Good morning, I’m Thom Hartmann, and this is your Raw America briefing for Tuesday, March 17th.
Three weeks into a war that nobody voted for, the stories breaking this morning are not about battlefield victories. They are about a president who knew exactly what was coming, lied to your face about it, invented a former president who never called him, and whose own allies are now privately warning that ground troops in Iran may be inevitable. And through all of it, CBS News is bleeding journalists and replacing them with Bari Weiss, while the FCC chairman rattles sabers at any broadcaster who covers the war honestly.
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Here’s what you need to know this morning.
Trump Knew. His Own Intelligence Officials Say So.
Donald Trump stood before reporters and said nobody, not one expert, not one intelligence official, could have predicted that Iran would retaliate against U.S. allies across the Gulf. “We were shocked!” he said.
Sources with direct knowledge of the pre-war intelligence assessments told journalists Monday that is flatly untrue. Iranian retaliation against military assets and allied targets across the region was not guaranteed, but it was, in the words of one source, firmly “on the list of potential outcomes.” Two additional sources confirmed that Trump was also specifically warned Iran might attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz. His own press secretary has since confirmed he received those briefings and chose to proceed anyway.
Iran was not exactly secretive about its intentions either. Less than ten days before the U.S. launched strikes on February 28th, Iranian officials sent a letter to the United Nations stating explicitly that all bases and assets of any hostile force in the region would constitute legitimate targets in the event of a military attack. That letter is a public document.
More than 1,400 Iranians have been killed in U.S. and Israeli strikes, including dozens of children killed when a U.S. missile struck a girls’ elementary school in the southern city of Minab on the first day of the war. Thirteen American service members are dead. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Gas is near four dollars a gallon with midterms approaching. And the president is telling the American public he had no idea any of this could happen. His own intelligence community is telling you otherwise.
When a president can lie about what he knew before sending Americans to die, and face no immediate consequence for it, we’re not just talking about one bad actor. We’re watching what happens when the guardrails of democratic accountability have been quietly dismantled, one norm at a time. That’s the thing about lies in wartime. They don’t just mislead. They kill.
Every Living Former President Says Trump Lied About That Phone Call
On Monday, Donald Trump claimed not once but twice that he had spoken with a former U.S. president who told him he wished he had attacked Iran himself. He refused to say who it was, adding that revealing the name would be bad for the person’s “career, even though they have no career left.” Later in the day, he hinted strongly it was Bill Clinton, describing the mystery caller as a member of the opposing party who happens to like him.
Within hours, aides to all four living former presidents, Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, told multiple news organizations that their bosses had not spoken with Trump about Iran. Not one of them. The call did not happen.
This matters beyond the embarrassment of it. Trump used this fabricated endorsement to defend a war that has killed 13 Americans and more than 1,400 Iranians. He also repeated his long-debunked claim that Iran was two to three years away from a nuclear weapon it would have used against Israel and then the United States, a claim contradicted by his own intelligence agencies. The president is constructing a fictional justification for a real war, and when pressed on the details, every piece of it falls apart.
We’ve seen this before. Presidents who need a war to stay popular have always needed a story to go with it. From the Gulf of Tonkin to weapons of mass destruction, the pattern is the same. What’s different now is that the lie got fact-checked within hours, by the offices of four former presidents, and it still didn’t matter to a significant chunk of the country. That’s not a Trump problem. That’s an information ecosystem problem, and it’s one of the deepest threats to self-governance this country has ever faced.
Trump’s Own Allies Are Warning This Could Mean Boots on the Ground
The most alarming story of the morning comes from inside the White House itself. Sources close to the administration are now privately warning that Trump has lost control of this conflict’s trajectory, and that the only remaining path to saving face may involve deploying American ground troops inside Iran.
The core problem is the Strait of Hormuz. Keeping oil shipments moving through the strait against sustained Iranian attacks almost certainly requires seizing Iranian territory on the ground. One White House insider put it plainly: “They decide how long we’re involved, and they decide if we put boots on the ground. And it doesn’t seem to me that there’s a way around that, if we want to save face.”
A second source said the situation has fundamentally changed. “The terms have changed. The off-ramps don’t work anymore because Iran is driving the asymmetric action.”
Some of this is a direct consequence of Trump’s own choices on the first day of the war. By assassinating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei along with senior commanders and family members, the administration may have made Iranian capitulation politically impossible. The new Supreme Leader is Khamenei’s son. His father was killed in a U.S. strike. His mother was killed in a U.S. strike. One White House source asked the obvious question out loud: “Do you think he’s going to be more, or less, reasonable?”
The “America First” coalition that cheered this war three weeks ago is now quietly panicking. Republicans heading into midterms are watching gas prices climb and a war with no exit. This is what happens when you launch a military campaign without a plan.
This is the oldest and most tragic story in American foreign policy. Young men and women end up dying not because a strategy succeeded, but because a president can’t figure out how to stop without losing face. And the people who’ll pay the price for that pride are not sitting in the White House. They’re sitting in forward operating bases, and in families across this country waiting for a phone call they don’t want to get.
CBS News Is Walking Off the Job, and Bari Weiss Is the Reason
Dozens of CBS News 24/7 staffers are expected to walk out today in the first labor action of Bari Weiss’s tenure running CBS News. The streaming unit’s workers have been negotiating with management since February over wages, overtime protections, and severance. After letting their three-year contract expire without a deal, and after management proposed annual raises of just 1.75 percent in a period of significant inflation, the 60-person unit delivered a strike pledge.
This is the same CBS that has lost anchor John Dickerson, correspondent Scott MacFarlane, CBS Mornings boss Shawna Thomas, and others who quietly exited rather than work under Weiss’s direction. Weiss told staff at a January town hall that CBS has been too focused on its current audience and needs to shift toward, in her words, “the center, the center-right, and the center-left.” Staff say the real message was simpler: get on board or get out.
The striking workers are fighting for basics. Overtime pay for twelve-hour weekend shifts. Severance protections ahead of a pending $110 billion merger between CBS’s parent company and Warner Bros. Discovery that could mean another wave of layoffs. Union representatives say editorial interference, political pressure, and layoff threats have all become existential concerns since the Paramount Skydance merger closed. The workers walking out Tuesday are not making a political statement. They are trying to protect their jobs and their profession. The fact that they have to fight Bari Weiss to do it tells you everything about what CBS News is becoming.
A free press isn’t just a nice thing to have in a democracy. It’s the mechanism by which citizens hold power accountable. When billionaires buy the newsrooms and install editors whose job is to sand off the edges, they aren’t just changing the product. They’re dismantling the early warning system. These CBS workers walking off the job today aren’t just fighting for a paycheck. They’re fighting for the idea that journalism is still supposed to serve the public, not the people who own it.
Here at Raw America, we have had reporters in the rooms that matter, covering the most consequential hearings in Washington this year. We have brought you exclusive interviews with top generals who have gone on the record about this war in ways you will not find anywhere else. We are now joining the Washington D.C. press pool to put our reporters in front of the people making these decisions and get their answers directly to you.
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Subscribe today. Stay vigilant. Keep fighting. I’m Thom Hartmann.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Top Trump Official Resigns Over Iran War. Joe Kent, who is the director of the National Counterterrorism Center within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, tendered his resignation on Tuesday over President Donald Trump’s war in Iran. Kent wrote in his resignation letter that Iran “posed no imminent threat to our nation” and that “it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Georgia Town Shuts Off Water to ICE Detention Facility. Eric Taylor, who is the city manager for Social Circle, Georgia — where the Department of Homeland Security purchased a large warehouse it means to convert into an immigrant detention center — has cut off water and sewer services to the facility and put a lock on the building’s water meter until DHS provides the city with more information. Taylor said the DHS has still not answered questions about how the facility would impact water and sewage capacity for the rest of the town, saying the detention center would effectively triple the population of Social Circle “practically overnight.”
GOP Senator Rips His Party Over Texas Primary and SAVE Act. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who is not running for reelection, didn’t mince words about Republicans’ handling of the increasingly contentious Republican U.S. Senate primary election in Texas. Incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is in a tight race with Attorney General Ken Paxton — who is running as a MAGA acolyte — for a May 27 runoff election after neither candidate managed to win the March primary outright. Tillis called Republicans “lazy and unstrategic” for failing to unite behind one of the two candidates and predicted the race would lead to GOP donors spending millions of dollars that he argued could be better spent on tough races in Georgia, Michigan and elsewhere. He also opined Republicans doubling down on the SAVE Act was bad politics given that it needs seven votes from Democrats who are united in opposition.
White House Fears Trump’s War May Last Through the Fall. Officials within the Trump administration are now expressing worry that the war in Iran may last at least through September, just weeks before the November midterm elections. This is despite Trump’s public statements estimating the war to last between four and five weeks. Meanwhile, AAA estimates the average cost of a gallon of gasoline is now $3.72, up from $2.93 last month.
Alleged Jan. 6 Pipe Bomber Argues Trump’s Pardon Extends to Him. Attorneys for Brian Cole Jr., who was charged with planting pipe bombs outside of the Democratic and Republican National Committee headquarters the night before the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, are now arguing that their client’s actions are covered by Trump’s pardon of roughly 1,500 January 6 rioters. The Department of Justice countered that because Cole allegedly planted the pipe bombs on the night of January 5 that the pardon doesn’t include him.
