America heads into this year's holiday season with a cheerful discussion of whether or not we've committed war crimes. Just another random week in the Donald Trump era, folks! Sorry for being snide, but it's hard to juxtapose the whole "peace on Earth" holiday sentiment with the revelations coming from Washington this week.

America is supposed to be above committing war crimes, of course. We're theoretically supposed to be better than that. In fact, here are a few pertinent quotes about that very subject:

I do think there have to be consequences for abject war crimes. If you're doing something that is just completely unlawful and ruthless, then there is a consequence for that. That's why the military said it won't follow unlawful orders from their commander in chief. There's a standard, there's an ethos. There's a belief that we are above what so many things that our enemies or others would do.

That bit about "unlawful orders" may make you think this was a quote from a prominent Democrat who appeared in a recent video reminding members of the military of their obligation to refuse unlawful orders. Senator Mark Kelly, perhaps, who is now under investigation by the Trump administration for his participation in this video (and who may be recalled to service and face a court-martial for his remarks, if the administration has its way)?

Nope. You may be surprised to hear that these stirring words did not come from Kelly or indeed any other Democrat. Instead, they were spoken by Pete Hegseth, who now leads the Defense Department. He said all of it back in 2016, as Kelly helpfully pointed out on social media and in a recent interview. Kelly had a few choice things to say about Hegseth:

"Pete Hegseth says he's going to court-martial me for saying the same exact thing he said 9 years ago," [Senator Mark] Kelly said in the caption of his tweet that included the clip of Hegseth in 2016. "What changed for Pete? Well to start, he spends all day thinking about how he can suck up to [Donald] Trump. When Trump says jump, he says how high."

The retired astronaut expanded upon this during his conversation with [Erin] Burnett on CNN Tuesday.

"Well, Erin, I think he's correct. And it's exactly what we said," Kelly said of Hegseth's 2016 video. "But when we said it, Pete Hegseth now said -- eight years later or... nine years later -- he says, what we said was false and reckless. And I think it begs the question: What has changed?"

He continued, "And it's pretty obvious what has changed is we have an unqualified secretary of defense who only cares about sucking up to this president, and loyalty to this president. That's the difference. It's who's commander-in-chief."

The United States of America has rules for how it conducts war. There are domestic rules, written down to train members of the military, and there are international rules from such treaties as the Geneva Conventions. They both say the same thing, essentially. An order to "give no quarter" is illegal, period. Attacking survivors of a blown-up ship is illegal too.

This doesn't even address the fact that the logic of why exactly the American military thinks it is justified in blowing up boats in international waters, which is quite likely also a war crime, we should add.

To follow the administration's logic in all this, you have to accept that: (1) international drug cartels are "at war" with America, because the drugs they smuggle in to the country can kill people here. Also: (2) they are terrorists, and (3) smuggling drugs into America is a "military attack" on our country. Therefore, any smuggler anywhere in the world who we determine (without having to offer up any proof) is heading to America with some drugs is a valid target and can be killed on sight. Also, that smuggling drugs is a military "mission" they are engaged in -- just by smuggling, they are "fighting" us, in a military sense.

None of this is true, at least in the way the rest of the world has defined "war" for the past century or so. Smuggling drugs is a crime, not an act of warfare. Smuggling drugs is in no rational way "terrorism" -- it fits no currently-accepted definition of that term. Smuggling drugs is also in no way a "military attack" on the country. And if you happen to be a drug smuggler on a boat that just got blown up by the American military, trying to survive and even calling for help is in no way "continuing their military mission against the United States."

But all of this down-the-rabbit-hole thinking is necessary for even the cartoonish explanations Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump and the Pentagon brass are now attempting to get us all to believe.

As time goes on, and as journalists and members of Congress uncover more of the reality of the situation, the administration's excuses have morphed to fit the new revelations. When the second strike was revealed by the Washington Post, they tried to brush it all aside. Now, after members of the House and Senate have been briefed and seen the full video, more of the actual facts of the matter are coming to light. Here is how the New York Times reported on what the new video provided to members of Congress actually shows:

The video that key lawmakers viewed on Thursday showed the first strike on Sept. 2, a fiery explosion that destroyed most of a boat in the Caribbean Sea. A black plume filled the air.

When the smoke finally cleared about 30 minutes later, the front portion of the boat was overturned but still afloat, according to lawmakers and congressional staff who viewed the video or were briefed on it. Two survivors, shirtless, clung to the hull, tried unsuccessfully to flip it back over, then climbed on it and slipped off into the water, over and over.

Then Adm. Frank M. Bradley, commander of the operation, gave an order for a follow-up strike. Three flashes of light filled the video screen. And the men were gone.

The military officers testifying tried to claim that "they assumed the hull might be afloat because it still contained packs of cocaine." They also thought "that the survivors might eventually have managed to float back to Venezuela, allowing them to try again to deliver that cocaine, or that another boat could come retrieve it." They also "assumed the survivors could be communicating." Those are all pretty thin reeds to base a lethal strike on.

The real facts of the matter are that there wasn't just a second strike on the boat, there were actually a total of four missiles launched at it. The two people who survived the first strike were not reloading the boat with the drugs floating in the water (as was first claimed), but desperately trying to cling to the boat's wreckage. The wreckage was upside-down, belying the claim that they were somehow going to attempt to "continue their mission of smuggling drugs." They did not, in fact, radio another boat to come and pick them (and their drugs) up because the boat was obliterated, including the radio. An observation plane flying at the time saw no second boat at all anywhere nearby. The survivors were waving at the sky, likely in an attempt to either surrender or beg for aid from their attackers. They were then killed by the remaining three airstrikes.

By the rules of war, the only justification for continuing to fire on a vessel or survivors of a shipwreck is if they are somehow "still in the fight." A warship might be disabled (can't maneuver), but if it is still firing its guns it is still a valid military target (for example). It is impossible to square that with what the American military did. The two survivors weren't "in the fight" in the first place, because the drug cartels are not "at war" with America. Even if you twist yourself into believing the administration's logic that smuggling drugs is somehow a "military mission" against us, it is impossible to believe that the two survivors were still "in the fight" by attempting to continue their mission, because their boat had been blown to bits.

Even if you accept the administration's rabbit-hole logic, if the two men were actually "at war" with us, then the proper thing to do would have been to rescue them and hold them as prisoners of war. We didn't do that. Or at the very least, rescue them then hold them on smuggling charges and try them in a court of law. We didn't do that either. A later boat strike left two other survivors, who were then picked up and immediately repatriated to their home countries, which makes no sense at all when using the administration's rationale for blowing up the boats.

It is also worth mentioning that none of the blown-up boats were likely smuggling fentanyl, which is the reason Trump keeps giving for his military campaign. No fentanyl is smuggled from Venezuela, almost all of it comes from Mexico. No proof that any of these boats is actually smuggling anything has so far been provided at all, in fact. Even if you assume these were smuggling trips, they almost certainly were smuggling cocaine -- and most of it was destined for Europe, not America. But none of this matters to Trump and his henchmen over at the Pentagon. Trump just wants to see videos of boats being blown up, and Hegseth (and the whole chain of command down to the guy who launches the missile) are happy to provide it to him.

Hegseth can prevaricate all he wants, but that is the reality of the situation. He initially tried to pass the buck by throwing the admiral in charge of the operation in question under the bus. Then he claimed he "wasn't in the room" when the second strike took place -- because he had more important things to do than supervise this new military policy the Pentagon was carrying out (the boat in question was the first one we hit, back in September). Then he claimed it was just "the fog of war." He also tried to laugh the whole thing off by posting an image of a beloved children's literature character (Franklin the Turtle) firing a rocket-propelled grenade at a boat, complete with a snarky comment. Mark Kelly had a few things to say about this as well:

[Pete Hegseth] runs around on a stage like he's a 12-year-old playing army. And it is ridiculous. It is embarrassing. I cannot imagine what our allies think looking at that guy in this job -- one of the most important jobs in our country.

He is putting out on the internet, turtles with rocket-propelled grenades -- I mean, have you seen this? This is the Secretary of Defense! This is not a serious person. He should have been fired after Signalgate, and then every single day after that.

Senator Kelly is right. Pete Hegseth is in over his head, is unqualified, and in any administration with a shred of competence or the ability to feel shame, he would be fired. If all of this wasn't enough, this week a damning report from the Pentagon's inspector general was given to Congress about Hegseth sharing operational war plans on an unsecured device ("Signalgate"). Here's what it had to say:

The highly anticipated inquiry by the Defense Department's Office of Inspector General determined that by using the unclassified chat app Signal to share advance details about a forthcoming bombing operation in Yemen, [Pete] Hegseth's actions "created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots." The report cited Hegseth, too, for using his unclassified personal device to relay that information via group chat to other top Trump administration officials and for not retaining all associated messages, in violation of federal recordkeeping laws.

Again, in any sane administration, Hegseth would have been fired for this security breach back when it happened. Hegseth responded to this damning report by claiming it "totally exonerated" him, which is just as laughably ridiculous as everything else that comes out of his mouth. But let's get back to the current military scandal again.

Up until this week, Trump supporters have tried to excuse Donald Trump from any questions about his entire campaign against the drug cartels by claiming he is some sort of badass warrior fighting the scourge of drug smuggling. Up until now, that's been the underlying rationale for all of it -- that he's just so determined to stop drugs coming into the country that he's willing to bend (or even break) some rules to do that. Trump has claimed that the leader of Venezuela is a drug kingpin who profits from all the drug smuggling, and therefore must be fought by any means necessary. But Trump not just undermined but in fact obliterated this entire justification this week by pardoning a different country's leader who was a drug kingpin and was serving a 45-year sentence in America for his crimes. Yep, that's right. A man who was responsible for overseeing 400 tons of cocaine smuggled into America, who had been captured -- and then tried and convicted in an American court of law and sentenced to a very stiff sentence -- was allowed to walk free this week. Because Trump thought the whole thing was somehow "unfair" to him. So much for Mr. Badass Drug Warrior, eh?

Just to translate that jaw-dropping figure, 400 tons of cocaine is a little more than enough to provide a full gram of coke (to get it down to street-level end-user quantities) to every single man, woman, and child in America. That's a lotta blow, you gotta admit.

Given the administration's own twisted logic, doesn't that mean that Donald Trump just aided and abetted someone who had waged war on America? Pardoning a "narcoterrorist" would seem to fall into that category. And there's a word for aiding and abetting someone we're at war with -- "treason."

Senator Kelly shouldn't be the one under investigation here. At a minimum, Pete Hegseth should be the one facing (as he put it) "consequences" for his war crimes. At a maximum, Donald Trump should be considered a traitor to the country and its current "war effort" for pardoning a major terrorist enemy.

 

It's not exactly an award, but we had to offer our congratulations to Senator Cory Booker, who got married this week. Here's to the happy couple!

We have two Honorable Mention awards this week, the first to Senator Kelly for being the strongest voice in the pushback against Pete Hegseth during all the revelations about war crimes. Kelly is in a unique position to offer such commentary, since he's under investigation for reminding servicemembers of their obligation to refuse illegal orders. He's also rumored to be considering a presidential run in 2028, just for the record.

Our second Honorable Mention goes to Barack Obama, for a comment he made recently in a public speech. Addressing the problems within the Democratic Party, Obama said:

My bet is that all the problems we have right now will be solved if old folks get out of the way and we turn the reins over to this next generation that is coming up, so that they can bring those good old-fashioned American values to new sets of problems.

That is sound advice for all the "really should have retired by now" Democrats still serving in public office, we have to say.

But the Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week this week was a Democrat who actually lost an election. There was a special election in Tennessee this week for an open House seat, and Aftyn Behn lost by nine points.

So why is Behn worthy of the award? Because she continued the streak Democrats are on of shifting the electorate in dramatic ways from the 2024 election. Millions of dollars (from both sides) were spent on this race, all to gain a single-point margin of victory for the Republican -- in a district that voted Republican in 2024 by a whopping 22 points. That is a 13-point shift in the vote towards the Democrats.

As we said, this continues a string of such victories. In House special elections this year, Democrats have outperformed their 2024 results at the ballot box by: 23 points, 16 points, 16 points again, 17 points, and now 13 points. That is stunningly impressive!

What it means is that Democrats are now eyeing a number of House races that initially seemed out of reach for them. Any district where the Republican (or Donald Trump) won by 15 points or less is now seen as a winnable battleground worth fighting for by the Democratic Party. That opens up the possibilities for regaining control of not just the House of Representatives but perhaps even the Senate as well.

There are no guarantees in politics, of course, and the election is still almost a full year away. But having said that, Democrats will enter the 2026 midterm cycle with the wind at their backs, while Republicans grow more and more worried. Trump's approval ratings are getting more dismal every week, as more and more of his own voters realize that he has no clue about how to bring prices down. Democrats, on the other hand, are going to make affordability the centerpiece of their midterm campaigns -- it's the one strategy that both moderate/centrist Democrats can agree upon with the progressives in the party. And so far, it is working wonders at the ballot box.

So for continuing the string of double-digit electoral shifts at the ballot box -- even though she lost the race -- we have to hand this week's Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week to Aftyn Behn. Because her performance is causing so much worry over on the Republican side of the aisle.

[Congratulate Tennessee State Representative Aftyn Behn on her official state contact page, to let her know you appreciate her efforts.]

 

There seems to be a power struggle among New Jersey Democrats these days. Democrats control the state legislature, and they used their power to quickly hustle a bill through committee (they introduced it three days before Thanksgiving and then held a hearing and a vote on it this Monday) that would strip a watchdog agency "responsible for investigating fiscal misconduct by state leaders and scrutinizing government contracts" of most of its power. This is being done to limit the power of the incoming governor, it bears pointing out. Here's the basic story:

The legislation would defang the Office of the State Comptroller by removing its subpoena powers and would instead rely entirely on the troubled State Commission of Investigation to lead inquiries into misuse of taxpayer funds and political self-dealing.

The bill is advancing weeks before Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat who campaigned on a commitment to government efficiency and transparency, is set to be sworn in as governor. The comptroller is appointed by the governor and cannot be removed from office by state lawmakers, imbuing the agency with investigatory independence.

For all of 2025, the commission has issued precisely zero investigative reports. The comptroller, on the other hand, issued reports on 25 separate investigations. So it's pretty easy to see which of them is more diligently trying to root out fraud and corruption.

So they held a five-hour committee hearing on the bill. United States Senator Andy Kim attended and put his name on the list of those who wanted to comment to the committee. Here's what happened:

Mr. [Andy] Kim, a first-term Democrat who was elected to replace Robert Menendez, a longtime Democratic power broker in New Jersey now serving an 11-year prison sentence for taking bribes, had arrived in Trenton at 9 a.m., and was among the first three people to request to speak at the hearing. He was instead called to address the committee dead last, more than four hours after the hearing began, prompting objections from several other speakers, who attempted to cede their time to him. They noted that he was trying to catch a train to Washington, where voting was set to start Monday evening.

The state senator chairing the hearing, James Beach, refused all these requests, saying "Nobody's special."

Kim, when he was finally allowed to speak, was pretty scathing: "You live in the time of the greatest amount of distrust in politics in modern American history. People want a politics that isn't some exclusive club for the well-off and the well connected... What we have come to see here in New Jersey must be fixed, and the people demand it. The people of New Jersey are sick and tired of this." When Beach cut him off for running over the three-minute window to speak, Kim asked to be allowed to continue: "Sir, I have been here for five and a half hours. Give me 30 seconds." Here was the response he got:

"Why do you think you're special?" asked Mr. Beach, who throughout the afternoon allowed other speakers to extend their time.

A woman in the audience reportedly yelled out: "Because he's got integrity!"

This was just incredibly rude, any way you look at it. The legislature is trying to hamstring the power of an incoming governor from their own party, by making it a whole lot easier for governmental corruption to take place and a whole lot harder for her to make good on her campaign promises. That's disgusting enough, right there. But to make a sitting United States senator wait four hours to speak to the committee -- even though others wanted to cede their own speaking time to him -- is just unbelievably rude and disrespectful.

Which is why this week's Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week is New Jersey state senator James Beach. Kim is right: this is precisely what disgusts people about politics today. And we get enough of that from Republicans already -- we don't need to add to it from within the Democratic Party.

[Contact New Jersey State Senator James Beach on his official state contact page, to let him know what you think of his actions.]

 

Volume 822 (12/5/25)

We have to begin with a program note. Because of the tricky calendar this year, this will be the last Friday Talking Points article of the year. For the next two Fridays, we will be presenting our year-end awards columns instead. Then there will be no new columns on either December 26th or January 2nd. Friday Talking Points will return for the new year on January 9th. Just to warn everyone in advance....

 

   We are better than this

We start on the moral high road this week.

"America is better than this. When war crimes are exposed, we are supposed to hold those who committed them accountable. There are supposed to be consequences for such criminal acts. The rest of the world used to look up to us, but sadly that seems to be a thing of the past. Now other countries gaze at us in disbelief, because instead of setting the gold standard for acceptable behavior we now are lowering the bar so far we have become unrecognizable. The president of the United States shouldn't be able to just kill anyone he feels like, and the United States military shouldn't go along with it and claim 'we were just following orders.' Because we are better than that. Or, at least, we used to be."

 

   Going rogue

We haven't heard the term used yet, but it's only a matter of time, really.

"How long will it be before other countries of the world start calling America a 'rogue nation'? We seem to be checking off all the boxes, folks. Our military kills whomever the president wishes. Our justice system now only prosecutes the president's political enemies -- any crimes committed by his buddies are given a pass, or granted a pardon. We have masked armed forces in the streets of our cities 'disappearing' people with zero accountability. The highest court in the land refuses to rein in Donald Trump in any way. We completely ignore any other country's opinion about our actions -- whether they are our allies or not. Those all seem to be the characteristics of a rogue nation to me, so it's just a matter of time before that's the label others start using to describe us."

 

   Tell me anther funny story

Seriously, this one is just ridiculous.

"Donald Trump proclaimed himself the 'AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT,' in all caps (of course). What a joke! As Americans continue to see prices spiral ever-upwards, Trump wants us all to believe that up is down, black is white, and the price you pay for groceries is actually somehow way, way down. Who is he trying to kid? Who believes this stuff, when they can see the reality with their own eyes? How out of touch is Donald Trump? The 'affordability president'? Really? Tell me another funny story...."

 

   The real con job

Of course, being Trump, he's trying to have it both ways.

"Mr. Affordability President is also out there trying to convince Americans that 'affordability' is some sort of 'Democratic con job' -- that's what he recently called it. Somehow the Democrats are conning you into believing that the prices you pay at the supermarket checkout have gone up. To Trump, all those prices are way, way down, remember? You know what the real con job is here, folks? The fact that Donald Trump centered his campaign around the promise that he would 'bring prices down on Day One' but then once he got elected, he did the exact opposite. His tariffs are responsible for a lot of the higher prices people are now paying -- people he conned into voting for him by promising the exact opposite would happen. That is the real con job here."

 

   Worst economy ever!

Nothing like rubbing his face in his own failure, eh?

"You know what the reality is out there, contrary to what Trump says it is? In a recent poll, 37 percent of the people who voted for Donald Trump now say that the economy is 'the worst' that they 'can ever remember it being.' Over half of the people who voted for Kamala Harris agreed -- not only that the economy was bad or really bad but in fact the worst of their entire lifetime. Furthermore, fully 25 percent of Trump's own voters hold him either mostly or entirely responsible for higher prices. So much for this being some Democratic scam, eh? Over one-third of Trump voters think things are worse than they've ever been. The reality of the affordability crisis is so obvious that even his own voters are deserting Mr. Affordability President himself on the issue."

 

   Time to go, maybe?

This one's just a straight-up taunt.

"As the voters see Democrats running on the affordability crisis while Republicans from Trump on down insist that there simply is no crisis, it's no wonder that Democrats have been topping their 2024 election results by double digits. More and more voters are disgusted with how they were conned by Trump and they are moving in droves to vote for Democrats instead. We've already seen some prominent Republicans in Congress either announce they're not going to run for re-election next year or just quit their seats altogether, and in the next few months they'll all have to decide whether to run again or not. How many of them do you think are going to decide that maybe it's just time to go? Because maybe hanging up the spurs is a better thing to do than to be one of the ones in your party to get wiped out in the next election? It'll be interesting to see how many of these announcements we'll be hearing, as campaign filing deadlines approach."

 

   Department of Irony

Please add any more to this list if you think some up -- it's a game everyone can play at home!

"I saw this week that Trump got a building renamed in his honor. After dismantling the United States Institute of Peace, Marco Rubio decided to rename the building they used to be housed in the 'Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.' No, really! The same guy who renamed the Defense Department the Department of War, the same guy who is bombing any boat he feels like and ignoring the laws of warfare is now supposed to be Mr. Peacemaker? Seriously? What next -- renaming a Child Protective Services office after Jeffrey Epstein? How about renaming the A.S.P.C.A. headquarters after Kristi Noem? The Marco Rubio Institute for Spinal Fortitude? The Dick Cheney Hunting Safety Association? The Stephen Miller Refugee Services building? I mean, if they're going for ridiculous irony, there's all kinds of buildings that could use new names, right?"

-- Chris Weigant

 

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant