Hegseth: We Negotiate With Bombs

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just perfectly summed up Donald Trump’s reckless military campaign in Iran.

Speaking in the Oval Office alongside Trump Tuesday, Hegseth insisted that the Pentagon had established its own role in ongoing negotiations.

“The air campaign that we’ve conducted, that Israel’s conducted alongside us, was one for the history books, truly. And it’s because we have a president of the United States that, when he sends his warfighters out to fight, he unties their hands to actually go out and close with and destroy the enemy as viciously as possible from moment one,” Hegseth said.

“And that’s why we see ourselves as part of this negotiation as well. We negotiate with bombs.”

How exactly is that working out for Hegseth? Not so great.

The Pentagon is reportedly planning to deploy 3,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East, despite Trump’s claim that U.S. officials have held productive conversations with Iran. Iranian officials have flat-out ignored requests to negotiate with the United States, and denied having entered talks. Some have speculated Trump’s surprise announcement was merely an attempt at market manipulation.

As Iran sent another wave of attacks across the Middle East Tuesday, Trump insisted they wanted to “make a deal.” Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed under threat of attack from Iran, halting global trade and sending energy prices soaring.

Still, Hegseth suggested that the U.S. keeping its finger on the big red button is helping things. “You have a choice as we loiter over the top of Tehran, as the president talked about, about your future. [The] president has made it clear that you will not have a nuclear weapon, the war department agrees. Our job is to ensure that.”

Neiyerver Adrián Leon Rengel, a 28-year-old Venezuelan man deported by the Trump administration to CECOT prison in El Salvador, is trying to make sure what happened to him will never happen again.

CBS News confirmed Leon Rengel had filed a first-of-its-kind federal lawsuit on Tuesday against the United States, seeking $1.3 million in damages for false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Leon Rengel was one of hundreds of immigrants deported to CECOT, a notoriously inhumane institution, for four months, before being released in a prisoner swap in July 2025. He alleges that he was beaten and abused by guards, and forced to drink the water that he and other prisoners had washed themselves in.

“There came a point when I thought about hanging myself with the sheet they gave us,” Leon Rengel told CBS News in Spanish.

A report from Human Rights Watch has documented how Venuezelans endured “arbitrary detention,” “torture,” and sexual abuse at CECOT.

The lawsuit also alleges that Leon Rengel, who had an active asylum case at the time of his deportation, had no criminal record besides one misdemeanor—in which he paid a small fine for possession of drug paraphernalia—and that the Department of Homeland Security incorrectly determined he was a gang member because he had a tattoo of a lion and a hair clipper.

Leon Rengel told CBS News he was a barber and was not part of any gang. Others at CECOT have also said they were told their tattoos were the reason they were detained.

DHS continues to claim Leon Rengel was a gang member, though it told CBS that providing any proof of this would “undermine” national security.

Regardless of whether you think immigrants should be allowed to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, the federal government is meant to abide by due process laws and wait for deportation cases to be heard before taking action. The Trump administration not only illegally sent people out of the country but sent them to prisons to be tortured. It amounts to one of the cruelest of the many crimes committed by the Trump regime. We can only hope Leon Rengel gets his day in court.

Texas Representative Chip Roy knows exactly how his own bill, the SAVE America Act, could make it harder for married women to prove their identity.

“We’ve got some folks out there that are trying to stir the pot on this allegation that it somehow is a barrier for married women to be able to vote because they’ve got to deal with getting IDs with name changes and all those things,” Roy said in newly released footage from a February 2025 Zoom meeting with the Election Integrity Network. The secretly recorded footage was obtained and released by the media group Called to Activism.

“Although frankly I’m trying to not to elevate the issue too much, my chief of staff had to go get a new ID in Virginia. Virginia’s adopted the REAL ID system, so she had to go through a bunch of hoops. She’s gonna have to go back to the DMV twice because they want the paperwork for it.”

The SAVE America Act would require that Americans present proof of citizenship like a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. If a person’s current name does not match their document, they would have to provide extra documentation to provide their identity. (The REAL ID system has similar requirements to obtain state identification.)

Roy and other Republicans claim the bill will fight against voter fraud—which is exceedingly rare—but it will likely just make it harder for the some 69 million married American women who have changed their names to vote, as well as trans voters who have changed their names.

“That’s just part of the issue with how we try to set up the ability to identify people,” Roy continued in the video. Despite describing in detail the very challenge married women would face if the SAVE Act passes, he then denied the bill would create any voting hurdles for married women.

“But there’s no barriers at all to married women being able to vote,” he nonsensically concluded, failing to hear his own ignorance.

Though he had just highlighted a potential hurdle that married women may face when they register to vote, Roy claimed that “there’s no barriers at all to married women being able to vote” with the SAVE America Act.

If Donald Trump says he’s ready for peace with Iran, why is the Pentagon planning to deploy thousands of troops from the 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East?

The Department of Defense is plotting to deploy 3,000 members of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, two U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal. The orders are expected to be signed Tuesday afternoon.

While the decision to put boots on the ground has not been made, the officials told the Journal, deploying the elite, rapid-response paratrooper division does expand the range of options Trump can take in Iran. The decision comes just days after Trump announced that the U.S had held “productive talks” with Iranian officials moving closer to a “complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East, with a five-day pause on strikes against energy infrastructure.

Iranian officials have denied that the country is in talks with the United States, and some have speculated Trump’s announcement was merely an attempt at market manipulation. At the same time, Israel launched fresh attacks on Tehran Monday despite Trump’s gesture at peace.

The 82nd Airborne Division, comprising up to 5,000 soldiers, specializes in missions that include parachute assault, reinforcing U.S. embassies, and enabling emergency evacuations. Earlier this month, the U.S. Army spontaneously canceled a training exercise for the elite division, sparking concerns that they would be deployed to the Middle East. It seems now that those concerns were well-founded.

President Trump took questions after Markwayne Mullin was confirmed as homeland security secretary on Tuesday, and dropped a strange detail about the ongoing negotiations to end the war in Iran.

After a journalist asked Trump why he would bother trying to negotiate with Iran if, as the president has claimed, he doesn’t trust their leadership, Trump replied:

“Because they’re going to make a deal. They did something yesterday that was amazing, actually. They gave us a present. And the present arrived today. And it was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money. And I’m not going to tell you what that present is, but it was a very significant prize.… That meant one thing to me—we’re dealing with the right people.”

It is simultaneously funny and depressing to hear that Iranian leaders have realized they can essentially just bribe Trump with an expensive gift. It’s a similar strategy to that recently employed by María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader who presented her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in January, sparking allegations that she was trying to curry favor with the president. (Trump was thrilled by the gift but later snubbed Machado anyway.)

Reporters prodded Trump about what the present was. The president wouldn’t say exactly but hinted that it “was oil and gas related” and “related to the flow, and to the Strait [of Hormuz].” Perhaps an agreement giving Trump and his cronies exclusive access to an oil field?

Negotiations to end the war have gotten off to a rocky start. After Trump claimed on Monday that Iran and the U.S. had held “productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities,” Iranian officials came out and said the talks had never happened.

Despite the fact that U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran are very much ongoing, as is Iranian retaliation, Trump also claimed in his remarks that the “war has been won” and “the only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.”