Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bullwark.

I'm with Andrew Edgar, who is dealing with illness and yet still coming on Bowork Takes.

This is like the Michael Jordan Flu game of Bullwark Takes.

Exactly. Yeah, play and hurt.

It's going to be a remarkable performance. People will talk about this for ages.

We just watched two pretty impressive briefings. One was Trump's cabinet briefing, which included a sort of North Korea-style intro with all the cabinet officials heaping praise on the guy.

And then the other one was another North Korean style moment where the Department of Defense

held its first press briefing today.

And it featured a new slate of Pentagon correspondence that were willing to sacrifice all

their integrity and dignity and sign a pledge to say they

wouldn't report on basic functions of the Pentagon. Andrew watched the Pentagon one. I watched

some of it, but I watched mostly the Trump Cabinet one. So, dealer's choice, we're going to start

a Trump cabinet. Sorry, buddy. So we could go in one of two directions here. One is like the

serious news and the other is the sort of

laughy stuff. I'll go with serious because I'm a serious person. So this, obviously,

that's what we've been by. This was the first time that the press got to ask Pete Hegseth,

what happened with the double-tap strike in the Caribbean on september 2nd and heggseth kind of

broke some news here and i'm not quite sure what to make of the significance of it he was asked

what happened with you specifically did you sign off on that second strike because up until

this point last night in fact texeth was tweeting

well i support what happened but it was a subordinate who actually directed it and he kind of disavowed

ownership of the strike while saying he approved of it and this is what he had to say when pressed

...