Good morning, I’m Thom Hartmann.
This morning, Senate Republicans are moving to slip $1 billion in taxpayer money into a reconciliation bill to fund “security upgrades” tied to Trump’s White House ballroom. Trump is threatening to blow Iran “off the face of the Earth” while his Secretary of State flies to Rome to try to patch things up with the Pope Trump has been attacking for months. Two children and their mother were arrested by ICE at a school bus stop in a San Antonio suburb. And a former federal prosecutor is saying out loud what a growing number of legal experts are saying quietly: that the president’s war threats constitute war crimes. Corporate media is running cover. The FCC chair has made clear what happens to outlets that don’t. And the Ellisons are still buying. Let’s get into it.
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Republicans Are Trying to Sneak in $1 Billion in Taxpayer Money Into the Ballroom Project
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley released a reconciliation package Monday that includes $1 billion for “security adjustments and upgrades” that can be applied to Trump’s White House ballroom project, officially known as the East Wing Modernization Project.
The legislation specifies that the funds cannot be used for “non-security elements” of the project, which is one way of saying that blowing up the East Wing of the White House and replacing it with a 90,000-square-foot event space counts as a security upgrade if you frame it correctly. Trump has claimed the ballroom is necessary because it would keep him from having to attend public events like the White House Correspondents’ dinner, where a gunman was tackled by security last month. He has also let slip that the military is building what he described as “a big complex” underneath the ballroom, including defenses against drones.
Trump has repeatedly claimed the ballroom will be funded by private donations. The administration said as recently as July 2025 that the Secret Service would cover any necessary security enhancements. Now Senate Republicans are putting $1 billion in taxpayer money into a law enforcement reconciliation bill to make sure the project goes forward.
The broader package includes more than $30.7 billion for ICE and nearly $3.5 billion for Customs and Border Protection. Grassley said in a statement that Republicans won’t allow Democrats’ “radical, anti-law enforcement agenda” to drag the country backward. A federal judge has already ordered construction of the ballroom halted without congressional approval. An appeals court allowed it to continue pending the outcome of the lawsuit. Congress is now moving to settle the question by writing a check from the public treasury.
The Founders wrote Article 1 Section 9 of the Constitution specifically so that the public treasury wouldn’t become a private piggy bank for whoever happens to occupy the President’s chair, and laundering a billion dollars through a “security upgrade” line item is exactly the kind of king-making Madison and Hamilton warned us about in the Federalist Papers. Every dollar Republicans are funneling into Trump’s gilded ballroom is a dollar they’re choosing not to spend on schools, hospitals, or the working people whose taxes are paying for it.
Trump Is Still Attacking the Pope. Rubio Is Flying to Rome to Clean it Up.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is set to meet with Pope Leo XIV in Rome this week in what is widely understood as an attempt to repair the damage Trump has done to U.S.-Vatican relations over the past several months.
Trump spent part of Monday’s Hugh Hewitt interview accusing the pope of believing “it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon” and saying Leo is “endangering a lot of Catholics, and a lot of people.” It is the same false accusation Trump has leveled repeatedly. The pope has never said anything of the kind. In fact, Leo has specifically called for a world “free from the nuclear threat” and recorded a video message in March saying “may the nuclear threat never again dictate the future of humanity.”
What Leo has done is call for peace, repeatedly and publicly. In March he told 10,000 Catholics gathered at St. Peter’s Basilica: “Stop. It is time for peace. Sit at the table of dialogue and mediation, not at the table where rearmament is planned, and deadly actions are decided.” He has described the world as “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants” without naming anyone specifically, and has bemoaned nations that choose weapons over diplomacy.
Trump’s response has been to brand him “weak on crime, and terrible for foreign policy,” post an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ within the hour, and claim credit for Leo’s election as pope. The pattern of attacking the most popular religious leader in the world, a man with 60 percent favorability against Trump’s 37 percent, and then dispatching the Secretary of State to Rome to apologize is not what winning looks like.
When Eisenhower stood at that podium in 1961 and warned us about the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex, he was making essentially the same argument Pope Leo’s making right now from St. Peter’s Basilica, and the fact that an American president is attacking a pope for echoing a Republican general’s farewell address tells you exactly how far this party has drifted from its own moorings. The First Amendment was written to protect religious leaders from government attack, not to give a president a green light to bully them into silence.
A Former Federal Prosecutor Says Trump’s Iran Threats Constitute War Crimes
Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Glenn Kirschner, responding to Trump’s Truth Social post threatening to blow Iran “off the face of the Earth,” said Monday that such threats amount to war crimes and called the president “a dangerous disgrace to the United States of America and all her people.”
“He is an unfit embarrassment to us all,” Kirschner said on his podcast.
The threat came as part of Trump’s announcement of “Project Freedom,” the new naval operation designed to escort commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump has made similar threats before, including saying in early April that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran did not open the Strait, a statement he later softened.
Kirschner’s broader point cuts to the heart of the war’s strategic failure: “Before Donald Trump’s unconstitutional war, the Strait of Hormuz was open. After Trump launched his reckless war with absolutely no legal justification and certainly no imminent threat to the United States, the Strait of Hormuz is virtually non-navigable. And Trump can neither fight nor negotiate his way out of the quagmire he created with his vanity war.”
The 60-day War Powers Resolution deadline passed last week without a congressional vote. The administration argued the deadline doesn’t apply because the ceasefire has suspended hostilities. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops remain in the region. The Strait remains largely closed. Gas prices are at $4.30 a gallon nationally.
The Nuremberg principles we helped write after World War II made it explicit that threatening to wipe out an entire civilization isn’t tough-guy rhetoric, it’s a war crime under international law, and the War Powers Act Congress passed in 1973 over Nixon’s veto exists precisely because the Founders never intended one man to have his finger on the button without the people’s representatives weighing in. We’re now watching what happens when both of those guardrails get treated as optional.
ICE Arrested Two Children and Their Mother at a School Bus Stop in a San Antonio Suburb
Maria Betania Uzategui-Castillo and her two children, who attend Cambridge Elementary School in the Alamo Heights Independent School District in San Antonio, were detained by ICE agents at a school bus stop Monday morning.
DHS confirmed the arrests and said the family, who are Venezuelan, entered the United States in December 2021 and are seeking asylum. A flyer circulating through the neighborhood described the family as asylum seekers. DHS said: “This administration is not going to ignore the rule of law.”
Parents at Cambridge Elementary found out what happened through Instagram. The school district said it could not comment because of federal privacy laws.
“They went after the kids at a bus stop,” said one parent at the pickup line. “That doesn’t make me feel safe at all,” said another. “These children are trying to go to school, they’re at a bus stop to go to school, and then they get detained.”
A grandparent who declined to be identified said: “I do not think it’s correct. I would like to see them look at more hardened criminals instead of people that are actually working for a living.”
Protests were held in the neighborhood over the weekend before the arrests. The family remains in ICE custody. The children’s classmates went to school Monday knowing their friends had been taken.
Asylum-seeking is a legal process written into American law through the Refugee Act of 1980, signed by Jimmy Carter after the lessons of turning away ships of Jewish refugees during World War II, and snatching kids at school bus stops isn’t enforcement, it’s the kind of state behavior the 14th Amendment’s due process clause was specifically designed to prevent regardless of what country you came from. When children become legitimate targets of the federal government, you’re no longer talking about a democracy, you’re talking about something else entirely.
This Is Why Raw America Exists — and Why We Need You
Let’s be honest about what this morning tells us.
Taxpayer money is being routed into a presidential vanity project through a security bill. The president is threatening to wipe a civilization off the map and a former federal prosecutor is calling it a war crime. Children are being arrested at school bus stops. And the press corps that is supposed to hold all of this accountable is being bought, threatened, and handed to Trump allies who have made their intentions plain.
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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 DOJ Demands Names of Fulton County Election Workers. The Department of Justice on Monday issued a federal grand jury subpoena demanding the names of all election workers in Fulton County, Georgia who worked the 2020 election. The list includes thousands of people, including both paid employees and volunteers, as well as bus drivers who worked a mobile voting location. Fulton County commission chairman Robb Pitts described the subpoena as “harassment” and “outrageous federal overreach,” while Fulton County lawyers countered that the statute of limitations for any alleged crimes committed in 2020 has already passed.
Amazon Union Leader Arrested Protesting Jeff Bezos at Met Gala. The New York Police Department announced Monday night that a 37 year-old man was arrested after climbing the barricades outside of this year’s Met Gala, in which Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was named an honorary chair. The man arrested appears to have been Christopher Smalls, who led a successful push to unionize an Amazon warehouse in 2022. The protester was carrying a sign Smalls posted to his Instagram account on Monday, which called on Amazon to begin negotiating with the union — which the National Labor Relations Board ordered Amazon to do last year.
23 Year-Old Democrat Confronts Geraldo Rivera. Adam Mockler, who is a contributor to the Meidas Touch network, confronted former Fox News host Geraldo Rivera on a recent episode of “Piers Morgan Uncensored.” Rivera previously insulted Mockler after the Meidas Touch commentator got into a spat with CNN pundit Scott Jennings. Mockler pushed back on Rivera’s critique, saying he was “playing in a reciprocal manner” when Jennings made a patronizing comment about his age.
Taxpayers Billed for Sexual Harassment Claims Against Members of Congress. A new CNN report found that six members of Congress billed taxpayers for more than $300,000 to settle sexual harassment claims made by congressional staffers. The office of former Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) paid out $77,000 from two separate incidents, while the office of former Rep. Blake Fahrenthold (R-Texas) paid out an $84,000 settlement. Both Conyers and Fahrenthold are now deceased. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who is not running for reelection, uncovered the settlement payments through a subpoena.
Rupert Murdoch’s Son Aiming to Buy Established Media Brand. James Murdoch — the son of NewsCorp founder Rupert Murdoch — is now reportedly planning to buy Vox Media’s New York Magazine and podcast division. The Wall Street Journal reported that the brands Murdoch is moving to purchase include not just New York Magazine, but The Cut, Grub Street and Vulture. Murdoch would also own the podcast studio that produces the show “Pivot,” hosted by journalist Kara Swisher and investor Scott Galloway.
