WASHINGTON — Retired general and former Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis emerged from a time machine in the nation’s capital today, recoiling in horror at the devastation wrought by his accidental disturbance of Earth’s timeline.

“It was just one butterfly…” he stammered while shakily reading a Washington Post headline about North Korean POWs in Ukraine while an ICE agent dragged a hogtied fourth-grader from the Air and Space Museum.

After a brief trip to the Library of Congress to get up to speed, Mattis called a press conference on the National Mall in front of his time-traveling Tesla Cybertruck. Mattis explained that he’d taken a late honeymoon with his physicist wife, slipping off to observe the dawn of humanity, when he’d accidentally stepped on the prehistoric Lepidopteran, forever altering the course of history.