Donald Trump might think he has a premium on withering nicknames, but his White House aides are catching up, and fast.
Text messages between high-ranking White House officials, obtained Saturday by The Minnesota Star Tribune, reveal a harsh moniker is now being used behind the MAGA administration’s closed doors to describe FBI Director Kash Patel.
Anthony Salisbury, a deputy of top GOP adviser Stephen Miller, is understood to have described Patel in a Signal exchange with colleagues as a “giant douche canoe.”
Salisbury levelled the Succession-esque putdown at the FBI director over his decision to can several agency employees who’d been photographed kneeling at protests in 2020, even as Miller’s deputy agreed President Trump was almost certain to look kindly on the firings.
The messages form part of a wider look by the Star Tribune into deliberations behind the Trump administration’s decision to send federal troops into Oregon’s largest city.
Trump has said the move is necessary to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) buildings from the threat of “domestic terrorists” in Portland, with the state’s governor, Tina Kotek, describing his “war-ravaged” characterization of the city as “pure fiction.”
The president’s ire would appear to be largely targeted at nightly protests held outside an ICE detention facility since earlier in June, which local police have described as “largely sedate” and “limited to fewer than thirty participants” at any given time. It follows after similar deployments in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C.
According to the newspaper, the texts reveal how Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, lately redubbed ‘Secretary of War’, had considered sending the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne to Portland. The unit’s notable previous deployments include the First World War, the Second World War, the Vietnam War and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.
“The messages suggest that the once-extraordinary step of sending military troops into an American city has been normalized within the administration,” the newspaper writes, noting the plans had been discussed via Signal during Salisbury’s recent trip to Minnesota, and that “troubled by seeing sensitive military planning discussed so openly, a source contacted the Star Tribune and allowed a reporter to review images of the texts.”
Salisbury’s conversations were apparently with one of Hegseth’s chief advisers, Patrick Weaver, along with a number of other high-ranking members of the federal government. Weaver’s comments appeared to suggest a degree of reluctance on the Defense Secretary’s part as to sending such highly trained military personnel into an American city.
“Between you and I, I think Pete just wants the top cover from the boss if anything goes sideways with the troops there,” he’s understood to have written in the exchange. “82nd is like our top tier for abroad. So it will cause a lot of headlines. Probably why he wants potus to tell him to do it.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House and the Department of Defense for comment on this story. Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for Trump’s office, told the Star Tribune Salisbury had travelled to Minnesota for a relative’s funeral, and that nothing contained in the messages exchanged with Weaver or others represented classified or otherwise sensitive information.
“Despite dealing with grief from the loss of a family member, Tony continued his important work on behalf of the American people,” Jackson said. “Nothing in these private conversations, that are shamefully being reported on by morally bankrupt reporters, is new or classified information.”
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