There is a version of the presidency that shows up at a dignified transfer to grieve with the families, and it isn’t Donald Trump. On his way to receive Americans killed in the Iran war, Trump claimed the fallen had personally told him—“very strongly”—that Iran must never get a nuclear weapon. Dead men, drafted as endorsers of the war that killed them, out of the mouth of a lunatic.
A day earlier, he had posted a body-count comparison on Truth Social framing eighteen American deaths as a bargain, and at the ceremony itself the military muted the microphones so the country could not hear the families.
In this report, David Shuster rolls the tape on all of it—then takes you inside the Senate hearing where Jon Ossoff asked Pete Hegseth one simple yes-or-no question about his “combat ineffective” claims, again and again, and got zero answers, even as the Pentagon requests $67 billion more to keep the war going.
Cliff’s Note:
A quick word on why this report is for paid subscribers. Shuster spending days pulling transcripts and matching a defense secretary’s sworn testimony against his own words from day 3, day 5, day 9, and day 14 of a war the administration keeps insisting it already won. No network green-lights that. No sponsor underwrites it. It exists because 3,000+ of you pay for it—sixty dollars a year, five bucks a month—and what that buys is the one thing the predator class cannot stand: somebody keeping the receipts. If you are a free subscriber and this story matters to you, today is a good day to come inside.
—Cliff
