Trump Burned Through Stockpile of Patriot Missiles at Alarming Rate

The United States doesn’t have the missile stockpile it needs for the Pentagon’s military plans.

The country has only 25 percent of the Patriot missile interceptors left from its initial stockpile level after heavy use of the weapon in the Middle East “in recent months,” reported The Guardian Tuesday. The arsenal issue raised concerns within the Defense Department that U.S. military operations could be jeopardized, with the situation becoming “more acute” in the wake of Donald Trump’s attack on Iranian nuclear facilities last month. The president ordered the use of nearly 30 Patriot missiles in an exchange with Iran’s military.

The U.S. produces some 600 Patriot missiles per year, but concerns remain over Iran’s stockpile, which is believed to contain more than 1,000 ballistic missiles. Those could theoretically be weaponized against U.S. bases if the ceasefire with Israel were to collapse, reported The Guardian. Meanwhile, the U.S. has also divided up its reserves to aid Ukraine while it fights Russia, earmarking dozens of Patriot missiles for the Eastern European nation.

The reported shortage also halted a weapons shipment to Ukraine last week in what a White House spokesperson described as a move to “put America’s interests first,” blindsiding practically everyone outside of the White House, including the State Department, Congress, officials in Kyiv, and America’s European allies, reported NBC News.

The decision to cancel the shipment was grounded in the Pentagon’s global munitions tracker, which highlighted that a number of critical munitions had fallen below a minimum readiness standard for several years, at least since President Joe Biden began sending weapons to assist Ukraine in its war against Russia.

Trump appeared unconcerned by the shortage come Monday, however, when he told reporters ahead of a dinner with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would “send some more weapons” to Ukraine. He did not, however, disclose whether those shipments would include the Patriot missiles.

Trump also told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that he was “not responsible” for the canceled shipment, telling the war-battered leader that he had directed a review of U.S. stockpiles but did not order the freeze, according to sources that spoke with The Guardian.

The news of a shortage comes at a pivotal moment, with U.S. officials wavering on the country’s commitments to aiding Ukraine and Democrats and Republicans alike excoriating the White House’s decision to pull back.

Democratic Representative Adam Smith referred to the decision to halt aid as “disingenuous,” claiming that his office had “seen the numbers” and had not seen any evidence that would warrant peeling back support from Ukraine.

“We are not at any lower point, stockpile-wise, than we’ve been in the three and a half years of the Ukraine conflict,” Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, told NBC News.

Last week, after news of the halted shipment broke, an analysis by senior military officers similarly found that a Ukraine aid package would not jeopardize U.S. supplies, reported NBC.

Donald Trump announced Monday that the U.S. will send more weapons to Ukraine to combat Russia—making a lot of MAGA world livid.

Seemingly shifting his stance from days earlier, when the president halted certain weapons shipments to Ukraine, Trump told reporters, “We’re going to send some more weapons. We have to. They have to be able to defend themselves. They’re getting hit very hard now. They’re getting hit very hard. We’re going to have to send more weapons. Yeah, defensive weapons, primarily. But they’re getting hit very, very hard.”

This was confirmed in a Pentagon statement, which read: “At President Trump’s direction, the Department of Defense is sending additional defensive weapons to Ukraine to ensure the Ukrainians can defend themselves while we work to secure a lasting peace and ensure the killing stops.”

To many MAGA Republicans who support Trump for his supposed “America First” foreign policy approach, the news was aggravating.

“I did not vote for this,” wrote Trump-pardoned January 6-er Derrick Evans. Natalie Danelishen, who works for a foundation that seeks to build upon Trump’s idea of “freedom cities,” echoed the sentiment, adding, “What the actual fuck?”

“Who in the hell is telling Trump that we need to send more weapons to Ukraine?” posted the conservative comedy and political commentary duo Keith and Kevin Hodge.

“So Trump just said we’re gonna support funding Ukraine’s proxy war now?” wrote “America First” influencer @TiffMoodNukes, who likened Trump’s behavior to a MAGA talking point alleging President Joe Biden was a puppet for the deep state.

For other Trump supporters, the decision was salt in a fresh wound, after a Trump Department of Justice memo published by Axios this weekend denied the existence of a much-anticipated “client list” maintained by Jeffrey Epstein, thereby deflating MAGA conspiracy theories—that Trump and his team had long entertained—about elites’ connections to the deceased sex trafficker and financier.

Many within MAGA world have been left feeling that either Trump had strung them along or, worse, that his administration is now in on the imagined cover-up.

Newsmax host Todd Starnes posted, “The White House just announced they are going to send more weapons to Ukraine.… And it turns out the Epstein files were just an urban legend. I did not vote for this.”

“Hey, you didn’t get the Epstein List, but at least Ukraine is getting weapons!” posted a “MAGA Activist” who goes by “Chief Trumpster.”

“There was a time when I was willing to entertain the idea of ‘trust the plan,’” posted Mike Adams, a right-wing health influencer known as “Health Ranger.” “But after the Epstein files have been memory holed … and the ‘peace president’ is sending more bombs to Israel and Ukraine, and we all realize we’ve been lied to about so many things, the idea that anyone could still trust the plan is truly idiotic.”

Donald Trump’s team must have been in quite a rush to send out the president’s copy-paste “tariff letters” Monday because they somehow missed a glaring issue.

A letter to Bosnia and Herzegovina announcing a 30 percent tariff rate starting on August 1 was mistakenly addressed to “Mr. President,” when the chairperson of the Balkan country’s presidency is a woman.

Bosnia and Herzegovina is led by a three-member governing body that collectively serves as head of state, and its chairperson since November 2024 has been Željka Cvijanović.

Team Trump eventually caught the mistake, and hours later, the president posted a new version on Truth Social that used the proper “Madam President.”

Within less than a day of disseminating 14 letters to various countries, Trump has already backed off the rates and deadlines, saying that basically everything in the letters is still subject to change—including the recipients, it seems. It sort of makes sense that the president wouldn’t put too much stock in his stationery, because they obviously didn’t require that much effort to put together in the first place.

Someone was using AI to impersonate the secretary of state.

A State Department cable obtained by The Washington Post detailed that an individual, yet to be publicly identified, was using AI to send voicemails and write text and Signal chats in the tone and manner of Marco Rubio. They named themselves “Marco.Rubio@state.gov” on Signal.

The cable, dated July 3, said that this person “contacted at least five non-Department individuals, including three foreign ministers, a U.S. governor, and a U.S. member of Congress” for about two weeks. The State Department declined to reveal whether any of the officials messaged by the impersonator had actually been duped.

The administration has had issues with AI-based espionage attempts before. In May, the FBI announced that there was an “ongoing malicious text and voice messaging campaign” against the Trump administration, using AI. And their issues with—and fondness for—the Signal app are now infamous.

“You just need 15 to 20 seconds of audio of the person, which is easy in Marco Rubio’s case. You upload it to any number of services, click a button that says ‘I have permission to use this person’s voice,’ and then you type what you want him to say,” Hany Farid, a digital forensics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told the Post. “Leaving voicemails is particularly effective because it’s not interactive.”

While there are clear competency and privacy issues within the Trump administration, this case also points to what the future of political espionage will look like.

Even Donald Trump’s most sycophantic followers are turning on him over his administration’s handling of the Epstein files.

Against the expertise of individuals who had worked on the case for decades, Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested in January that the pedophilic sex trafficker had maintained a “client list,” supercharging ideas and theories about which high-powered individuals could have been involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes.

But the administration’s language changed abruptly on Monday, when the Department of Justice posted a memo confirming that no such “incriminating client list” existed, undercutting Bondi’s language. Far-right influencers who had absorbed themselves into the details of the case refused to believe that Bondi had misstepped—instead, they interpreted the sudden reversal as an administration cover-up.

“So I’m going to go throw up, actually,” said Alex Jones, the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist. “Because I have integrity, and I just really need the Trump administration to succeed and to save this country, and they were doing so much good, and then for them to do something like this, it tears my guts out.”

But Jones wasn’t the only ex-Trump ally to lose his marbles over the update. Laura Loomer, who was not one of the lucky far-right influencers to receive an Epstein files “binder” from the White House earlier this year, called on Trump to throw his attorney general out of the government.

“President Trump should fire Blondi for lying to his base and creating a liability for his administration,” Loomer wrote on X, referring to Bondi as an “embarrassment.”

“I hope Trump realizes what an Fing LIAR Pam Blondi is,” Loomer continued in another post. “She’s useless. Covering for pedophiles and never arresting criminals.”

And Trump’s biggest 2024 campaign donor was similarly appalled by the DOJ memo.

“What’s the time? Oh look, it’s no-one-has-been-arrested-o’clock again,” Elon Musk posted.

The whole situation has thrown Trump’s position with his conspiracy-minded supporters into a bit of a pickle. The 79-year-old billionaire has achieved messiah-like status within the QAnon conspiracy circle for years thanks to the group’s principal belief that, despite his being named and photographed as an associate of Epstein’s and being a reputed fraudster, and despite being found liable by a jury for sexually abusing Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll, Trump will rid the world of Satan-worshipping, liberal-minded pedophiles who run the government and media.