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by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
May 7, 2026

My latest interview on Securing America with Frank Gaffney. Sign up NOW for Frank’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!

Rod Martin & Frank Gaffney discuss how the Supreme Court’s ruling against racial gerrymandering will impact the midterms, plus Trump’s “tough love” toward NATO, the uncertain future of the alliance, and the changes necessary for it to survive.

It’s 20 minutes you won’t want to miss. Watch, like, and share!

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by John Haughey
May 7, 2026

The “storage clock” is ticking as tankers that exported 3.2 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil remain bottled up in Iranian ports by the U.S. Navy.

The blockade in the Gulf of Oman is a pressure-point tactic, part of a global strategy to deny Tehran $13 billion in monthly revenues and paralyze Iran’s petroleum industry by forcing it to shut down when it runs out of space to store what it can’t ship.

Since President Trump imposed the blockade on April 13, at least 1.5 million barrels of Iranian oil have been stored every day because there’s no place to move it.

Those barrels are starting to pile up. According to consensus industry estimates, including by UK-based Energy Aspects, up to 68 million barrels of Iran’s 122-million-barrel maximum storage was full in late April, and there was space for 20 million to 30 million barrels more.

The squeeze is rattling Islamic Republic leaders, Trump said.

“Iran has just informed us that they are in a ‘State of Collapse,’“ the president wrote. ”They want us to ‘Open the Hormuz Strait,’ as soon as possible, as they try to figure out their leadership situation.”

The president has expressed confidence that Iran will soon meet his demands to terminate nuclear weapons development, end support for terrorist groups, and withdraw its territorial claim — and effort to control — of the strait.

To calculate when these “state of collapse” concessions will manifest, time and space become coefficients in an equation. The answer is a so-called storage clock. It has one fulcrum constant: More time equals less space.

Kpler and JP Morgan analysts were among those in late April doing storage clock math, projecting that Iran would run out of time and space within 15 to 22 days—mid- to late May — if it can’t ship oil.

“Iran is being pushed into a storage-driven shut-in cycle,” analyst Homayoun Falakshahi wrote in a separate April 29 Kpler analysis. “Iran faces imminent forced shut-ins, with storage saturation likely within [about] 20–24 days, triggering rapid production cuts.”

Energy Aspects projected in late April that it could take up to seven weeks, or until mid-June, for the blockade to force shut-ins and shutdowns. Analyses by Wood Mackenzie, the Atlantic Council, the Center for Strategic International Studies, and the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, among many others, offer timelines that fall between.

Some maintain that Iran’s storage clock has already expired. The Institute for the Study of War and The Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute said Iran’s storage was depleted as of April 29.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies projected there would be a shutdown by April 25.

Foundation senior fellow Miad Maleki, a former U.S. Treasury executive, estimated in an X post that Iran had approximately 20 million barrels of storage left on April 12 and predicted that within 13 days of maxing out capacity, “Iran must shut-in wells.”

No Way Out

Iran has four oil- and gas-producing regions. The Khuzestan fields have been producing since the 1960s, generating about 2.2 million bpd. West Karoun on the Iraqi border produces 500,000 bpd. The provinces of Fars and Bushehr along the Persian Gulf mostly produce offshore natural gas, including from South Pars, the Iranian sector of Qatar’s North Field, the world’s largest gas field. The fourth region is Iran’s Persian Gulf fields, with about 65 percent originating from the Kharg district’s three fields.

All roads, railways, and pipelines, and virtually all hydrocarbons extracted from Iran’s oil and gas fields, lead to Kharg Island, an eight-square-mile coral outcrop 300 miles north of the Strait of Hormuz that houses more than 25 percent of Iran’s storage capacity. Ninety percent of Tehran’s oil exports are pumped from terminals at Kharg into supertankers, up to 10 at a time.

By April 20, one week after the United States implemented the blockade, stored oil at Kharg Island was at 74 percent capacity, Center on Global Energy Policy fellow Antoine Halff wrote in an April 28 analysis.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote on X on April 21 that storage on the island would be full “in a matter of days“ and that ”the fragile Iranian oil wells” would be shut in.

Four of Iran’s five other export-capable ports — Sirri and Lavan islands, Saroosh, and Assaluyeh near Bushehr — are inside the Persian Gulf. Only Jask is south of the strait, although no ships are using its newly built terminal on the Gulf of Oman with the U.S. Navy lurking nearby.

Although Iran has a robust domestic pipeline network, it only receives crude via cross-border pipelines for refining from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, and it only exports natural gas in pipelines to Turkey, Iraq, and Armenia.

Tehran has limited capacity to expand exports by rail, although Iran Oil Exporters Union spokesman Hamid Hosseini said in widely reported comments that the regime is considering shipping oil by train on a newly built rail corridor from Iran to Yiwu and Xi’an in China.

But that capacity is highly limited. At most, Iran could ship no more than roughly 6 percent of its exports by this means. That does not solve its problem.

Unless the U.S. Navy lifts its blockade, Iran cannot move oil and gas out of the country, putting the same squeeze on Tehran that it has imposed on its Gulf State neighbors since early March — menacing the Strait of Hormuz, bringing Gulf trade to a standstill, damaging ports and infrastructure in drone and missile strikes, and marooning an estimated 20,000 sailors on ships anchored in limbo on “the Arab side” of the Gulf.

“When Iran first disrupted tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, those Arab producers with the least available storage capacity and no export alternative were quick to ramp down production,” Halff said. “With the United States now restricting marine traffic to and from Iranian ports, Tehran faces the same conundrum.”

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But unlike the Gulf Arab states, Iran has no good options. And time is running out: cashflow considerations aside, the damage to Iran’s oil wells could be extreme.

Here’s what comes next.

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by Rod D. Martin
May 6, 2026

Friday May 1st marked the 60th day of President Trump’s Operation Epic Fury against Iran. Supposedly, reaching that date without explicit Congressional approval means the War Powers Act’s automatic termination provision kicks in.

Supposedly.

In reality, the War Powers Act of 1973 is both unconstitutional and unworkable. It’s also unclear in a key respect the President has already made use of. Can Congress stop the President? Certainly. Can the War Powers Resolution? No.

That distinction matters. Congress has enormous constitutional power over war. It can declare war. It can fund, or crucially, refuse to fund war. It can limit, condition, or prohibit specific military actions. If necessary, it can impeach a rogue President.

If you disagree with this argument, or any other interpretation of the Constitution, there’s a solution. It’s called Article V. Learn more here.

But aside from the funding question, if it wants to do any of these things, the Constitution requires Congress to affirmatively act. It has to pass a law. It has to present that law to the President. And if the President vetoes it, Congress can only override him by a two-thirds vote.

The War Powers Act attempts to avoid that. It purports to give Congress something very much like a veto over the Commander in Chief — a “legislative veto” the Supreme Court has already rejected in INS v. Chadha (1983). And even if Congress tries to use the proper constitutional route instead, Donald Trump has a real veto.

The Act says what it says. So did laws imposing segregation. That didn’t make them valid law.

The War Powers Overreach

The War Powers Act was passed in 1973, over Richard Nixon’s veto, in the aftermath of Vietnam. It was the ultimate exercise in blame-shifting.

The irony is rich. The Vietnam War was launched, micromanaged, bungled, and morally squandered by the same Democrats who proceeded to blame Nixon for cleaning up the mess. Then, after years of authorizing, funding, and enabling the conflict, a Democrat Congress decided the real problem was not bad strategy, bad leadership, or their own inept cowardice. The problem, they suddenly “discovered,” was the institution of the presidency.

How convenient.

The War Powers Act was not some noble restoration of the Founders’ design. It was a Democrat Congress trying to wash its hands of its own war. And having lost two straight presidential elections over it, it was also an effort to blame Republicans for what Democrats had done.

But it wasn’t only that. It was also a thoroughly Beltway “solution”: avoid responsibility by inventing a mechanism. (See also: Gramm-Rudman and PayGo.)

The Act requires the President to notify Congress within 48 hours when U.S. forces are introduced into hostilities or hostilities are imminent. So far so good. It then says the President must terminate such use of forces within 60 days unless Congress has declared war, specifically authorized the operation, extended the deadline, or is unable to meet because America has been attacked. The President may receive up to 30 additional days to withdraw forces safely.

That sounds precise. It sounds balanced. It sounds constitutional.

But it’s not.

The Founders gave Congress and the President overlapping war powers. They created tension, not neatness, because war powers require both democratic accountability and executive decisiveness. Then once in office, those same Founding Fathers fought a series of declared and undeclared wars that they believed were perfectly consistent with their constitutional design.

Who would know better than them?

The War Powers Act attempts to assert Congressional supremacy over the President through mere legislation, in much the same manner as the many acts creating Deep State agencies that unconstitutionally divert Article 2, Section 1 powers away from the elected President and thus the electorate.

That’s the constitutional problem. The practical problem is no better: the countdown clock is unworkable.

Let’s say the President — in good faith — believes military operations must continue. Can the 60-day clock stop him? Obviously not.

Can Congress? Certainly, by refusing to authorize funding. But what if the war is already funded, as it is now, and simply a matter of the Executive Branch determining how best to use the appropriation it’s already been given? Well, then Congress would have to affirmatively legislate against any use of funds to prosecute the war.

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So what happens then? Oh wait: the President inevitably vetoes that act.

Can Congress override that veto? Of course it can: it overrode Nixon’s veto of the War Powers Resolution itself. But it would actually have to. And certainly in the current conflict, there is approximately zero chance of that happening.

And that brings us to the part that’s unclear. The President has announced publicly that the Iran ceasefire has “paused” the Act’s 60-day clock. Wait, what? The Act doesn’t say anything about pauses. Scholars can argue, but only judges can decide, and so far, no one with standing has sued. Who knows how the Supreme Court might rule on such a question, but the bigger point is that they likely would not rule on it at all, deeming it a “political question”.

So Congress is back to the necessity of actually passing legislation. And the President can veto whatever they pass, so at least two-thirds are going to have to oppose him to make that stick.

The 60-day rule is functionally meaningless.

Presidents Have Understood This for Decades

Since its passage, Presidents of both parties have complied with the War Powers Act’s reporting requirements. They notify Congress. They send letters. They cite the statute. But they do so carefully. The usual formulation is that the President is acting “consistent with” the War Powers Resolution, not “pursuant to” it.

That phrasing is not accidental. It is the Executive Branch saying: we’ll keep Congress informed, but we do not concede that Congress may put the Commander in Chief on a statutory egg timer.

No President should concede it.

It was Democrats who passed this mess, so it’s instructive to examine how Democrats have handled it.

Bill Clinton’s Kosovo air campaign lasted 78 days. Congress did not declare war. Congress did not clearly authorize the operation. Congress also did not stop it. The 60-day clock ticked. The operation continued.

Barack Obama’s Libya operation lasted 222 days. As in Iran today, the campaign consisted of ongoing airstrikes with no ground forces deployed. The Obama administration argued that this did not even rise to the level of “hostilities” sufficient to trigger the War Powers Act!

And a divided Congress — Republican House, Democrat Senate — didn’t stop him. It didn’t even object.

That’s the practical problem. It’s also the Constitution’s design.

The two branches’ powers overlap. But the legislature does not get to execute anything. If it’s sufficiently unified, as it was in 1973, it can certainly take effective action. If not, it cannot. And that is exactly why the Founding Fathers replaced the legislature-driven Articles of Confederation with our current three-branch Constitution: in a crisis, somebody has to actually act.

That somebody can’t be a committee. Or at least it can’t since 1789.

One may disagree with this or that specific military action: I certainly disagreed with Obama’s Libya operation, as some of my friends disagree with Trump on Iran. But that’s a political question. It has nothing to do with the correct operation of the Constitution. And the impulse to take major decisions out of the hands of elected leaders is fundamentally an attempt to diminish the power of the electorate.

Congress Can Stop the President. The Act Cannot.

Congress controls the legal and financial architecture of war. The President commands the forces. That is why the same generation that wrote the Constitution fought the “Undeclared Naval War with France” (yes, that’s its name), the undeclared Barbary Wars, and repeated undeclared frontier wars with Indian tribes formally recognized as sovereign nations, all without treating every use of force as requiring a formal declaration of war.

They understood the difference between a general war and a limited war. They also understood the difference between Congress limiting the President through its enumerated legislative powers and Congress usurping the executive powers granted exclusively to the President under Article 2.

That is the balance. Not executive monarchy. Not legislative supremacy. Overlap.

So we are back where we began.

Can Congress stop the President? Yes. But it must affirmatively act: by funding, defunding, limiting, prohibiting, or impeaching through constitutionally valid means.

The War Powers Act attempts to avoid that. And that’s exactly where Chadha matters. Congress cannot bind the Executive’s clear Constitutional powers by resolution. If Congress wants legal effect, it must actually legislate: both houses, presentment, presidential signature or veto and (possibly) override. The War Powers Act pretends there’s a third path. There isn’t.

That is not a loophole, or “presidential lawlessness”. That’s the system.

The War Powers Act is unconstitutional because Congress cannot make itself Commander in Chief by statute. It is unworkable because the clock cannot enforce itself. And it is unclear precisely where its defenders need it to be automatic: whether “hostilities” continue when the President says a ceasefire has paused or ended them, or even if an air campaign, as with Obama in Libya, counts as “hostilities” at all.

The War Powers Act was a naked political fraud from the beginning. It exists. But it’s irrelevant.

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by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
May 5, 2026

My latest interview on Securing America with Frank Gaffney. Sign up NOW for Frank’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!

Rod Martin & Frank Gaffney discuss:

1. How Trump is making the dollar dominant. After decades of talk of the dollar being replaced, Trump is making it even more indispensable. Here’s how.

2. Why the UAE left OPEC and its effect on the Middle East, global oil prices, and America’s new security architecture.

3. The chokepoint strategy undergirding America’s growing dominance.

4. The rise of new state-issued gold-backed currencies and their effect on the dollar.

5. And finally, the Supreme Court ends racial gerrymandering. Why, how, and what will it mean for the midterms?

It’s a jam-packed 16 minutes you won’t want to miss. Watch, like, and share!

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NOTE: I originally wrote this essay ten years ago. It’s well worth a re-read, on this holiday that no one takes seriously (yet everyone should). — RDM

by Rod D. Martin
May 5, 2016

Cinco de Mayo is more important than you probably realize. And in some respects, it is more important for us as Americans than for our genuinely heroic neighbors to the south.

Oddly enough, in Mexico the day is barely celebrated. While public schools are closed in its honor, it is not a national holiday. And in America, despite being celebrated in California since the 1860s, Cinco de Mayo would be virtually unknown here if beer companies hadn’t popularized it beginning in the 1980s. Hardly anyone can tell you why it matters.

So I will.

From 1858-1861, Mexico was wracked by civil war (the Reform War, as it was called). In the aftermath, exhausted and bankrupt, the Mexican government found itself unable to pay its debts to European lenders.

The Framers’ Plan to Stop a Runaway Government. Here Is How It Works.

Article V of the Constitution gives state legislatures the authority to call a convention to propose amendments, bypassing Congress entirely. The Framers designed this mechanism deliberately, with structural safeguards that prevent any faction from seizing control of the process. Convention of States Foundation has produced a full account of how it works — including why constitutional scholars recognize it as the most controlled amending mechanism in the Constitution. Learn more here.

Under normal circumstances, this might have been a relatively minor crisis. And in fact, Britain and Spain sent naval forces and troops to Veracruz, negotiated a settlement and withdrew, more or less business as usual for the mid-19th Century.

But France was another matter.

France, under Emperor Napoleon III, saw an opportunity. The United States was convulsed in its own Civil War. There were no spare resources available for it to enforce the Monroe Doctrine (whether or not there would have been without the Civil War is another question). Mexico looked like an easy conquest. It also looked like the perfect jumping off point for further meddling to the north.

So in January 1862, a powerful French fleet landed its own well-armed force at Veracruz and drove the Mexicans into retreat. After consolidating its position, the French began their march on Mexico City, with the intent to depose the Mexican Republic and set up a puppet Mexican Empire, under an Austrian archduke named Maximilian, believed by many to be the illegitimate grandson of Napoleon I. (Interestingly enough, Mexican monarchists had previously invited Maximilian to take the throne during the Reform War, albeit minus the invading French army.)

The Mexican commander, a 33-year-old named Ignacio Zaragoza Seguin, born in Goliad, Texas and a cousin of the great Texas Revolutionary hero Juan Sequin, struggled to hold off the superior French force. Eventually, he retreated to Puebla, where he mounted his defense.

It was at Puebla that Zaragoza and his outnumbered, outgunned heroes decisively defeated the premier army in the world, May 5th, 1862.

New Orleans had fallen to Union forces just days before. Antietam was months away. Had Napoleon rolled the Mexicans at Puebla, he likely would have had an almost unlimited ability to reinforce the Confederacy, making him the master of America’s fate. How he would have used that power is anyone’s guess. But forcing a Southern victory, at the price of Mexican recovery of the western lands lost in 1848 with the Confederacy rendered a French client state had to be high on the agenda.

Instead, thanks to the Mexican heroes at Puebla, the French were forced to retreat and regroup. Napoleon doubled down on his invasion, eventually defeating the Mexicans at the Second Battle of Puebla a year later, and installing Maximilian as Emperor almost a year after that.

The delay made all the difference. Puebla was immensely inspirational, encouraging resistance throughout Mexico. Even once victorious, the French were never able to pacify the country, much less project power north. And by the time Maximilian was seated on his throne in Mexico City, the South had long since lost Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and Sherman was preparing to march on Atlanta. The French opportunity had passed.

That proved to be the least of their troubles. Barely a year into Maximilian’s reign, a victorious Union, possessed of the largest, best-armed military force in the history of the Earth, was far more inclined to remind the French of the Monroe Doctrine. In 1866, as General Sheridan began transferring tens of thousands of Union rifles directly to Mexican Republican forces, the French announced they would withdraw. And withdraw they did; but not before the Mexicans inflicted upon them an ever-growing string of defeats.

The Republicans retook the capital, evacuated by the French in February 1867. Maximilian stayed. He lived to regret it, but not for long: the Mexicans executed him that June, just over five years after Cinco de Mayo.

Few of America’s drunken partiers tonight, celebrating some confused combination of Mexican heritage, Corona and Dos Equis, will have the slightest idea of any of this. But they are right to celebrate. Much like the heroes of the Alamo, the courageous Mexicans at Puebla gave their lives to delay what seemed inevitable, and in the process, made it anything but.

They saved their country. They very likely saved ours too.

Feliz Cinco de Mayo!

-- This article was originally published at The Daily Caller.

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by Rod D. Martin
May 4, 2026

Today we’re talking about the unraveling of NATO. Is it happening? Is that a good or bad thing, and what can we do about it?

So first, we have to understand what NATO is for. NATO was created in 1949 in the aftermath of World War II because of the Soviet threat. The Soviet Empire made no secret of its desire to subjugate the entire world, and it had a great big army in the center of Europe aimed at Frankfurt and Paris and London and Madrid. So it’s pretty important to us to prevent that because the last thing in the world we wanted was for the Soviets to control the Atlantic ports in the way that Hitler had and potentially launch an invasion of the United States. Better to fight there than here.

So we created NATO, 32 countries, all of them well-to-do. Germany has the third largest economy in the world. Great Britain has the sixth largest economy in the world. These are not microstates, nor are they poor. They are countries that could carry their own weight, and yet they don’t.

So here’s the problem.

An alliance is supposed to be a group of partners who materially add to each other’s defense. The question I would ask you is, what is the threat that Germany would protect us from? There really isn’t any. And for that matter, what threat are we protecting Germany from? Who’s going to invade them? Switzerland? This just isn’t the world we live in. The Soviet Union ended in 1991, and modern Russia can’t get to Kiev after four years. It’s certainly not marching on Warsaw or Berlin.

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But even that’s not the point. Germany should be able to stop them if they did. But Germany can’t. They’ve outsourced that — for free — to us.

So what’s an alliance for? Well, there is the general benefit, of course, of just having people on side and not against you. That’s good.

But I’m not too worried about Germany invading the United States right this minute. And even if I were, I would have to note that they aren’t carrying their weight enough for it to matter. The Germans, not long ago, were showing up at NATO exercises, their troops armed with broomsticks because they didn’t have enough rifles. Are you kidding me?

Likewise, Great Britain: “Britannia rules the waves”? They now have twice as many admirals as warships. They can’t get a single destroyer to Cyprus in eight weeks’ time. They have no capability to project power at all.

So if we got in a fight with somebody we needed their help with, what could they do for us? Literally nothing. And yet, the truth of the matter is, we pay more than 70% of the cost of defending the NATO area. One country paying nearly all the bills, 31 countries sitting on their butts, spending lavishly on their welfare programs, adding nothing.

Now, it’s important to remember that this is not uniform. Poland is an incredible ally. I wouldn’t mind if we got rid of Donald Tusk, but I’m very, very happy with Poland in general, and they live up to their commitments. So does Sweden. So does Lithuania, and Latvia, and Estonia, and Romania, and lots of these countries, and we shouldn’t be down on them.

But it might be worth considering whether we want bilateral defense agreements with some of them instead of this NATO mess where Britain, France, Germany, and Spain are constantly obstructing us in our foreign policy aims.

They say Iran is “not our war”. They didn’t mind starting a “not our war” in Serbia. They didn’t mind starting a “not our war” in Libya. They are certainly committed to our fighting a “not our war” in Ukraine.

And all of those things might be worthy on the merits. That’s not my point. And I certainly don’t want Putin to win in Ukraine, although to be clear, he’s not going to. That’s not the point. The point is they want us committed to their cause. But at that same moment, those same European “partners” have sent twice as much money to Moscow in energy purchases as they have to Kiev in aid.

So I’ll bottom line it for you. Our European allies hector us unceasingly about Ukraine, but are actually financing Putin’s invasion. It’s absurd. It’s got to stop. And they built up Iran as well.

So the truth is, NATO is not worth salvaging in its current form unless our allies actually become partners, not dependents. That’s what the president was trying to do with the 2 percent of GDP defense spending target, which now, to be fair, NATO has met.

The new goal is 5 percent of GDP. That would actually make Europe a potent military force. And for some inane reason, the Beltway establishment is horrified by that. Apparently they think the European Union is somehow going to become a threat to the United States. That’s just hooey. That will never, ever happen.

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The European Union having enough military to defend itself means the United States doesn’t have to have as much military presence there. If Europe can handle its own region, they’re a real partner. And American power can come in decisively at the moment of decision in a crisis.

That’s exactly the model we’re constructing in East Asia with partners like Japan and South Korea and Taiwan and the Philippines and Malaysia and Singapore and Indonesia, not to mention Australia, which is a little iffy just at the moment, but so far so good. We’re going to sell them nuclear submarines and we’re talking about maybe selling them B-2 or B-21 bombers. So they can be a potent force. In a crisis they can matter, with our help.

We’ve extended that logic all the way to India. Trump’s trade agreement with India in February was transformative, not just economically, but also — crucially — militarily. Immediately, the Indians started capturing Russian oil tankers, shipping steeply discounted illegal oil to the Chinese. So the entire American security architecture is being transformed before our eyes. And the model is simple: partners, not dependents.

NATO is a dependent. It is absurd how they have treated us, particularly with their high-handed, surly, utterly condescending bunk. It’s tiresome. It’s enough. And I don’t want to pay for labor union benefits in Germany because Friedrich Merz doesn’t want to pay for rifles for his troops. That’s just stupid.

There is one more element of this, which is economic. We did ink a trade deal with the EU and they’ve cheated on it nonstop since. I don’t see any reason why we should put up with four times the auto tariff from Germany that we charge them. They’re bad friends. They’re a bad ally. They can be good friends and a good ally very, very simply. They just have to want to.

So I’m on record right now. I am pro-NATO. I want to see a NATO that works the way it’s supposed to work, not as a welfare project for the American taxpayer. If we can save that, that would be good for the world. If we can’t, the world won’t end. And, crucially, it might be a really good object lesson for future allies in more dangerous regions.

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by Charafeddine Mouzouni
May 4, 2026

In February, Microsoft’s CEO of AI, Mustafa Suleyman, sat down with the Financial Times.

For 8 seconds, he said something that should have ended his career.

“I think we’re going to have human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks. Most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.”

Lawyers. Accountants. Project managers. Marketers. Gone. By next spring.

Dozens of outlets clipped it. YouTube ran wild with it. Reddit lost its mind.

And then, quietly, sometime later, the Financial Times edited those 8 seconds out of the official video.

If you go watch it now, you’ll see an awkward cut. A close shot becomes a wide shot. He skips to another topic. The most consequential prediction of 2026…vanished from the source.

Too bad for them. The internet had already screenshotted everything.

Now ask yourself the obvious question.

Why would they delete it?

Because somewhere between the interview and the edit, somebody on Microsoft’s executive team realized this claim was BS. And not the harmless kind. It’s the kind that ends careers, kills budgets, and makes professionals panic-buy AI subscriptions they don’t need.

So today, we’re doing three things:

1. Dismantling Suleyman’s claim with surgical precision.

2. Exposing why every major AI CEO is financially incentivized to lie to you about this.

3. Handing you a 4-question framework — The Automation Audit — that tells you exactly what to automate, what to augment, and what to leave alone.

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This is the AI OS, applied. Let’s go.

Four Reasons Suleyman Is Wrong

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NOTE: The Supreme Court’s long-awaited restoration of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause with regard to racist gerrymandering has finally come. There will be consequences.

The Enemedia says the Court “gutted” the Voting Rights Act. But that’s a lie. The Court actually restored its original meaning, in line with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to prevent discrimination for or against either the minority or the majority. To Democrats, whether in their Klan hoods then, or their Antifa masks now, or their SPLC-funded Klan hoods now again, that is anathema.

The reason is as simple as it was in 1895. Democrats may or may not be racists, but they certainly understand the power of race to help them win. If that means discriminating against blacks, so be it. If that means discriminating against whites, so be it. Just as the Southern planters used Jim Crow to divide poor whites from poor blacks and thus thwart the rising Populist movement, modern plantation foremen from Hakeem Jeffries to Tim Walz know identity politics and DEI short-circuits reason, stokes hate, and propels their Party to victory.

And that’s the case for these 21 racially gerrymandered House districts. The lie is that whites won’t vote for blacks, so we have to give them their own districts. If that were true, in an America that’s just 12 percent black, Barack Obama could never have been elected…twice! It’s even worse than that: two-thirds of black House members are elected from districts that aren’t even racially gerrymandered. Their argument just falls flat.

But it ought to fall flat for two other reasons, one practical, the other moral.

Practically, Democrats have not used this travesty to enhance black representation: they’ve used it to spot themselves 21 House seats. In an era of razor-thin majorities, that’s an extraordinary difference on every policy matter before Congress. It is one of oh so many ways Democrats have put their thumbs on the scales. It’s wrong, and it’s ending.

Morally, though, the idea that only people of my race can represent me is an abomination. Do we not believe that men should be judged by the content of their characters and not the color of their skin? Well, no, actually: Democrats don’t. Having adopted their latest racist schtick, they now profess fealty to Dr. King while preaching race hate, standpoint epistemology, and everything America thought it had overcome not long before I was born.

But this week, the Supreme Court overcame some of it. And the nation can begin to heal. — RDM

The Democrats’ Race-Based Regime is Collapsing

by Daniel McCarthy
May 2, 2026

The Supreme Court’s decision this week in Louisiana v. Callais et al has inevitably drawn strong criticism. In ruling that electoral districts cannot be redefined along racial lines, the Court stands accused of “gutting” the Voting Rights Act, crippling civil-rights law, and effectively disenfranchising minority voters.

But the Court’s decision was correct on the merits. It also represents a great retrenchment that’s taking place in American politics.

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The rules by which our political system operates have been overdue a revision — not the rules codified in the Constitution but the thicker web of precedents and practices that have served as a second constitution since the 1960s, or in some cases since the 1930s.

Yesterday’s decision will have the near-term practical effect of helping Republicans fortify their position going into November’s midterm elections, improving their chances of holding onto their majority in the House of Representatives.

But the long-term effect of the ruling also promises to strengthen the GOP, as the racial regime on which the Democratic Party has long depended collapses.

What the Court’s Republican-appointed majority has actually “gutted” is not the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — but a nakedly racial form of gerrymandering.

Louisiana had been ordered by lower courts to redraw its congressional districts to ensure that not one, but two districts would be majority-black, virtually guaranteeing that two of the state’s six members of Congress would also be black — so a third of the congressional delegation would match the roughly one-third of the state’s black population.

In effect, representation by race was assumed to be more important than representation by geography or anything else.

The Voting Rights Act has long been used to ensure that certain areas will have representation by one race. This racial gerrymandering, mostly adopted in the South, would apply to state legislative districts as well as federal congressional districts.

It’s obvious why such a heavy-handed approach might appear reasonable in the immediate wake of segregation. More than sixty years later, however, it can’t be argued that it’s a response to discrimination because it’s now an enduring form of discrimination in its own right — in essence a set-aside or quota not in the private sector but in the legislative branch of government itself, at the state and national levels alike.

This has served the Democratic party very well, not only because the black legislators elected by these black-majority districts are usually Democrats to begin with, but also because the very existence of these districts is a kind of bribe or reward Democrats provide to a loyal constituency and its leaders. It’s a racial spoils system.

Now Democrats will have to make a different kind of case to black voters — indeed to all voters in districts which are no longer so racially segregated.

Catch the irony — separating blacks from other voters, in order to create more majority-black districts, is a kind of segregation.

The Democrats, who were the party of the white segregationists, too, came to see segregation for the sake of additional black representation as a positive good.

Needless to say, in a state such as Louisiana, where the population is one-third black, perfect proportional integration of every congressional district or state legislative district would result in one-third of the voters in each district being black. That would be complete integration. It would also be politically inconvenient.

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In reality, of course, geography matters, and racial and other groups are not evenly distributed throughout any state. But the Supreme Court has now ruled boundaries shouldn’t be carved up just for racial reasons. The decision allows for race to be a factor when there has been clear discrimination against a group, but racially-oriented districting can no longer be a normal practice. And without that practice, Democrats will have lost the keystone to the strategy they’ve long relied on in the South.

That doesn’t mean they’re finished in the region. Virginia is more “blue” than “red” overall, even though Republicans remain competitive there. North Carolina and Georgia have Republican leanings but still produce embarrassments for the GOP.

The Republican “solid South” didn’t last long. Yet the loss of racial gerrymandering will be felt by Democrats long beyond this November’s midterms — which, despite the wave of non-racial gerrymandering this year, still present Republicans with high hurdles to maintaining their majority.

Even if Republicans come out ahead in the tit-for-tat redistricting efforts now taking place, they may still be overcome by midterm voters who typically vote for the party not holding the White House.

Yet however rough the weather Republicans are heading into in November, their long-range outlook is bright.

Republican states are flourishing while big Democratic states — including the biggest, California — are losing population and major employers. The rules Democrats wrote to their own advantage in the heady days of the New Deal and Great Society are slowly being rewritten or repealed.

The second constitution is giving way to something like the actual Constitution.

But Democrats will be prepared to write new rules for their benefit as soon as they get the chance. Look for calls to pack the Supreme Court with liberals and to make Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico into states to grow louder. The rules themselves are now stakes in the game.

That’s not because Republicans are acting selfishly — at least not entirely. The more important point is that the rationales behind the norms that served Democrats so well in the 20th century are losing salience and authority, not least legal authority.

Segregation in the name of fighting segregation was always a bad idea, but at one point it may have seemed like a lesser evil than letting the effects of Jim Crow linger.

Sixty years on, this racial policy has long since demonstrated the limits of what it can accomplish and promises nothing new, just the perpetuation of the spoils system. What was once for many Americans a hope has become a scam.

And now the Supreme Court has said it must end.

— Daniel McCarthy is a columnist for The Spectator, where this article first appeared, and is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.

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by Rod D. Martin
May 1, 2026

I appeared on NTD Good Morning with Stephania Cox to discuss Gen. Dan Caine’s statement that Russia is now helping Iran: how far does that go, what is the threat, and what’s the effect on Ukraine? We also address the effect of the U.S. blockade, the growing danger to Iran’s oil fields, the likelihood of renewed hostilities, and the prospects for a democratic uprising.

It’s seven minutes of the deep analysis you can’t get anywhere else. Watch the interview, and pass it along!

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NOTE: This essay was originally published 23 years ago, but as the Marxist malignancy has metastasized in America, it is far more pointed today. — RDM

by Rod D. Martin
May 1, 2003

You would probably never have heard of Karl Marx had it not been for V.I. Lenin. Marx was neither terribly successful nor terribly important in his own right, and had it not been for a revolution carried out three decades after his death, he would be a footnote at best.

But on this May Day, the high holy day of Socialism, it is important that we remember.

You still hear it said that "communism wouldn't have been so bad if it had been carried out like Marx suggested, without all that junk from Lenin and Stalin."  And in a sense, one can forgive these apologists for their ignorance, because in fact, Marx never produced a political program per se. The entirety of his plan for his new world order was contained in ten short points — nothing more than slogans, really — in his very first "book", the Communist Manifesto. He never defined them further. He never saw a need. Marx had grander work in mind.

He was producing a religion.

Marx, the anti-Semitic Jew, the hater of Christianity and all it stood for, created an entire atheology. It was, in the words of James Billington, "fire in the minds of men." Marx sought to turn the old order on its head, to regenerate mankind through chaos. He preached a dialectical view of history which he claimed had turned Hegel "right-side up" and which, at root, embraced ancient dualism. He propounded a materialism borrowed from Feuerbach which reduced man to a mechanistically-determined automaton, mere "matter in motion." He wedded to this a naively classical interpretation of the labor theory of value to produce his economics, and a utopian view of the state which said man, morally neutral and therefore perfectible, could be utterly re-made — regenerated, or saved — by a state or party empowered to completely mold his environment.

To all of this he added an eschatology of victory, a certainty of success raised to the level of first principle, of dogma, of prerequisite faith. It is forever worth noting that Whittaker Chambers, even when he embraced freedom, believed without question that he was abandoning the winning side. The contagiousness of the Communist faith was such that virtually everyone at the time agreed.

The tenor of the "worker's paradise" to come was already apparent in Marx's own dictatorial leadership of the International Workingmen's Association. But once in the hands of a state, Communist atheology became thoroughly consistent with its presuppositions. Since the individual man was just a biological machine, he could be discarded at will. Since good and evil were entirely relative, they could be defined entirely by the party and therefore by the state. Since the state/party could and must regenerate man and build the paradise to come, its power must be absolute and unquestioned.

And since victory was inevitable, millions could and would surrender their individuality, their families, even their lives, without a fight.

Marx's atheology produced the greatest idol of all, the omnipotent state. This idol appealed to men more than any other in history, because it made all morality relative and gave ambitious men the means to become gods themselves. But it also appealed precisely because it was not an idol of stone or wood, but of power: prayers to it could be answered, needs and greeds fulfilled. And because it indulged all of man's basest instincts while ever appealing to his noblest motives, it was exactly the sort of god man wanted to create: a god in his own image.

The pieces of Marx's puzzle weren't new: his work was but the logical conclusion of left-wing Enlightenment humanism, and had roots as old as Pharaoh; and it was left to others — Lenin, Stalin, Mao — to carry out his vision. Yet Marx's creation proved to be one of the most successful false gods of all time. In its heyday enslaving more than half the world (and nearly taking the rest), its tenets remain the dominant faith of much of the world's ruling elite. That is itself a terrifying thought. Marxism in the 20th century killed a hundred million people, and sent easily two billion more to hell. It withered whatever it touched; and it frankly touched us all.

If Lenin's minions were the "vanguard" of the old revolution, we must then be the vanguard of the new. Nothing has taught us better than Marxism the danger of holding false theological presuppositions, even in the absence of a clear political program. Men may embrace the truth, or embrace a lie. The difference between the American Revolution and the Russian is the difference between worlds; and it is that better world — Reagan's beloved "city on a hill" — which we must advance, for the sake of all mankind.

— This essay originally appeared at WorldNetDaily.

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by Rod D. Martin and Eric Metaxas
April 30, 2026

My latest interview on The Eric Metaxas Show. Sign up NOW for the Eric’s YouTube channel and don’t miss a single episode!

Eric Metaxas and Martin Capital founder Rod D. Martin discuss:

• The latest attempt on President Trump’s life

• The rise of political violence and the Marxist ideas fueling the left

• Why America must recover the Founders’ vision of ordered liberty

• Iran: the possibility of regime change, what a Reza Pahlavi transitional government would achieve, and whether the Iranian people will rise against the mullahs.

It’s a half-hour you won’t want to miss. Watch and share!

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NOTE: We are today republishing my lament over the Fall of Saigon. — RDM

by Rod D. Martin
April 30, 2025

Fifty years ago, April 30, 1975, the world watched in horror and disbelief as the last American helicopter lifted off from the rooftop of our embassy in Saigon. South Vietnam had fallen in the manner of Ernest Hemingway, “first gradually, then suddenly”: a decades-long war, a relative peace, and then a mad dash by the North Vietnamese Army that consumed the country in less than a month.

The tragedy was simply breathtaking. And horribly, horribly unnecessary.

What followed was not peace, but darkness. The swift collapse of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (turns out the Domino Theory was true) brought the subjugation of millions, and the opening act of a Communist bloodbath across Southeast Asia. At least a million were sent to the “re-education camps” in Vietnam alone. Half a million were murdered. Another two million fled this brutal night by sea, on rafts wholly unsuited for the tumultuous ocean, in wild hope that an American aircraft carrier might happen upon them. Close to half a million died in the water.

I remember standing before one of the refugees, one of the countless “boat people” who was resettled to Fort Smith, Arkansas. He was a slight, middle-aged man, with thinning hair and humble dignity. We were in the fellowship hall of my church. I was eight years old. And I remember looking up at the South Vietnamese flag on his lapel and just weeping, and saying over and over “I’m sorry, I’m just so sorry.”

We should all be so sorry.

None of that counts the genocide of Pol Pot — whom the American left had dubbed “the George Washington of Cambodia”. Over the next three years he murdered between a quarter and a third of his entire population. He would have gone right on had not even the Communists in Moscow and Hanoi been horrified (though Beijing gave him their unqualified support both before and after the massacre).

None of this had to happen. This was not the end of a war, but the culmination of betrayal — a betrayal of an ally, of a cause, and of the very principles America had defended with precious blood and treasure for eight long years.

The received wisdom is that Vietnam was a mistake, a misguided war fought in the wrong place at the wrong time. That narrative is false. The Vietnam War was part of a noble, epic struggle — the same struggle that won the Cold War and saved the whole world from a similar fate. It was a just effort to stop Communist totalitarianism and genocide from consuming yet another corner of the globe. South Vietnam was not a hopeless case. It was a fledgling republic, striving to build a free society in the shadow of Marxist tyranny and under constant assault from within and without. Its people fought with courage and resolve for more than two decades, first with our help and then — fatally — with almost none.

In many ways, the fall of Vietnam mirrored the loss of China in 1949: a long American effort thrown away at the very last through perfidy in Washington — begun and betrayed by Democrats in both cases — with ghastly, ongoing consequences. The two were even similar in this: a Christian President of China (Chiang Kai-shek) betrayed by Truman, a Christian President of South Vietnam (Ngo Dinh Diem) assassinated on orders from JFK, after both of which came the deluge.

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By 1973, we had won. No, really. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger negotiated the Paris Peace Accords, forcing North Vietnam to accept South Vietnam’s sovereignty and halting hostilities. The terms included an ironclad U.S. guarantee not only to supply and train the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) but to bomb North Vietnam into the Stone Age if it transgressed the treaty. The Communists agreed to this. They also agreed that no Soviet arms would replace those lost during the war, on penalty of Nixon’s aerial wrath.

American troops came home with honor, leaving behind an allied nation capable of defending itself, provided it received the continued support we’d promised. That support was a central condition of the peace. Nixon called it “peace with honor” because it represented more than withdrawal — it was a commitment, a guarantee that America would not desert its friends or allow 58,000 of its sons to have died in vain.

But with Nixon forced from office, Congress fell into the hands of men more concerned with leftist politics than principle. Nixon won 49 states in 1972. In the aftermath of Watergate, in 1974, Democrats won overwhelming Congressional majorities: almost 300 House seats, and a filibuster-proof 61 in the Senate.

This radicalized majority, driven by post-Watergate bloodlust, slashed military aid to South Vietnam by over 75%, prohibited any American military response to a massive Soviet rearmament of the North, and watched coldly as North Vietnam violated every term of the accords. They wouldn’t even send our allies tires for their Jeeps or gas for their tanks.

Deprived of ammunition, fuel, and the will of its ally, South Vietnam collapsed — not because it lacked heart, but because it was abandoned, by the same Democrat Party that had sent America’s sons to die there just ten years before.

This is the reality the left refuses to confront even half a century later. The fall of Saigon was not inevitable. It was engineered in Washington more than Hanoi. It was not a military defeat — it was a political surrender, the first of many. Over the next five years, Democrats handed 26 countries to the Communists. That’s on top of Carter’s betrayal of the Shah of Iran.

Richard Nixon understood this. Years after, in No More Vietnams, he laid out the real lessons of that conflict, lessons we ignore at our peril. He did not argue that we should never fight again. Quite the contrary. He argued that when America fights, it must fight to win — and that when we make commitments, we must keep them.

Nixon identified several hard-earned principles. First, never again should we enter a war without the will to achieve total victory. Limited wars, hamstrung by political calculations and media hysteria, are recipes for disaster. The United States must use overwhelming force early, break the enemy’s will, and end conflicts on our terms — not theirs. He rightly condemned the gradual escalation that defined the Kennedy and Johnson years, insisting that decisive action at the outset would have saved countless lives.

The same could be said for China, where decisive Soviet action in 1945 in Manchuria, fecklessly answered by Truman, set the tone for the rest of the war.

Second, we must never send our soldiers to fight unless the cause directly serves vital American interests. In this, Nixon prefigured Trump. But once engaged, we must not allow domestic politics to undercut our efforts. Unity at home is essential. Leadership must resist the temptation to bow to the transient winds of public opinion or the distortions of a hostile press.

Nixon was blunt: wars cannot be run from newsrooms. Nor, I should add, should bombing targets (or tennis court times) be selected from the Oval Office.

Third, America must support its allies fully or not at all. Partial support, tepid commitments, and shifting loyalties invite chaos and death. South Vietnam stood ready to defend itself — with our help. Once we withdrew that help, we ensured their destruction. Nixon rightly saw that as an even greater moral failure than a strategic one.

And fourth, peace is only possible through strength. The idea that we can withdraw from the world, that we can turn our backs on aggression and be left in peace, is a fantasy. Weakness invites conflict. Only credible deterrence, backed by the willingness to act, can maintain stability and peace.

These lessons, learned at tragic cost, should have guided us forward. But they were forgotten. In 2021, Joe Biden gave us a second Saigon, this time in Kabul.

Once again, a Democrat President abandoned our allies, violated our commitments, and handed victory to the forces of barbarism. Once again, desperate people clung to departing American aircraft, hoping in vain that the land of the free would not forget them. Once again, we left billions of dollars worth of weapons for our enemies and consigned countless friends to death.

It’s a very dangerous thing to be an American ally when Democrats are in power.

Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was not a tragedy born of necessity. It was a choice — a deliberate reversion to the very perfidy that doomed South Vietnam. And just as in Vietnam, the consequences were immediate: a resurgent Taliban, women and girls booted from schools and reduced to chattel, jihadists emboldened, and American credibility in tatters. Kabul gave us Ukraine, and all the death that ensued.

The cause in Vietnam was just. The men who fought there — American and South Vietnamese alike — were heroes, even when they didn’t believe they were. They did not lose. They were betrayed. And those who denied them the support they needed bear responsibility for the horrors that followed.

Fifty years later, we must remember not just the fall of Saigon, but why it fell. We must honor the noble cause that was abandoned, and we must resolve never to make the same mistake again. The world does not forgive weakness, and history does not forget cowardice.

Let us say now, clearly and finally: no more Vietnams, no more Afghanistans, no more betrayals. If America is to lead, it must lead with strength, with clarity, and with resolve. Because freedom is never free — and the price of abandoning it is always paid in blood.

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by Rod D. Martin
April 29, 2026

I appeared on NTD News Room with Don Ma to discuss the UAE’s surprise departure from OPEC, the effective death of the cartel that for decades held the world hostage, and why it’s a huge triumph for U.S. diplomacy.

Every American should just be giddy. We should throw a ticker-tape parade.

We examine:

• How Trump’s diplomacy and Iran blockade nuked OPEC

• The UAE’s payback for Iran

• The evils of OPEC since 1973

• Why the UAE was essential to OPEC’s ability to fix prices

• Why the coming major reduction in long-term oil prices

• The harm to Russia, Iran, and China; and

• The emergence of a U.S.-led global energy order

It’s fifteen minutes of the deep analysis you can’t get anywhere else. Watch the interview, and pass it along!

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by Rod D. Martin
April 29, 2026

A relatively obscure headline crossed the wires last week, the kind most people skim past without a second thought. The Trump Administration is considering dollar swap lines with key Gulf and Asian allies, including the United Arab Emirates, much like the one executed with Argentina last year.

That sounds technical. It sounds arcane. It sounds like the sort of thing only central bankers, bond traders, and Treasury staffers need to understand.

It is not.

Reuters reported that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the United States is discussing currency swap lines after “a number of allies” sought help dealing with fallout from the Iran war. He added that additional swap lines could reinforce dollar usage and liquidity internationally, maintain smooth dollar funding markets, promote trade and investment with the United States, and serve as “a major first step” toward creating new U.S. dollar funding centers in the Gulf and Asia.

That last phrase is the tell: new U.S. dollar funding centers.

This is not just about the UAE, Argentina, or anyone else just named. It is about the architecture of global finance. It may represent the biggest shift in the global financial order since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971.

For half a century, the dollar has been the global reserve currency, the operating system of the world economy. Everyone complains about it. Everyone predicts its demise. Every few years, some new theory emerges about the euro, the yuan, BRICS, SDRs, gold, crypto, or the “petroyuan” bringing the dollar empire to its knees.

It isn’t going to happen. It wasn’t going to anyway. Now Trump and Bessent are restructuring the global financial system to ensure permanent dollar dominance.

The President and his Treasury Secretary understand something America’s foreign policy establishment long ago forgot, and the Enemedia never understood at all: that the dollar is not just a currency. It’s a strategic weapon, a diplomatic instrument, a commercial magnet, a sanctions platform, a military enabler, and the financial high ground of the entire global system. It is undergirded by the most potent military force in history, which Trump has made sure — in just one year — controls every important chokepoint on Earth. Energy flows, international trade, power projection, everything is within the power of the United States Navy.

That makes the dollar irreplaceable. An America willing to use that power — and Trump is certainly willing — is unstoppable.

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But that’s the foundation: it isn’t the point. The point is that the Trump Administration is sidelining (though not replacing) the International Monetary Fund. Crisis finance is moving in-house to the U.S. Treasury, in much the same way that Lloyd’s of London’s maritime risk business is getting “relocated” to the U.S. Development Finance Corporation, and the center of global energy is shifting from the Middle East to the Gulf of America.

Trump doesn’t just mean to put America “first”: he intends to make America dominant. Or in a phrase, “great again.”

What Is a Swap Line and Why Does It Matter?

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by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
April 28, 2026

My latest interview on Securing America with Frank Gaffney. Sign up NOW for Frank’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!

Rod Martin & Frank Gaffney discuss:

1. How Trump is pushing Iran’s regime to the point of collapse, the factionalization of the Iranian government as its cash dries up, and what happens when the blockade forces Iran to shutter its oil fields.

2. We also discuss the SPLC indictments: how the left has been funding the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party, creating the “hate” they pretended to fight. Turns out the left’s demand for white racism greatly outstripped supply, so just like Jussie Smollett, they funded their own and then raised hundreds of millions of dollars to “fight” it. Worse still: the SPLC was in Fortune 500 boardrooms determining who would be canceled, debanked, and generally ruined. And it was all a partisan scam.

3. We also look at the SPLC’s sister organization ActBlue, the nation’s largest Democrat fundraising platform, which appears to have money laundered billions of dollars in illegal foreign contributions: “foreign election interference”. The question: how high does it go?

4. Finally, we discuss why the Trump class battleship is a sound idea, and why the retirement of the Ohio class SSGNs adds urgency to the program.

It’s a jam-packed 20 minutes you won’t want to miss. Watch, like, and share!

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by Sam Faddis
April 28, 2026

In 2022, the election security firm True the Vote broke the story that a company called Konnech in Michigan was storing data on American election workers on servers in China. True the Vote leaders Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips were, of course, ridiculed by the so-called mainstream press.

Then it got worse.

Engelbrecht and Phillips were actually jailed because they would not give up the name of their source, who had blown the whistle on Konnech. The federal government didn’t seem to give a damn that a hostile foreign power might be able to influence our elections. It did seem very intent on making sure no one knew about it.

Now, four years later, we can see that it was much, much worse than that. According to John Solomon, at the time True the Vote was being silenced, the Intelligence Community had assessed the situation, recognized the risk, and issued a report outlining the danger we faced. And that report and that assessment were hidden from the public, even as patriots trying to protect the republic were being persecuted and jailed.

“We judge that U.S. adversaries, including, at a minimum, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as non-state groups, have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure for the 2020 presidential election,” the National Intelligence Council wrote in the memo dated Jan. 15, 2020.

“Adversaries gaining access to U.S. election-related systems could disrupt the voting process, steal sensitive data, or undermine confidence in the election results, but we do not know whether any of them have specific plans to manipulate election-related systems,” the memo added.

The document was recently declassified by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who continues to expose examples of the intelligence community suppressing or misusing intelligence. The report in question was prepared by then National Intelligence Officer for Cyber. Chief Christopher Porter.

Talking to John Solomon, Porter had this to say.

“What is shocking is how uncontroversial some of these findings are to professionals—it is no secret that China and Iran compromise election equipment for a variety of intelligence purposes, nor was it controversial at the time that these systems had technical vulnerabilities. Every agency concurred on these findings, but because it was seen as potentially aiding the President’s reelection campaign, there was an active effort to damage him politically by refusing to share the declassified report with the public.”

Keep in mind what was known about Konnech when True the Vote blew the whistle. Konnech wasn’t just storing data in China. Konnech was using contractors inside China to do work in the United States on American election systems. This is the exact language in the criminal complaint ultimately filed by Los Angeles. (Charges were dropped against the head of Konnech after the federal government intervened.)

“On or about October 10, 2019, through October 4, 2022, Eugene Yu and other employees at Konnech, Inc. were providing these services to Los Angeles County using third-party contractors based in China.”

“…Konnech employees known and unknown sent personal identifying information of Los Angeles County election workers to third-party software developers who assisted with creating and fixing Konnech’s internal ‘PollChief’ software.”

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Konnech gave Chinese contractors in mainland China “super-administration access” to the electoral systems on which Konnech worked. It is incredible enough that Konnech itself ever had such access. It is literally almost beyond belief that Konnech would have been in a position to grant such access to other entities. Yet again, it is confirmed by the criminal complaint filed against the company.

“On or about August 18, 2022, Luis Nabergoi, project manager for Konnech’s contract with the County of Los Angeles, confirmed via the messaging app DingTalk that any employee for Chinese contractors working on PollChief software had ‘superadministration’ privileges for all PollChief clients. Mr. Nabergoi described the situation as a ‘huge security issue.’”

An individual with super administration access to a system can do (effectively) anything inside that system. He or she can delete data, steal data, alter data, change programming, etc. Perhaps most importantly, that individual can cover his or her tracks because they can potentially also access and alter all security protocols and programs (e.g., delete audit logs).

So, Konnech, which has numerous questionable ties to Chinese entities, was allowed to punch a hole into our election systems, and then Konnech was allowed to grant that same level of access to unknown “contractors” in China.

And yet, it got even worse.

Konnech didn’t only work for state and state electoral systems. Konnech also had access to something called the Uniformed And Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, (UOCAVA) program. Press reporting suggests that Konnech was hired on at least one occasion to do work for the Department of Defense pursuant to the UOCAVA.

In 1986, the federal government enacted the UOCAVA to provide special registration and absentee voting provisions for military and overseas civilians. The Department of Defense administers the UOCAVA program. Pursuant to the act, any uniformed and overseas citizen can register to vote and request an absentee ballot via the UOCAVA system. The individual simply submits what is known as a Federal Post Card Application. They are then sent an absentee ballot.

A person requesting a ballot under UOCAVA can, for some inexplicable reason, select any address they want when registering and requesting a ballot. Per the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP), an overseas non-military voter may claim an address of domicile “even if you have not physically been present at that address.” There appears to be no requirement that the individual requesting a ballot even prove they are a U.S. citizen. In 2020, the FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Election Assistance Commission, and National Institute of Standards and Technology described the UOCAVA process as “high risk” and “susceptible to fraud.”

Interestingly, the number of non-military UOCAVA voters skyrocketed to 573,000 from 228,000 between 2016 and the 2020 election.

If Konnech and contractors in China had super administrator access to the UOCAVA system, they could have done literally anything inside the UOCAVA system. The idea that we have a back door into our voting system with few or no safeguards to control who registers to vote is troubling enough. The thought that this back door could literally be under the complete control of entities connected to Communist China is chilling.

In the four years leading up to the 2020 election, roughly 350,000 “people” registered to vote using the UOCAVA system. That system may well have been compromised. All indicators point to mainland China.

Instead, not only did no one investigate, but action was taken against True the Vote for disclosing the threat. Catherine and Greg were, in fact, jailed and literally thrown into solitary confinement when they refused to identify the source of their information regarding Konnech. Federal agencies that were busy hiding intelligence regarding a grave national security threat apparently had all the time in the world to attack and imprison patriotic Americans trying to defend their country.

The Biden administration knew the Chinese could manipulate our elections, and they covered it up.

Why?

— Sam Faddis is Senior Editor of AND Magazine, where this essay originally appeared. A retired CIA operations officer, he is a Senior Fellow of the Institute for the American Future, and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger.

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by Rod D. Martin
April 27, 2026

I appeared on NTD Good Morning with Cary Dunst to discuss the third Trump assassination attempt. We look at:

• Why it happened

• Who is Cole Allen? And is he “crazy”?

• Why 26 percent of young Democrat men believe resorting to political violence is “justified”

• How Critical Theory replaced Critical Thinking and led us to this pass, and

• What must be done from here?

It’s nine minutes you won’t want to miss. Watch the interview, and pass it along!

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by Ido Singer
April 27, 2026

Imagine a group of women, fake scars applied to their faces. They looked in a mirror and saw themselves disfigured.

Then, as they were led out of the room to a job interview, the researchers quietly removed the scars. The women walked in looking exactly as they always had.

They came back reporting massively increased discrimination.

Many of them identified specific comments the interviewer had made that they were certain referenced their disfigurement. Comments the interviewer never made with any such intention. The scar was gone. The wound was not.

That experiment stopped me cold — not because it was surprising, but because it named something I had been watching for years without having the right language for it.

If we tell people constantly that they are oppressed, that the deck is stacked against them, that their skin color or their background or their faith makes them automatically disadvantaged, we do not need to oppress them. We just need them to look for it. They will find it everywhere: in neutral faces, in ordinary rooms, in a job interview where nobody is looking at a scar that does not exist.

That is not an accident. That is the point.

In 1984, a former KGB operative named Yuri Bezmenov sat down in front of a camera and explained, in precise detail, how to destroy a free society without firing a single shot. He called it ideological subversion. Four stages: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, normalization.

The first stage, demoralization, takes 15 to 20 years — exactly as long as it takes to educate one generation of students and expose them to the ideology of the subverter without any counterbalancing national values to weigh it against.

The goal of demoralization, Bezmenov explained, is not to convince people of anything. It is to make them incapable of processing reality accurately. Once a person is demoralized, he said, we cannot change their mind even if we expose them to authentic information. They are no longer receiving information. They are receiving confirmation of what they have already been programmed to feel.

He was describing 1984. He was also describing right now.

The demoralization does not require a KGB handler in every classroom. It requires only the adoption of one false idea and the patient installation of that idea into education, media, and culture over decades. Bezmenov’s chosen example was egalitarianism, the legislated insistence that all outcomes must be equal regardless of inputs, but the mechanism works with any false idea sufficiently installed.

The false idea currently running is this: You are a victim. The system is designed against you. Your suffering is not the result of circumstance, choice, or randomness. It is the result of oppression. And your oppressor has a face.

Once that idea is installed, the scar does not need to be real. The person will find it anyway. And they will report, with complete sincerity, that they saw it everywhere they went.

The Palestinian cause is the most successful current deployment of this mechanism in the Western world. I want to be precise here. There are Palestinians who have suffered. Real suffering exists. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is real. These things are not manufactured.

What is manufactured is the frame, which requires that Palestinians be presented as entirely agentless. Incapable of choosing differently, incapable of leadership that serves their people rather than perpetuating their misery, incapable of the kind of decision that Israel’s founders made in 1948 when they accepted partition and built a state, and that Palestinian leadership (back by several Arab states and others) rejected.

The frame requires that every rocket, every tunnel, every massacre, every hostage taken into a civilian home, be explained as the inevitable product of oppression rather than the chosen strategy of an ideology that has explicitly and repeatedly stated it prefers destruction (of the Jewish state) to the welfare of its own people.

To maintain this frame, Israel must be “the Nazi,” the oppressor, the singular cause of everything — not a small country surrounded by nations that have tried to destroy it in every decade of its existence, not a democracy that returned the Sinai to Egypt and withdrew from Gaza and southern Lebanon, not the country that offered a Palestinian state to the Palestinians multiple times (the last serious offer at Camp David in 2000) and was refused again and again. No, Israel must be the explanation for everything, because the frame requires a villain and the frame has already chosen one.

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This is not analysis. It is the oldest trick in the political playbook, dressed in the language of human rights.

Bezmenov named the tactic explicitly: The subverter’s goal is to turn a stronger force against itself, to take the West’s genuine commitment to justice, to equality, to the protection of the vulnerable, and use that commitment as the delivery mechanism for the ideology that will destroy it. You do not attack Western values directly. You hijack them. You convince the West that its own existence is the oppression, and then you watch it dismantle itself from the inside.

The Palestinian cause, as deployed in Western universities and streets, is not primarily about Palestinians. It is about the West. It is about installing the oppressor-oppressed framework so thoroughly into an entire generation that they can no longer think outside it. Everything becomes colonialism. Everything becomes apartheid. Everything becomes genocide. The words lose their actual dictionary meanings. The meanings lose their anchor in reality. And the demoralized Westerner walks throughout life, looking for the scar, finding it everywhere, and reporting, with complete sincerity, that they saw it in every face.

I grew up in Tel Aviv. In 1991, I wore a gas mask and sat in a sealed room while Iraqi missiles flew overhead under threats of mustard gas deployed within them. During the Second Intifada, I learned to read a room the way soldiers read terrain. I narrowly missed two suicide bombings. I left in 2003 carrying everything that experience puts in a person’s body and never fully takes out. These experiences are not unique to me. Almost every Israeli had them.

I did not grow up with a theory about victimhood. I grew up with a lesson: Nobody is coming to save me.

That is not bitterness; it is the founding principle of the only functioning Jewish state in human history. For 2,000 years, Jews waited for someone to come. In Alexandria and in Spain and in Poland and in Germany, they waited. The waiting did not go well.

The Zionist movement was not primarily a theological project; it was the conclusion of a people who had finally processed the data and understood that agency is not optional; agency is survival. When we have no agency, we have no safety. We are dead.

Israel exists because a few thousand people decided to stop waiting for someone to grant them safety and went to build it themselves. That decision, made under conditions of genuine persecution, genuine displacement, genuine historical trauma, produced a country. It produced the most battle-tested democracy in the world. It produced a population that is, despite everything, among the world’s happiest.

The decision to claim agency, even from the depths of the worst circumstances human beings have produced, produces life. The decision to embrace victimhood, even when the grievance is real, produces dependence, resentment, and a population that is permanently available to be aimed at whatever scapegoat the people running the system have selected this cycle.

The people running the system selected Israel. They always select Israel.

Yuri Bezmenov had a term for the people who carry the ideology without understanding what it is or where it leads: useful idiots. He meant it precisely. They are useful to the subverter. They are idiots about what they are being used for.

He also said something that should be tattooed on the wall of every university in the Western world: When the process is complete, when the new order has been established, the useful idiots are the first to go.

The Islamists who overtook Iran in 1979 Iranian Revolution and claimed to be “liberators” had no further use for the protestors. The people who burned the most things down, chanted the loudest, built the most public registries of enemies, were executed, quietly or publicly, because a stable authoritarian system cannot tolerate people who have demonstrated they will tear things apart for an idea.

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They were never building anything. They were demolishing. And demolishers are only useful until the demolition is done.

In the West, the students in the encampments, the professors who give them cover, the administrators who cannot answer a question about genocide in front of legislators, the Western politicians who chanted river-to-sea from government podiums — none of them are running the system they are building. They are useful right now. They will not be useful later.

Bezmenov watched this happen in country after country. He knew exactly how it ends.

Author and political commentator Konstantin Kisin, whom I learned about the scar experiment that I started this essay with, said very plainly: We have to teach young people in particular that they are strong, that they are capable, that they are able to overcome adversity — not that they are victims.

That sentence is the antidote, not the political antidote but the human one.

Because the most powerful thing the system can do to us is convince us, before we have even tried, that the outcome is already determined; that our skin color or our background or our faith or our address has already written the verdict; that the interviewer is already looking at a scar that we cannot see but that everyone else can; that the deck is so stacked, agency is a delusion the powerful tell the weak to keep them compliant.

That is the lie. And it is a lie designed by people who benefit from the paralysis manufactured by self-imposed victimhood.

The obstacle does not determine the outcome. The person does. They can only influence those who are already defeated. They need us defeated before they can use us. But we are not defeated; we have not even started.

The most radical act available to a human being right now is not the encampment or the protest or the hashtag or the boycott. It is accountability.

It is the decision to look at one’s life and ask not who did this to me, but what am I going to do about it. It is the decision to refuse the scar — not because the world is fair. It is not fair. It has never been fair. The Jews who built Israel did not build it because the world was fair. They built it because they had decided, finally and permanently, that waiting for fairness was a strategy that only produced more and more graves.

Yuri Bezmenov said the process of demoralization is irreversible for at least one generation once it takes root. I think he was mostly right, but not entirely, because demoralization operates on a population, and a population is made of individuals. And an individual can wake up.

We wake up the moment we decide that each of our lives is ours — not the system’s, not the oppressor’s, not the algorithm’s, not the professor’s, not the activist’s. Ours.

The scar was never there. They put it there. We looked in the mirror and saw it and walked into the world looking for confirmation. So let’s stop looking for the scar and start building something.

That is what they cannot stop — not the protest, not the petition, not the chant, not the hashtag. They cannot stop the person who decided to build something instead.

— Author and speaker Ido Singer is the child of a Holocaust survivor who has lived through two intifadas.

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NOTE: My friend Fred Fleitz is a former Trump National Security Council Chief of Staff, a former CIA analyst, and a former senior staffer at the House Intelligence Committee. — RDM

by Fred Fleitz
April 25, 2026

In December 2025, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un toured a shipyard and inspected the completed hull of a supposed 8,700-ton nuclear-powered “strategic guided-missile submarine.” North Korea’s state-controlled media hailed this sub as a breakthrough in Pyongyang’s naval nuclear ambitions.

Just weeks earlier, President Trump announced that the United States would share closely held nuclear propulsion technology with Seoul, clearing the way for South Korea to build its own nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs).

Trump’s announcement was a long-overdue recognition of a strategic reality: in an era of nuclear-armed adversaries on the Korean Peninsula and a rapidly modernizing Chinese navy, South Korea cannot deter aggression with diesel-electric submarines alone.

For decades, Seoul has operated some of the world’s most sophisticated conventional submarines. South Korea’s KSS-III-class subs are quiet, heavily armed with vertical-launch cruise and ballistic missiles, and equipped with advanced air-independent propulsion. They represent a remarkable indigenous achievement.

However, diesel-electric submarines have significant limitations. Range and time at sea are limited by their diesel fuel. These subs must periodically surface to recharge their batteries, limiting their time submerged to days or weeks at best. In the shallow, confined waters around the Korean Peninsula — and in any broader Indo-Pacific contingency — the KSS-III subs are vulnerable to detection and cannot sustain the persistent, high-speed patrols required for naval deterrence today.

South Korean nuclear-powered submarines can change that equation. An SSN can remain submerged for months, travel at sustained high speeds, and operate across vast distances without fuel constraints. For South Korea, this capability is a necessity. North Korea’s growing fleet of ballistic-missile submarines already threatens to complicate Seoul’s defense planning. Beijing’s expanding submarine force, designed to project power far beyond the first island chain, poses an even larger challenge.

The good news is that South Korea is ready. Its “Big Three” shipbuilders — HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, Samsung Heavy Industries, and Hanwha Ocean — are global leaders in the shipbuilding industry. They already produce world-class conventional submarines and have invested heavily in U.S. shipyards, including the Philadelphia facility acquired by Hanwha. Transferring U.S. naval nuclear propulsion technology would help bring South Korea’s advanced shipbuilding industry to the next level.

However, building and sustaining a nuclear submarine fleet requires far more than hulls and reactors. South Korea must gain access to the full nuclear fuel cycle: the ability to enrich uranium to produce nuclear fuel and to reprocess spent fuel rods into advanced nuclear fuel. Without this, both its submarine program and civilian nuclear industry would remain dependent on foreign suppliers.

Access to the full nuclear fuel cycle would also be a boon to South Korea’s broader civilian nuclear ambitions. South Korea relies on nuclear power for about 30 percent of its electricity. It is also a leading producer of advanced nuclear reactors. Granting South Korea access to enrichment and reprocessing would boost its efforts in next-generation nuclear power technology, such as the production of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) and advanced nuclear fuel needed for Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and new reactor designs.

Moreover, providing South Korea with access to the full nuclear fuel cycle is not only a strategic imperative but also a matter of basic fairness and logic.

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South Korea operates one of the world’s most advanced civilian nuclear industries. Yet it cannot enrich uranium to make nuclear fuel rods or reprocess spent fuel. This makes little sense when other non-nuclear weapon states — including Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, and Argentina — already possess these capabilities under IAEA safeguards. Meanwhile, North Korea has secretly developed both enrichment and reprocessing technologies in flagrant violation of international law.

It is both illogical and counterproductive to withhold full nuclear fuel cycle rights from a model NPT member and steadfast U.S. ally like South Korea while granting or tolerating them for so many other nations.

Access to the full nuclear fuel cycle also would allow Seoul to sharply reduce its growing spent fuel stockpiles, extract vastly more energy from existing uranium resources, cut waste volumes by up to 90 percent through closed-fuel-cycle technologies like pyroprocessing, and establish itself as a premier exporter of complete nuclear solutions — including SMRs — to allies around the world. Recent U.S.–South Korea agreements already support this peaceful pathway, but likely will require revisions to the U.S.–South Korea “123 agreement” on sharing peaceful nuclear technology.

Transferring U.S. naval nuclear propulsion technology would be an improvement on Australia’s AUKUS agreement, which focuses on building new submarines from scratch. By contrast, under the U.S.–South Korea submarine agreement, Seoul can quickly and cost-effectively build a nuclear-powered variant of its proven KSS-III design. Joint production or technology-sharing arrangements also would strengthen America’s own submarine industry, which is years behind in production and maintenance.

Naturally, critics have raised nonproliferation concerns. These concerns are unwarranted. South Korea is a model member of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). North Korea, by contrast, has blatantly violated its nuclear treaty obligations, has constructed an estimated 50 nuclear weapons, and is now reportedly building nuclear-powered submarines.

Denying South Korea the nuclear technology it needs to defend itself while North Korea races ahead is not responsible nonproliferation; it is strategic malpractice. The Trump administration’s October 2025 decision correctly recognized this fact by supporting South Korea’s pursuit of civil uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing for peaceful uses as well as the production of nuclear submarines.

South Korea’s efforts to acquire enriched uranium fuel from the U.S., to receive technical assistance to enrich uranium domestically, and to obtain the right to reprocess spent fuel rods will also greatly benefit America’s nuclear power industry.

An AUKUS-style framework with updates to the U.S.–South Korea 123 agreement is the best way forward to provide Seoul with critical nuclear technology while ensuring safety, security, and non-proliferation standards.

South Korea has the industrial capability, the strategic need, and the alliance commitment to make this new nuclear technology cooperation work. The U.S. has taken the first step. The only remaining question is speed. The Trump administration, in consultation with Congress, should move ASAP to provide South Korea with the full suite of naval nuclear technology, reactor design support, fuel-cycle cooperation, and pathways for advanced reactors, including SMRs.

Security threats from China and North Korea are growing in the waters of the Asia-Pacific. A comprehensive U.S.–South Korea nuclear partnership is one of the best ways both nations can promote peace, security, and prosperity in this region.

— Fred Fleitz is a former CIA analyst and staff member with the House Intelligence Committee. In 2018, he served as the National Security Council Chief of Staff and as a Deputy Special Assistant to President Trump. This article originally appeared at American Greatness.

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by Joseph Trevithick and Hope Hodge Seck
April 24, 2026

Last December, President Donald Trump officially rolled out plans for the Trump class, the first of which is currently set to be named the USS Defiant, the world’s first new class of battleships since World War II. We just learned a lot more about them.

The Navy’s top leadership says they are working hard to avoid serious issues that have plagued previous shipbuilding efforts when it comes to the Trump class “battleship” program. Senior officials have focused, in particular, on the need to have a very firm design before any work on the large surface combatants, the first of which could cost a whopping $17 billion, actually begins. A lack of a finalized design, along with repeated changes to it along the way, contributed heavily to the demise of the Constellation class frigate last year.

Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Adm. Daryl Caudle and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, who left the Pentagon this week, both discussed the Trump class battleship, also known as the BBG(X), at separate roundtables on the sidelines of the Navy League’s Sea Air Space 2026 exposition this week.

“I think it is a necessary element to the force,” and “I think it provides real and needed flexibility to the force,” Secretary Phelan said about the BBG(X) effort at his roundtable.

From what the Navy has shared so far, the Trump class warships will displace approximately 35,000 tons, very roughly three times that of the newest Flight III subvariant of the Arleigh Burke class destroyer. They will also be between 840 and 880 feet long, have a beam (the widest point in the hull) between 105 and 115 feet, and be able to reach a top speed greater than 30 knots.

The armament on each of the ships will include a mix of nuclear and conventional missiles, including hypersonic types, loaded into large vertical launch system (VLS) arrays. They will also have an electromagnetic railgun, a pair of traditional 5-inch naval guns, laser directed energy weapons, and various additional weapons for close-in defense.

Navy officials also provided additional details about the costs and production schedule associated with the Trump class during yesterday’s rollout of the service’s proposed budget for the 2027 Fiscal Year. As it stands now, the Navy is looking to order the first of three of these large surface combatants in Fiscal Year 2028, at an estimated cost of $17 billion.

The Navy is currently projecting it will spend $43.5 billion on the program, overall, across the next five years. As a point of comparison, the estimated total procurement costs of each of the next three Ford class aircraft carriers range from roughly $13 to $15 billion.

The $17 billion figure “is the early initial estimate. We’ll see where we really settle down as we get through that and start to rationalize some of the costs,” Secretary Phelan noted at his roundtable at Sea Air Space. “So, let’s see where we land on that first ship, and then what the economies of scale get us to as we move through it.”

The Navy has already started “talking to two different vendors” about actually building the Trump class warships, he added. “Then it’ll be a function of how we get through that design process with them, and then their capacity in their yards, what we think they can do. Because we’re looking to really get moving on this and lay the keel in [20]28.”

The Secretary of the Navy and CNO Caudle have made clear that the BBG(X) design is still in the very early stages of being formulated. The ships are also set to incorporate a host of advanced capabilities, many of which, such as the railgun and laser directed energy weapons, have yet to be fully proven out, despite years of relevant work the Navy has done already.

“The ship needs to be designed. So, I got to put money toward the research and design of it,” Adm. Caudle said during his roundtable at Sea Air Space. “It’s really the design and how much pull-through I can do from previous efforts, like things that we already have on Arleigh Burke and DDG(X) designs that were already in the works.”

The Navy has previously confirmed that BBG(X) is a direct successor to the DDG(X) next-generation destroyer program. The service has also said that the new large surface combatant addresses shortcomings that had emerged with the previously planned DDG(X) design, which we will come back to later on.

“So all that has to go into a form factor in which we’re fundamentally changing the capacity, [the] vertical capacity of it, [and] the electrical plant and electrical generation for future large-scale directed energy [weapons] and other munitions that require a lot of power, like railgun,” Caudle continued. “So all that’s being baked into that design. And, because we’re taking it so seriously, we want to make sure that we have the right resources applied to the design.”

One of the “mistakes that we’ve done before, quite frankly,” is “we’ve started to build before the design is mature enough,” the CNO added. “And we want to make sure that we’re at [sic] least a very, very high level – I won’t try to give a percentage, but you can think like 80% or more design – before the first weld is done.”

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Caudle did not explicitly mention the Constellation class frigate, but the design of that ship was still being finalized as of April 2025, nearly five years after the initial contract award. Work had already begun on the lead ship at that time. This was all despite the Navy having explicitly chosen a derivative of an in-production frigate – Franco-Italian Fregata Europea Multi-Missione (FREMM) – specifically to help reduce risk and keep the program on track. Needless to say, that did not happen, as you can read more about here.

The Navy has also deliberately utilized a process known as “concurrency,” which entails starting production without having a validated design in place, on other shipbuilding projects. Concurrency has been presented in the past as a cost and time-saving measure, but has often produced exactly the opposite results. It has had notably negative impacts on the Navy’s newest operational aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, and both classes of Littoral Combat Ships (LCS).

“Look, we were doing work on railguns. We kind of abandoned it. We do have some directed energy [weapons] we are testing out right now,” Secretary Phelan also pointed out in terms of work the Navy has already done to develop key capabilities for the Trump class. “These are all things we have to get better at and need to do. So I think it’s just making sure that we’ve got the design down in an appropriate fashion, pretty locked down, and then making some trade-offs as we decide where to build that ship, when, how.”

The Navy just disclosed earlier this year that it conducted at least one new round of live-fire testing utilizing a prototype electromagnetic railgun currently at the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) in New Mexico. In the early 2020s, the Biden Administration shelved work on that weapon despite promising developments, citing technical hurdles.

Navy officials also continue to be very supportive of work on laser directed energy weapons, despite ongoing challenges with their development. The service is actively pursuing microwave directed energy weapons, as well.

At his roundtable at Sea Air Space this week, Phelan said that there are discussions ongoing about the possibility of the Trump class warships being nuclear-powered, though he said that was “unlikely” to be the case. Nuclear propulsion would have major impacts on the complexity and cost of the ships. Navy budget documents say the plan currently is for the BBG(X) to use a combined conventional propulsion system that includes diesel generators and gas turbines.

The Navy is also still fleshing out how it plans to employ the Trump class battleships operationally, which will also have impacts on the final design. This ties back into the aforementioned issues with DDG(X) that the service has cited in the past. The Navy has said it had previously arrived at a place with the next-generation destroyer program where it was considering building two subclasses with different armament configurations. This, in turn, had prompted questions about the limits that course of action would have imposed on the operational flexibility of the class as a whole.

“It’s something we’re trying to understand all the proper trade-offs, and then think about it as a Battleship Strike Group, Carrier Strike Group, how do they work in which different theaters,” Phelan said. “Look at how we’re deployed today, and ask yourself, how a ship like that, what it could do for us. If I had a ship like that today, I could park that off the coast of Venezuela, and I don’t need a ton of DDGs [Arleigh Burke class destroyers] to support it, and I can relieve some of the pressure on those.”

The Secretary’s comments here are in line with how the Navy’s latest budget request describes the current operational concept behind BBG(X).

“Adding capability at the highest end of the Golden Fleet high-low mix, the Battleship’s primary role is to deliver high-volume, long-range offensive fires and serve as a robust, survivable forward command and control platform. The expanded size and energy density of the new Battleship provide critical advantages for future naval warfare, offering a future-proof platform with distinct capabilities that enhance deterrence,” the line item for the program says.

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“Its advanced systems will enable true long-range strike with hypersonic weapons housed in new, larger vertical launch systems. Vastly increased power generation, managed by a sophisticated integrated power system with high-capacity energy storage, will support mission-critical directed energy weapons like high-output lasers and electromagnetic railguns, reducing reliance on costly single-use munitions.”

“Furthermore, its advanced naval gunfire offers cost-effective options for strike and defense, and its capacity to embark a fleet command staff enhances survivability by putting commanders closer to the fight. As a flexible command-and-control platform for both manned and unmanned platforms, the Battleship can lead a Surface Action Group, integrate with a Carrier Strike Group, or operate autonomously to secure critical sea lanes,” it continues. “To overcome the capacity limits of the Arleigh Burke class destroyer and the capability compromises of the previously planned DDG(X), the Battleship is designed specifically to accommodate these advanced weapon systems.”

Questions remain about the actual ability of a warship like the Trump class design to conduct independent operations, as well as the general utility of employing it in this way. These questions are compounded by the Navy’s plans, at least for now, to only acquire a very small number of these ships, which can only be in one place at one time. Moreover, with the plan now to order the first of these ships in Fiscal Year 2028, the decision about whether to proceed at all could fall to a new administration, as well.

The service does not appear to have ever put out a firm target for how many of the smaller DDG(X)s it expected to buy, but there had been talk of acquiring between 30 and 50 of those ships in the coming decades.

There are also industrial base and affordability concerns around acquiring such an expensive class of new large surface combatants amid the Navy’s other shipbuilding priorities. Naval shipbuilding capacity, or lack thereof, in the United States has been of growing concern for years, especially when contrasted with China’s industrial might in this regard.

“What we’re looking at more is this distributed ship building in modular [sic; modules], and I think that is a way to tackle that issue,” Phelan said at his roundtable in response to a direct question about these issues. “We’re going to need to really improve our ability to build ships.”

At a separate event earlier this year, Adm. Caudle also touted the importance of a greater focus on modular shipbuilding methods, which are not new. At that time, CNO was talking about how that could be used to help accelerate work on new FF(X) frigates that the Navy is now looking to acquire in place of the abortive Constellation class.

“An innovative strategy is guiding the new Battleship’s design and construction, centered on a state-of-the-art digital workflow. This utilizes modern digital engineering, AI-enabled design, and advanced production practices to reduce cost and schedule risk. Adopting best practices from Korean and Japanese shipbuilding, the approach emphasizes high design maturity before construction begins, precision modular construction, and tight integration between design and production teams,” according to the Navy’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request.

“This digital-first, modular approach allows for distributed construction across the industrial base, with U.S. shipyards focusing on final assembly and integration. The strategy is designed to stabilize the workforce, increase industrial resilience, and deliver the new capability more predictably and affordably.”

With the Navy now pushing to order its first Trump class battleship in Fiscal Year 2028, and insisting it won’t start work without a very firm design in place, more details about these warships are likely to continue to emerge in the coming months.

— This article first appeared at The War Zone.

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