U.S. President Donald Trump met executives from seven defense contractors on Friday, he announced in a social media post, as the Pentagon works to replenish supplies drawn down by U.S. strikes on Iran and other recent military operations. The meeting underscores the Trump administration’s drive to shore up weapons stocks after the Iran operation drew on munitions. “We just concluded a very good meeting with the largest U.S. Defense Manufacturing Companies where we discussed Production and Production Schedules,” Trump said in a social media post. Companies including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon parent RTX, BAE Systems, Boeing , Honeywell Aerospace, L3Harris and Northrop Grumman, attended the meeting, Trump said. Pentagon negotiators have not been able to reach terms with large defense contractors as quickly as they would like, a U.S. official told Reuters earlier this week. The administration has been steadily ratcheting up pressure on defense contractors to prioritize production over shareholder payouts. Trump signed an executive order in January to identify contractors deemed to be underperforming on contracts while distributing profits to shareholders. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and Israel’s military operations in Gaza, the U.S. has drawn down billions of dollars’ worth of weapons stockpiles, including artillery systems, ammunition and anti-tank missiles. In a sign of the preparations underway ahead of Friday’s gathering, Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg held a call with select defense contractors on Wednesday evening, a previously unreported development, people familiar with the matter told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment. At the center of the talks are deals with large contractors like Lockheed Martin, two government sources and one industry executive said. In January the company reached a seven-year agreement with the Pentagon to increase annual production capacity for its PAC-3 missile interceptors to 2,000 units a year from about 600 previously. The company has announced it expects to quadruple production of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, missile interceptors to 400 per year from 96. In the social media post following Friday’s meeting Trump said the companies had agreed to quadruple production of precision-guided munitions – but clarified efforts to increase production began three months ago. Demand for air defense systems such as the PAC‑3 has surged among the United States and its allies amid heightened geopolitical tensions and the conflict in Iran. The White House meeting also may coincide with the release of a supplemental budget request of around $50 billion, which Reuters was first to report on Tuesday. The new money would pay for replacing weapons used in recent conflicts including those in the Middle East. The figure is preliminary and could change depending on the length of the operation. The supplemental request would come on top of an additional $150 billion in defense spending included in Republicans’ sweeping “one big beautiful bill.” (Reporting by Mike Stone in Washington; editing by Diane Craft)

U.S. Gulf Coast heavy grades continued to surge on Friday as the Iran conflict spurred several Middle Eastern producers of heavy crude to curtail production and drove buyers to scoop up U.S. barrels. Prices of Mars sour crude, the flagship crude produced in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and favored by refiners globally, traded at a $11 premium to U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude on Friday, brokers said. That was the highest since April 2020, and up $4 from Thursday. Just a week ago it traded at a premium of $1.50. Other heavy grades such as the Heavy Louisiana Sweet and the West Texas Sour also rose. Benchmark crude oil prices have surged since the initial attacks last week, with Brent crude settling at $92.69 a barrel, its highest level since October 2023 on Friday. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has forced several countries, including Iraq, to curb output. The strait is a key route for medium and heavy sour crude from the Persian Gulf, and those flows are now largely cut off. Additional production cuts announced in Kuwait on Friday also helped lift Mars prices, a trader said. “Refiners that rely on these grades will need to find similar, or roughly similar, alternatives to replace the lost barrels, so Mars and other U.S. Gulf sour heavies and mediums are natural substitutes and are getting bid up aggressively,” Kpler lead Americas oil analyst Matt Smith said, adding that buyers, especially in Asia, are scrambling for more of these medium and heavy crude barrels. “This time of year also marks the shift from winter into driving season, when demand typically rises across all crude grades,” said Tim Snyder, chief economist at Matador Economics, adding that ultimately the supply disruption caused by war was driving prices. “In the short term we will continue to see these grades rise until we see the Strait of Hormuz open up,” Snyder said. (Reporting by Siddharth Cavale in New York and Georgina McCartney in Houston; Editing by David Gregorio)

The U.S. and Ecuador carried out a joint operation targeting drug trafficking operations in the South American country, authorities in both countries said on Friday, with the U.S. calling the move “lethal kinetic operations.” Neither the U.S. Southern Command, a branch of its military that oversees forces in Latin America, nor Ecuador’s defense ministry, said if anyone was killed or captured in the strike, which Ecuador dubbed operation “Total Extermination.” The operations used helicopters, aircraft, river boats and drones to locate and bomb a drug traffickers’ training camp in north-east Ecuador near the Colombian border, Ecuador’s defense ministry said in a statement. The camp belonged to the Comandos de la Frontera (CDF), a Colombian crime group made up of FARC dissidents, and had a capacity for 50 people, it added. Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa has made a military crackdown on organised crime a cornerstone of his administration, and his government imposed tariffs on its larger neighbor Colombia, accusing it of not doing enough to fight drug trafficking. He is set to travel to Miami this weekend to take part in the Trump administration’s “Shield of the Americas” summit, which brings together many right-wing leaders across the region with a focus on regional security and organized crime. “The United States is a key ally in this fight,” the defense ministry said. “At the request of Ecuador, the Department of War executed targeted action to advance our shared objective of dismantling narco-terrorist networks,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell wrote on X. The operation followed a similar U.S-Ecuadorean operation announced by the U.S. Southern Command earlier this week. (Reporting by Jasper Ward in Washington, Alexandra Valencia in Quito and Sarah Morland in Mexico City; Editing by Christian Martinez and Diane Craft)

President Trump is not subject to brain rot. Kristi Noem was captured by brain rot, the online incentive structure that causes people to do dumb things for clicks and ubiquity. She’s not the only one. Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Gavin Newsom are all terminal brain rot patients. But Trump is not. And so he fired Kristi Noem, who took the president’s single most popular issue and proceeded to run it directly into the ground. In April 2025, President Trump’s approval rating on his handling of border security and immigration was 49%. Strong disapproval was just 34%, according to NBC News. By February 2026, according to the same NBC News poll, his approval on the issue had dropped to 40%, and strong disapproval had jumped 15 points to 49%. That takes some doing, but somehow Kristi Noem achieved it. The problem wasn’t Trump’s actual immigration policy, which remains highly popular. Americans still want large-scale deportations, but they would like to focus on criminals first. The moment that Noem was replaced in Minneapolis by White House border czar Tom Homan, the Democratic hysterics stopped. That’s not because Democrats suddenly became good-hearted border hawks on this issue. It’s because Tom Homan does what good administrators should. He quietly goes about his job in a calm, collected fashion. He actually implements policies. He doesn’t make the story about himself. That’s the opposite of Kristi Noem, who was into photo ops, which may play well online for people who get very excited about performative politics, but do not play particularly well in mainstream America. She called Renee Good a domestic terrorist and did it again with Alex Pretti, who similarly was shot by federal agents while resisting arrest. I agree that both the Good and the Pretti shoots were legally justifiable. But do I think either of them was a domestic terrorist with mass murder on their minds? I don’t, and most Americans don’t. But Kristi Noem proceeded to put the administration in an unwinnable public relations position by going whole hog. And she blamed everybody else in the administration for it, and then denied doing it. In fact, she apparently spent some $220 million on an ad campaign featuring — wait for it — Kristi Noem. She apparently put together a sweetheart deal for her friends to produce exactly those commercials. Noem testified in front of the Senate that President Trump had cleared this use of taxpayer funds. I do not think President Trump sat there and greenlit that commercial. It’s one thing to direct cash to your friends, to make commercials to burnish your future presidential run. It’s another thing to then turn around and blame President Trump for that outlay. And that wasn’t Noem’s only scandal, of course. Obviously, the most salacious scandal involving Noem was her relationship with Corey Lewandowski, which pretty much everybody in D.C. knows likely goes well beyond the platonic. The pair have apparently been using a luxury 737 Max jet with a private cabin in the back for their travel around the country. DHS is leasing that plane. Now they’re trying to acquire it for $70 million. The bottom line is that Kristi Noem was not doing a good job, and it was past time for her to go. President Trump announced yesterday that he would be replacing her with Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin. He put out a statement: “I am pleased to announce that the Highly Respected United States Senator from the Great State of Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin, will become the United States Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS), effective March 31, 2026. The current Secretary, Kristi Noem, who has served us well, and has had numerous and spectacular results (especially on the Border!), will be moving to be Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas, our new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere we are announcing on Saturday in Doral, Florida. I thank Kristi for her service at ‘Homeland.'” Democrats, of course, are trying to claim victory. Gavin Newsom, fresh off of whatever anti-Israel podcast he can find, is trying to regain those hard-Left voters, saying that Noem’s firing represents a sort of retreat by the administration. He said: “Donald Trump is in retreat. Today is a perfect example of that. With the first firing of a high-profile cabinet member, he’s in retreat, places like Minnesota, because the steel spine of citizens that stood up, real patriots in this country pushed back against all that, and you’re seeing it globally. You’re exactly right. That’s why Trump is acting out as he always does: Weakness masquerading as strength.” But this, of course, is incredibly stupid. Trump is not retreating. He is making a smart adjustment. You think Markwayne Mullin is going to be soft on the border? It’s obviously the right move. And it gives an important lesson: Addiction to the clicks and the giggles of the internet rots your brain and leaves you on the wrong side of normal Americans. Up to and including President Trump.

The following is an edited transcript excerpt from The Michael Knowles Show. * * * Are we about to take Cuba? President Trump keeps talking about it. The first time, you might say, well, it’s a joke. The second time, maybe it’s still a joke. The thing about jokes, though, is they often have an element of truth to them. First, on Monday, when asked about the communist nation 90 miles off the Florida coast, he said this: The Cuban government is talking with us. They’re in a big deal of trouble, as you know. They have no money. They have no anything right now. But they’re talking with us, and maybe we’ll have a friendly takeover … We could very well end up having a friendly takeover of Cuba. Trump: “Maybe we’ll have a friendly takeover of Cuba. We could very well end up having a friendly takeover of Cuba.” pic.twitter.com/YCI8WcxzBG — unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) March 2, 2026 Source: @unusual_whales/FoxNews/X.com This was the line he made a few days ago: maybe we’ll have a friendly takeover of Cuba. Then yesterday, Thursday, he brings up Cuba again.  All of a sudden you see—where’s Marco? He’s not around anymore. I don’t see him, he’s doing some job. Next one is going to be… we want to do that special Cuba, he’s waiting. He says let’s get this one finished first. We could do them all at the same time, but bad things happen if you watch countries over the years. If you do them all too fast, bad things happen. We’re not going to let anything bad happen to this country. Trump announces Cuba is the US’ next target. Follow: @AFpost pic.twitter.com/GLHIHKv5fB — AF Post (@AFpost) March 5, 2026 Trump says, “Look—we’re not going to do it right away. But maybe Marco is going to head on down.” Marco Rubio, who’s wanted to topple the communist regime in Cuba for his entire life. Are we going to do it? I think Trump is serious about taking Cuba. I think it makes sense to take Cuba. And let me remind you that this is something that basically everybody agreed on until recently. Trump’s most vocal critic who used to be on the Right and now is on the Left — Bill Kristol — worked in a Republican White House, was a major thought leader on the Right who then he became a Biden guy and a Kamala guy — even Bill Kristol, who hates Donald Trump with the fire of a thousand suns, said some years ago that we should take Cuba. We have already taken Cuba on multiple occasions. We’ve controlled Cuba three or four times over the last hundred years. This is not that weird. It’s 90 miles off the coast of Florida. The regime is starving right now. They don’t have oil. They don’t have leadership. Virtually no one can even name the president of Cuba. I can, because I’m particularly interested in the tobacco industry — and also it’s a nice place, Cuba. But can you name the leader of Cuba? No. His name is Miguel Díaz-Canal. We remember the Castros. Fidel Castro ruled for decades and then his brother Raúl took over. But the Castros are now gone. After Trump took over Venezuela, Cuba has really been on the brink of collapse. So there does seem to be a method to this. And after Iran — maybe check in five or six weeks — maybe Cuba’s next. Not so bad.