Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann. Fox News’s own military analyst is now saying out loud what the Pentagon won’t: the president knows a U.S. missile hit that school. The war burned through $5.6 billion in precision munitions in its first 48 hours. CBS News is hollowing itself out from the inside. And Trump spent Monday at his golf resort telling Republican lawmakers not to worry. None of this is going according to plan.
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Now let’s get into it.
Fox News’s Own Analyst Says Trump Knows That Was Our Missile
It takes something to get Fox News’s chief national security correspondent to go on air and call the president a liar by any other name. Jennifer Griffin did exactly that on Monday’s Special Report.
Griffin was asked about Trump’s insistence that Iran may have been behind the missile strike on the Shajareye Tayabeh girls’ school in Minab, which killed at least 175 people. Trump held a press conference at his Doral resort and suggested Tomahawk missiles are “sold and used by other countries” and that whether Iran had any was “being investigated right now.”
“The U.S. has Tomahawks. Tomahawks have to be fired from either submarines or from warships,” Griffin said. “The Brits and the Australians have Tomahawks, but they’re not part of this conflict. So it seems highly unlikely that it would be anyone’s Tomahawk other than a U.S. Tomahawk that hit that school. And I think the president knows that. He’s trying to muddy the waters.”
When pressed on why he alone was suggesting Iran bombed its own school, Trump said: “Because I just don’t know enough about it.” The Pentagon’s full response to press questions: “This incident is under investigation.”
One hundred and seventy-five people are dead. Fox News is doing more honest reporting on this than the White House.
When a president can stand in front of cameras and suggest that a country bombed its own school full of girls, and the press secretary offers nothing but “it’s under investigation,” we’re not just watching spin. We’re watching a government that’s decided it doesn’t owe the American people the truth about what’s being done in their name.
$5.6 Billion in Two Days, and the Pentagon Is Coming Back for More
The United States military burned through $5.6 billion in advanced munitions in the first two days of Operation Epic Fury, according to figures shared with Congress and reported by the Washington Post. That covers only the opening salvos, before the Pentagon shifted away from Tomahawks and air defense interceptors toward cheaper laser-guided bombs.
The Trump administration is now expected to send Capitol Hill a supplemental defense spending request worth tens of billions of dollars as early as this week. Democrats, whose war powers efforts have already been defeated twice, are not going to greet it warmly. The Daily Beast previously reported the war is costing roughly $1 billion a day. At that pace, if the conflict stretches to September as some officials have warned, the total bill is $215 billion. Trump told House Republicans gathered at Doral on Monday it would be “a short-term excursion” finished “pretty quickly.”
Behind the dollar figures is a strategic problem. The Pentagon has begun moving THAAD missile defense components from South Korea and Patriot interceptors from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East. Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Post: “The more THAADs and Patriots you shoot, the more risk you assume in the Indo-Pacific and in Ukraine.” The Joint Chiefs chairman had warned Trump before the war that a prolonged conflict could dangerously deplete America’s precision weapons stockpiles.
Three U.S. F-15s were destroyed in a friendly-fire incident involving Kuwait, at roughly $100 million each. Russia has been sharing intelligence with Iran to sharpen targeting of American and Israeli positions. Seven U.S. service members have now died. The meter is running.
Every dollar burned in this conflict is a dollar that won’t fix a bridge, won’t fund a school, won’t go toward the healthcare that tens of millions of Americans still don’t have. And every Patriot battery we move to the Middle East is one less standing between our allies in Asia and an increasingly aggressive China. Wars that start as “short-term excursions” have a way of rewriting the national balance sheet for a generation.
CBS Is Becoming a MAGA Mouthpiece. Another Journalist Just Walked Out.
Scott MacFarlane, one of CBS News’s most respected Justice Department correspondents, announced his departure Monday. He covered January 6, the Epstein files, and Trump’s pardon spree with more rigor than most. He won’t be doing it at CBS anymore.
MacFarlane is the latest departure since Bari Weiss took over as editor-in-chief and began steering the network toward conservative audiences. Anderson Cooper left 60 Minutes. Now MacFarlane is out. Multiple people told the outlet Status he was “appalled and disheartened” when new anchor Tony Dokoupil marked the five-year anniversary of January 6 with a both-sides treatment on just his second night in the chair. That was the same night Dokoupil appeared to salute Secretary of State Rubio on air and called him the “ultimate Florida man.” “It’s an insult to the storied news giants who came before him,” one CBS staffer told The Independent. MacFarlane told colleagues he was looking forward to “some independence.” Read between those lines.
This is what the billionaire takeover of American media looks like. CBS is being reshaped to serve a political agenda. CNN is not far behind. When institutions Americans have trusted for decades start giving January 6 the both-sides treatment, when the anchor chair goes to someone willing to salute a cabinet secretary on live television, the only people left doing the real work are independents. That is exactly why Raw America exists. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, we need you today.
A free press isn’t just a nice idea in the First Amendment. It’s the mechanism by which citizens hold power accountable. When that mechanism gets bought up, hollowed out, and refashioned into a megaphone for whoever signs the checks, democracy doesn’t die all at once. It just quietly stops working, one departure at a time.
Trump Says He Was Talked Into This War. Most Americans Wish He Hadn’t Been.
At his Doral press conference Monday, Trump offered an unrehearsed explanation for the timing of the attack on Iran.
“The situation was very quickly approaching the point of no return,” he said, citing what Witkoff, Kushner, Hegseth, and Rubio were telling him. “Marco was so involved that I thought that they were going to attack us. I thought that if we didn’t do this at the time we did it, I think they had a mind to attack us.”
Mehdi Hasan flagged it Tuesday and laid out two readings: either Trump was manipulated into war by advisers with their own political, financial, and religious agendas, or he is already spreading blame before the body count is final. One describes a president who can be maneuvered into bombing a country by the people around him. The other describes a president running from accountability. Both are damning.
A new CNN poll found nearly 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of the Iran strikes. Only 12 percent support ground troops. Trump has refused to rule out reinstating the draft, and called the conflict a “little excursion” on Monday. The people he says talked him into it include Jared Kushner, who has a $2 billion Saudi investment fund, and Steve Witkoff, whose portfolio depends on Middle East stability. The “point of no return” was a meeting at Doral.
The Founders were explicit about this. They gave Congress the power to declare war precisely because they didn’t trust a single person, no matter how well-intentioned, to make that call alone. When a president can be nudged into a war by advisers with personal financial stakes in the outcome, and Congress can’t stop it, that’s not a foreign policy failure. That’s a constitutional one.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. We’ll see you back here tomorrow.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Epstein Files Get Even Worse for Trump. A new document released by the Department of Justice shows that Jeffrey Epstein had Trump on speakerphone while Epstein ordered a 16 year-old girl to undress and give him a massage. Whether Trump knew what was happening on the call is still an open question, though White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the allegations “completely baseless” and described the accuser as a “sadly disturbed woman” with a criminal history.
Democrats Sue to Find Out Whether Trump Plans to Send Troops to Polling Places. A new lawsuit the Democratic National Committee filed Tuesday is now aiming to compel the government to state whether it aims to send armed federal agents or military personnel to polling places in the November midterm elections. The lawsuit follows 11 separate Freedom of Information Act requests filed last fall that have been met with no response from the Trump administration, which is a violation of federal law.
New Mexico Officials Search Epstein’s Ranch. The New Mexico Department of Justice announced this week it would be conducting a detailed search of the infamous Zorro Ranch south of Santa Fe, where activists have alleged Jeffrey Epstein may have buried the bodies of several girls he abused. The property is owned by businessman Don Huffines, who is the Republican nominee in Texas’ state comptroller race.
Trump Skips Dignified Transfer of Soldier’s Remains. President Trump was absent from the dignified transfer ceremony of the 7th U.S. military service member killed in Iranian counterattacks after being criticized for wearing a hat to the last ceremony. 26 year-old Sgt. Benjamin N. Pennington of Glendale, Kentucky recently succumbed to injuries sustained from the March 1 attack on the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, where he was stationed.
Supreme Court Justices Have Public Dispute. This week, Supreme Court Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Brett Kavanaugh publicly debated the use of the Court’s emergency docket (also known as the “shadow docket”) to address President Donald Trump’s actions. Shadow docket rulings typically come with no explanation or rationale and are delivered without oral arguments. The conservative majority has used the shadow docket to allow Trump to fire thousands of federal workers, take control of independent agencies and allow Trump to impose significant parts of his immigration agenda despite rulings from lower court judges striking them down.
