Good morning, I’m Thom Hartmann. This morning, Trump threatened to resume bombing Iran at a “much higher level and intensity” than before if Tehran doesn’t agree to his terms, even as his own Secretary of State declared the war “over.” The Pope responded publicly to Trump’s false accusation that he supports Iranian nuclear weapons, and Rubio is flying to Rome to try to clean up the mess. Democrats just won another special election in Michigan, flipping a competitive swing district and holding their state Senate majority, in the latest sign of a building blue wave. And CNN’s Christiane Amanpour stood up at a journalism summit in London and publicly eviscerated her future boss, David Ellison, for what he has done to CBS News. Corporate media is running cover for all of it. The FCC chair has made sure they know the cost. And the Ellisons keep buying. Let’s get into it.
Raw America is Raw Story and Really American’s people-powered response to the MAGA billionaire takeover of American media. We are reader-funded, editorially independent, and not for sale. CBS is already under Ellison control and CNN is next. The FCC chair has threatened to pull broadcast licenses from any outlet that covers this war the wrong way. And independent newsrooms are being absorbed into billionaire portfolios at every level, not just the Washington Post and the LA Times, but local stations and digital outlets across the country going soft or going dark. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, today is the day.
Trump Threatens to Bomb Iran ‘at a Much Higher Level’ While Rubio Says the War Is Over
Early Wednesday, Trump posted on Truth Social that if Iran doesn’t agree to his terms, “the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before.” Hours earlier, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that Operation Epic Fury was “over” and that the United States had achieved its objectives.
Both things cannot be true at the same time, and the contradiction tells you a great deal about where negotiations actually stand.
Sources familiar with the talks told reporters that Trump’s team believes a deal is within reach, potentially involving a moratorium on nuclear enrichment in exchange for the U.S. lifting sanctions and unfreezing billions of dollars in Iranian assets. But the same sources acknowledged that “many of the terms laid out in the memo would be contingent on a final agreement being reached,” leaving open the possibility of renewed war or an extended limbo in which the fighting has paused but nothing is resolved.
Pakistan, which has been mediating between Washington and Tehran since the April 8 ceasefire, asked Trump to pause “Project Freedom,” his naval escort operation in the Strait of Hormuz, to give negotiations room to breathe. Trump agreed to the pause Tuesday evening. Then posted the bombing threat Wednesday morning.
The White House notified Congress last week that hostilities had been “terminated,” narrowly sidestepping a mandatory House vote on whether to continue the war past the 60-day War Powers deadline. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops remain in the region. The Strait remains largely closed. Gas is at $4.30 a gallon nationally. And the president is telling Truth Social that if he doesn’t get what he wants, he will bomb a country harder than he already has.
The Founders gave Congress the power to declare war for exactly this reason. They knew that if you let one man decide on his own when to start a war and when to end it, based on his mood that morning and what he posted before breakfast, you don’t have a republic anymore, you have a king with missiles. And every senator who voted to gut the War Powers Resolution helped build the throne he’s sitting on.
The Pope Responded to Trump. Rubio Is Flying to Rome.
Pope Leo XIV addressed Trump’s repeated false claim that the pontiff supports Iran’s nuclear weapons program, doing so without naming the president directly.
“I have already spoken from the first moment: ‘Peace be with you.’ The mission of the Church is to preach the Gospel, to preach peace,” Leo said. “If anyone wants to criticize me for proclaiming the Gospel, let them do so truthfully. The Church has spoken out against all nuclear weapons for years, so there is no doubt about that.”
Trump had told a Salem News Channel interviewer Monday that Leo “thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon” and that the pope was “endangering a lot of Catholics.” The accusation is false. Leo has specifically called for a world “free from the nuclear threat” and encouraged leaders to take “the path of dialogue and diplomacy.” In March he recorded a video message saying “may the nuclear threat never again dictate the future of humanity.” The pope has never said anything resembling support for Iranian nuclear weapons.
Rubio, filling in at Tuesday’s press briefing for Karoline Leavitt, tried to reframe Trump’s comments, saying the president’s concern was that Iran would use nuclear weapons against places with large Catholic and Christian populations. That is not what Trump said, but Rubio pressed forward anyway.
Rubio flies to Rome Wednesday and meets with the pope Thursday. The stated purpose is to discuss the Middle East and the Western Hemisphere. The unstated purpose is apparent to everyone watching. The most popular religious figure in the world, sitting at 60 percent favorability against Trump’s 37 percent, has been publicly attacked for months by the president, and someone has to try to make it stop.
Authoritarians have always understood that the most dangerous opposition isn’t another politician, it’s a moral authority they can’t fire, can’t bribe, and can’t out-shout. That’s why Mussolini fought the Vatican, that’s why every strongman in history has tried to bend the church to his will, and that’s why Trump is sending his Secretary of State to Rome to clean up the mess his own ego made.
Democrats Just Won Another Special Election. They’ve Now Flipped 30 Seats Since Trump Returned.
Democrat Chedrick Greene, a firefighter and military veteran, won Michigan Senate District 35 Tuesday in a competitive swing district that includes counties Trump carried by double digits just last year. The victory keeps Democrats at a 20-18 majority in the state Senate. Had they lost, it would have resulted in a 19-19 split and zero margin for error on every vote going forward.
Greene’s message throughout the campaign was straightforward: affordability. “It sounds so cliche, but it is about affordability. It really is,” he said ahead of the election, describing voters on the campaign trail raising concerns about making ends meet as energy costs climb. The Iran war has pushed those concerns even higher.
Republican candidate Jason Tunney had the backing of former Congressman Mike Rogers, who lost to Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin by just 0.3 percent in 2024. Republicans saw this district as winnable. They lost.
The Michigan Democratic Party chair summarized the result directly: “Republicans ran with their typical playbook of bending the knee to Trump and putting corporations over working people, and it failed — miserably.”
Tuesday’s result is part of a pattern that has been building since Trump returned to office. Democrats have now flipped 30 state legislative seats from red to blue in special elections across the country. Every major special election this cycle has seen Democrats outperforming their 2024 margins by double digits. If that trend holds into November, the House majority and potentially the Senate are in play.
Michigan is now one of the states both parties are watching most closely heading into the fall.
Special elections have warned us before. They warned us in 1934 when FDR’s coalition came together against the wealth-hoarders of his day, they warned us in 2018 when the resistance built into a wave, and they’re warning us right now. When a firefighter flips a Trump-plus-double-digits district by talking about gas prices and groceries, working people are telling you exactly which way the wind is blowing.
Christiane Amanpour Just Publicly Eviscerated Her Future Boss in London
CNN chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour stood up at a journalism summit in London this week and said out loud what the people inside CBS News have been saying privately for months.
Amanpour, who has worked at CNN since 1983, is about to come under the control of David Ellison after Paramount Skydance secured shareholder approval for its $111 billion acquisition of CNN’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery. The deal is pending final regulatory review. Ellison, the son of Trump megadonor Larry Ellison, would then control two of the largest newsrooms in America.
“Clearly I’m concerned,” Amanpour told the Truth Tellers Sir Harry Evans Investigative Journalism Summit. “I am obviously, as a person, as a journalist with a record, concerned based on what’s happened to the other things that he’s taken over already, like CBS News.”
She then listed those things without being asked. “Hemorrhaging viewers, probably hemorrhaging money, this ideological realignment of CBS and the destruction, potentially, of 60 Minutes.”
Amanpour praised 60 Minutes as something “nobody can match” for “doing hard news and cultural news for decades, top rated, top money maker for the network.” She said she was hoping for editorial independence from the incoming ownership, said CNN’s leadership was “very, very committed to that,” and added that she didn’t think she needed to say more.
She also pushed back on the claim that Trump’s second term has been good for cable news ratings. “I would question the business about Trump ratings boost,” she said. “What’s happening right now is the Iran war, the Venezuela intervention. Actual news events are jacking up our ratings.”
Ellison installed Bari Weiss as CBS News editor-in-chief after acquiring Paramount. Weiss has pulled a 60 Minutes segment on Trump’s El Salvador deportations, killed CBS News Radio after nearly a century on air, fired the network’s London bureau chief for wanting balanced war coverage, and is reportedly planning a major overhaul of 60 Minutes itself. CBS Evening News has now fallen below 4 million viewers three weeks in a row, its worst numbers since the Weiss era began.
A veteran anchor who has covered wars and dictatorships for four decades looked at what Ellison did to CBS and said publicly that she is watching him take over her network with dread. That is where American journalism stands this morning.
When Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and when Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act in 1996, this was the endgame they set in motion. A handful of billionaires owning the airwaves, installing political commissars in the newsrooms, and a Trump-aligned FCC chair making sure everybody knows what happens if you cover the news the wrong way, exactly the kind of consolidated, captured press the Founders wrote the First Amendment to prevent.
This Is Why Raw America Exists — and Why We Need You
Christiane Amanpour just said from a podium in London what we have been saying in this newsletter for months. The billionaires are buying the press. They are installing ideological operators to run them. And the journalists who push back are being fired or watching what they built get dismantled around them.
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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 Ousts Indiana Republican Senators Who Voted Down Redistricting. President Donald Trump’s revenge campaign against Republican state senators in Indiana bore fruit Tuesday night, with five of the seven Republican incumbents targeted by the president losing their primaries to Trump-endorsed opponents. Pro-Trump groups inundated the primaries with more than $8.3 million in spending against the seven Indiana State Senate Republicans Trump targeted.
Susan Collins Prompts Health Questions After Visibly Shaking. While on a campaign stop, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) gave an interview to Fox News with a quavering voice while shaking. This prompted a wave of questions on social media about Collins’ fitness to seek another six-year term. Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein called out Fox News for asking the 73 year-old senator about her health. author Eoin Higgins observed that Collins was clearly “unwell, shaking and frail.”
Trump Falls Asleep on National TV During Public Event — Again. During a signing ceremony to bring back the Presidential Fitness Test in public schools, Trump was once again caught nodding off in the Oval Office in full view of reporters. The president has prompted speculation about his health after being caught nodding off during press conferences and Cabinet meetings. Earlier this week, the 79 year-old president insisted he felt exactly the same as he did 50 years ago.
Charges Dropped Against Activist Who Leafleted Stephen Miller’s Neighborhood. Retired professor Barbara Wien is no longer facing criminal charges for distributing fliers to the Arlington, Virginia neighbors of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller — the architect of Trump’s immigration policy. Arlington County Prosecutor Parisa Dehghani-Tafti dropped the charges, saying there was “insufficient evidence” to declare that Wien acted with intent to harass. The fliers showed Miller’s photograph with a red line drawn through it, along with his home address and the language “wanted for crimes against humanity. No Nazis in [Northern Virginia]. Miller and his wife, Katie, have since listed their home for sale and moved into a mansion on a military base.
Republicans Shut Down ICE Watchdog Agency. In the bill that ended the weeks-long shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Republicans left the decision to keep the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman — which is tasked with monitoring abuses in ICE detention facilities — up to the discretion of the DHS. This week, the DHS announced it would be shutting down the office. Its page on the DHS website is now listed as “archived content.” The decision comes as dozens of immigrants have died in ICE custody since Trump’s second term began.
