The Troops Deserve Better than Hegseth
The president, the secretary of defense, and the top Navy officials are blithely ignoring the suffering of the sailors at sea.
The jerks in the federal courts might have VICIOUSLY and UNGRATEFULLY taken President Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center earlier this year, but fear not: The tireless patriots on the center’s board have thought of a new solution. The board voted yesterday to update the building’s inscription to read: “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.”
Not that any restoring and renovating has actually happened yet, but first things first: gotta make the Make-a-Wish president happy. Happy Friday.
Join Catherine Rampell and JVL for Receipts Live on Substack and YouTube today at 12:30 p.m. EDT.
Of Sailors and Scoundrels
by William Kristol
The USS Abraham Lincoln, one of our eleven nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, left port in San Diego on November 21 for a routine deployment to the Indo-Pacific region. It was redirected to the Middle East in January 2026 in anticipation of Donald Trump’s attack on Iran. But despite the greater attention that would presumably be paid to service members engaged in a theater of war, credible reports emerged several weeks later, in mid-April, of unusually poor living conditions besetting the sailors aboard the ship, and of family members concerned about the sailors’ well-being.
Nothing to see here, we were told by the brass. The reports “grossly mischaracterized” the situation, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle assured the service, the families, and the country. This is the same Caudle who, the New York Times reported, became CNO last year after campaigning for the job by sucking up to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a grossly partisan, political manner unbefitting an officer, especially a service chief. He did this both before and after Hegseth fired Caudle’s widely respected predecessor, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, apparently because she is a woman.
Hegseth also chimed in about reports from the Lincoln, calling them “fake news.”
The families of the service members deployed on the ship responded that the reports were not fake.
They were telling the truth. Hegseth and Caudle were not.
Nor, it seems, did Hegseth and Caudle do anything to address the situation. Last week, on August 5, MSNOW Pentagon correspondent Priya Sridhar reported on conversations with a dozen family members of sailors aboard the Lincoln increasingly alarmed about morale, safety, and conditions on the ship, as the carrier entered its ninth month at sea.
On the evening of August 6, in a two-hundred-person meeting at Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego, families confronted acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao and other Navy leaders about the situation. Cao is acting secretary because his predecessor, John Phelan, was fired in April of this year after repeatedly clashing with Hegseth. This is the same Cao who, after retiring from Navy service as a captain in 2021, ran for Congress in 2022 and for the Senate in 2024 in Virginia, and had received some national attention when he said “witchcraft” had taken over the city of Monterey, California. In 2024, in response to a question about military recruiting, Cao said, “What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat ‘em, and ask for seconds. Those are young men and women that are going to win wars.” This presumably is what got him a job as under secretary of the Navy in Hegseth’s Pentagon, and got him promoted—even though Phelan had so little confidence in Cao that he routinely excluded him from briefings and meetings.
Cao didn’t reassure families at the meeting. Nor did an unidentified representative of the Navy brass, who was asked about a sailor who had reportedly jumped off the Lincoln a few days earlier. The official responded by saying it wasn’t clear if the sailor had fallen or jumped, and that in any case the sailor was back on board and was “fine.” This met with incredulity and jeers in the room. It now turns out the sailor had jumped on August 3, and in fact was in the water for about an hour before he was rescued. Navy officials didn’t contact his wife about the incident until four days after her husband jumped overboard—until the day after the town hall in San Diego. And this week, the Navy Times reported that several Lincoln sailors have tried to go overboard during their extended deployment.
Yesterday, Hegseth pushed back on the reports of poor conditions aboard the Lincoln.
“We make sure that every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment,” he told reporters during a visit to Panama.
Nicole Conrad’s son is serving on the Lincoln. Conrad says she would like Hegseth to visit the Lincoln and see the conditions for the roughly 5,000 sailors and marines onboard. “Go visit,” she said. “If you want to sit here and you want to say that Trump is taking care of the soldiers, go yourself.” Mrs. Conrad, by the way, says she voted for Trump.
As one astute tweeter pointed out:
ghislaine maxwell is living a better life in that prison camp todd blanche transferred her to, than the sailors on USS Abraham Lincoln.
The United States Navy is a large and capable organization. Its budget is close to $300 billion a year. It is capable of adequately resupplying an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. It is capable of acting in response to reports of conditions endangering sailors’ well-being. It is capable of managing its ships and taking care of its personnel.
If the people in charge are using up sailors as carelessly and recklessly as they are using up their munitions, it’s because they don’t care enough to do otherwise.
The Navy announced on Thursday that it would send another carrier group to the Middle East, allowing the Lincoln to return to its home port in San Diego.
But it’s not just the Lincoln that should return home. It’s all the troops deployed to Donald Trump’s misbegotten and mismanaged war who should return. And their commanders and nominal “leaders”—from Donald Trump to Pete Hegseth to Daryl Caudle to Hung Cao—should be held accountable.
AROUND THE BULWARK
The Death of Reading Has Been Greatly Exaggerated… Reading is good. Reading more would be better. But literate societies can be susceptible to illiberalism, argues CATHY YOUNG.
Five Years Since the Fall of Kabul, the Betrayal Continues… When we forget Afghanistan, and the Americans and Afghans who fought there, we turn our backs on our own, writes WILL SELBER.
How to Save the Smithsonian… The institution was born of debate and chance. Surviving today’s culture wars requires grounding its mission in open inquiry, shared inheritance, and the objects in its collection, writes SARAH ROGERS MORRIS.
Brandon Herrera is running for Congress in Texas… and THE TRIO have discovered a very strange side of his public persona.
Trump’s Kennedy Center Obsession Is Getting Embarrassing… Trump is finding new ways to fight old battles he’s already lost. SONNY BUNCH and ANDREW EGGER discuss the latest absurd vote by Trump’s Kennedy Center Board.
Quick Hits
HELD WITHOUT BOND: One of the Supreme Court’s highest-profile decisions next term will involve the Trump administration’s “detention without bond” policy, under which any illegal immigrant detained by ICE—even if they have no criminal record and have lived in the country for many years—is treated as an “applicant seeking admission” who can be detained indefinitely as their cases proceed. Politico has the background on how Trump keeps losing at the lower level:
A divided panel of the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals concluded 2-1 that the Trump administration’s massive expansion of detention without bond was a distortion of decades-old immigration laws that were aimed primarily at recent border-crossers, not those who have resided in the country for years.
The administration’s unprecedented interpretation of ICE’s detention powers, adopted on July 8, 2025, ignited a tsunami of emergency lawsuits filed by people detained under the new policy. And judges across the country have overwhelmingly rejected the administration’s position, with more than 460 concluding it was a misreading of a 1996 statute while just 54 have sided with the Trump administration.
The deluge has left a trail of shattered families, strained courts, traumatized attorneys and a massive trail of legal rejection.
Earlier this year, the American Immigration Council reported that the number of people in ICE detention swelled by about 75 percent during Trump’s first year, with a corresponding 2,450 percent increase—more than twenty four times as many—in people held on any given day despite no criminal record.
TRUTH API SUIT: Donald Trump’s sale of early access to his Truth Social posts is an extraordinarily corrupt attempt to profit personally off the decisions he makes as the head of government. Now, the new practice has drawn a significant lawsuit from the Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation. CNBC has more:
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, notes that Trump’s posts on his own social media site often move financial markets with announcements about government policy, military actions and other decisions.
“President Donald Trump is charging $100,000 per month for advance access to his official government announcements on Truth Social, the social media platform he owns,” the civil suit says. . . .
The complaint alleges that the new service, known as Truth API, violates the First and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution by giving subscribers preferential access to Trump’s public announcements for “unreasonable sums.”
It’s a shame the plaintiffs have to make a constitutional argument—there really ought to be a law against this type of corruption.
BURYING THE HATCHET: Donald Trump and Elon Musk had a legendary breakup over Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” last year, which culminated in Musk calling for Trump’s third impeachment and accusing him of being in the Epstein files. Now the WSJ reports on Republicans’ yearlong effort to reconcile the two:
One day after the public falling out between the two men, Vice President JD Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles quietly reached out to Musk in an attempt to lower tensions. They figured things were so bad, they had little to lose by trying. The conversation went well, according to people familiar with the matter.
Early the next week, Musk called Trump and they also had a positive conversation, the people said. Musk followed the call with a social-media post expressing regret for some of his comments, saying they went too far.
But it would be many months before the relationship was more fully repaired. In September, Trump told a senior White House official that he wasn’t ready to bring Musk back into his inner circle.
Vance played a central role in mending ties between the two men, keeping open lines of communication with the businessman and his allies. Late last summer—in what was viewed as a peace offering by some of Trump’s advisers—Musk abandoned plans to start a new political party, according to people familiar with the matter, in part because he wanted to maintain a relationship with Vance, who is widely seen as a likely 2028 presidential candidate.
Check out JD the peacemaker over here! He can’t land the plane with Iran, but this isn’t bad work either—and just in time for Musk to plow another hundred million or so into the GOP’s midterm efforts.
Cheap Shots
Read this morning in the AP that this moron actually ordered the advanced jet fighter system on aircraft carries to revert back to steam catapults.
Let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Republicans are the party of a strong military.
Speaking of aircraft carriers, I saw that Trump is demanding that the new AC under construction be equipped with steam catapults instead of the more modern electromagnetic catapults. I'll leave this argument for the experts, but I'm convinced the only reason Trump wants catapults to be steam is because it reminds him of Top Gun. Nothing says 'Murica like Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer in their underwear.