ANALYSIS — Faced with a burgeoning military scandal, President Donald Trump on Tuesday turned to his familiar strategy of trying to deflect and distract as he feels bipartisan heat from Congress.

His Defense secretary, meanwhile, opted to go full hawk.

“I ask questions from very intelligent lunatics, you people. I give the right answers. There’s never a scandal. There’s never a problem,” Trump told reporters, verbally papering over a number of controversies during his first 10 months back in office. “I give you answers and solve your little problems. You go back and you can’t find anything, but you do, you do stories.”

The commander in chief huddled with his Cabinet as Democrats and some Republicans demand clarity on a U.S. military operation against a vessel in the Caribbean that the administration said was being used by “narco-terrorists” to move drugs into the country.

The White House confirmed Monday that an initial strike severely damaged the ship and that a second strike was ordered to destroy it. The Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, while remotely monitoring the Sept. 2 mission, ordered the second strike to “kill everybody,” referring to the vessel’s surviving crew members.

Administration officials have denied that Hegseth gave such an order, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday saying it was U.S. Special Operations Command chief Adm. Frank Bradley who issued the second strike order. On Tuesday, Hegseth defended Bradley’s decision: “And, by the way, Adm. Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat.”

Hegseth was at his usual seat Tuesday, to the immediate left of Trump, who declared, “Pete’s done a great job.” Trump added that he wanted drug-carrying vessels “taken out.”

Here are three takeaways:

Hawkish Hegseth

As Trump went around the long, oval-shaped table, Hegseth led off, taking a hawkish tone on the drug boats.

“I’ve said (it), and I’ll say again: We’ve only just begun striking narco boats and putting narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean,” the defense chief said. “Because they’ve been poisoning the American people. And Joe Biden tried to approach it with kid gloves and allowed them to come across the border. … President Trump said, ‘No, we’re taking the gloves off. We’re taking the fight to these designated terror organizations, and that’s exactly what we’re doing. So we’re stopping the drugs. We’re striking the boats. We’re defeating narco-terrorists.”

Hegseth said he watched the first strike live from the Pentagon, then moved on with his day.

“As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we (have) got a lot of things to do. So I didn’t stick around for the hour, two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation, digitally, occurs,” he said. “So I moved on to my next meeting.”

He said he learned a “couple of hours later” that Bradley had made the strike, “which he had the complete authority to do.”

Speaking later, Trump didn’t seem miffed at his Defense secretary.

“I still haven’t gotten a lot of information, because I rely on Pete. But to me, it was an attack. It wasn’t one strike, two strikes, three strikes. Somebody asked me a question about the second strike — I didn’t know about a second strike,” he said. “I knew they took out a boat, but I would say this, they had a strike. I hear the gentleman that was in charge of that is (an) extraordinary, extraordinary person. … Pete was satisfied. Pete didn’t know about second attack having to do with two (survivors).”

Senate Armed Services Committee member Jacky Rosen, in a statement Monday, said Hegseth should give up his seat beside Trump in the White House’s Cabinet Room.

“If the reports are true, Pete Hegseth likely committed a war crime when he gave an illegal order that led to the killing of incapacitated survivors of the U.S. strike in the Caribbean,” the Nevada Democrat said. “The American people deserve to know exactly what happened. … It’s deeply shameful that the secretary of Defense would violate the laws of armed conflict and put our brave servicemembers in this position. He should resign immediately.”

The White House and Pentagon have received bipartisan pushback on the second strike, which the Post reported as targeting survivors who were clinging to the wreckage.

Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats and sits on the Armed Services and Intelligence committees, told CNN if the Post report is accurate, “that’s a stone-cold war crime.”

The GOP chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, Alabama Rep. Mike D. Rogers and Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, also have raised concerns.

Rogers and HASC ranking member Adam Smith, D-Wash., in a joint statement vowed to conduct “rigorous oversight of the Department of Defense’s military operations in the Caribbean.” Wicker joined SASC ranking Democrat Jack Reed of Rhode Island in their own joint statement announcing they had “directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”

Notably, Bradley hasn’t denied giving the secondary strike order. The administration would have ample positions into which Bradley, already a four-star Navy admiral, could be promoted as a reward for taking responsibility. That list could include chief of naval operations, the head of a combatant command like Central Command or Southern Command, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — or even chairman.

After all, showing loyalty to this president is often a savvy career move.

‘Affordability, affordability, affordability’

Weeks after Republicans suffered sweeping losses in the off-year elections after voters largely blamed them for still-high prices, Trump continued to downplay voters’ concerns regarding the affordability issue.

“And, you know, there’s this fake narrative that the Democrats talk about affordability. They just say the word. It doesn’t mean anything to anybody,” he said, pooh-poohing multiple polls and exit polling from last month’s elections showing prices as a top issue for many voters.

“Just say it, ‘affordability.’ I inherited the worst inflation in history. There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything,” Trump said, again blaming former President Biden for the economy that he has helmed for nearly one year. “The prices were massively high. … But the word ‘affordability’ is a con job by the Democrats.

“I watched the other day where some very low-IQ congresswoman talked about, ‘Affordability, affordability, affordability,’” he claimed, without naming the Democratic member. “She had no idea their (Democrats’) prices were much higher.”

But, literally seconds later, the Republican president stepped all over his own message.

“And there is still more to do,” he said. “There’s always more to do.”

Trump has continued to focus on the inflation rate while ignoring pricing data from his own Bureau of Labor Statistics that shows prices climbing over the past 12 months.

“Since last January, we’ve stopped inflation in its tracks,” he said. “But we have it down to a very good level. It’s going to go down a little bit further.”

Wreath weirdness

With questions swirling about the 79-year old president’s cognitive and physical health, Trump made several strange statements.

“The first lady’s done a beautiful job with the Christmas trees and all the decorations,” he said of wife Melania Trump, who oversaw holiday decorating at the executive mansion. “I see the wreaths on the windows. I’ve never seen that before on the windows of the White House.”

Photographs from Getty Images show wreaths on the windows of the White House, including along those of the mansion’s presidential residence, each year during his first term. That includes the holiday seasons of 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. He seemed to have forgotten.

“And, you know, it’s four stories. I said, ‘How did they get that wreath?’ I wouldn’t want to do it,” he said of lift equipment used to hang the massive decorations. “But they put them up.”

He also claimed federal income tax might be nixed — without fully explaining how he would replace the $2.4 trillion in income tax that the federal government collected in 2024, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

“I believe that at some point in the not-too-distant future, you won’t have (federal) income tax to pay,” Trump said. “Because the money we’re taking in is so great, it’s so enormous that you’re not going to have income tax to pay.”

Then there was his description of a recent cognitive test: “By the way, I took my physical. I got all A’s everything. But they said to me, ‘Would you like to take a cognitive test?’ I said, ‘Is it hard?’ … No president has ever agreed to take one, because when you get into the mid-questions — meaning, you know, No. 10, 11, 12, 28, 30 — they get harder and harder.”

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