What A Day - The Reality Of Being Trapped On The USS Lincoln

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

You may have heard about the conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln — the carrier where sailors have been facing food shortages and broken toilets. They’ve gone without a traditional port call for eight and a half months, and counting. But they’re not the only vessel facing long deployments and concerning conditions. In May, the USS Gerald Ford finally returned to port in the U.S. after 11 months at sea – the longest deployment since the end of the Vietnam War. Those months away from home featured a massive fire that raged for hours onboard, and – you guessed it – plumbing problems. So to talk more about what our men and women in uniform are facing because President Donald Trump started a war of choice, we spoke with Colorado Democratic Representative Jason Crow.And in headlines, Trump delays 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian imports, the Ebola outbreak in Congo reaches 5,000 cases, and college students at some universities can now pay their tuition using PayPal or Venmo.Show Notes: Call Congress – 202-224-3121 Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail]

He started this war, had no plan for it, which is why now our service members are suffering, why we have spent down our munitions, our missile inventories that we would use for other operations and other contingencies. And has put us in a really, really difficult position. And the service members, more than anybody, are the ones who are suffering here. I'm Jane Koston, and this is what a day. The show seeing some tiny issues with South Carolina Republican Senate candidate, Darling Grimm's understanding of foreign policy.

Here she is during Tuesday's GOP primary runoff debate against Representative Ralph Norman. Are Taiwan and the South China Sea national security issues for the United States? And if so, why or how? I'm just going to be honest here. I'm not on national security. I'm not that informed on national security. But I do support the military. Remember that time that you got called on in class to answer a very specific question,

but you were staring out the window thinking about something else? and had been for the past show, 40 minutes. This is like that, only if you were running for Senate. Afterwards, she said that South Carolina voters were, quote, worried about their pocketbooks more than they're worried about the South China Sea, quite honestly. That's not a flex, darling. On today's show, we talk about the state of our Navy during President Donald Trump's War of Choice against Iran with Colorado Democratic Representative Jason Crowe.

Before we dive into the problems facing our sailors, Here's what we're following today. Wednesday, August 19th. They were going to get a 50% tariff on everything starting today, and we've held it back three days. It's all subject to finalization of documents. So subject to the finalization of documents, we have a deal with Canada,

and I think it's a very good deal for both parties. Ah, classic Mr. Art of the Deal subject to the finalization of documents. Trump talked to reporters today about his decision to delay the 50% U.S. tariff's on. $20 billion worth of Canadian imports. The three-day delay comes as the U.S. and Canada reached a last-minute deal right before the sanctions were supposed to go into effect. It buys time for more negotiations and, for now, avoids another strain in already tense relations with Canada. God, imagine beefing with Canada.

Who does that? The Ebola outbreak in Congo has reached 5,000 cases, according to government data. Responders warn it's spreading at an unprecedented speech. feed, fueled by insecurity, displacement, and intense population movements. Data from Congo's Ministry of Health showed the outbreak had recorded over 2,300 deaths as of Sunday. The World Health Organization estimates it will likely surpass the 2014-216 outbreak across West Africa, which was the deadliest Ebola outbreak on record, with more than 11,000 deaths. At a meeting Tuesday, the WHO Director General said, quote,

we must be frank, the epidemic is far from being under control. We are still in primary season, and it's Wednesday, so here's another list of election results. In Florida's Democratic Senate primary, Democratic Socialist Angie Nixon defeated retired lieutenant colonel Alex Vindman, an establishment-backed candidate who raised millions more than her. A loss that was very exciting for Trump, who posted on true social that Vindman, who is a witness during Trump's first impeachment trial, was a, quote, treasonous creep. But it was a tough day for Trump overall. Two Trump-backed Republicans, including scandal-plagued Representative Corey Mills, also lost their bids. You know, Cory Mills, who was reportedly under investigation by both the House Ethics Committee and the Department

of Justice. And in Alaska's Senate primary, former representative Mary Peltola received the most with 48 percent. Senator Dan Sullivan received the second most with 42 percent, and not Senator Dan Sullivan came in third with over 2%. Not bad. All of them will advance to the general election. College students at some universities can now pay their tuition using PayPal and Venmo. Yes, the app you use to pay your friend for Macha, you can now use to pay your tuition. What could possibly go wrong?

In a news release, PayPal and Venmo said so far, Bellarmine University, Butler University, Kansas State University, Michigan State University, and Texas Tech University are on board with a new payment option. And while I applaud efforts to make paying tuition more accessible, experts are warning students to be careful. You know, since it might be difficult to get your money back if you send a semester's worth of fees to the wrong account. Carla Sanchez-Adams, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, told the Washington Post, quote, the stakes are much higher when you're sending tens of thousands of dollars of tuition than 20 bucks to a friend for dinner. You don't say, Carla, and that's the news. Let's talk about our men and women in uniform.

You may have heard about the conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, the carrier where sailors have been facing food shortages and broken toilets. They've gone without a traditional port call for eight and a half months and counting, and they're not the only vessel facing long deployments and concerning conditions. In May, the USS Gerald Ford finally returned to port in the United States after 11 months at sea, the longest deployment since the end of the Vietnam War. Those months away from home featured a massive fire that raged for hours on board, and, you guessed it, plumbing problems. So, why are sailors suddenly facing months far away from home with no idea when they'll get to return or even just step on land? Two words. Donald Trump. First, his adventures in Venezuela, and now his war of choice in Iran.

Our armed forces are stretched to their limit because a man who claimed he wanted to end forever wars decided to dabble in the military. adventureism he once condemned. So to talk more about what our men and women in uniform are facing because Trump started a war of choice, I spoke with Colorado Democratic Representative Jason Crow. Representative Crowe, welcome back to Water Day. Thanks for having me, Jane. So last week, you and more than 50 of your colleagues sent a letter to the acting Navy secretary demanding information on the conditions of the USS Lincoln, an aircraft carrier that has been at sea for more than 260 days. Have you received the answers you were looking for? No, we haven't, which, which is, you know, part for the course of this administration, right? They stonewalled congressional oversight. The number of hearings

and briefings that we have have fallen off a cliff in the last year and a half, all the normal things we'd get for an administration, even things that we got in the first Trump administration. Not that I, not that I will defend any Trump administration, but it's, it's unlike anything I've ever seen. So they had not responded to those requests yet. Meanwhile, as you point out, This has set a record, the type of record we don't want to set for modern Navy history, the longest time an aircraft carrier has been at sea. And we're seeing the crew, the sailors, really at a breaking point. Yeah, MS now reported that sailors are telling their families about moldy showers, long periods without hot water, and just the pure mental strain that they are enduring. Also, because they're in a war zone.

They are in the Arabian Sea. They are in a war zone. You serve on both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Intelligence Committee. I think my question is, how does this happen? Like, how do we get this kind of length of deployment and these kinds of conditions? What's happening? It's pretty simple, actually. It happens because they started a war.

Donald Trump started a war, and he had no plan for how to end it and no plan for how to win it. So we are simply stumbling from day to day, week to week, now, month. the month, bombing, launching missiles, having aircraft carriers, having fighter wings just there with no end in sight. And now we have Iran saying that they're simply just going to wait out the Trump administration, which I told you from day one was what was going to happen. That's what happens in these endless conflicts in the Middle East is our adversaries just wait us out. That's what happened in Iraq. That's what happened in Afghanistan. There's that age-old saying in Afghanistan, the Taliban would always say, the Americans have all the clocks, but we have all

the time, right? That's always what they do. So he started this war, had no plan for it, which is why now our service members are suffering, why we have spent down our munitions, our missile inventories that we would use for other operations and other contingencies, and has put us in a really, really difficult position. And the service members, more than anybody, are the ones who are suffering here. Trump has no plan for the war he started, and our service members are bearing the brunt of his hubris. If that makes you unbelievably mad, join the club. We'll get back to my conversation with Representative Jason Crow in the moment.

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Crooked on MS Now airs every Saturday at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific. Let's get back to my conversation with Representative Jason Crow. I want to widen this out because this isn't just about ships that are near Iran. The USS Lincoln is not the only vessel in crisis. For example, the USS Benfold, a Navy destroyer in the South China Sea. So not a fun place to be. It went four days without power last month, a fact that was not disclosed until just this week. What did these events tell you about how overstretched our armed forces are right now? So after our 20-year, quote-unquote war on terror in the Middle East where we spent $3 to $5 trillion of taxpayer money, lost. 7,000 American lives, hundreds of thousands of other lives around the world lost. And we said to ourselves, this is insane. We're not going to do this anymore.

We have to learn the lesson. And not only have we lost lives, families have been changed forever, our national security was undermined, but we actually spread our military thin and all of the replacement that we would normally do, replacing aircraft, replacing trucks, replacing ships. That didn't happen because of the cost of the operations that were happening. in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places. So in comes the Trump administration and the Biden administration. They say, well, we're going to stop doing these endless wars. We're going to pull out and we're going to use that opportunity to rebuild our military. And even Trump said that.

I remember. I was there. Yeah, I know. He campaigned on it because he actually knew at the time that that's where Americans are on the right and the left. People are fed up with it. They don't wanted it anymore. Right? So he campaigned on this and he said, we're going to actually rebuild our military and now he's doing the opposite. He's doing the same thing that he campaigned against, and that is spending all of our defense money, all of our service member time and all of our equipment, just wearing it out and wearing folks out. And it's actually jeopardizing our national security. But there's one other point that I wanted to make here, if I may, and that is what Donald Trump and Pete Higsef and others in the administration have been saying in response

to the claims of bad conditions, the reality actually of bad conditions. It's not claims, it's actually happening. And what they say is, oh, they have to suck it up. War is tough. You know, service members are supposed to deal with this. They train for tough conditions. And when we're at war, at a conflict, this is just part of it.

No, it's not part of it. Because there's a really big difference between doing tough things, because that's what you're trained to do. And I'm a former paratrooper and Army Ranger. I went to war three times, Iraq and Afghanistan. I've done tough things. And missions are tough. But there's a really important distinction between a tough mission and unnecessary conditions that with the right leadership and the right preparation and planning can be avoided. And that's what we're seeing right here, right?

A huge difference between asking people to do difficult things versus subjecting them to poor conditions, squalid conditions, and bad morale because of incompetent leadership under Pete Hexeth. To that point, on Friday, President Trump said the sailors in the Lincoln had been deployed, quote, not nearly long enough. This is someone who has not served anything ever. And while these sailors are waiting for relief, Defense Secretary Pete Hexeth went to Iowa to campaign for Representative Zach Nunn. I feel like this tells you a lot about how the Trump administration views members of our armed services. I mean, it tells me a lot, but what does it tell you? Well, we know that Donald Trump is a five-time draft dodger. We know that Donald Trump can't

possibly comprehend this idea of service above self. In fact, not only can he not comprehend it, but he looks at folks that serve something higher than themselves with distaste. He thinks we're, quote, suckers and losers because that's what he said about veterans, right? He says that he prefers people that don't get captured. He refused to go to a military cemetery in Europe because it was raining and he didn't want to get rained on. This is a man who has spent his life focusing on enriching himself and his family and couldn't possibly comprehend service above self. That's number one. Number two is you look at Pete Hegeseth.

This is a corrupt and incompetent former TV personality with zero experience running a large national security department, let alone our biggest, their most important in the Department of Defense. And Pete Hagseth was hired to play a Secretary of Defense on TV, not to be one. That's why Donald Trump hired to shoot videos, to be performative, to look the part behind a podium. And that's what he has done. And he spends his time shooting videos, spends this time building his personal TV studio with a complete makeup section outside of his office in the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, our service members at war continue to suffer. So this is the inevitable consequence of what Donald Trump has decided to do, who he has decided to hire, and the wars that he has decided to start. I wanted to ask you something, because you are in a comparatively unique position. You are a veteran and a Democrat, not just a Democrat, but a member of Congress. And I think that something that has always bothered me is that if this were a Democratic administration, talking about veterans this way, talking about members of the armed services this way, we would never hear the end of it. Fox News would implode into a fiery ball. How do you think Democrats? How do you think voters?

And how do you think Democrats in Congress should be talking about these issues, protecting our troops, working towards better conditions for our troops in an environment in which Republicans get an assumption of patriotism that Democrats don't? Well, the first thing is we actually have to talk about it. The first step is Democrats need to talk about these issues. You know, I focus so much on being, you know, what I call an unabashed national security Democrat. And I'm for smaller defense budgets, leaner defense budgets, which I actually think will result in a better military. And I'm for supporting our veterans. I'm supporting our military and military families. And we should not shy away from taking on these issues and talking about it.

But for a long time, the simple fact of the matter is, Jane, Democrats just avoided it. We avoided talking about it. We seated the ground in the territory to Republicans. Republicans showed up. They talked about it ad nauseum, and they took the mantle for us. So now is our opportunity to take the mantle back because they have been epically irresponsible and egregious with the way that they've treated our veterans, cutting, cutting veterans benefits, cutting the VA, trying to privatize the veteran system.

They have been egregious with our military, stealing, literally stealing money, reprogramming it out of military barracks and military housing construction funds at Congress on a bipartisan basis allocated and taking that money to build a border wall. Right. So they have been anything but supportive of our military and military families. And the biggest thing of all, if you want to talk about supporting veterans and military families, how about if we stop getting in unnecessary reckless wars that we don't need to get into? Like that is the number one thing anybody can do, Republican or Democrat, to support our military

and our veterans. Stop fighting stupid wars because we are spending our time, our money, our precious lives. our military family time, doing things that are unnecessary, that are not making us safer, and are wasting taxpayer dollars in our precious military lives. So it really starts and ends there in my book. Representative Crow, as always, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. Thanks for having me. That was my conversation with Colorado Democratic Representative Jason Crow. Before we go, with ICE running rampant in the streets, it's more important than ever for us to

understand our Constitution and to claim it for. for ourselves. That's why Crooked's resident law professors, Kate, Leah, and Melissa have launched a new bonus series called Know Your Rights. Check out the latest episode to learn all about our legal right to observe and record law enforcement and federal officers. Listen to it now in the strict scrutiny feed or watch it on YouTube. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, listen to the wise words of Jesse Waters and tell you friends to listen. And if you are into reading, and not just about how on Tuesday, the worst guy on Fox News, had the only correct right-wing take on Georgia Senator John Alsuff's comment about Trump's

assistant and human printer Natalie Harp. Am I phased by this comment? No. Has Trump said so much worse? So much more sleazy things against other people? Yes, have I defended those things? Absolutely. So I'm not going to pretend I'm all hot and bothered about it. Like me, Whataday is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooky.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston. And my take is that all Asoff did was mention her name. And for some reason, Maga went all in on he's accusing Trump of having an affair.

Which is an odd thing to think, isn't it? What a day is a production of Crooked Media. Our show is produced by Caitlin Plummer, Emily 4, Erica Morrison, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Haley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Joseph Dutra, Johanna Case and Desmond Taylor. Our music is by Kyle Murdoch and Jordan Cantor. We had helped today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

If you miss some of your favorite crooked pods this week, don't worry, you can now catch up on the week's best moments on MS Now on Saturday nights. MS now is streaming an episode of highlights from your favorite crooked pods, packing as much analysis, funny moments, and 100% correct opinions into 40 minutes as humanly possible. Crooked on MS Now airs every Saturday at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific.