Good morning, I’m Thom Hartmann.
This morning, a new poll shows Trump’s approval rating hitting its lowest point across either of his presidencies, with cracks now opening even among non-MAGA Republicans. Whistleblowers inside Customs and Border Protection are warning Congress that another child death in federal custody is only a matter of time. Trump spent Wednesday night sharing posts from a self-described Canadian conspiracy theorist to attack the chief justice of the Supreme Court. And Republican lawmakers have introduced legislation to permanently shield Big Oil from any legal accountability for the climate damage it caused. Corporate media is running cover for the war and the administration behind it. The FCC chair has made clear what happens to broadcasters that don’t. And the Ellisons are still buying. This is what they’d rather you not be reading this morning.
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Trump’s Approval Hits a Record Low. Non-MAGA Republicans Are Starting to Break.
A new CNBC poll of 1,000 Americans conducted April 15-19 shows Trump’s job approval at 40 percent, with 58 percent disapproving. His net approval of -18 is a 10-point drop from the previous quarter and the worst recorded across either of his presidencies.
The most telling number is not among Democrats or independents. It is among Republicans. Overall Republican approval slipped but remains high at 77 percent. Among MAGA-aligned Republicans, support holds at 96 percent. But among non-MAGA Republicans, approval fell 19 points to 60 percent. That is the fracture the White House should be watching.
On the economy, the numbers are worse. Trump’s economic approval sits at 39 percent, a net -21 that marks his weakest economic rating in CNBC polling across both terms. The decline is especially pronounced among independents, Latinos, and white non-college voters, the same coalition that delivered his 2024 victory.
The Iran war is dragging him down across the board. Forty-eight percent of Americans say the conflict has made them feel less safe. Sixty-four percent say it is not worth the financial strain and rising gas prices. Nearly 80 percent say they have taken some form of financial action in response to higher prices at the pump, from cutting non-essential spending to increased reliance on credit cards.
One Democratic pollster working on the survey told CNBC: “It’s hard to imagine a set of policies that could be proposed and implemented between now and Election Day that would have a material enough impact on the American people that they would say, ‘Actually this guy is doing pretty good with the economy.’”
History tells us that authoritarian movements can survive almost anything except a collapsing kitchen table, because when people can’t afford gas and groceries the propaganda stops working. That 19-point crack among non-MAGA Republicans is the sound of consent withdrawing, and once that starts no amount of flag-waving from a podium puts it back together.
Whistleblowers Say Another Child Will Die in Border Custody. It Is Only a Matter of Time.
The Government Accountability Project, representing multiple whistleblowers inside U.S. Customs and Border Protection, sent a four-page letter to Senate committees Monday warning that another preventable child death in federal immigration custody is only a matter of time.
The letter follows reporting that CBP’s Office of the Chief Medical Officer, the unit responsible for medical care for the roughly two million migrants detained annually, has cycled through three chiefs in under five years. Whistleblowers described the office as a revolving door with no stable leadership at a moment when the agency is processing migrants at historic volume.
The warning comes just over a week after the family of eight-year-old Anadith Danay Reyes Alvarez sued the federal government for wrongful death. Anadith died in May 2023 at a Border Patrol facility in Harlingen, Texas after medical contractors repeatedly ignored her mother’s pleas for an ambulance. She had a known heart condition. The lawsuit alleges her death was entirely preventable.
The whistleblowers are asking Congress to act before the next child dies. Congress has not yet publicly responded.
A government that already knows a child is going to die in its custody and can’t be bothered to keep a medical office staffed has already answered the question of what kind of country it wants to be. The real test of a constitutional republic isn’t how it treats its powerful, it’s how it treats an eight-year-old girl with a heart condition whose mother is begging for an ambulance that never comes.
Trump Promoted a Canadian Conspiracy Theorist to Attack the Chief Justice
During a late-night Truth Social posting spree Wednesday, Trump shared a post from a self-described conspiracy theorist with a Canadian-based account who had spun an elaborate claim linking Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to Norm Eisen, Barack Obama’s former ethics czar, as part of some unnamed scheme.
The post was built on a single fact: Eisen, who served as U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic, once mentioned that Roberts had stayed at his residence in Prague for a week while working on rule of law issues. Eisen himself has said publicly that while he believes corruption has crept into the Supreme Court, Roberts “is not corrupt.” The conspiracy theorist took that, attached the phrase “Colour Revolution Expert,” and handed it to the president, who shared it with his 12.5 million Truth Social followers.
There was no evidence of any scheme. The New York Times reporting on Supreme Court deliberations that prompted the original controversy made no mention of Eisen at all.
Eisen responded to the Daily Beast by saying Trump was “rattled” by the network of legal organizations fighting his agenda, including more than 300 active legal cases. “If he’s this upset, he should stop illegally profiting off the American people, spending their tax dollars on monuments to himself, and trampling their rights,” Eisen said.
In the same posting session, Trump also claimed he had personally persuaded Iran to call off the executions of eight female protesters. Iran’s judiciary responded the next day saying Trump had been “misled” and was the victim of “fake news,” noting that the women faced prison sentences, not imminent execution.
When a sitting president starts laundering conspiracy theories from foreign nobodies to smear the chief justice he himself put on the bench, you’re watching the collapse of the norms that kept the judiciary independent of the executive for two and a half centuries. The founders wrote Article III the way they did precisely because they’d lived under a king who thought the courts worked for him, and that’s exactly the arrangement Trump is trying to resurrect one late-night Truth Social post at a time.
Big Oil Wants Permanent Legal Immunity for Climate Damage. Republicans Are Trying to Give it to Them.
Republican lawmakers have introduced legislation that would permanently shield the oil and gas industry from lawsuits and state laws holding it accountable for climate damages.
The Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026, led by Representative Harriet Hageman of Wyoming in the House and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas in the Senate, would dismiss all currently pending climate accountability lawsuits, void existing climate superfund laws in New York and Vermont that require major polluters to pay for past damage, and block any similar laws from being passed in the future. It would declare federal authority over greenhouse gas regulation and effectively strip states and municipalities of the right to seek damages for climate harms in their own courts.
More than 70 state and local governments have sued oil companies for allegedly deceiving the public about the dangers of their products. That litigation is what this bill is designed to kill.
“They are not hiding the ball whatsoever,” said one climate accountability advocate. “They’re saying it out front: you can’t hold us accountable.”
Legal experts note that while the bill may not pass as standalone legislation, it could be slipped into a larger must-pass spending package or moved through reconciliation, where it would need only a simple majority. The American Petroleum Institute called blocking climate lawsuits its top priority for 2026. Last week, Tennessee passed a state-level version of the same protection. Utah did the same earlier this month.
“The industry knows it’s vulnerable,” said one scientist tracking climate litigation. “They are not totally confident they can win cases on their merits.”
The entire point of a courthouse in a functioning democracy is that ordinary people can haul the most powerful corporations on earth in front of a jury and demand an accounting, and that’s precisely the right this bill is engineered to destroy. When Congress starts handing out permanent legal immunity to industries that poisoned the planet and lied about it for fifty years, we’ve stopped being a nation of laws and started being a nation of favors owed to donors.
This Is Why Raw America Exists — and Why We Need You
Let’s be direct about what the picture looks like right now.
The oil industry is trying to legislate away its legal accountability for the climate. The government is arresting the wives of soldiers and ignoring dying children in its own custody. The president is promoting Canadian conspiracy theorists to attack his own Supreme Court appointees. And the press 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 to fall in line or lose their licenses, and handed to Trump allies who have made clear 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.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
4 Senate Republicans Vote Against Adding SAVE Act to Budget Deal. An attempt to ram through draconian voter ID laws through the budget reconciliation process has failed in the U.S. Senate. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) joined all 47 Democrats in voting down the measure on Wednesday night. If passed, the SAVE Act would require voters provide proof of citizenship in order to be added to voter rolls. This could even impact married women who changed their last names, as a voter would have to demonstrate that their last name is identical to the last name on their birth certificate.
Devin Nunes Forced Out as CEO of Trump’s Media Company. Former California Republican Congressman Devin Nunes is no longer the CEO of Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), which operates Trump’s Truth Social platform. Under Nunes’ leadership, TMTG’s value plummeted from $10 billion to roughly $3.7 billion. Since going public in 2024, TMTG has lost more than $1.4 billion in value. TMTG’s value dropped sharply after it invested $3.5 billion in Bitcoin just before Bitcoin’s price plunged.
Republicans Come Out Against Trump’s Surgeon General Nominee. Casey Means — who Trump nominated to be the next Surgeon General of the United States — is rapidly losing support in the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate. One large reason for this is the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention (the largest and most influential Protestant Christian denomination in the country) urging senators to vote against Means due to her answer to question about abortion drug mifepristone in her confirmation hearing. When asked if patients should be required to see a doctor before getting mifepristone, Means said it was “out of the purview of the surgeon general's office.”
RFK Jr. Won’t Dispute Trump’s Mathematically Impossible Claims. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently defended Trump’s claims of lowering drug prices by hundreds of percentage points — despite such a steep price cut meaning that companies would be paying patients to take their drugs. After media outlets corrected Trump’s math on drug price cuts, the president conceded that the numbers ultimately depended on “how you want to calculate it.”
Kansas Democrat Survives Failed GOP Attempt to Gerrymander Her District. Republican state lawmakers in Kansas officially failed to carve up Rep. Sharice Davids’ (D-Kan.) congressional district after 10 Republicans refused to sign the petition that would have authorized it. Kansas’ Democratic Governor, Laura Kelly, announced she would veto the legislation. But even though Republicans hold a two-thirds majority in both chambers, those 10 Republicans refusing to endorse the gerrymandering plan means the effort to erase Davids’ district won’t come to fruition.
