Good morning, I’m Thom Hartmann.
This morning, a new poll shows Trump at 37 percent approval, his lowest of the term, with only 25 percent of independents backing him and two-thirds of Americans saying the country is on the wrong track. Trump has launched “Project Freedom,” a new naval operation in the Strait of Hormuz that sources close to the president say could be designed to give the U.S. justification to bomb Iran if Tehran responds. Marjorie Taylor Greene has gone public with her most detailed account yet of Trump personally calling her to kill the Epstein files, saying it was the moment “MAGA died” for her. And 60 Minutes closed Sunday night with a Harvard historian making a quiet, pointed argument that the Supreme Court has been amending the Constitution without the American people. Corporate media is running cover. The FCC chair has made sure they know the cost. And the Ellisons keep buying. Let’s get into it.
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Trump’s Approval Is at 37 Percent. One in Four Independents Still Back Him.
A new ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll of more than 2,500 adults conducted April 24-28 puts Trump’s approval at 37 percent, his lowest of the term, with disapproval at 62 percent, his highest yet. It puts him back near the levels he hit after January 6, 2021.
The numbers inside the poll are worse than the headline. Strong Republican approval has fallen to 45 percent, down from 53 percent in September and the lowest level across both of his terms. Among independents, just 25 percent approve, a record low. On the economy, 65 percent disapprove. On inflation, 72 percent disapprove, up from 65 percent in February. On the cost of living, 76 percent disapprove. On Iran, 66 percent disapprove. On his handling of allies, 65 percent disapprove.
About 7 in 10 Americans say Trump is not honest or trustworthy. Two-thirds say he lacks careful judgment. Six in 10 question his mental sharpness. Majorities doubt his physical fitness and his leadership strength. Two-thirds say the country is on the wrong track.
The economic pressure driving these numbers is real. A Gallup survey this week found 55 percent of Americans say they are getting worse off financially, the highest level since Gallup began asking in 2001, exceeding even the pandemic and the 2008 financial crisis. Gas prices have surged more than 40 percent since the Iran war began in late February. And the Democrats now hold a 5-point lead for the midterms, up from 2 points in February.
A former Republican president going into a midterm election with 37 percent approval, a 5-point deficit, and two-thirds of the country saying things are headed in the wrong direction is not in a strong position. That is the state of play with six months to go.
When a president sinks this far this fast, the founders’ deepest fear wasn’t that he’d accept the verdict of the voters. It was that he’d reach for something outside the constitutional order to hold onto power, and that’s precisely the moment we’re living in right now.
Trump Launched ‘Project Freedom.’ A Source Says It Could Be Designed to Justify Bombing Iran.
Trump announced a new naval operation Monday called “Project Freedom,” described as an effort to help free up commercial ships to traverse the Strait of Hormuz. The announcement came after weeks of stalemate in ceasefire negotiations and growing impatience inside the White House.
One person close to the president told reporters that the operation may serve a secondary purpose beyond reopening the Strait. “If the Iranians do something, they will be the bad guys and we will have the legitimacy to act,” the source said. A senior U.S. official was even more direct: “It’s either we’re looking at the real contours of an achievable deal soon, or he’s going to bomb the hell out of them.”
Iran’s parliament national security chairman called Trump’s announcement “delusional” and warned it could violate the ceasefire that has been in place since early April. Tehran has not fired on U.S. forces since the ceasefire began, but has continued blocking commercial shipping through the Strait, which normally carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply.
The ceasefire is now approaching its fourth week. Trump has grown visibly impatient. The official description of the president’s mindset: “He wants action. He doesn’t want to sit still. He wants pressure. He wants a deal.”
Whether Project Freedom produces a deal or provides the pretext for resumed bombing is what the next few days will determine.
The Gulf of Tonkin taught a generation what happens when a president manufactures the conditions for a war Congress never authorized, and the framers put war powers in Article One specifically so that one man couldn’t bomb his way out of a collapsing poll number.
Marjorie Taylor Greene Says Trump Personally Called Her to Kill the Epstein Files, and That’s ‘When MAGA Died’
Marjorie Taylor Greene gave her most detailed public account yet of the phone call she says ended her alliance with Donald Trump, speaking at a Ron Paul Institute conference in Texas on April 25 and sharing the footage Sunday on X, where it collected more than 700,000 views by Monday morning.
By her account, Trump called her after she signed a bipartisan discharge petition to force release of the Epstein files. He told her: “Marjorie, you’re gonna have to take your name off that discharge petition. It’s a Democrat hoax. My friends are going to get hurt.” She said Trump also told her that “people in Palm Beach” and “people you know at Mar-a-Lago” would be hurt by the files’ release, and that he leaned on Speaker Johnson to bury any Epstein bill in committee and ordered then-Attorney General Pam Bondi not to release the files at all.
She refused. “That’s when MAGA died,” she said. “That’s when the entire thing shattered for me.”
Greene has since become one of Trump’s most persistent critics on the Epstein issue. Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November only after a four-member Republican revolt left him no choice, and has since branded her “Marjorie Traitor Greene” and a “ranting lunatic.” Greene has said she has received hundreds of death threats since Trump used the “Traitor” label, including a pipe bomb scare at her home and direct threats against her son.
On Sunday she reframed Trump’s signature insult directly: “I don’t have Trump Derangement Syndrome. I have Trump Disappointment Syndrome.”
Every authoritarian movement in history eventually reveals that its real organizing principle isn’t ideology, it’s the protection of a small circle of powerful men from accountability, and the founders warned us over and over that this kind of corruption at the top is how republics rot from the inside.
60 Minutes Closed Sunday with a Quiet Argument That the Supreme Court Has Been Amending the Constitution Without You
In the final segment of Sunday night’s 60 Minutes, Harvard historian Jill Lepore appeared to make an argument that landed with particular weight given where the Supreme Court has been taking the country.
Lepore, a professor of American history at Harvard and a staff writer for The New Yorker, told viewers the Constitution has not been amended “in any meaningful way” since the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age in 1971. But she argued that does not mean it has been static. “You’d have to concede that the U.S. Constitution is being amended all the time,” she said. “Not by the people, but by the Supreme Court.”
She connected this to the broader question of whether Americans still know they can amend the Constitution at all, and suggested the 250th anniversary of the first state constitutions in 1776 was “an excellent time to ask that question.”
The segment aired in the same week the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in a 6-3 decision along partisan lines, a ruling Justice Elena Kagan called the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition” of the 1965 civil rights law. Three of the six justices in that majority were appointed by Trump in his first term.
Lepore has argued in her recent work that the Constitution is a living document designed to be amended by each generation. The current court’s originalist majority has moved in precisely the opposite direction, treating the founding era as the ceiling of constitutional interpretation rather than its floor.
Anderson Cooper introduced the segment. Cooper declined to renew his CBS contract in February. It was one of his last appearances on the program.
Hamilton called the judiciary the “least dangerous branch” because it was supposed to have neither the sword nor the purse, and watching six unelected lawyers quietly rewrite the Constitution to dismantle the right to vote is the exact inversion of the system the framers thought they were building.
This Is Why Raw America Exists — and Why We Need You
A president at 37 percent approval is launching a naval operation his own sources say might be designed to justify bombing Iran. The Supreme Court is dismantling the Voting Rights Act, piece by piece, before a midterm election. And the press corps that is supposed to cover all of this is being bought by the billionaires who benefit from silence, threatened by regulators who have told broadcasters what happens when they step out of line, and handed to Trump allies who have said directly that the coverage will change once the deals close.
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This is Thom Hartmann for Raw America. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
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