Washington Post:
Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all
As two men clung to a stricken, burning ship targeted by SEAL Team 6, the Joint Special Operations commander followed the defense secretary’s order to leave no survivors.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.
Reuters:
Trump’s campaign of retribution: At least 470 targets and counting
Reuters documented at least 470 targets of retribution under Trump’s leadership – from federal employees and prosecutors to universities and media outlets. The list illuminates the sweeping effort by the president and his administration to punish dissent and reshape the government.
The Trump vengeance campaign fuses personal vendettas with a drive for cultural and political dominance, Reuters found. His administration has wielded executive power to punish perceived foes – firing prosecutors who investigated his bid to overturn the 2020 election, ordering punishments of media organizations seen as hostile, penalizing law firms tied to opponents, and sidelining civil servants who question his policies. Many of those actions face legal challenges.
At the same time, Trump and his appointees have used the government to enforce ideology: ousting military leaders deemed “woke,” slashing funds for cultural institutions held to be divisive, and freezing research grants to universities that embraced diversity initiatives.
Reuters reached out to every person and institution that Trump or his subordinates singled out publicly for retribution, and reviewed hundreds of official orders, directives and public records. The result: the most comprehensive accounting yet of his campaign of payback.
The analysis revealed two broad groups of people and organizations targeted for retaliation.
POLITICO:
How Trump's base could break
A significant portion of 2024 Trump voters — more than a third — do not consider themselves to be MAGA Republicans, according to The POLITICO Poll.
President Donald Trump has held his coalition together throughout much of the first year of his second term in office like few other figures could — albeit at times with bailing twine and a red MAGA cap — but cracks are starting to show, according to the latest results from The POLITICO Poll.
And it’s clear whoever tries to pick up the MAGA mantle ahead of 2028 has some serious work to do to keep the coalition together.
Cliff Schecter/Blue Amp:
Trump’s Only Real Theory of Politics: ‘He Said Nice Things About Me’
Trump's never been guided by ideology — only ego. His one rule's simple: flatter him, you’re in; don’t, you’re done. From Pence to Putin, it's the real theory that explains every move he's ever made.
There’s something almost poetic—even mythopoetic—about how so much of the literati, glitterati, and paparazzi who cover Donald Trump still don’t get him. After nine long years of chaos, coups, and covfefe, many pundits, reporters, authors, and influencers continue to inanely analyze him as some Machiavellian mastermind.
Others who don’t bestow upon him that level of credulous pornographic composition or oral flatulence, still pretend, or worse believe, there’s purpose to what Trump does beyond the obvious. Some hidden complexity determinative of his impulsive, unpredictable, and self-sabotaging conduct.
And this is why there were so many ludicrous takes about why Trump got on so well with Zohran Mamdani—or kissed his arse, if you will. It’s because Mamdani is from New York! Nope. It’s because Mamdani is a winner! Maybe a tick, but still not even close. Lotsa folks doubted it was even real in our days of AI fake-outs.
Paul Waldman/Public Notice:
Why MAGA is coming apart at the seams
Turns out they're not in it for Trump, they're in it for themselves.
The MAGA movement has always been defined by faith and loyalty: Faith in Donald Trump and his power to remake the world, and loyalty toward him in all things, even when his words and actions might lead some to doubt.
Now, however, their faith is being tested and their loyalty is wavering.
In part, this is a rather simple story about failure and weakness. It’s not hard to keep a movement together when it’s succeeding, but when the ship begins taking on water, the crew starts looking for lifeboats to jump into. But even more fundamentally, the events of the last few weeks demonstrate that MAGA was always a more rickety craft than it appeared.
While the fissures have been building for months, last Friday was a particularly disorienting day for the MAGA faithful.
New York Times:
Trump’s Response to Shooting Shows Intensified Anti-Immigration Stance
The president is furiously demanding limits on migration and attacking ethnic groups as he steps up his efforts to equate immigration with crime and economic distress.
And in remarkably derogatory and personal terms, he assailed Somali refugees as preying in gangs on innocent Americans, and Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, who emigrated to the United States from Somalia and became a citizen 25 years ago, as someone who “probably came into the U.S.A. illegally.” He described her as “always wrapped in her swaddling hijab.”
Those statements came after he had ordered the administration to review the status of green card holders from 19 nations that he has subjected to a travel ban.
It is not clear what authority Mr. Trump has to follow through on his demands or how he will seek to have them carried out. Under federal law, for example, U.S. citizens can generally only be denaturalized if they are found to have concealed material facts about their background in gaining citizenship or to have misrepresented themselves in the process.
But the ferocity of his response was in keeping with his longstanding views on immigration, race and national identity and what he sees as a direct link from those factors to crime, national security threats and economic distress — even though those links, where they exist, are often tenuous and more complex than he makes out
