Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

December 2, 2025 (Tuesday)

The news of last Friday, November 28, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a Joint Special Operations commander overseeing an attack on a small vessel carrying 11 people on September 2 to “kill everybody” is shaping up to be a fight over control of the United States government. 

A missile strike shattered the boat and set it afire, but two men survived. A second strike fulfilled Hegseth’s order. According to Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post, the commander, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, said “the survivors were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.” In a report, the Joint Special Operations Command said the second strike was not to kill survivors, but to remove a navigation hazard. 

There had already been significant pushback in the first place over the strikes, which legal experts say are unlawful. But the so-called double tap is illegal and a war crime even under the Trump administration’s flimsy justification for the strikes. 

Lawmakers of both parties have pushed back on what Senator Angus King (I-ME) yesterday called “a stone cold war crime.” The Republican chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL) and Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), have vowed to launch investigations of the incident, as well as of the larger operation. 

Yesterday, Hegseth and President Donald Trump began to distance themselves from the strike. Last night, Hegseth pinned the blame for the order on Admiral Bradley, posting: “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since.” 

Today, at a televised meeting, Trump’s Cabinet officers rallied around the president, telling him he is brilliant and a miracle worker, and Trump threw his support behind Hegseth. Clearly, the president intends to stand by the weekend Fox News Channel host he installed in one of the most important positions in the United States government. 

Shortly after the meeting, PBS NewsHour journalist Nick Schifrin reported that a U.S. official told him “[t]he US military struck the boat on September 2_four_times: twice to kill the 11 people who were on board, and twice more to sink the boat.” 

Trump is slipping. After he drew attention by posting wildly on social media last night, today’s meeting was clearly designed to demonstrate that the president is alert, active, and on top of things. But this made-for-television photo opportunity was anything but a display of competence: Trump could not stay awake while his Cabinet members were praising him, and so we had the wild visual of Secretary of State Marco Rubio praising Trump as the only man who could end Russia’s war in Ukraine, gesturing at the president sitting next to him, who was, to all appearances, sound asleep.

At the Cabinet meeting today, Trump announced that “the word ‘affordability’ is a Democrat scam,” insisting falsely that his economic policies were bringing down costs. Trump won the 2024 election in large part by promising to bring down inflation, but prices have risen under him at the same time that the economy is slowing. 

G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers pointed out today that Americans’ concerns about affordability are not just about costs, though. They are concerns about social mobility, economic inequality, and fairness, values that run opposite of Trump’s focus on funneling contracts and privileges to well-connected billionaires. People are unlikely to change their minds about the unreasonable power of that “Epstein class” as the deadline for the release of the Epstein files gets closer.   

Now Trump’s defense secretary, already in trouble for sharing classified information about a strike on Yemen’s Houthis over a non-secure messaging app on which a reporter had been included, is tangled up in a war crime. Today, libertarian conservative writer George Will noted in the Washington Post: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.” Will went on to refer to the Trump administration as a “moral slum.” 

On Sunday, Miranda Devine of the New York Post reported on a leaked document written for congressional leadership by retired and active-duty FBI agents and analysts of the first six months of Kash Patel’s leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They said Patel is “in over his head” and that deputy FBI director Dan Bongino is “something of a clown.” Both Patel and Bongino are arrogant, the report says, and have an “unfortunate obsession with social media.” Under Patel, they say, the FBI is a “rudderless ship” and “all f*cked up.”  

Trump made it clear during the Cabinet meeting that he has embraced the white nationalism of Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who reject the nation’s longstanding principle of welcoming immigrants and have vowed to purge the nation of them, concentrating on those who are Brown and Black. Yesterday, Noem called them “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.” 

“I hear…Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars, billions,” Trump said of Minnesota. “Every year, billions of dollars, and they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88%, they contribute nothing. I don't want ‘em in our country, I'll be honest with you, okay. Somebody would say, ‘Oh, that's not politically correct.’ I don't care. I don't want ‘em in our country. Their country's no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don't want ‘em in our country. I can say that about other countries, too. I can say it about other countries, too. We don't want them the hell, we gotta—we have to rebuild our country.” 

Trump embraced the idea, popular with white nationalists and the neo-Nazi right wing, that the U.S. must reject the multiculturalism of our entire history or perish. “You know, our country’s at a tipping point,” he said. “We could go bad. We’re at a tipping point. I don't know [if] people mind me saying that, but I'm saying it. We could go one way or the other, and we're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”

Then he turned on an elected representative, using dehumanizing rhetoric historically associated with violence against a people. “Ilhan Omar [D-MN] is garbage. She's garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people that work, these aren't people that say, ‘Let's go. Come on, let's make this place great.’ These are people that do nothing but complain. They complain, and from where they came from, they got nothing. You know, if they came from Paradise, and they said, ‘This isn’t Paradise.’ But when they come from hell, and they complain and do nothing but b*tch, we don't want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.” 

The Cabinet appeared to applaud, although it is not clear whether they were agreeing or hoping to stop him from talking like a Nazi. 

Tonight the administration put Miller and Noem’s policy into place, pausing all immigration applications from 19 countries and halting the processing of green cards and citizenship applications. Federal authorities say they will target Somali immigrants in Minneapolis–St. Paul in an upcoming sweep, although Jaylani Hussain, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says about 95% of the Somalis in Minnesota are already U.S. citizens and that about 50% were born in the U.S. 

According to Mike Balsamo and Steve Karnowski of the Associated Press, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey says Trump’s attack on Somalis “violates the moral fabric of what we stand by in this country as Americans. They have started businesses and created jobs. They have added to the cultural fabric of what Minneapolis is.” Minneapolis police—many of them Somali—will not work with federal officials in the sweep. 

Also tonight, Trump announced that because former president Joe Biden used an autopen, “[a]ny and all Documents, Proclamations, Executive Orders, Memorandums, or Contracts,” pardons, and commutations he signed are “invalid.” This is bonkers, of course. All modern presidents have used autopens, including Trump himself, and there is no mechanism in the Constitution for erasing the actions of a previous president by fiat. 

More to the point, as Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket pointed out, Trump himself said he had no idea who crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao was after having pardoned him. And in March, Trump told reporters he had not signed the proclamation invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, although his signature appears on the proclamation in the Federal Register.