Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Trump’s own election security officials secretly tried to get Dominion voting machines banned across more than half the country, using debunked conspiracy theories as their justification. Anderson Cooper used his final “60 Minutes” appearance to deliver a pointed warning about what billionaire David Ellison’s new CBS News boss Bari Weiss is doing to the network, and Weiss was not happy about it. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, is now publicly warning that Trump may try to use war as a pretext to cancel the 2028 presidential election. And Stephen Colbert signed off from The Late Show with a sharp, knowing parting shot aimed squarely at the CBS bosses who canceled him.
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Trump Tried to Ban Half of America’s Voting Machines
Trump’s so-called election-security czar, a White House lawyer named Kurt Olsen, spent months last year trying to get Dominion Voting Systems machines declared a national security risk. The goal was to get the Commerce Department to ban the machines outright. Dominion equipment was used in at least 27 states in 2024. That’s more than half the country.
The justification? The same thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that Dominion machines were secretly controlled by Venezuelans to steal the 2020 election from Trump. That claim has been investigated, litigated, and rejected over and over again. Fox News paid Dominion $787 million to settle a defamation lawsuit over it. There is no evidence. There has never been any evidence.
Folks, when the Founders wrote Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution, they deliberately handed authority over the “Times, Places and Manner” of elections to the states, precisely because they’d just watched King George try to dissolve colonial legislatures whenever the results didn’t go his way. What we’re watching now is the executive branch attempting to do exactly what the Constitution was written to prevent.
But Olsen pressed on anyway. He worked with Paul McNamara, a senior aide to Tulsi Gabbard at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to get Commerce Department officials to take the machines apart and look for foreign-made components that could serve as a legal hook to pull them off the market.
What did they find? One chip packaged in China by Intel, which is an American company. Not a threat to national security by any standard measure. The rest of the chips were from Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia. Olsen’s team reportedly described them all as “East Asian” in their report, which sources told Reuters appeared designed to obscure the fact that they’d come up empty.
Commerce Department officials began exploring what grounds they might use to execute the ban. But the whole effort eventually collapsed because Olsen’s team couldn’t provide the evidence needed to actually justify it.
This is what authoritarianism looks like in a country that still has a paper trail of laws. They couldn’t find the facts, so they tried to manufacture them. They couldn’t find a national security threat, so they invented one out of geography. James Madison warned in Federalist 10 that the great danger to a republic was a faction that would “execute and mask under plausible disguises” the destruction of the public good. He could’ve been describing this memo.
Here’s what makes this especially alarming. The U.S. Constitution gives authority over elections to the states specifically to prevent the executive branch from seizing control of them. And yet the Trump administration has been systematically trying to get around that guardrail. Reuters found that officials in at least eight states have been pressured to hand over confidential records, provide access to voting equipment, and reopen fraud cases that courts have already dismissed.
Election security experts are broadly supportive of the current system, which combines machines with paper trails that can be audited. Olsen wanted to replace it all with hand-counted paper ballots, which University of Michigan computer science professor Alex Halderman says would be “chaotic” and could actually make cheating easier, not harder.
The timing matters too. Olsen was pushing to get Dominion machines invalidated before the 2026 midterms, which Republicans are widely expected to lose. Democrats and election integrity watchdogs worry this is all preparation for another round of baseless fraud claims if the results don’t go the administration’s way.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. This is documented. Reuters sourced it to multiple people with direct knowledge. The White House called it misinformation. But they didn’t provide a single fact to counter it.
Every authoritarian regime in the twentieth century, from Mussolini to Orbán, followed the same playbook. First you delegitimize the elections you might lose. Then you take control of the machinery that counts the votes. We’re watching step two in real time.
Anderson Cooper Blindsides Bari Weiss on Her Own Network
This story is a perfect illustration of what happens when a billionaire buys a news organization and tries to remake it in his political image.
When longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper taped his final appearance on the show, he used the platform to deliver what everyone in the industry understood as a direct message to Bari Weiss, the right-wing opinion columnist who now runs CBS News at the pleasure of billionaire Paramount CEO David Ellison.
Cooper said that independence is “crucial” to “60 Minutes.” That trust with viewers is “critical.” That running a program like that requires genuine appreciation for the history and the hard work of the people who built it. And then he said, “I hope ‘60 Minutes’ remains ‘60 Minutes.’”
That’s not subtle. Weiss has made clear she plans to overhaul the program now that the season is over.
A free press isn’t just one of the rights enumerated in the First Amendment. It’s the right that makes all the others possible. Thomas Jefferson said he’d rather have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers, because he understood that the second you let the powerful control what gets reported, you’ve lost the ability to hold them accountable for anything else.
According to reporting from Status News, Weiss was blindsided. She hadn’t been given advance notice of Cooper’s remarks. She was furious. And the sting was sharpened by the fact that she had personally reached out to Cooper earlier, trying to offer him a bigger role at the network. He turned her down.
What makes this moment bigger than just an industry spat is what it represents. “60 Minutes” is the most watched news program on American television. It’s been number one for 52 straight seasons. This past season it averaged 9.1 million viewers despite all the turbulence surrounding CBS News. That’s a strong brand that stands alone even as CBS Nightly News’ ratings plummet to historic new lows.
And now it’s in the hands of someone whose media empire was built on fighting the kind of journalism “60 Minutes” has always done.
This is the same consolidation Eisenhower warned about in his 1961 farewell address, just transposed from the military-industrial complex to the information-industrial complex. When a handful of billionaires own the megaphones, the rest of us are reduced to whispering. And democracy, as Justice Brandeis once said, dies in the darkness they’re paying to create.
Cooper’s comments were published on CBS News’ own platforms. That’s the detail that says everything. A legendary correspondent using the network’s microphone to warn the public about what’s coming. It didn’t go unnoticed, and it won’t be forgotten.
Marjorie Taylor Greene Worried Trump Will Cancel 2028 Election
Pay attention to this one, because when Marjorie Taylor Greene is warning that the president she used to support might try to suspend democracy, she might know something we don’t.
Greene appeared on Alex Jones’ show this week and said she’s concerned Trump may use an ongoing war as justification to cancel the 2028 presidential election. She’s referring to remarks Trump made in the Oval Office last August while meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. At the time, Trump noted that Ukraine hadn’t held elections since Russia invaded, then said, “So you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”
Trump framed it as a joke. Greene doesn’t think it’s that simple.
“Knowing President Trump, I looked at that, and I thought, I don’t know if he’s saying it joking,” she told Jones.
Here’s something worth remembering. In 1864, while the Civil War raged and over 600,000 Americans had already died, Abraham Lincoln held a presidential election. He could have postponed it. There was precedent in other countries for doing exactly that. Instead, Lincoln said, “We cannot have free government without elections, and if the rebellion could force us to forego or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.” That’s the standard. That’s what a real wartime president sounds like.
She went further, arguing that Trump is deliberately repeating the idea to normalize it and test public reaction. “Saying it over and over and over again normalizes the idea,” she said. “And I think it’s incredibly dangerous, and no one should ever accept it.”
Greene isn’t coming at this from the left. She was one of Trump’s most vocal defenders for years. She broke with him over the Epstein files, leading him to attack her for it and endorse her primary opponent, prompting her to resign from Congress. She has every personal reason to downplay concerns about Trump’s behavior. Instead, she’s amplifying them.
Two things can be true at once. Greene has spent years pushing dangerous nonsense, and she’s also telling the truth about this. Authoritarian movements always eventually devour the loyalists who saw too much. She watched the machinery from the inside, and now she’s describing what she saw.
Trump has sold “TRUMP 2028” hats. He’s claimed he’s “entitled” to an unconstitutional third term. He’s said he’ll only accept the 2026 midterm results if he decides they were “honest,” and told NBC News that if they aren’t, “something else has to happen.”
This shouldn’t be treated as normal. And when even his former allies are going on record to say so, that’s a giant red flag.
The Twenty-Second Amendment isn’t a suggestion. It was ratified in 1951 specifically because Americans across both parties decided that no president, however popular, should be allowed to accumulate the kind of multi-term power that breeds the dictators we’d just spent a world war defeating. When a sitting president signals he plans to ignore it, that’s not branding. That’s a confession.
Colbert Ends His Show By Taking Parting Shot at CBS
Stephen Colbert wrapped up 11 seasons of The Late Show on Thursday night, and he went out exactly the way you’d expect him to go out. With wit, with grace, and with one perfectly placed parting shot at the network that canceled him.
CBS announced the cancellation back in July 2025, calling it a financial decision. Critics pointed out that when NBC faced similar financial pressure with Seth Meyers’ show, they cut the band. They didn’t cut the show. The circumstances around Colbert’s cancellation have always looked like more than a budget call.
The Late Show was the highest-rated program in its time slot. You don’t cancel a winning franchise because it’s losing money. You cancel it because it’s making the wrong people uncomfortable. And the wrong people, in this case, happened to be the same people negotiating a multi-billion-dollar merger with an administration that demanded a pound of flesh first.
Colbert mostly kept it classy in his final monologue. But during his “Meanwhile...” segment, he brought up a story about a copyright lawsuit over unauthorized use of Peanuts music. Right on cue, his band started playing the Charlie Brown theme.
Colbert feigned surprise, asked his band leader if he was really playing music people were being sued over, and then looked directly into the camera and said, “Oh no, I hope this doesn’t cost CBS any money.”
The audience lost it. And they understood exactly what he meant.
Earlier in the show, Colbert addressed the whole situation more directly. “If you choose to do it with joy,” he said, “it doesn’t hurt as much when your fingers get caught in the gears.” Jon Stewart joined him, and envisioned the day Americans “repudiate this putrid administration,” saying that when accountability from the American electorate inevitably comes for Trump and the Republican Party, it will be “historic.”
Colbert didn’t mention Trump by name on his way out. He didn’t have to. Stewart said everything.
Satire has always been one of democracy’s most important weapons, going all the way back to the political cartoons that helped Americans turn against King George. Will Rogers, Mark Twain, the Smothers Brothers, George Carlin. Every generation has had voices who could puncture the powerful with a punchline. Silencing those voices isn’t a financial decision. It’s a tell.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
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