I recently came across an amusing meme: President Donald Trump, dressed as a magician, lifts his wand and declares, “For my next trick, I’ll make Democrats support the drug cartels.” And indeed, he has.
Over the past 10 months, Trump has forced Democrats into defending some of the most indefensible, anti-American positions imaginable: fierce opposition to a comprehensive audit of the federal government, resistance to the deportations of illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes, and allowing biological males to compete in female sports — to name a few.
But perhaps the most egregious example is the Democrats’ sudden sympathy for two narco-terrorists — crew members on a drug boat who were being paid eye-watering sums to ferry deadly drugs into the U.S.
CAN WE PLEASE STOP IT WITH THE ‘SOURCES SAY’ REPORTING?
On Friday, the Washington Post reported that, according to two people with direct knowledge of the first military strike on a drug boat in the Caribbean Sea, War Secretary Pete Hegseth “gave a spoken directive. ‘The order was to kill everybody.’”
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
CNN correspondent Natasha Bertrand, known for playing fast and loose with the truth, piled on. She reported, “The U.S. military was aware there were survivors in the water following the first strike on September 2 and carried out another to both sink the vessel and kill the remaining crew, the sources said.”
Clearly, it would be relatively easy to find a senior Pentagon official willing, even eager, to trash Hegseth as long as they could do so anonymously. Hegseth’s shake-up of the status quo has made him many enemies within the Department of Defense and left the old guard itching for a chance to throw him under the bus.
Suddenly, every Democratic politician and journalist who had done a quick Geneva Convention search on ChatGPT proclaimed that Hegseth was a war criminal. They said live drone footage allegedly showed two men clinging to the remains of their burning boat right before the second strike snuffed them out.
They had not seen the footage, of course, because it’s classified. But they took the word of their anonymous sources, because the story was simply too irresistible to pass up.
Who would have guessed that the New York Times would emerge as the voice of reason? Without explicitly calling the Washington Post story a lie, it effectively called the story a lie.
