'Full-blown meltdown': President doesn't care about criticism as 'Trump continues to Trump'

President Donald Trump's recent actions including his tariff policy and his defiance of courts over the deportations being carried out by his administration have raised concerns, but the president has been doubling down on most of his controversial positions.

In an article for the Washington Post published Friday, columnist Dana Milbank noted Trump is least concerned with the blowback.

"And Trump continues to Trump. Twice in the last week, he has posted a photo from the Oval Office of himself holding an image purporting to show the knuckles of deportee Abrego García, with a message saying 'He’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles,' Milbank said.

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"But the 'MS-13' characters are obviously photoshopped, as clumsily done as Trump’s one-time manipulation of a government weather map with a Sharpie," he added.

“'The president deserves better than the current mishegoss at the Pentagon,' John Ullyot, who just quit as a top aide to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, wrote in a takedown of his former boss in Politico this week.Ullyot, who had been the department’s chief spokesman, described 'a month of total chaos at the Pentagon,' a 'near collapse inside the Pentagon’s top ranks' and a 'full-blown meltdown at the Pentagon,' and he alleged that 'the Pentagon focus is no longer on warfighting, but on endless drama.'

The author noted that "in the celebrated case of Kilmar Abrego García, deported from Maryland to El Salvador in violation of a court order, the Trump administration blamed 'an administrative error' and 'an oversight' for the original deportation. Now, the administration is trying to justify Abrego García’s deportation retroactively with a statement from a disgraced police officer who claims the Maryland resident was an 'active member' of the MS-13 gang in Upstate New York — where he has never lived.

Milbank said everyone is used to the president's controversial actions. "We are by now all accustomed to Trump’s amateurism. When he rolled out his 'reciprocal' tariffs, they targeted penguin-occupied Antarctic outposts and the like," he said.

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