Trump Is Getting New Battleships—and Naming Them After Himself |
Just days after plastering his name onto the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., President Trump will be naming a new class of battleships after himself.
Trump is planning to make the naming announcement of the Navy’s new battleships alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Monday. An anonymous Pentagon official told The New York Times that Trump will call them “Trump-class” battleships.
The ship will be part of Trump’s vision of a new “Golden Fleet.” Each ship is expected to cost at least $5 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
As The New Republic’s Matt Ford wrote earlier this week—as bleak as the Gulf of America, the Trump Kennedy Center, the War Department, and others sound, Trump won’t be president forever. If he can change them just that easily, there’s no reason the next Democratic administration should hesitate to change them back.
CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss told 60 Minutes producers she was killing their story on the CECOT megaprison in El Salvador, where Trump deported more than 250 Venezuelan immigrants, because it did “not present the administration’s argument.”
“What we have is Karoline Leavitt’s soundbite claiming they are evildoers in America (rapists, murderers, etc.). But isn’t there much more to ask in light of the torture that we are revealing?” Weiss wrote in a Sunday memo. “Tom Homan and Stephen Miller don’t tend to be shy. I realize we’ve emailed the DHS spox, but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record.”
Weiss’s decision to kill the story because it didn’t have enough perspective from DHS officials—who had already declined to speak with 60 Minutes—was met with uproar when it was leaked on Monday. But she doubled down.
“We need to be able to get the principals on the record and on camera,” she said on a Monday staffing call, insinuating that the testimonies of CECOT inmates were insufficient.
Killing a story about a brutal megaprison because the folks that are sending people to the brutal megaprison aren’t featured prominently enough has not been favorably received.
“The Trump administration sent dozens [of] young men with no criminal record to be tortured and abused in a foreign prison,” podcaster Jon Favreau wrote. “@bariweiss can keep reporting, delaying, or kill the story altogether, but the basic facts have been well-documented in multiple court cases, including by Trump’s own DOJ and Trump-appointed judges.”
“Bari Weiss’s main criticism is that 60 Minutes doesn’t advance the story,” writer Randye Hoder chimed. “But her solution is to ask Stephen Miller to regurgitate the same talking points this admin has given from the get-go, which we’ve heard a gazillion times)!”
The Trump administration has yet to comment. View the trailer for the scrapped segment here.
Here's the deleted trailer for the now-"delayed" segment. It's almost impressive how much damage Bari Weiss has done to CBS News in such a short period of time.
Someone quickly schedule a prime-time Town Hall with Alan Dershowitz to rectify the harm:pic.twitter.com/382gRG5Lgp https://t.co/3gHRKNES2y
Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse are claiming that the Trump administration broke the law by failing to redact some of their names and withholding other documents.
In a joint statement Monday, multiple survivors slammed the government’s recent document dump for failing to redact “numerous victim identities” while also making “abnormal and extreme redactions with no explanation.”
“We are told there are that there are still hundreds of thousands of documents still unreleased. These are clear-cut violations of an unambiguous law.”
The statement follows a survivor’s formal legal notice to Justice Department attorneys on Saturday, claiming that the government had failed to redact their name after previously withholding their file.
“The DOJ asserts that my own file requires prolonged review to determine whether redactions are appropriate—yet it had no difficulty publicly releasing my identity in mass disclosure,” the survivor wrote.
The survivor noted that the Epstein Files Transparency Act included protecting the victims’ identities as a “central statutory safeguard.” At the same time, the DOJ has already been criticized for redacting many names from the files, including Trump’s, a move totally devoid of transparency.
The survivor added that if the government’s decision to include their name unredacted had been an effort to intimidate them, it had failed. “This unlawful disclosure does not silence me. It does not frighten me. If anything, it has made me more resolved than ever to resolve in full, lawful release of the Epstein files,” the survivor wrote.
Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, who sponsored the Epstein files Transparency Act, have begun