Good morning, I’m Thom Hartmann.
The MAGA coalition that carried Donald Trump to the White House is fracturing in public, loudly, and over a war most of them never wanted. Tucker Carlson says he feels sorry for the president. Megyn Kelly says she is sick of it. Alex Jones called him a supervillain. Candace Owens suggested it may be time to put grandpa in a home. And Trump responded by calling all of them “NUT JOBS” and “LOSERS” with low IQs in a 485-word Truth Social meltdown. Meanwhile, inflation just hit its highest annual rate since May 2024 because of the same war, the CDC is burying evidence that the Covid vaccine works, and Trump’s own lawyers just declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional. There is a lot to get to this morning.
Raw America is Raw Story and Really American’s people-powered response to the MAGA billionaire takeover of American media. Corporate networks are running cover for this war in Iran, and the FCC chair is openly threatening broadcast licenses of outlets that refuse to cheerlead. The Washington Post and the LA Times are being swallowed by oligarchs. Independent media has never been more necessary. If you’re not a paid subscriber, please become one today. It is how we stay standing when everything else is being bought or broken.
Trump Melts Down on His Own Base Over Iran
Trump attacked several prominent right-wing commentators over their criticism of his war in Iran in a lengthy and bizarre Truth Social post Thursday, referring to Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones as “NUT JOBS” and “Third Rate” podcasters who are “just trying to latch on to MAGA” for publicity.
The break has been building for weeks. Carlson called Trump’s threats against Iranian civilian infrastructure “a war crime, a moral crime,” warned people around the president to block him from using the nuclear codes, and called Trump’s foul-mouthed Easter Truth Social post “vile on every level.” Carlson’s response to Trump’s Thursday meltdown was characteristically understated. He told sources he “loves” the president “more than ever” but added: “I feel sorry for him. The Israelis have him in a hammerlock.”
Owens responded by posting Trump’s attack on X and writing, “It may be time to put Grandpa up in a home.” Jones said on his show, “Trump’s mad that he’s wrong. He’s mad that he got set up by Israel. Once a man, twice a child. This is dementia.”
Megyn Kelly, who took the stage with Trump in 2024 and called him a “protector of women,” said this week on her podcast: “I don’t know about you, but I am sick of this. Can’t he just behave like a normal human?” She also torched her former employer, saying sources tell her Fox News anchors are under pressure to simply cheerlead the war day in and day out, with no room for critical coverage. Polls show 28% of Trump’s 2024 voters now disapprove of him on Iran specifically, and 45% disapprove of him on gas prices, which have spiked because of the conflict. The coalition is cracking.
What you’re watching here isn’t just a celebrity spat. It’s what happens when a political movement built entirely around one man’s personality runs headlong into the consequences of that man’s decisions. Authoritarian coalitions don’t fracture over policy disagreements. They fracture when the strongman starts losing.
Trump’s War Is Hitting Your Wallet — and the Data Just Landed
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly Consumer Price Index report Friday, and the numbers are stark. Prices jumped 0.9% in March alone — nearly four times the typical monthly increase of 0.2% to 0.3% — and are up 3.3% compared to a year ago, the largest annual increase since May 2024. Leading the surge was a 21.2% spike in gasoline costs, which accounted for nearly three quarters of the entire monthly price increase. Groceries, health care, transportation — all up.
The culprit is not a mystery. The Trump administration’s war against Iran disrupted trade through the Strait of Hormuz, sent oil prices soaring, and the cost of nearly everything followed. Sources say traders are watching the fragile ceasefire with deep skepticism. The two-week agreement reached earlier this week has already shown cracks, with Israel launching what sources describe as the heaviest and deadliest strikes on Lebanon since the conflict began in late February — within hours of the ceasefire being announced. Iran has said its attendance at Saturday’s peace talks in Islamabad is contingent on what happens in Lebanon.
So the ceasefire that was supposed to bring prices back down is wobbling. The war Trump started — without a vote of Congress, without a coalition, without a plan — is now living in the gas prices every American is paying at the pump, in the grocery bill, in the cost of getting on a plane. The people who will feel this most are not the defense contractors cashing in on the conflict. They are the working families who never had a say in any of it.
This is the oldest story in American political history. The rich and connected decide to go to war, and the working class pays for it twice. Once at the recruiting office, and once at the gas station. And the men who made the decision never feel either bill.
Fox News Is Cheerleading the War — and Megyn Kelly Is Saying So Out Loud
It is worth pausing on what Megyn Kelly said this week, because she spent 14 years inside the machine she is now describing. Sources say she told her audience that if she were still a Fox News anchor right now, she would know exactly what her job was: cheerlead. “That’s it. It’s all about rah, rah, rah, go military, that’s what’s patriotic, praise the president, support the war, day in, day out.” She called the Iran war “folly” from the beginning and said the ceasefire deal sounds “very much like surrender on our part — which I’m in favor of.”
This is what state-aligned media looks like. The FCC chair is threatening the licenses of broadcasters who don’t play ball. Corporate networks have their marching orders. And the handful of people willing to say publicly that the emperor has no clothes are getting called low-IQ losers by the president of the United States on social media.
But here is what makes this moment even more dangerous: it is not just Fox News. The so-called liberal corporate networks are pushing pro-war talking points too. When the bombs started falling on Iran, the coverage across the dial was wall-to-wall military pageantry. Retired generals were brought in as commentators — many with undisclosed financial ties to defense contractors — to explain why the strikes were necessary, why the strategy was sound, and why dissent was naive. The same networks that spent years positioning themselves as a check on Trump snapped to attention the moment the war drums started. That is not a coincidence. That is what happens when your parent company’s stock goes up when Raytheon’s stock goes up.
The Founders understood this threat so well that they wrote press freedom into the very first amendment. A free press isn’t a luxury in a democracy. It’s the immune system. And right now that immune system is being systematically bought out, threatened into silence, or pressured into becoming a mouthpiece for the next war.
This is precisely why independent media is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between journalism and propaganda dressed in a chyron. Raw America does not have a defense contractor to answer to. We do not have a billionaire owner deciding which wars are good for business. We have our readers — and that is it. If you believe the public deserves coverage that tells the truth about this war, about who is profiting from it and who is dying in it, please become a paid subscriber today. This work only exists because you make it possible.
The CDC Is Sitting on Proof That the Covid Vaccine Works
A Trump administration appointee has blocked publication of a CDC report showing that the Covid vaccine cut emergency room visits and hospitalizations for healthy adults by roughly half last winter. The acting CDC director delayed the report citing concerns about the study’s methodology — a methodology that has been used by the CDC for about two decades and was used in a flu vaccine study published in the same journal just one week earlier without any objections.
The research found that between September and December of 2025, vaccinated healthy adults reduced their likelihood of Covid-related hospitalizations by 55% and their likelihood of emergency and urgent care visits by 50%. The report was scheduled for publication in March. A political appointee stopped it.
“This is definitely an escalation of this administration’s undermining of CDC science,” said a former senior CDC vaccine adviser who resigned last year over the administration’s approach to vaccine policy. “The report said something this administration doesn’t want publicized — that Covid vaccines are effective at preventing severe illness. It’s a very dangerous step.”
RFK Jr. once called Covid vaccines the deadliest vaccine ever made. He has fired vaccine advisory committees, replaced members with vaccine skeptics, and now his appointees are stopping peer-reviewed research from seeing daylight. This is not a policy disagreement. It is the deliberate burial of public health evidence for political reasons.
When a government starts hiding scientific evidence from the public, it isn’t just attacking medicine. It’s attacking the very concept of shared reality. Self-governance only works when citizens can make decisions based on facts, and the moment those facts become politically inconvenient, what you’ve got isn’t a democracy anymore. It’s a managed narrative.
We have had reporters in the room at the most consequential hearings of this administration, brought you exclusive interviews with top generals and senior officials, and we are now joining the D.C. press pool to put the sharpest reporting directly in front of our readers without a corporate filter telling us what to ask or what not to say. Coverage that challenges power, refuses to sell wars, and won’t propagandize for the Ellisons and the oligarchs buying up the press requires real support from real people. The Washington Post has its billionaire. The LA Times has its billionaire. Fox News has its marching orders. Raw America has you.
Become a paid subscriber today and keep independent journalism alive at the exact moment it needs it most.
I’m Thom Hartmann. Stay informed. Stay engaged. We’ll see you tomorrow.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Trump Posts Snuff Video to Social Media. On Thursday night, President Donald Trump posted an unedited, uncensored video of a man beating a woman to death with a hammer. Trump pointed out that the man was a Haitian immigrant, and used the video to justify his mass deportations and draconian immigration policy. The video is merely the latest example of Trump demonizing Haitian immigrants, which dates back to the 2024 campaign when he baselessly accused Haitians in Springfield, Ohio of eating pets despite city officials saying the claim was false.
All But Three Refugees Admitted Since October Are White South Africans. New data released Thursday shows that of the 4,499 refugees admitted to the United States since October of 2025, all but three are white Afrikaners from South Africa. To compare, the Biden administration admitted 125,000 refugees from 85 different countries in the last full year of Joe Biden’s presidency. Trump has falsely claimed white South Africans are victims of “genocide,” despite South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and many Afrikaners themselves disputing that claim.
Hunter Biden Challenges Trump’s Adult Sons to a Cage Match. Former President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, has now issued a direct challenge to Trump’s eldest sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, to a mixed martial arts fight. Neither the White House nor the Trump Organization have responded to the challenge, though the Trump administration is planning to host a mixed martial arts tournament featuring fighters from the Ultimate Fighting Championship promotion on the White House grounds in June as part of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Epstein Survivors Respond to Melania Trump’s Press Conference. On Thursday, First Lady Melania Trump held a press conference denying all ties to deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and called on Congress to hold hearings featuring the testimonies of Epstein survivors. In an official statement, 15 of Epstein’s victims said they had “already shown extraordinary courage by coming forward, filing reports, and giving testimony,” and that the first lady’s remarks were “a deflection of responsibility, not justice.”
U.S. Consumer Sentiment Hits New Record Low Amid Iran War. A University of Michigan poll released Friday found that consumer sentiment is just 47.6, which is down ten points from March, making it the worst on record. The poll also noted a drastic spike in inflation expectations, with prices up by 4.8 percent compared to April of 2025. Survey director Joanne Hsu said consumers largely “blame the Iran conflict for unfavorable changes to the economy.”
