Good morning, I’m Thom Hartmann.
This morning, Tucker Carlson is publicly apologizing for helping put Donald Trump in the White House. Trump’s own team cannot keep his story straight on Iran negotiations, with White House staff scrambling to correct the president’s public statements in real time. The British ambassador scandal is now touching Epstein, Starmer’s government, and Trump himself. And 34 members of Congress are demanding answers about how Palantir and a network of surveillance companies are being used to build what they are calling a mass surveillance ecosystem targeting American citizens. Corporate media is running cover for the war and the administration running it. The FCC chair has made clear what happens to broadcasters that don’t. And the billionaires are buying up whatever newsrooms remain. This is the news they don’t want you sitting with this morning.
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Today at 1:30 PM Eastern Time, Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson will be hosting a live conversation with Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. Watch on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.
Tucker Carlson Says He’s Sorry for Helping Elect Trump
Tucker Carlson went on his podcast Monday and did something that would have been unimaginable two years ago. He apologized.
“I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people,” Carlson told his brother Buckley, a former Trump speechwriter. “It was not intentional, that’s all I’ll say.”
He went further, accepting personal responsibility for Trump’s return to power. “You and I and everyone else who supported him, you wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him. We’re implicated in this for sure.” He acknowledged there had been warning signs about Trump’s character that he and others chose to ignore: “Clearly, there were signs of low character. We knew that.”
His brother raised the 25th Amendment on air, saying it was “not crazy to talk about it in this context.”
Trump has responded to Carlson’s criticism in recent days with a series of Truth Social attacks, calling him a “broken man” and a “low IQ person” and grouping him with “Flailing Fools.” Carlson’s son, also named Buckley, recently resigned from his role as deputy press secretary to Vice President JD Vance amid the escalating feud.
A note of context worth keeping in mind: in 2023, documents released through Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News revealed that Carlson had privately written, just two days before January 6, “I hate him passionately.” He privately called the entire first Trump term “a disaster” and described Trump as a “demonic” force, even while publicly championing him to millions of viewers every night.
There’s a long history in this country of propagandists discovering their conscience only after the damage is done. The question isn’t whether Tucker’s sorry now. It’s what we do as a nation with the documented proof that television personalities will knowingly lie to tens of millions of Americans, night after night, because the paycheck is good and the ratings are better. That’s not a personal failing. That’s a business model, and it’s still running.
The apology tour now underway is either genuine reckoning or performance. The audience will have to decide.
Trump Can’t Keep His Story Straight on Iran and His Own Staff Keeps Cleaning it Up
The Washington Post reported Monday that Trump told journalists on Sunday morning that Vance would not travel to Pakistan for Iran negotiations because of security concerns. This directly contradicted what UN Ambassador Mike Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright had already told reporters publicly. White House staff then scrambled behind the scenes to correct the president, telling reporters privately that Vance would in fact lead the delegation to Islamabad.
The next day, Trump told the New York Post that Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner were already in the air and would arrive in Pakistan that night. About ninety minutes later, Vance’s motorcade pulled up to the White House. Staff again had to walk back what the president had just publicly said.
The contradictions go beyond logistics. Trump initially said Iran had agreed to uranium removal and that most of the 15 negotiating points were already settled. When Vance then proposed a 20-year moratorium on enrichment at the April 11 talks, Trump told the New York Post he didn’t like it. He subsequently claimed Iran had agreed to uranium removal again. On the Strait of Hormuz, Trump claimed Iran agreed never to close it, while Iranian officials announced they would close it due to the continued U.S. naval blockade. Trump then claimed the American blockade had already closed it.
On gas prices, Trump told The Hill that his own Energy Secretary was “totally wrong” predicting prices wouldn’t hit $3 a gallon until 2027. A week before, Trump had told a different outlet prices should be “around the same” in November. The current national average is $4.04 a gallon, up 87 cents from a year ago.
The founders put war powers in Article One for a reason. They didn’t want a single person stumbling this country into armed conflict, especially not a person who can’t remember what he said ninety minutes ago. When the commander in chief can’t keep his own policy straight on a nuclear-armed confrontation, that isn’t a communications problem. That’s a constitutional emergency hiding in plain sight, and Congress is letting it happen.
The White House spokeswoman described negotiations as “very fluid and evolving in real-time.” That much, at least, appears to be accurate.
The British Ambassador Scandal: Epstein, Mandelson, and a Security Vetting Override
Trump attacked British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Truth Social Monday night over the Peter Mandelson affair, writing that Mandelson was “a really bad pick” as UK ambassador to Washington, and somewhat confusingly adding, “Plenty of time to recover, however!”
Here is what actually happened. Starmer appointed Mandelson, a former EU trade chief, as British ambassador to Washington in late 2024. Mandelson failed the standard security vetting process because of his longstanding friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and his business ties with China. Officials at the Foreign Office overrode that vetting failure to allow Starmer to proceed with an appointment he had already announced publicly.
Starmer says he did not know the vetting had initially been denied. He fired Mandelson last September after the U.S. House Oversight Committee released documents showing Mandelson had maintained contact with Epstein well after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor. A second round of Justice Department files alleged Mandelson had passed sensitive government information to Epstein on multiple occasions. That is now the subject of a police investigation in the UK.
This is what an international elite protection racket actually looks like in daylight. Security vetting exists because governments learned the hard way that people who socialize with predators and foreign adversaries shouldn’t be handling state secrets. When that vetting gets overridden and the friendships with Jeffrey Epstein keep surfacing on both sides of the Atlantic, year after year, you’re not looking at isolated bad judgment. You’re looking at a transatlantic club that protects its own across every border it crosses, and the public is expected to keep pretending that’s normal.
Trump’s willingness to publicly pile on carries some irony. Trump himself had a longstanding relationship with Epstein beginning in the late 1980s, believed to have ended over a real estate dispute around 2005. Allegations about the nature of that relationship have followed his administration throughout his second term. Several of his cabinet members, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, have also faced scrutiny for maintaining contact with Epstein after claims against him first became public.
34 Members of Congress Say Palantir Is Being Used to Build a Mass Surveillance Ecosystem
Thirty-four members of Congress sent a letter Thursday to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and acting ICE director Todd Lyons demanding answers about how the administration is using surveillance technology to power its immigration crackdown, including tools built by Palantir, Clearview AI, PenLink, L3Harris, and Paragon Solutions.
The letter states that this suite of tools could be used to “compile, aggregate, and analyze large volumes of personal data and information” about Americans. It demands a response by April 24.
The lawmakers asked specifically about a Palantir-built app called ELITE, short for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement, requesting a full accounting of its purpose, its data categories, and how many DHS officials have access to it. Palantir also built ICE’s core law enforcement case management system and the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System, which agents use to select deportation cases and track who has been removed.
Congressman Dan Goldman, a lead author of the letter, said the administration has “weaponized” Palantir technology to power its “inhumane mass deportation agenda” and to “surveil American citizens.” The lawmakers also asked whether DHS collects data on people who are “peacefully observing, documenting or protesting immigration enforcement operations,” citing cases in which facial recognition was used to identify U.S. citizens who encountered ICE agents.
Every generation of Americans has had to decide whether to let the government watch everyone all the time. The Church Committee warned us back in the seventies what happens when surveillance tools built to chase foreign threats get turned on citizens at home. Now Peter Thiel’s company is building that same infrastructure on a scale J. Edgar Hoover couldn’t have dreamed of, and they’re renting it to an administration that has openly threatened its political enemies and declared protesters enemies of the state. The Fourth Amendment wasn’t written for comfortable times. It was written for exactly this moment.
Palantir’s government revenue nearly doubled in fiscal year 2025, hitting approximately $1 billion. Its business has exploded since Trump’s second term began. The company’s founder has been closely allied with the administration. And the congressional letter demanding transparency has, so far, received no substantive public response.
This Is Why Raw America Exists — and Why We Need You Now
Here is the picture we are looking at this morning.
The government is using Palantir and a network of AI-powered surveillance tools to track, target, and deport people at a scale this country has never seen, including American citizens caught in the dragnet. Those same tools are being used, lawmakers allege, to monitor people who are simply watching or filming immigration enforcement in public. The surveillance infrastructure being built right now is not just for immigrants. It is being built for everyone.
At the same time, the billionaires are buying the press. CBS and CNN are heading under the control of the Ellison family, Trump allies whose Defense Secretary has said publicly the sooner David Ellison takes over CNN the better. The FCC chair has threatened to pull broadcast licenses from any outlet that covers the Iran war in ways the administration doesn’t like. And independent newsrooms are being absorbed into billionaire portfolios one by one, not just the Washington Post and LA Times, but local stations and digital outlets across the country going soft or going dark.
This is not a media story. It is a power story. A government building mass surveillance infrastructure needs a press corps willing to report on it. What it is getting instead is a press corps being bought by the people who built it, intimidated by the regulators who protect it, and told to look away.
Raw America was built to look directly at it.
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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:
Trump Demands $1.5 Trillion for Pentagon at Expense of Healthcare and Housing. In a new column, The Guardian’s Steven Greenhouse elaborated on President Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion budget request for Pentagon funding, and how he proposes paying for it. Greenhouse noted that the war in Iran has already caused gas prices to skyrocket in excess of $4 a gallon due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and now Trump risks causing even more stress on the finances of working-class Americans by targeting social welfare programs they rely on. According to Greenhouse, Trump’s proposed cuts also hit “medical research, job training, home heating assistance, environmental protection and disaster relief after hurricanes.”
Ketanji Brown Jackson Tears into Supreme Court Conservatives. The Supreme Court recently ruled 7-2 in favor of the Washington D.C. Metro Police Department in a case over a 2023 stop in which a driver claimed police violated his 4th Amendment rights. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor were the only dissenters. In her dissent, Jackson laid into her conservative colleagues for stepping in to wordsmith the lower court’s analysis of the case, and for the continued erosion of the Fourth Amendment under the Roberts Court.
Republicans Fight to Kick Each Other Out of Congress. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) recently filed a resolution to expel Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) from the House of Representatives, accusing him of sexual misconduct. Mace explained she was filing the resolution because “the swamp has protected Cory Mills for far too long and we are done letting it slide.” Mace’s resolution comes on the heels of Mills filing his own expulsion resolution against Mace, citing an incident from earlier this year when she launched into a profanity-laced tirade at airport security in Charleston, South Carolina.
The SAVE Act Dies in the Senate. The SAVE Act — Republicans’ attempt to disenfranchise millions of voters ahead of this fall’s midterm elections — failed to pass the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate. The bill would have required voters provide proof of citizenship in order to be added to their state’s voter rolls. The bill may also have caused voter registration problems for married women who changed their last name, as it requires a voter’s eligibility be based on citizenship documents like their birth certificate.
House Republican Shrugs Off FBI Director’s Alleged Drinking Problem. In the wake of an explosive report in the Atlantic about FBI Director Kash Patel’s alleged bouts of excessive drinking, Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) dismissed Americans’ concerns. In an interview with journalist Pablo Manriquez, McCormick said Patel was “executing his job brilliantly” and that “as long as it doesn’t affect his job in a negative way, I’m cool.” Patel has claimed the allegations in the story are false and is suing the Atlantic for $250 million.
