Good morning, I’m Thom Hartmann, and this is your Raw America morning briefing for Friday, March 13th.
We have a lot to get to this morning. Trump posted a late-night social media message boasting about killing Iranians, hours before four U.S. troops were confirmed dead. We now know the administration had no plan for what to do if Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, and now the world is paying for it at the gas pump. A landmark medical study says Trump’s policies are going to kill millions of Americans through lung disease. And Palantir and Nvidia just announced a partnership that should alarm every person who believes in civil liberties. This is the news corporate media does not want to lead with this morning.
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Now, here’s what you need to know this morning.
Trump Brags About “Killing” Iranians Hours Before U.S. Troops Die
In the early hours of this morning, Donald Trump posted a message to his social media platform boasting that it is his “great honor” to be, in his words, killing Iranians. The post went up just before 1 a.m. while four of the six crew members of a U.S. military refueling plane that crashed in western Iraq were confirmed dead. The crash is under investigation and is not believed to have resulted from hostile fire, but the timing was jarring even by Trump’s standards.
In the post, Trump rattled off what he called accomplishments in the war, declared that Iran’s navy and air force are gone, and taunted what he called “deranged scumbags.” He also used the moment to attack the New York Times for covering the rising costs and civilian casualties of the conflict, including the U.S. Tomahawk strike on a girls’ elementary school on the first day of the war that killed at least 175 people, most of them children. When a Times reporter asked Trump directly at a White House briefing who was responsible for that strike, Trump said, “I just don’t know enough about it.”
Operation Epic Fury has now cost American taxpayers $11.3 billion. Gas prices hit $3.65 a gallon on Thursday, up from $2.82 last month. And a man who received five military deferments during Vietnam, including one reportedly arranged as a favor to his father, is now publicly celebrating the killing of people in a war he launched. That is where we are.
Every democracy that has ever collapsed has had a moment like this one, where the leader of the country started celebrating death in public and the institutions around him just went quiet. We’re not supposed to go quiet.
Trump Had No Plan for the Strait of Hormuz
Here is something that should shake you. Sources familiar with the war planning say the Pentagon and National Security Council had no contingency for what would happen if Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. They simply did not believe Iran would do it. And now, for the first time in four years, oil is trading above $100 a barrel. One-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes through that strait. Ships are stranded. The U.S. Navy has reportedly refused to escort tankers through because it is too dangerous. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Thursday that naval escorts “can’t happen now.”
Sources say members of both parties emerged from classified intelligence briefings in a state of genuine shock at the absence of planning. One former official who served under both Republican and Democratic administrations said he was, quote, “dumbfounded.” The new Iranian Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, whose father was killed on the first day of the war, has said the strait will stay closed as a tool of pressure. This is what happens when you start a war with no plan for what comes next. Corporate media is busy airing administration talking points. We are telling you the truth.
This isn’t just incompetence. It’s what happens when you put people in charge who’ve never been accountable for anything, who’ve never had to live with the consequences of a bad decision. And right now, working people are paying for it every time they fill up their tank.
Trump’s Policies Are Killing Americans’ Lungs
A sweeping new study published this week in one of the country’s leading medical journals finds that Trump’s second-term policies amount to, in the words of the Harvard pulmonologist who led the research, “an attack on Americans’ lungs” that could cause millions to “die needlessly in the years ahead.”
The researchers, from Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, examined ten policy areas including healthcare access, air quality standards, workplace protections, and vaccine policy. The picture they paint is sobering. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill slashed more than one trillion dollars from health programs, the largest federal healthcare rollback in American history, gutting Medicaid access for millions. The administration has simultaneously rolled back air pollution standards, delayed clean energy projects, forced fossil fuel power plants to stay open past their retirement dates, and undermined vaccine uptake under RFK Jr.
For someone with chronic lung disease, these changes do not happen in isolation. They stack. You lose your insurance, lose access to your inhaler, face dirtier air from weakened emissions rules, lose access to tobacco cessation programs because CDC funding was cut, and are exposed to vaccine misinformation from the Health Secretary himself. The American Lung Association called the findings stark. Black communities, coal miners, and low-income Americans of all races face the worst of it. This is not policy disagreement. This is a government choosing polluter profits over human life.
The founders believed that a government’s most basic obligation was to protect the lives of its citizens. What this study describes isn’t a failure of that obligation. It’s the deliberate dismantling of it, piece by piece, in exchange for campaign contributions from industries that profit from making people sick.
Palantir and Nvidia Just Built the Surveillance State’s Operating System
This week, Palantir Technologies and Nvidia announced what they are calling a Sovereign AI Operating System, a fully integrated hardware and software stack built on Nvidia’s most powerful processors that lets governments and large organizations run advanced AI entirely on their own infrastructure. They are marketing it as a tool for “data sovereignty,” meaning governments no longer have to rely on outside cloud providers. They control the data. They control the models. They control everything.
Palantir has been a government surveillance contractor since its founding. Its tools are already embedded across the Defense Department, the intelligence community, and immigration enforcement agencies. Under Trump, those agencies have expanded their surveillance powers dramatically. ICE is using AI tools to identify, track, and detain immigrants. DHS has broadened its domestic monitoring capabilities. The MAGA government has moved aggressively to build what critics call a digital infrastructure of authoritarian control. And now, Palantir and Nvidia are handing that government a turnkey AI operating system designed specifically for sensitive, high-stakes environments where someone needs total, unaccountable control over data.
Palantir’s chief architect has said that from the company’s first government deployment onward, its software has had to meet the moment in “the most complex and sensitive environments.” Meanwhile, the Pentagon recently blacklisted Anthropic after it refused to allow its AI to be used for autonomous lethal weapons or mass domestic surveillance. The companies that said yes are the ones getting the contracts.
Trump is not just a puppet for oil companies and media moguls. He is a puppet for the big tech surveillance state, and the surveillance state is building itself a nervous system right now, in real time, with your tax dollars.
Every authoritarian government in history has needed two things to consolidate power: a monopoly on violence and a monopoly on information. What Palantir and Nvidia just handed this administration is the architecture for both, wrapped in the language of national security and sold to us as progress.
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Stay informed. Stay in the fight. I’m Thom Hartmann.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Trump’s Cabinet Fracturing Over Iran War. Disagreements over Trump’s war in Iran have led to fissures among President Donald Trump’s inner circle. According to unnamed senior White House officials who spoke to Politico, Vice President JD Vance is “skeptical” of whether the war will ultimately be successful. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has also expressed concern about the war’s impact on gas prices, and the political damage to Republicans as a result. Both she and White house deputy chief of staff James Blair have reportedly urged Trump to say that the war is nearly over.
Pentagon Burning Through Years of Ammunition Stockpiles. The war in Iran is burning through the Department of Defense’s stockpiles of ammunition at an unsustainable rate, raising concerns about the cost of both the war and restoring the United States’ arsenal. One unnamed source told the Financial Times that this includes a “massive expenditure of Tomahawks,” including a Tomahawk missile that was used in a strike on an Iranian girls’ school, killing more than 170 students and teachers. Each individual Tomahawk missile costs between $1.4 million and $2.5 million.
Trump Administration Removes Sanctions on Russian Oil. The Trump administration temporarily lifted sanctions on Russian oil currently at sea in response to the shock to global markets resulted from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The sanctions — which were put in place in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — are set to be relaxed through April 11, though experts fear the Trump administration could make the temporary pause permanent.
Washington Post Reporters and Editors Confront Jeff Bezos. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos recently invited several journalists and editors to his mansion in Washington D.C. for a meeting regarding recent firings at the storied newspaper. In addition to asking him about the layoffs of hundreds of reporters, journalists also confronted Bezos over Amazon’s $70 million expenditure on First Lady Melania Trump’s documentary and whether it was an attempt to curry favor with the Trump administration. Bezos pushed back and insisted that while the project was currently a financial loss, it would eventually make money.
Democrats Make Plan to Investigate Companies That Cooperated with Trump. Congressional Democrats recently met to coordinate plans to launch new investigations into companies that donated to Trump’s effort to bulldoze the East Wing of the White House to make room for his planned ballroom, as well as law firms that agreed to provide free legal services to the Trump administration. Democrats also set their sights on universities that agreed to pay millions of dollars to the administration. Should Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives in November, they would gain subpoena power to launch independent investigations.
