Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is facing accusations from veterans in Congress of lying to military families about the horrendous conditions on the U.S.S Abraham Lincoln, where sailors have reportedly tried to jump overboard. Podcaster Joe Rogan, who endorsed Trump in 2024, is now using his platform to condemn the president for using his office to add billions to his own personal net worth. Newly surfaced documents confirm that ICE and the Department of Homeland Security spied on left-wing groups protesting the execution of nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. And the White House is reportedly now considering yet another round of tax cuts aimed at making the wealthiest Americans even richer.
Before we get into the news, a brief ask: we’re up against a cadre of impossibly wealthy MAGA oligarchs tied at the hip to the Trump regime, who are all using their billions to buy as many news outlets as they can so they can quietly snuff out all dissent and make themselves the sole deciders of what we get to know. Raw America will never take a dime from a billionaire, because we know that means they get to control what gets reported and what gets buried. But to be perfectly honest, we’re short on our fundraising goals this month and need free readers like you who value the importance of independent journalism to chip in. The good news: you can upgrade to a paying subscription for just 22 cents a day. That’s it. For less than a cup of coffee, you can make sure we stay independent and answer to no one else but you, the reader.
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Veterans Say Hegseth ‘Lying’ to Military Families About Dire Conditions on Aircraft Carrier
Members of Congress who served in the military are accusing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of blatantly lying about what’s happening on board the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. That’s the aircraft carrier that’s been on an extended deployment in the Middle East. The ship is carrying approximately 5,000 sailors and Marines who were expecting to be home three months ago.
Those service members are struggling to keep it together amid brutal conditions according to family members, veterans and reporting from multiple outlets. They’re having to contend with moldy showers, long stretches with no hot water, shortages of various crucial supplies, toilets continuously out of service and even laundry rooms that have been inaccessible for weeks.
There’s also a significant mental health toll for the Marines and sailors on the carrier. Family members say a medical professional on the ship warned commanding officers that the crew needed to reach port before people started — in their words — “losing their minds.” At least one sailor reportedly tried to jump overboard before other crew members intervened.
Hegseth’s response to these claims was to downplay and dismiss them. He said the reports about the ship’s conditions “completely misrepresented” what is supposedly happening. He told reporters during a press gaggle in Panama that every ship has every amenity the Pentagon can provide.
Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, who served in the Iraq War as a Marine corporal himself, said he’s in direct contact with a military spouse who’s been forwarding him her husband’s text messages from the ship. Gallego told Hegseth to stop lying and fix the problem.
Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, a captain in the Marine Corps who also served in Iraq, also cast doubt on Hegseth’s claims. Moulton made sure to remind reporters that this is the same defense secretary who’s already been caught misusing classified information in last year’s “Signalgate” scandal. He also observed if everything’s fine on that ship, why is the Navy now rushing to replace it with the U.S.S. George Washington?
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversees military operations in the Middle East, put out a statement last night pushing back on some unproven and debunked claims, like sailors reportedly dying in a brawl. But that statement notably never addressed the specific complaints from military families who have loved ones on board about the lack of food, showers and working toilets. CENTCOM did confirm one sailor went overboard, though the statement said he “fell” rather than addressing the accounts from families that described the sailor deliberately trying to jump into the sea.
The crew of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln has now spent more than 260 days at sea. That’s more of a stress test than a standard rotation, and it’s happening while the people at the top of the chain command try to tell us there’s nothing to see here.
George Washington spent the winter of 1777 at Valley Forge writing letter after letter to Congress about men with no shoes and no meat, because he knew a republic that hides what it's doing to its own soldiers has already started lying to itself. We didn't build a citizen military so the people running it could tell the families back home that everything's fine.
‘Literally Crazy’: Joe Rogan Calls Out Trump’s ‘Shady’ Corruption
Podcast host Joe Rogan, who endorsed Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, spent a significant portion of his most recent episode condemning Trump and his family using the office of the president to pad their pockets with billions of dollars.
Rogan honed in on Trump’s crypto ventures as one prime example of corruption. Since his second term, Trump has pushed pro-crypto policies all while his family’s businesses have aggressively expanded their footprint into the crypto industry. Trump has already profited to the tune of roughly $1.4 billion from crypto, including his $TRUMP memecoin, which has plummeted approximately 97 percent in value since it launched last year. This means that while the Trump family made out like bandits, everyone else lost their shirts in what appears to be a textbook rugpull scheme.
Rogan went on to say this president has brazenly done things no American president has ever done before, specifically pointing to Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, being entangled in a plethora of “shady” crypto deals. He told comedian Shane Gillis, his guest, that there’s so much money moving around that if regulators wanted to, they could dig deep and find real problems.
The podcaster added that while all of this is technically legal, he’s not sure it should be.
Florida Atlantic University political science professor Craig Agronoff told Newsweek that Rogan’s analysis is spot-on, pointing out that no modern president has ever reported personal income from one specific industry of this level while simultaneously shaping the regulations governing that very same industry. Past presidents put their assets in blind trusts to avoid the appearance of self-dealing, but Trump has notably refused to do the same.
Rogan also took aim at Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), which is the parent company of the president’s Truth Social platform. The company recently launched a subscription service charging between $60,000 and $100,000 a month for early access to Trump’s market-moving posts. A new lawsuit is making the argument that this amounts to selling privileged access to information generated through the president’s official duties. Several high-frequency trading firms have already subscribed.
Trump remains the largest shareholder of TMTG, with an equity stake worth approximately $1 billion.
Rogan’s reaction to Trump selling early access to posts for $100,000 a month was probably what most of us were thinking, called it “literally crazy.”
The White House response was, of course, a boilerplate denial of any conflicts of interest, with the president’s assets supposedly being held in independently managed accounts. Sure thing. Whatever you say.
After Watergate, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 to force presidents to open their books, because the country had just learned what happens when a man treats the office as personal property. Legal and clean aren't the same thing, and Rogan just said out loud what a lot of his own listeners have been quietly thinking.
ICE Caught Spying on Left-Wing Groups After Killing of Alex Pretti
In Minneapolis, January’s fatal shooting of 37 year-old V.A. nurse Alex Pretti by federal agents triggered a uniquely ominous response from the Trump administration.
Rather than investigating the agents who pulled the trigger — as is standard in any fatal shooting across law enforcement agencies — the Trump administration instead turned its investigative power on the people protesting them.
The New York Times just reported that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proceeded to open investigations into labor unions, a climate change group, socialist organizations, and other leftists in an attempt to find out if they provided aid to “violent opportunists and agitators.”
This was a widespread effort. Government documents show federal agencies gathered intelligence on Americans who were never suspected or accused of any crimes. The Trump administration subpoenaed three years of financial records from the Sunrise Movement, which is a youth-led climate group. They did the same for the Communications Workers of America, which is the labor union representing journalists and editors at numerous media outlets, including at Raw America’s sister organization, Raw Story.
The Trump administration also investigated the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which is the nation’s largest union of healthcare workers. Investigators demanded three years of the SEIU’s wire transfer records saying they were inquiring about “domestic terrorist financing.” But those time periods included in the government’s request predate the very operation the administration claims justified its crackdown in Minneapolis, suggesting this was more about intimidation than investigation.
Federal agents also reportedly conducted extensive surveillance operations at various libraries, parks and churches, as well as online meetings of these groups. They took down license plate numbers of vehicles at these locations, gathered names and assembled details of discussion topics. They even infiltrated private Signal group chats to get details of planned protests and even the political opinions of the organizers.
Federal prosecutors went on to present a grand jury with a slide alleging a massive conspiracy to obstruct immigration operations that involved eighteen separate groups, including the AFL-CIO, which is the largest labor union in America.
Again, none of the groups the Trump administration targeted were ever charged with a crime. But in June, the Justice Department charged 15 individual protesters with interfering with immigration operations, framing them as part of the antifascist movement as if opposing fascism is a crime. The protesters maintain their actions are protected by the First Amendment.
This all shows the motivations of the government isn’t to safeguard Americans’ constitutional rights. When a nurse was executed in broad daylight, the government’s response was to spy on people exercising their First Amendment rights rather than looking into their own agents’ conduct.
In 1958 the Supreme Court ruled in NAACP v. Alabama that a state couldn't force a group to hand over its membership lists, because the justices understood that exposure is itself the punishment and fear is the whole point. Swapping membership lists for three years of bank records doesn't change what's happening here, it just updates the technology.
Trump Wants to Cut Taxes for the Richest Americans — Again
With less than three months before a midterm election in which voters have the affordability crisis at the top of their minds, the Trump White House has apparently decided the best thing to do is to talk about potentially giving even more tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.
According to Bloomberg, the Trump administration is weighing two specific proposals: one would peg capital gains taxes (which are exclusively paid by investors rather than people who actually work for a living) to inflation. The other would exempt home sales from capital gains tax up to $2 million. That’s a significant increase from the current exemption of $500,000.
It’s worth remembering that tax cuts for the rich is a genuinely unpopular position with a broad swath of the American public. Gallup has tracked this question since 1939, and as of right now, 52 percent of Americans say the government should redistribute wealth by imposing higher taxes on the rich. Pew Research found in April that 61 percent of Americans — and even 41 percent of Republicans — think the richest Americans don’t pay enough taxes.
So naturally, the Trump administration is trying to characterize these proposals as a benefit to the middle class.
So what these proposals would actually do? The Yale Budget Lab estimates that tying capital gains taxes to inflation would cost anywhere from $170 billion to $1 trillion over the course of a decade, depending on how it’s applied. The benefits are also extremely slanted in favor of the super-rich, as anyone making less than $100,000 would get almost nothing, while people making over $3 million a year would get a tax cut of roughly $350,000 annually.
As for the $2 million capital gains exemption, the National Association of Realtors says that would only help the richest 15 percent of homeowners, which is already far wealthier than the rest of the U.S. population. The other 85 percent are already not subjected to any capital gains taxes from home sales.
This proposal comes after last year’s tax cuts in Trump’s Big Ugly Bill already slashed federal tax revenuesby an estimated $570 billion. Trump’s tariff rebates, which the Supreme Court allowed after striking down Trump’s tariffs as unconstitutional, amount to billions more in lost revenue. Those tariff rebates, by the way, went to the same corporations that gouged us with higher prices, and yet consumers got no rebate at all.
If this government truly wanted to bring down housing costs, they could consider real solutions like zoning reform, new investments in infrastructure, scrapping tariffs on imported construction materials like lumber and steel and increasing subsidies for low-income housing. Handing out even more tax breaks to millionaires isn’t one of them.
Americans ratified the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913 for one reason, and that reason was the conviction that great fortunes owe something back to the country that made them possible. A century later we're being told the way to fix housing costs is to hand another break to the people who already own most of the housing.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for watching, and thanks for supporting independent media. Have a great weekend.
Here are some stories you may have missed:
Trump Treasury Department’s New Policy Is a Gift to Money Launderers. This week, President Donald Trump’s Treasury Department announced it would be scrapping its registry of shell company ownership. In her latest column for the Bulwark, Catherine Rampell pointed out that this flies in the face of existing federal law requiring the Treasury Department maintain a shell company database in order to crack down on money laundering operations. Not only is the Treasury eliminating future gathering of shell company data, but its destroying its current database, meaning no future administration or law enforcement agency can access it.
Female Federal Employees Accuse Trump Administration of Blocking Sexual Harassment Lawsuits. A new lawsuit from Deanna Chelette and Alexzandria Boyd, who are employed as guards at the federal prison in Pollock, Louisiana, alleges that Andrea Lucas, the Trunp-appointed chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is deliberately refusing to investigate sexual harassment claims. Chelette and Boyd say their superiors at the prison are refusing to restrain and discipline inmates who are harassing correctional officers. Lucas implemented a policy on December 10 of freezing all class-action complaints from federal workers.
CNN MAGA Commentator Gives Update on Mitch McConnell. CNN commentator Scott Jennings — the one-time political director for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) recently provided an update on the 84 year-old senator during a recent appearance on “The Arena with Kasie Hunt.” Jennings said McConnell “seemed to be doing a lot better” since his return home from a rehab facility. McConnell still has yet to make any public appearances since his June 14 hospitalization, which his staff attributed to a fall and a brief episode of pneumonia. McConnell staff has said he’ll continue to work from home while he continues his recovery. His lengthy absence from the Senate has meant missed votes on everything from War Powers Act resolutions and confirmation votes for federal judges.
