White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt walked into a briefing this week trying to keep the focus where President Donald Trump wanted it — defending the administration’s handling of the escalating war with Iran and projecting confidence that the operation was working exactly as planned.
But as reporters pressed her about the deaths of U.S. service members, the moment began slipping away, and the briefing room exchange quickly spiraled into a tense back-and-forth she struggled to rein back in.
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 06: White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt introduces Steve Witkoff, special envoy to the Middle East to speak to the press outside of the White House on March 06, 2025 in Washington, DC. Witkoff spoke to the press about a range of foreign policy issues including peace talks involving Ukraine and Russia and the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
On Wednesday, Leavitt’s sales pitch ran into turbulence. CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins pressed her about remarks made earlier in the day by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who appeared to complain about the way the media was covering the deaths of American troops killed during the military campaign known as Operation Epic Fury.
The tense exchange erupted in the White House briefing room after Collins asked whether the administration believed the press should avoid prominently covering the deaths of U.S. service members.
Earlier that day, Hegseth had lashed out at the media while discussing the conflict.
“This is what the fake news misses,” Hegseth said. “So when a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front page news. I get it — the press only wants to make the president look bad. But try for once to report the reality.”
When Collins brought up those remarks during the briefing a tense back and forth ensued.
“Given what Secretary Hegseth said this morning, is it the position of this administration that the press should not prominently cover the deaths of U.S. service members?” Collins asked.
Leavitt immediately rejected the premise.
“No. It’s the position of this administration that the press in this room and the press across the country should accurately report on the success of Operation Epic Fury …,” she said.
Collins wasn’t convinced and pushed back, quoting Hegseth directly and noting that he had criticized the media for placing coverage of the troop deaths on the front page.
“That’s not what the secretary said, Kaitlan, and that’s not what the secretary meant — and you know it,” Leavitt fired back. “You know you are being disingenuous.”
Leavitt continued, attempting to pivot away from the quote, “We’ve never had a secretary of defense who cares more.”
But Collins quickly interrupted and read Hegseth’s remarks verbatim. Suddenly Leavitt seemed to reverse course.
“The press does only want to make the president look bad — that’s it, that’s a fact,” she declared, doubling down in a way that appeared to confirm the very point Collins was pressing.
The room erupted as reporters reacted to the blunt admission.
“Listen to me,” Leavitt snapped, attempting to regain control of the briefing.
“Especially you — and especially CNN.”
She went on to accuse the network of relentlessly attacking the president, declaring that it was an “objectible fact” that CNN’s coverage of Trump was overwhelmingly negative — though she appeared to briefly misspeak while making the argument.
“If you’re trying to argue right now that CNN’s overwhelming coverage is not negative of President Donald Trump I think the American people would tend to agree — and your ratings would tend to agree,” Leavitt said with a freudian slip she never caught.
Clips of the confrontation quickly spread across social media, where critics mocked the press secretary’s argument and accused the administration of attacking journalists rather than answering the underlying question.
“He does not need help looking bad Karoline,” one Threads user wrote. Another added, “Trump makes Trump look bad. The press don’t need to put any effort in.”
“Kaitlan Collins seems to be the only one who asks this administration tough questions. Look how they completely lose their shit every time she presses them on something,” one X user wrote.
“Leavitt really out here mad the truth got dragged into the light huh,” one X user wrote.
“She is unraveling in real time. Let’s see if she lasts a month,” another added.
Some critics also pointed to the controversy surrounding Trump’s past remarks about service members. One X post read, “Karoline Leavitt and Pete Hegseth: the press is making Trump look bad by reporting the death of 6 ‘suckers and losers.’”
The phrase “suckers and losers” references allegations that Trump privately disparaged U.S. service members killed in war. In 2023, former White House chief of staff John Kelly confirmed that Trump had made disparaging comments about military veterans and fallen troops during his presidency, reinforcing earlier reporting that sparked widespread backlash.
Later Wednesday night, Collins addressed the clash during her CNN program “The Source,” pushing back against the suggestion that coverage of the fallen soldiers was politically motivated.
“Needless to say, our coverage of Americans who have made the ultimate sacrifice for their country is not about the president, and it’s not about CNN either,” Collins said.
“It’s about the people that you’re looking at here.”
She then read the names of the six U.S. service members killed so far during the conflict with Iran: Captain Cody Khork, Sergeant First Class Noah Tietjens, Sergeant First Class Nicole Amor, Sergeant Declan Coady, Major Jeffrey O’Brien and Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert Marzan.
The tense exchange underscored the administration’s increasingly combative posture toward the press as the Iran conflict stretches into its fifth day and questions continue to swirl about the costs and consequences of the military campaign.
Gender Liberation and Warm Fuzzies tells the story of the class trip Stephie went to. Do you remember all the drama that happened then?!
Also, I added the Legend of The Rarest Genders to it because that story was just so awesome and it makes this book the longest I’ve ever published :O Yay!!
I have dysphasia from a stroke in 2023 but it doesn’t effect my typing, I just spell really bad anyway. Hugs
Holy shit his son is creepy.
The Ellisons are going to strip assets from their acquisitions that were built by talented artists and truly skilled professionals and create new content that caters to these douchebags.
The same people who felt Benghazi was mishandled will have absolutely no interest in all our embassies being destroyed and all our staff left stranded due to DOGE budget cuts.
“With these strikes, the President sends a powerful message to the world. We’ll let you know when we figure out what it is.”
This report is terrifying. This country doesn’t have money to feed or give healthcare to the people, but we can spend billions arming and militarizing a secret masked unrestrained force with the power to detain, restrain, and kill the public with no consequence. The report explains how in other cases these groups take on a power and lawlessness of their own. They are the Taliban of the US. How soon until they show up with military vehicles not just in our cities but at our places to vote? What do ICE and border patrol need with high powered rifles, military armaments, and ar-15 style weapons for anyway, they are arresting the easy low hanging fruit from court rooms and hearings, school teachers, and kids. Plus remember they have ramped up public survaence, facial recognition, and databases on everyone. Hugs
In addition to staffing up at a furious rate, ICE and CPB are acquiring a vast cache of weapons from private contractors, new data reveals. This will not end well—or anytime soon.
The “forever wars” abroad and the global war on terror after the September 11 attacks left behind a long trail of failure, disillusionment, and death—but they also funneled huge sums of taxpayer money to companies that supplied the equipment that made all that destruction possible. That resulted in windfalls for GOP-connected companies, and fueled a massive public-private bureaucracy that grew harder to rein in as it metastasized to monstrous proportions.
Something like this is happening again in a different theater of operations: Donald Trump’s campaign of violent mass deportations. It’s becoming its own forever war: It could drag on for years or decades without success. It’s producing misguided military occupations of restive local populations. It has launched a huge arms buildup. And it also has what might be termed its very own war profiteers.
To wit: A handful of private companies that manufacture weaponry and ammunition have already inked very lucrative contracts with the Department of Homeland Security, which will provide it with enormous stockpiles of military-style equipment, some to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, according to data from Senator Adam Schiff’s office, which is probing DHS contracts.
The pileup of all that equipment hints at a major long-term problem. Just as we saw in the long aftermath of September 11, this new and evolving MAGA terror bureaucracy will expand in grotesque ways. It too will grow less constrained as it amasses more troops—and more firepower.
A harrowing glimpse of this future lies in a new report by Schiff that has gotten surprisingly little notice: It finds that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection have formally approved contracts for at least a whopping $144 million in weapons, ammunition, and other accessories during Trump’s first year. The analysis—based on government contracting data—documents at least a fourfold increase for ICE and a doubling for CBP, relative to 2024, concluding that this will “build a heavily-armed domestic police force.”
It’s eye-opening stuff. One ICE contract is with Geissele Automatics for millions of dollars’ worth of “precision long guns and accessories” to support “armed agents” and other ICE operations, Schiff’s report says. This involves an unknown number of Geissele Border Patrol rifles, the report notes, describing this weapon as an “AR-style rifle with military specifications.” CBP contracted for millions of dollars more in rifles, as well.
ICE and CBP also contracted with Glock for millions of dollars in handguns and accessories, the report says. Taking all these contracts together, the report starkly concludes: “ICE and CBP have together placed orders to purchase thousands of new high-powered lethal weapons at taxpayer expense.”
There’s still more. The report documents ICE and CBP contracts totaling more than $30 million in ammunition and more than $25 million in contracts for the “non-lethal” weapons. That’s not a reassuring description: They include Tasers, pepper spray, and tear gas canisters.
In short, we’re looking at a massive stockpiling of weapons that will be in ICE’s and CBP’s possession for years to come. And someone is supplying all that equipment.
At my request, Schiff’s office analyzed the contracting data it collected to determine which companies are the top ICE and CBP contractors. Here are the results, per a chart provided by Schiff’s staff:
These particular contracts are mostly for small arms (including AR-style rifles), ordnance, ammunition, and related accessories like gun sights and suppressors, Schiff’s office says. A subcategory includes pepper spray, Tasers, tear gas, and other “non-lethal” weaponry.
“These contracts expose how DHS has set in motion a massive surge in spending to put even more dangerous weapons in ICE and CBP’s arsenal,” Schiff told me in an emailed statement. “This misuse of taxpayer dollars to maximally arm federal immigration agents, including those with questionable vetting and insufficient training, must end.”
In a sense, we’re seeing yet more cancerous growth of the post-September 11 national security bureaucracy, but with a more intensified inward focus. DHS, which was created after September 11, has long had a domestic anti-terror component. But now Trump has supercharged its role as a mass immigrant-expulsion operation that is unleashing violence toward U.S. citizens—and even killing them—while operating with near-total impunity among American populations, which Trump officials openly describe as a good thing.
“It’s the transformation of DHS from an entity that protected the homeland from external threats to one increasingly policing American society,” Donald Moynihan, author of an excellent Substack on state capacity, tells me. With this ramped-up stockpiling, Moynihan says, the endgame will be “filling those warehouses with people and using those guns and that technology to control American cities.”
The war on terror also teaches us that expanding bureaucracies like these only grow harder to control over time. “Trump is building up a well-funded, poorly trained paramilitary force that could easily take on a life of its own,” says Georgetown national security law expert Rosa Brooks. “Once you have a massive moneymaking machine ginned up, it’s hard to reverse course and turn off the spigot.”
The folly and waste of the forever wars, we are endlessly told, enabled Trump to successfully campaign against elites who foolishly sank unlimited blood and treasure into misguided imperial adventures abroad. Yet Trump’s mass deportations constitute their own forever war.
This is not meant glibly: Measured in political years, Trump’s mass expulsions actually will seemingly go on forever. Deporting an estimated 14 million people, if it continues at current rates, will take longer than this Trump term followed by two terms of President JD Vance. The scaled-up prison camps, if they materialize, will seemingly have to be packed for years, constituting an ever-expanding immigrant carceral state.
Meanwhile, just like the forever wars, this fiasco is also birthing its own captive constituencies and internal political momentum. This includes everyone from the private contractors supplying it to the large population of MAGA-adjacent young (and not so young) men signing up for ICE, which writer John Ganz describes as “an employment program for the Trumpenproletarian mob.”
Any entity this hypermaterialized—especially one simultaneously aimed at immigrants—will inevitably attract white nationalists and evolve into a political paramilitary force in thrall to ideologically aligned leaders, as Substacker Brian Beutler explains. This is borne out in ICE recruitment messaging, which explicitly seeks to get recruits invested in the mission of achieving national rejuvenation by employing cleansing ethno-nationalist violence.
The stockpiling of weapons underscores the point unnervingly. Now that Trump is feinting toward winding down in Minneapolis, what will be done with all that ideologically fired-up ICE manpower—and all that heavy weaponry? Even a relatively benign answer is alarming. It means more operations like the one in Minneapolis, but packaged with a sheen of new constraints that will simply be shrugged off by the force of this machine’s internal momentum—with more horrors awaiting us.
This is a quagmire for Trump, even if he doesn’t know it. Appropriately enough, it has also been created by unprincipled elite folly—only MAGA elites support it, while the American people verymuchdo not. Trump’s approval on immigration, once a foundational political strength, has deteriorated rapidly at moments when ICE dominates our attention. If his forever war continues in its current form—with its bureaucracy metastasizing in unpredictable directions—it will further cripple his presidency. And it’s darkly fitting that it may take down the presidential ambitions of Vance, also a self-proclaimed critic of forever war follies, along with him.
This is total white supremacy Christian nationalism and an attempt to both roll back all civil rights of minorities and project a fake white Christians were the only good people in the country mentality. Propaganda in other words to support fragile white men’s egos and prop up declining church attendance. This is driven by people who don’t want to share the country equally with others but want everything for their group only. They want to remove an entire group of people from society, the LGBTQ+ community and go back to the pre1960s civil rights for nonwhites. Hugs
An internal government database first reported, by the Washington Post and posted on two public on Monday revealed the scope of the Trump administration’s effort to revise or remove information on African-American history, LGBT rights, climate change and other topics at hundreds of national park sites.
“The narrative being advanced is false and these draft, deliberative internal documents are not a representation of final action taken by the department,” an Interior Department spokesperson said. The National Park Service is part of the Interior Department.
United States Department of the Interior logo and U.S. flag are seen in this illustration taken April 23, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
The U.S. Interior Department said a database revealing how President Donald Trump’s administration planned to revise information on key phases of American history at national park sites was deliberative and the employees who released it “will be held accountable.”
An internal government database first reported, by the Washington Post and posted on two public on Monday revealed the scope of the Trump administration’s effort to revise or remove information on African-American history, LGBT rights, climate change and other topics at hundreds of national park sites.
“The narrative being advanced is false and these draft, deliberative internal documents are not a representation of final action taken by the department,” an Interior Department spokesperson said. The National Park Service is part of the Interior Department.
Trump has targeted cultural and historical institutions – from museums to monuments to national parks – to remove what he calls “anti-American” ideology.
His declarations and executive orders have led to the dismantling of exhibits on slavery, the restoration of Confederate statues and other moves that civil rights advocates say could reverse decades of progress.
The Interior Department spokesperson alleged the internal working documents were edited in a misrepresenting way before being released. The spokesperson also labeled the release as inappropriate and illegal, without specifying the law it allegedly violated.
“Employees who altered internal records and leaked in an effort to hurt the Trump administration will be held accountable,” the spokesperson added.
The Trump administration has sought to stifle internal dissent within government agencies and taken action against employees who have criticized its policies.
Last year, some employees at the Federal Emergency Management Agency were put on leave after they signed an open letter against the agency’s leadership, while some Environmental Protection Agency employees were fired after they signed a letter critical of the government’s actions.
Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) faced a major legal setback as federal judges in New Jersey and Texas criticized the agency over prolonged detentions and repeated violations of court orders.
A federal judge in New Jersey wrote a withering critique of the agency and the Department of Justice (DOJ) over what he described as widespread violations of court orders in immigration matters. Meanwhile, in Texas, another federal judge ordered that an ICE detainee be given a bond hearing or be released, continuing a string of rulings challenging the agency’s mandatory detention policy.
A Department of Homeland Security agent wearing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement patch and badge at Royalston Square on January 22 in Minneapoli… | Jim Watson – Pool/Getty Images
These back-to-back rulings place ICE’s operations under increased court scrutiny amid ongoing tensions between immigration authorities and federal judges. Courts across the country have increasingly pushed back against what they view as procedural lapses or administrative overreach in detention practices under the Trump administration’s expansion of mandatory detention and mass deportations.
DHS has frequently criticized federal judges whose rulings slowed or blocked deportations, often labeling them as “activist judges.” Trump officials have argued that these judicial interventions interfere with enforcement priorities and complicate efforts to remove individuals quickly, framing the courts as obstacles to the administration’s immigration agenda.
New Jersey Judge Slams ICE Over Repeated Court-Order Violations
New Jersey District Judge Michael Farbiarz issued a strongly worded order pointing to dozens of instances in which ICE and the DOJ failed to comply with judicial directives concerning the detention and transfer of immigration detainees, according to a court filing reviewed by Newsweek.
The case involves Baljinder Kumar, who filed a habeas petition challenging his detention without a bail hearing. A January 26 injunction barred ICE from transferring Kumar out of the district, but the agency moved him to Texas on January 31, per the filings.
Farbiarz noted the scale of the problem, writing in a court opinion that “no-transfer injunctions issued by New Jersey district judges have been recently violated 17 times by the Respondents,” about “three every two weeks.”
The court acknowledged an investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which concluded that the transfers “occurred inadvertently due to logistical delays in communicating the court order to the relevant custodians or to administrative oversight of the court order,” and that ICE had “agreed to return the petitioner to the District of New Jersey to regain compliance.”
Court filings showed violations of more than 50 orders over roughly 10 weeks, including cases in which detainees were moved or deported despite explicit court prohibitions.
“The revelation that the Department of Homeland Security violated dozens of judicial orders in New Jersey is shamefully unsurprising. This isn’t just inadvertent or sloppy; the Trump administration has repeatedly flouted judicial orders and attacked the integrity of judges,” ACLU-NJ Executive Director Amol Sinha said in a statement.
Texas Ruling Orders Bond Hearing or Release for ICE Detainee
A federal judge in the Western District of Texas has ordered ICE to either hold a bond hearing or release a Mexican national who has been detained for more than eight months without a final removal order at the Camp East Montana detention facility, according to court filings.
On March 2, Senior U.S. District Judge David C. Guaderrama ruled that Victor Zamudio Sanchez’s continued detention without a hearing violated the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.
Guaderrama wrote in court documents, “Respondents, by detaining Petitioner without the opportunity for a custody redetermination hearing, have deprived Petitioner of his procedural due process rights.”
The judge directed that if Sanchez was not released by March 9, ICE must provide a bond hearing before an immigration judge.
At that hearing, the government would be required to prove, “by clear and convincing evidence, the dangerousness or flight risk justifying Petitioner’s continued detention,” according to the filing.
Sanchez, who has lived in the United States for more than two decades, has been held without a meaningful opportunity to challenge his confinement, the court said. Guaderrama emphasized that the prolonged detention, absent any individualized assessment, posed a serious risk of “erroneous deprivation of [Petitioner’s liberty] interest.”
The court found that Sanchez had been caught in a procedural limbo, with ICE failing to issue a timely Notice to Appear and repeatedly denying him a bond hearing. While the agency eventually initiated formal removal proceedings, the judge ruled that Sanchez’s indefinite detention violated the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, ordering ICE either to release him or provide a bond hearing.
The administration has interpreted federal law to allow ICE to hold many noncitizens without bond hearings, applying mandatory detention to people who entered the United States without inspection, even if they have lived in the country for years. This represents a departure from decades of practice, when many detainees could seek release while their cases proceeded.
A poor person calls in to explain how they have nothing and no way to live with all these cuts to social services. Horrific. The Democrats must promise to fix this and return the safety to the safety nets. Hugs
Scottie's Playtime 