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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's inflammatory social media post that he is ready and willing to send Marines into Los Angeles to confront protesters is nothing more than a ploy to curry favor with Donald Trump.

That is the opinion of long-time military analyst Max Boot who pointed out that Hegseth's tenure at the Pentagon has been disastrous and the protests in LA against ICE agents storming businesses while looking for immigrants handed the former Fox News personality a chance to get out of the Trump administration doghouse.

On Sunday, MSNBC "The Weekend" co-host Elise Jordan promoted her guest, "It really is something that Pete Hegseth jumped from National Guard to Marines at Camp Pendleton, right?"

"This is not what you want in a situation like this, a trigger-happy secretary of defense," Boot began. "Now, you know, I think to, you know, one thing you can say in favor of the Trump administration is I don't think that they are looking for wars overseas. They're not necessarily looking to involve U.S forces in conflict with Iran or other bad actors, but it does seem like they are looking for wars at home. They're looking for confrontations at home."

"And, you know, this is very convenient for somebody like Pete Hegseth, who's had a bad first few months on the job where, you know, he was involved in the Signalgate scandal, where he was texting us attack plans to the editor of The Atlantic, as well as to a lot of his colleagues in the government and on an unsecured app," he pointed out.

"He's had massive turmoil in the secretary of defense office, people coming and going. He's been focused on culture wars, not on really preparing America for actual wars against actual adversaries. And from what we read, he has not been in good odor in the White House, that President Trump has not been happy with a lot of the stuff that he's doing, including when he wanted to give Elon Musk access to U.S. war plans involving China."

"So this is an opportunity for him to get in Trump's good graces to, you know, be on the same page as the White House and say, 'Yeah, you're sending a National Guard. I'm going to send in Marines.' It's completely inappropriate it's very, very dangerous because you should not be having active-duty U.S. troops involved in missions on U.S. soil, barring some catastrophe, which has not happened here."

"And I think this is the key point you're talking about dozens or hundreds of demonstrators," he told the MSNBC host. "There is nothing that remotely would justify the deployment of active duty Marines to Los Angeles."

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A former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official during Donald Trump's first term as president claimed that what is happening in Los Angeles is exactly what the president has been hoping for so he can unleash the military on Americans.

Speaking on MSNBC's "The Weekend," former DHS chief of staff Miles Taylor stated the protests in Los Angles against militarized ICE agents do not rise to the level of insurrection that Trump's inner circle is claiming, but it has handed him the pretext to do what he has always wanted to do.

As he explained, "This is, in my opinion, the single most significant act you've seen yet in the Trump administration. People are going to start to come to that realization over the next few days. This is the big one, this is the one that people like me were warning about when I came forward first in 2020 and started talking about the things I was most worried about that I saw in the first Trump administration that the president wanted to do."

"At the top of that list was deploying the U.S. military on U.S. soil to enforce domestic law," he recalled. "We had stopped Donald Trump in 2019 from invoking the Insurrection Act because we and our lawyers didn't think the way he wanted to do it was legal. In fact, I rushed to the White House as he was planning to make the State of the Union address and he wanted to insert a line about how he was invoking the act and deploying the U.S. military on U.S. soil. We felt like that was a dangerous slippery slope so that Donald Trump would end up taking control of national law enforcement."

"Make no mistake, his own lieutenants were worried he would create a de facto police state if he was going to be deploying the military on U.S. soil," he added.

"What is happening in Los Angeles is not a rational response to what they're seeing on the ground," he pointed out. "This is indeed, in my view, pre-planned to be able to give the president justification to invoke the Insurrection Act and it made sense that where they decided to do these raids was Los Angeles."

"I very firmly believe in the White House they suspected the response would be protests, and then they could use the protests as a response to use the Insurrection Act," he elaborated. "But this is much, much bigger than Los Angeles. I'm telling you, from the first term, if Donald Trump had gotten the authority to use the military on U.S. soil to enforce domestic law, it was going to go much beyond enforcement of immigration law. That was our fear and we are seeing potentially the early innings of that play out in real-time."

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According to one of Donald Trump's many former lawyers, the initial skirmish between the president and billionaire Elon Musk is far from over and likely to grow more vicious.

In a second segment with MSNBC host Ali Velshi on Saturday, former Trump "fixer" Michael Cohen doubled down on an earlier prediction where he stated, "...what Trump is actually doing is weaponizing the Department of Justice through his attorney general and other people — and they are going to drop the hammer on him out of nowhere when he least expects it. That's the playbook. And again, this is political guerrilla warfare at the highest level."

According to Cohen, onlookers may be on the verge of seeing a historic "war."

Cohen noted the disparity of Musk's social media reach via X, compared to Trump barely scratching the surface on Truth Social.

"On his platform which is going to really irritate and I'm sure it already has Trump on that, 172 million people viewed Elon Musk's post versus Trump's on his social media Truth Social platform: 179,000," he told the host.

'Elon Musk has massive powe and here's the problem with that, " he continued. "Trump craves relevance, Elon Musk craves dominance –– it's a very big difference. You're talking about an immovable force trying to smash into something that's indestructible. This is going to be a war like nobody has seen in maybe in all of history."

"But to your point, you just made a minute ago, most Americans are worried about other stuff, so it's fun to watch this little tennis match between them," he added.

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A comment by Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Solomon Jones as he battled with conservative Scott Jennings ended up angering CNN's normally unflappable Harry Enten on Saturday morning.

During a discussion on CNN's "Table for Five" over the Donald Trump administration's use of antisemitism as a pretext to continue his assault on higher education, Jones and Jennings went back and forth on the president's plans to punish California for ignoring his executive orders.

That led Jones to comment, "How do you, as the president, target an entire state because you disagree with two things that happened there. That makes no sense to me, and I don't think it should make sense to any of us."

"Because antisemitism should not be condoned," Jennings replied.

"Why is antisemitism the only prejudice that matters? Why does it feel like that?" Jones shot back.

That was when Enten entered the fray.

After some overtalk, he exclaimed, "I got to tell you, you know, I'm a Jewish-American, I've been so my entire life. I'm not exactly the most religious guy in the world but I will tell you, as a Jewish-American, I have been so sick of every single time that there's been hate against Jewish folks that all of a sudden, well, the hate against other minorities is just as bad, and we should elevate that as well."

"I'm not saying that we shouldn't talk about it, but sometimes it is okay just to talk about antisemitism," he added.

"It is okay to talk about it, but it's not okay to target an entire state and say that the only thing that we're targeting you for is antisemitism and what happened with a transgender athlete," Jones explained. "I think that there are other forms of prejudice that matter. I think that there are other forms of racism that matter."

"Certainly," Enten agreed.

"I think that there are other things that matter, and it feels like everything is kind of centered on –– in fact, the trump administration feels like they're weaponizing antisemitism in a way against those who disagree with it," the columnist finished.

"I'll just finish quickly," Enten replied. "I would just say, I just think it is nice that we're really actually focusing on antisemitism for a change in this country and talking about that. We do have a real issue and that there is real Jewish hate on the rise, and we all need to address it."

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