WASHINGTON — The self-described most transparent administration in history once again threw its doors open to the public with a three-hour live-streamed Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, one in which the president once again made it clear that he stands by his Secretary of War. The meeting, at times meandering and broad in its focus, nevertheless allowed the White House to firmly and publicly defend its most recent moves: in Venezuela, on the southern border, and with regard to domestic policy priorities. But the highlight of the meeting came when the president and Pete Hegseth addressed news reporting about the September 2 strikes on drug cartel boats in the Caribbean. The Washington Post reported this week that Hegseth had personally given a “spoken directive” to “kill everybody,” citing two people who allegedly had “direct knowledge” of the matter. The report framed the situation as if Hegseth and his commanders saw smoke from the wreckage clear, observed two men still alive, and then the commander ordered a second strike in order to “comply with Hegseth’s instructions.” The New York Times reported Tuesday, however, that Hegseth’s directive ordering the strike on the boat did not specifically address what should happen if the first missile didn’t fully complete the job, and his order was not responding to footage showing that two people had survived. The Times noted that Admiral Mitch Bradley ordered both the initial strike and several follow-up strikes that killed survivors and sank the boat, and during the operation, Hegseth did not give him any other orders. But the initial Washington Post reporting suggested Hegseth had violated the laws of war, prompting wild speculation from reporters and Democrats that Hegseth had committed war crimes and could be removed from his post. On Tuesday, during his cabinet meeting, the president briefly defended the War Department, but let Hegseth take the lead in his response, leading to a remarkable moment where the public could watch both the face of the president and that of the Secretary of War as they dealt with the high profile topic. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (2nd-L) speaks during a Cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House on December 02, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) As Hegseth spoke, the president nodded on in agreement. He had seated Hegseth directly to his left, in an apparent show of support. “We sunk the boat and eliminated the threat,” Hegseth explained. “It was the right call, we have his back, and the American people are safer because narco-terrorists know you can’t bring drugs through the water, and eventually on land if necessary, to the American people. We will eliminate that threat and we are proud to do it.” 50% off DailyWire+ annual memberships will not return for another year, so don’t miss this deal! Join now at DailyWire.com/cyberweek. “So you didn’t see any survivors?” pressed a reporter. “To be clear, after that first shot.” “I did not personally see survivors,” Hegseth said. “The thing was on fire … this is called the fog of war.” The Secretary of War proceeded to then tear into the reporter, as the president grinned and nodded along in support. “This is what you in the press don’t understand,” Hegseth said. “You sit in your air-conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill, and you nitpick, or you plant fake stories in the Washington Post, about ‘kill everybody,’ phrases on anonymous sources not based on anything, not based on any truth at all, and then you want to throw out really irresponsible terms about American heroes, about the judgment they made …” “President Trump has empowered commanders to do what is necessary, which is dark and difficult things in the dead of night on behalf of the American people,” he added. “We support them, and we will stop the poisoning of the American people.” When the reporter pressed again, asking how long after the first strike the second strike occurred, Hegseth responded, “I couldn’t tell you the exact time,” adding with clear annoyance when the reporter continued to press, “I already stated my answer quite clearly.” Let’s make one thing crystal clear: 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. America is fortunate to have such men protecting… — Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) December 1, 2025 Earlier on Tuesday, War Department Press Secretary Kingsley Cortes said in a press briefing that Hegseth has been very clear in every statement that the strikes were “presidentially directed and the chain of command functions as it should.” “We make sure that commanders on the ground, their positions are taken into account, and they are able to tell us and make decisions if they see things that need to be flagged,” she explained. “But at the end of the day, the secretary and the president are the ones directing these strikes and any follow-on strikes like those which were directed by Admiral Bradley, the secretary 100% agrees with.”

Pete Hegseth is going to war — but not with the Venezuelans. No, the Secretary of War is locked in a battle with Canadian publisher Kids Can Press. Over a meme. On Sunday, Hegseth posted a fake book cover showing Franklin, a cartoon turtle, shooting rocket-propelled grenades at narco-terrorists from the landing skid of a military helicopter. “For your Christmas wish list,” Hegseth wrote along with the book, titled “Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists,” which is billed as “A Classic Franklin Story.” The cover image features Franklin seated in the open bay door of a helicopter, aiming an RPG launcher at narco-terrorists in their boats in the water below. For your Christmas wish list… pic.twitter.com/pLXzg20SaL — Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) December 1, 2025 Less than 24 hours later, Kids Can Press issued a statement in response, condemning Hegseth’s use of the “beloved” character. pic.twitter.com/uYUF68eDyI — kidscanpress (@KidsCanPress) December 1, 2025 “Franklin the Turtle is a beloved Canadian icon who has inspired generations of children and stands for kindness, empathy, and inclusivity,” the post read. “We strongly condemn any denigrating, violent, or unauthorized use of Franklin’s name or image, which directly contradicts these values.” The statement marks the first time Kids Can Press has posted on X since a mid-January announcement declaring a shift to posting more on other platforms like Bluesky. 50% off DailyWire+ annual memberships will not return for another year, so don’t miss this deal! Join now at DailyWire.com/cyberweek. The most recent thing in the publisher’s timeline was a repost advertising a workshop for kids called “An Indigenous History Lesson on Fascism” and featuring Gord Hill, the author of “The Revised & Expanded ANTIFA Comic Book.” In addition to triggering Kids Can Press, Hegseth also got a rise out of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). “I have never seen someone so unserious, so childish, and so obviously insecure serving as Secretary of Defense as Pete Hegseth. The man is a national embarrassment,” the senator posted. Former “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd was also clearly upset by the meme, saying Hegseth was “literally mocking the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Congress and humiliating and embarrassing America worldwide with this childish tantrum.”

'It is venom sold as virtue'

It must be confronted

What do you think?

'They are like scam artists'

House Democrats recently blamed the Trump administration’s efforts to rein in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for poor information security. But the agency was fully staffed during the Biden administration when a massive—and still unresolved—data breach occurred.  In February 2023, CFPB experienced a data breach that forwarded the confidential information of 256,000 consumers to a personal email address. The CFPB fired the staffer who emailed a spreadsheet with the names, transactions, and account numbers.  The breach may have contained customer information from more than 50 financial institutions. Protecting data of consumers compromised in this breach is a separate issue from whether the CFPB should continue to exist in its current state, Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, a member of the House Financial Services Committee, told The Daily Signal. He said he intends to find out directly from the agency. “I have not blown off or forgotten about this,” Sessions noted. “The big question that needs to be answered is, when were notices given to consumers?” “If the CFPB has followed the law, people who were affected have been notified,” he said. “I will go directly to the CFPB and ask questions to be sure they follow the law.” President Donald Trump named Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought acting director of the CFPB, which falls under the Federal Reserve. Vought eliminated the agency’s budget request for the next quarter and ordered about 1,700 employees not to perform any work. Vought has proposed cutting the CFPB workforce by as much as 90%.  “CFPB is an unaccountable agency that D.C. bureaucrats have weaponized to the detriment of consumers,” Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky., chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions, told The Daily Signal.  “Under Democrat control, the bureau was responsible for one of the biggest data breaches in recent American history,” Barr said. “I commend Director Russ Vought and President Trump for cleaning up the rogue CFPB, empowering consumers and financial institutions.”  In November, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, pointed to an audit by the Federal Reserve’s Office of Inspector General that said staffing and funding cuts at the CFPB were to blame for the lack of information security.  “To put it bluntly: consumers and their data are more at risk than ever and more vulnerable to bad actors due to the Trump Administration’s harmful actions,” a Waters press release says. “The continued dismantling of the CFPB will only worsen this crisis.”  A Waters spokesperson did not respond to inquiries for this story on Tuesday. The IG report says security issues were “compounded by the loss of contractor resources supporting information security continuous monitoring and testing activities and the departure of agency personnel.”  Experts have noted that personal financial information stored at the agency has been in jeopardy since the agency’s beginning.  A CFPB spokesperson did not immediately respond to The Daily Signal for this story on Monday or Tuesday. After the 2023 breach happened, a CFPB spokesperson said in a statement at the time, “The CFPB takes data privacy very seriously, and this unauthorized transfer of personal and confidential data is completely unacceptable.”  The CFPB was established by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation to regulate banks, credit card companies, lenders, and other financial services companies. It receives funding through the Federal Reserve. The post House Republicans Seek Answers on Biden-Era Data Breach of 256,000 Consumers appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump called affordability “a hoax that was started by Democrats who caused the problem of pricing.” “Look, affordability’s a hoax that was started by Democrats who caused the problem of pricing. And they didn’t end it when, look, they lost it in a landslide,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday.   Trump bashed Democrats for using the word “affordability” as a “con job.”   “But the word affordability is a Democrat scam,” Trump said, adding that the Biden administration “had the worst inflation in the history of our country.”  Trump called it a “fake narrative that the Democrats talk about affordability. They just say the word. It doesn’t mean anything to anybody. You just say it—affordability.” President Trump: "There's this fake narrative that the Democrats talk about. Affordability. They just say the word. I inherited the worst inflation in history. Nobody could afford anything. Their prices were massively high. The word affordability is a con job by the Democrats." pic.twitter.com/nfrgJLQanA— TheBlaze (@theblaze) December 2, 2025 Trump claimed that Democrats don’t know that prices were “much higher” under President Joe Biden, pointing to the prices of gas as an example. Today, the average price for a gallon of gas in the U.S. is $2.99. One year ago, the average price was $3.047, according to AAA.   “But our prices now for energy, and for gasoline are really low. Electricity is coming down, and when that comes down, everything comes down,” Trump said. “Beef is coming down now. We’ve done certain magic and beef is coming down,” the president said, adding, “we fixed inflation.” “We’re gonna get prices down still further, but we brought them down,” he said. “The reason that they had the highest inflation in the history of our country is because they had the highest prices. But we brought them down, and now we have normal inflation.” The U.S. inflation rate hit a 30-year high at 8% in 2022 under the Biden administration. The inflation rate today is 3.01%.   Politicians in Washington and around the country have talked more about the issue of affordability following the elections in November. Affordability surfaced as the key issue voters cared about in Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, and the mayoral race in New York. Republican losses in those elections, and the margins by which the GOP candidates lost, is partially being attributed to a failure to address the affordability crisis in America.   Since taking office, Trump has pushed for a decrease in interest rates. Trump has continued to call on the Federal Reserve to decrease them following the recent elections. In November, the White House said Trump plans to ramp up domestic travel ahead of midterms as he sells voters on his affordability accomplishments.   The post ‘HOAX’?: Trump Changes Tune on Affordability appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Lawmakers in Washington are contemplating an artificial intelligence provision that could have wide ranging ramifications for how states and localities regulate the emerging technology and protect the vulnerable online. The provision could be added to the National Defense Authorization Act that will direct how nearly $1 trillion will be spent on national defense for Fiscal Year 2026, The NDAA text is expected to be released this Thursday. While the precise language of the AI provision remains unknown, it could likely entail efforts to prevent states or localities from regulating AI and possibly even render many state laws to protect children moot. According to a report from Axios, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., have shopped language around Capitol Hill that would preempt or override state-level AI regulations. Some of the bills that would come to regulate AI on the federal level would likely pass through Cruz’s Senate committee as the Texas senator eyes another White House bid in 2028. The White House has supported efforts by Congress to get such AI provisions into law. If Congress does decide to slip the AI provision into the NDAA, it would be the second time this year Congress has tried to add an AI provision of this nature to a large legislative item. The Senate debated adding a 10-year AI regulation moratorium for states in the One Big Beautiful Bill that was signed into law in July. That AI provision mulled by the Senate would have withheld federal broadband funding to states if sought to enforce the laws passed by the duly elected representatives of their American citizens. Furthermore, federal broadband funds would have also been withheld if states and localities dared to address new concerns about AI for the 10 years following the enactment of the provisions. Cruz was a proponent of placing the AI provision in the reconciliation package signed by President Donald Trump in July. Proponents of the previously debated AI provision expressed concerns that America’s patchwork of AI regulations would hinder American technology companies’ abilities to compete with China and other rivals of the U.S. The provision as written would therefore have affected red and blue states alike including the technology hubs of Texas and California. It was ultimately removed in the final version of the budget bill by a vote of 99 to 1 in the Senate. Some Republicans in Congress, however, are throwing cold water on putting an AI provision into the NDAA. House Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., has reportedly said he does not think a moratorium on individual state regulation of AI will be included in the final version of the NDAA.  “From what I hear, it’s kind of lost its momentum. It doesn’t have enough support,” Rogers said according to Politico.  As The Daily Signal previously reported, Texas has already passed legislation regulating the utilization of AI in censoring viewpoints on the Internet as well as user privacy protections from AI-empowered data harvesting, allowing Americans to opt-out of being profiled. Such laws are widely supported by the chief law enforcement officers of dozens of states as demonstrated by a National Association of Attorneys General letter to congressional leadership in May that came out against the 10-year moratorium. The letter noted the absence of federal action addressing the potential harms of AI, which has required states to step up and protect their residents themselves by passing laws.  “These include laws designed to protect against AI-generated explicit material, prohibit deep-fakes designed to mislead voters and consumers, protect renters when algorithms are used to set rent, prevent spam phone calls and texts, require basic disclosures when consumers are interacting with specific kinds of AI, and ensure identity protection for endorsements and other AI-generated content,” the attorneys general letter explained. The moratorium was also opposed by one of the most prominent Republican state executives in the country, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders.  “Congressional Republicans like Sen. [Marsha] Blackburn, Sen. [Josh] Hawley, and members of the House Freedom Caucus are right: The One, Big, Beautiful Bill will be a huge win for the American people, but can’t include a provision that strips states of their right to regulate AI,” Sanders said to The Daily Signal in June about the moratorium.  When asked about the return of the potential regulatory ban, Sanders’s office told The Daily Signal that, “Governor Sanders supports President Trump’s leadership to unleash American AI dominance and looks forward to working with his administration and other stakeholders to make sure we win the race against China and also protect Americans.” The post Congress Could Slip a Major AI Regulation Change Into the NDAA appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth defended the Department of War’s second strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean, citing the “fog of war.” Hegseth said during the second strike on Sept. 2, the boat “was on fire,” so he didn’t personally see survivors, and he said he “didn’t stick around” for the remainder of the mission following the first strike. He said Adm. Frank Bradley “made the correct decision” in sinking the boat, which he “had complete authority to do.” “This is called the fog of war,” Hegseth said at Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting. “This is what you in the press don’t understand. You sit in your air-conditioned offices up on Capitol Hill and you nitpick. You plant fake stories in The Washington Post about ‘kill everybody,’ based on anonymous sources, not based in anything, not based in truth at all.” Hegseth said reporters were throwing out “really irresponsible terms about American heroes, about the judgment that they made.” “I wrote a whole book on this topic because of what politicians and the press does to war fighters,” he said. “President [Donald] Trump has empowered commanders—commanders—to do what is necessary, which is dark and difficult things in the dead of night on behalf of the American people. We support them, and we will stop the poisoning of the American people.” A reporter asked Trump if he supported the second strike to kill survivors of the Venezuelan boat strike. “All I know is this, every boat that’s blown up that you see, we save 25,000 lives,” Trump said, adding that he still hasn’t gotten a lot of information. “To me, it was an attack,” he said. “It wasn’t one strike, two strikes, three strikes.” The president said he wants the drug boats taken out, and he is willing to attack on land if necessary. “These people have killed over 200,000 people last year,” he said. “We’re taking those sons of b—- out.” The post ‘Fog of War’: Hegseth Tells Press What They ‘Don’t Understand’ About Strikes on Narco-Terrorists appeared first on The Daily Signal.