The jerks in the federal courts might have VICIOUSLY and UNGRATEFULLY taken President Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center earlier this year, but fear not: The tireless patriots on the center’s board have thought of a new solution. The board voted yesterday to update the building’s inscription to read: “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.”
Not that any restoring and renovating has actually happened yet, but first things first: gotta make the Make-a-Wish president happy. Happy Friday.
Join Catherine Rampell and JVL for Receipts Live on Substack and YouTube today at 12:30 p.m. EDT.
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Of Sailors and Scoundrels
by William Kristol
The USS Abraham Lincoln, one of our eleven nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, left port in San Diego on November 21 for a routine deployment to the Indo-Pacific region. It was redirected to the Middle East in January 2026 in anticipation of Donald Trump’s attack on Iran. But despite the greater attention that would presumably be paid to service members engaged in a theater of war, credible reports emerged several weeks later, in mid-April, of unusually poor living conditions besetting the sailors aboard the ship, and of family members concerned about the sailors’ well-being.
Nothing to see here, we were told by the brass. The reports “grossly mischaracterized” the situation, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle assured the service, the families, and the country. This is the same Caudle who, the New York Times reported, became CNO last year after campaigning for the job by sucking up to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a grossly partisan, political manner unbefitting an officer, especially a service chief. He did this both before and after Hegseth fired Caudle’s widely respected predecessor, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, apparently because she is a woman.
Hegseth also chimed in about reports from the Lincoln, calling them “fake news.”
The families of the service members deployed on the ship responded that the reports were not fake.
They were telling the truth. Hegseth and Caudle were not.
Nor, it seems, did Hegseth and Caudle do anything to address the situation. Last week, on August 5, MSNOW Pentagon correspondent Priya Sridhar reported on conversations with a dozen family members of sailors aboard the Lincoln increasingly alarmed about morale, safety, and conditions on the ship, as the carrier entered its ninth month at sea.
On the evening of August 6, in a two-hundred-person meeting at Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego, families confronted acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao and other Navy leaders about the situation. Cao is acting secretary because his predecessor, John Phelan, was fired in April of this year after repeatedly clashing with Hegseth. This is the same Cao who, after retiring from Navy service as a captain in 2021, ran for Congress in 2022 and for the Senate in 2024 in Virginia, and had received some national attention when he said “witchcraft” had taken over the city of Monterey, California. In 2024, in response to a question about military recruiting, Cao said, “What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat ‘em, and ask for seconds. Those are young men and women that are going to win wars.” This presumably is what got him a job as under secretary of the Navy in Hegseth’s Pentagon, and got him promoted—even though Phelan had so little confidence in Cao that he routinely excluded him from briefings and meetings.
Cao didn’t reassure families at the meeting. Nor did an unidentified representative of the Navy brass, who was asked about a sailor who had reportedly jumped off the Lincoln a few days earlier. The official responded by saying it wasn’t clear if the sailor had fallen or jumped, and that in any case the sailor was back on board and was “fine.” This met with incredulity and jeers in the room. It now turns out the sailor had jumped on August 3, and in fact was in the water for about an hour before he was rescued. Navy officials didn’t contact his wife about the incident until four days after her husband jumped overboard—until the day after the town hall in San Diego. And this week, the Navy Times reported that several Lincoln sailors have tried to go overboard during their extended deployment.
Yesterday, Hegseth pushed back on the reports of poor conditions aboard the Lincoln.
“We make sure that every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment,” he told reporters during a visit to Panama.
Nicole Conrad’s son is serving on the Lincoln. Conrad says she would like Hegseth to visit the Lincoln and see the conditions for the roughly 5,000 sailors and marines onboard. “Go visit,” he said. “If you want to sit here and you want to say that Trump is taking care of the soldiers, go yourself.” Mrs. Conrad by the way, says she voted for Trump.
As one astute tweeter pointed out:
ghislaine maxwell is living a better life in that prison camp todd blanche transferred her to, than the sailors on USS Abraham Lincoln.
The United States Navy is a large and capable organization. Its budget is close to $300 billion a year. It is capable of adequately resupplying an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. It is capable of acting in response to reports of conditions endangering sailors’ well-being. It is capable of managing its ships and taking care of its personnel.
If the people in charge are using up sailors as carelessly and recklessly as they are using up their munitions, it’s because they don’t care enough to do otherwise.
The Navy announced on Thursday that it would send another carrier group to the Middle East, allowing the Lincoln to return to its home port in San Diego.
But it’s not just the Lincoln that should return home. It’s all the troops deployed to Donald Trump’s misbegotten and mismanaged war who should return. And their commanders and nominal “leaders”—from Donald Trump to Pete Hegseth to Daryl Caudle to Hung Cao—should be held accountable.
AROUND THE BULWARK
The Death of Reading Has Been Greatly Exaggerated… Reading is good. Reading more would be better. But literate societies can be susceptible to illiberalism, argues CATHY YOUNG.
Five Years Since the Fall of Kabul, the Betrayal Continues… When we forget Afghanistan, and the Americans and Afghans who fought there, we turn our backs on our own, writes WILL SELBER.