the suicide epidemic really ravage their units, and watched sexual assault tear units apart … to then be told that ‘we don’t care about that anymore,’ when the Army is really a people organization, it doesn’t surprise me that there’s a lot of folks who aren’t going to stick around for that.”
Bussiere’s retirement announcement also follows that of the Air Force’s chief of staff, Gen. David Allvin, who in August said he would retire in November after serving two years of his four-year term. Though Bussiere did not mention Hegseth’s speech in his resignation note, he suggested he would find other ways to support the U.S. military after he leaves.
“While I’m stepping away from active duty, my commitment to service remains. I look forward to finding new ways to support our Air Force, our national defense and the incredible people who make it all possible,” he wrote.
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5541871-defense-secretary-hegseth-resignation-fears
President Donald Trump announced in a social media post on Wednesday night that he is “designating ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION.” He made the same declaration in 2020 amid the Black Lives Matter protests against the police killing of George Floyd, with no real effect on the ground.
But Trump’s new declaration came with another, more specific order: “I will also be strongly recommending that those funding ANTIFA be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices.” And that may be the real significance of his decision.
There is no such thing as a domestic terrorist organization list in the United States. When Congress debated the first counterterrorism legislation in the 1990s, the Clinton administration and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) pushed for sweeping domestic police powers. It was Republicans who opposed those measures at the time because they worried that counterterrorism would be weaponized against the right.
As a compromise, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 only allowed the government to designate and ban foreign terrorist organizations. The first Trump administration reportedly tried to paint Antifa as a foreign organization by pointing to Antifa activists who fought for Kurdish militias in Syria. The problem is that the same Kurdish militias were also allied with the U.S. military, which introduced a foreign policy complication.
The current administration could try to use the Palestinian solidarity movement to paint the left as foreign terrorists. Both Republican politicians and the ADL have tried to imply that student protesters are materially connected to Hamas. As with the Kurdish connection, however, the Palestinian connection to Antifa is fairly stretched.
During the 2020 unrest, then–Attorney General Bill Barr also reportedly told prosecutors to consider using the “seditious conspiracy” law against rioters. The law, passed during the Civil War to round up Confederate guerrillas, punishes any group of people that violently opposes the authority of the U.S. government. The government did not end up pursuing those charges.
The most obvious measure is one that Trump has already hinted at using: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. After protesters disrupted Trump’s dinner last week, Trump told reporters that he asked the attorney general “to look into that in terms of RICO, bringing RICO cases against them. Criminal RICO. Because they should be put in jail, what they’re doing to this country is really subversive.”
Originally designed to go after the mafia, the RICO Act allows prosecutors to charge an entire organization for criminal behaviors. In September 2023, the state of Georgia tried to use its own state-level RICO law to prosecute members of Stop Cop City, a protest movement against a new police training center. A judge threw out the charges last week.
As many critics have pointed out, Antifa doesn’t exist—at least not as a centralized organization. Anti-fascist is a label that many different left-wing and anarchist activists around the country have adopted, along with similar tactics and aesthetics. But the vagueness of the label can help rather than hinder the Trump administration, if its goal is to crack down on political enemies.
The RICO Act allows prosecutors to define more or less anything they want as a mafia organization, and the charges are nearly impossible to defend against, partly because the government can seize the defendant’s assets before trial, making it impossible to pay a defense lawyer.
Trump’s reference to “those funding ANTIFA” is a hint that he wants to tie Antifa rioting to various progressive donors, as in earlier attempts to go after the Palestinian movement. In May 2024, the House Oversight Committee and House Education Committee demanded information from a wide range of philanthropists—George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Pritzker family’s Libra Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—about their connection to campus protests.
At the time, Foundation for Middle East Peace President Lara Friedman told Reason that this investigation was meant “to demonize parts of the tax-exempt sector that a part of the Republican Party views as a key target in the war on woke….If you make this about supposedly fighting antisemitism, you bring parts of the Democratic Party with you.”
Now that the Republicans are in power, they may calculate that the war on woke no longer needs Democratic support, and they can go after their targets much more directly. But it doesn’t take much imagination at all to see what the retaliation by a future Democratic administration might look like.
The Biden administration used seditious conspiracy charges to pin the January 2021 riot at the Capitol on the leaders of the right-wing Proud Boys, whom Trump later pardoned. Trump himself was charged under Georgia’s RICO law in 2023 for alleged election interference, a case that is currently on pause but could be resumed in the future.
Of course, Trump’s declaration about domestic terrorism was empty bluster in 2020. Given how much blood the Trump administration tastes from its successful attacks on critical media, and the fact that Democrats have broken the seal on other forms of domestic repression, this time might turn out to be more serious. The tools are there for a political crackdown—not a full descent into dictatorship, but for an escalation of the current surveillance state.
The U.S. military conducted a strike on Friday against a vessel that was allegedly transferring drugs, President Trump said.
Why it matters: This was the fourth such strike in recent weeks as part of a broader Trump administration military campaign against drug traffickers off the coasts of Venezuela.
What he is saying: Trump wrote on his Truth Social account that the vessel was attacked in international waters in the U.S. military southern command area of responsibility. He also posted a video of the strike.
- He claimed the vessel was “affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization conducting narcotrafficking” and that “three male narcoterrorists” were killed in the strike. No U.S. forces were harmed, Trunp noted.
- “Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking illicit narcotics, and was transiting along a known narcotrafficking passage enroute to poison Americans”, Trump claimed.
- “STOP SELLING FENTANYL, NARCOTICS, AND ILLEGAL DRUGS IN AMERICA, AND COMMITTING VIOLENCE AND TERRORISM AGAINST AMERICANS!!!”, he stressed.
The big picture: President Trump ordered seven warships carrying 4,500 personnel — including three guided-missile destroyers and at least one attack submarine — to the waters off Venezuela.
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/20/us-strikes-vessel-drugs-trump-narcotics
