Good morning, I’m Thom Hartmann.
This morning, Trump called a New York Times reporter’s work “treason” on Air Force One and threatened Iran with two more days of bombing. He reversed his campaign pledge to stop Chinese nationals from buying American farmland within 24 hours of meeting Xi Jinping. He is now planning to drop his $10 billion IRS lawsuit and instead create a $1.7 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund to pay allies who claim they were persecuted by the Biden administration. And he admitted on Fox News that his entire demand for Iran’s enriched uranium is, in his own words, “more for public relations than anything else.” These are stories you won’t hear on Ellison’s CBS, or read in Bezos’ Washington Post. Billionaires are trying to silence accountability journalism, but Raw America is committed to doing what the captive press won’t. Become a paying subscriber and help support the independent journalism giving you the knowledge the Trump regime wants to keep hidden from you.
Trump Called a Reporter’s Work ‘Treason’ on Air Force One
On the flight home from Beijing, Trump erupted at New York Times journalist David Sanger over questions about the Iran war, calling his coverage “treasonous” and accusing him of being directed by editors to write falsehoods.
“You should write the truth. I actually think it’s kind of treasonous, what you write,” Trump said. “You and the New York Times, and CNN, I would say, are the worst.” When another reporter interrupted with a question, Trump doubled down: “I actually think it’s treason.”
He then pivoted to a BBC journalist and demanded to know who she worked for before launching an attack on the broadcaster over a 2024 documentary that spliced together two portions of his January 6 speech. Trump characterized this as the BBC “putting AI in his mouth.” It was not. Both comments featured in the documentary were things he actually said. The BBC has acknowledged an “error of judgment” in how they were edited, two senior executives resigned over the fallout, and the broadcaster has vowed to fight Trump’s $10 billion defamation suit in court.
The mid-air meltdown capped a China trip that went poorly by most measures. Xi skipped the tarmac welcome. Chinese state censors let a wave of social media posts mocking the U.S. as a “paper tiger” go viral. Elon Musk, who accompanied Trump, attracted widespread ridicule for his behavior at a state banquet. And Trump’s most memorable public comment from the summit, when asked how his two-hour meeting with Xi went, was: “It’s great. A great place. Incredible. China is beautiful.”
Treason’s the only crime the framers bothered to define inside the Constitution itself, and they defined it narrowly on purpose because they’d watched British kings hurl that charge at anyone who questioned the throne. A president who calls a reporter treasonous for asking about a war he started is reaching for the exact weapon Article III was written to keep out of his hands.
Trump Reversed His Chinese Farmland Pledge Within 24 Hours of Meeting Xi
On the campaign trail in September 2024, Trump was unequivocal about stopping Chinese nationals from buying American farmland. “We don’t want you buying our land,” he said. “That’s a very easy thing to do.”
On Thursday in Beijing, asked by Sean Hannity why he had abandoned that promise, Trump said pulling the investment out of the market would hurt American farmers by driving down land prices. “You want to see farm prices drop, you wanna see farmers lose a lot of money? Just take that out of the market,” he said.
The reversal is striking in context. Farm-dependent counties voted for Trump at a 78 percent rate in 2024, up from his already strong first-term support. His administration had rolled out a “National Farm Security Action Plan” in July 2025 that aimed to ban new Chinese farmland purchases and force existing owners to divest within a year or face prison.
The actual scale of Chinese-owned farmland in the United States is considerably smaller than the political attention it receives. Federal data puts Chinese ownership at 0.52 percent of foreign-held agricultural acres, or roughly 0.02 percent of total U.S. agricultural land. Trump, asked about the reversal, blamed Obama.
Thomas Jefferson believed an independent yeoman farmer was the backbone of a self-governing republic, and that’s why foreign control of American land has been treated as a national security question since Washington’s Farewell Address warned us against entangling our future to foreign powers. Trading that principle away after one meeting with the leader of an adversary isn’t a policy adjustment, it’s an admission that the people who delivered 78 percent margins in farm country were just useful for a season.
Trump Is Dropping His $10 Billion IRS Lawsuit and Replacing It With a $1.7 Billion Slush Fund
Trump is set to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, the one a federal judge recently described as legally dubious since he is essentially suing agencies he controls, and replace it with a proposed $1.7 billion taxpayer-funded compensation fund.
The fund would be overseen by a five-member commission whose members Trump could remove without cause. The process for determining payments and the identities of recipients could be kept private. The IRS would formally apologize to Trump. Entities connected to Trump could receive payments, though Trump himself would not be allowed to receive them directly. The money would come from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund.
The framing, according to sources, is part victim compensation fund and part truth-and-reconciliation commission, targeting people who claim they were persecuted by the Biden administration. This would include allies and figures from the January 6 orbit, a population Trump spent the first days of his second term pardoning and has since talked openly about compensating with public money.
Judge Kathleen Williams had already flagged the fundamental absurdity of the original lawsuit, writing that Trump’s “named adversaries are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction.” Dropping it to create a fund he controls, distributing taxpayer money to political allies, is a different kind of problem.
Madison called the power of the purse the most effectual weapon Congress had against an overreaching executive, which is why Article I, Section 9 says no money leaves the Treasury except through appropriations made by law. A president routing 1.7 billion taxpayer dollars through a private commission he handpicks to pay his own allies isn’t reforming a lawsuit, he’s rebuilding the spoils system the Pendleton Act was passed to bury in 1883.
Trump Admitted His Core Demand from Iran Is Mostly a PR Stunt
For weeks, Trump’s stated red line in Iran negotiations has been Iran surrendering its stockpile of enriched uranium to the United States. Military action has been threatened over it. The ceasefire has been held hostage to it.
On Thursday, on Fox News with Sean Hannity, Trump said this:
“I’d just feel better if I got it, actually. But it’s... I think it’s more for public relations than it is for anything else.”
That is the president of the United States, describing the central demand of his Iran nuclear negotiating position as a public relations move.
Experts have been saying as much for weeks. The director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency told sources that seizing Iran’s enriched uranium would not actually prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon in the future, because the country already has the knowledge to produce more. “You cannot unlearn what you’ve learned,” he said. Military historian Max Boot has argued that a seizure operation would require thousands of U.S. troops on the ground in Iran for weeks.
Trump launched this war in February declaring unconditional surrender was the only acceptable outcome. Regime change followed. Then a nuclear freeze of 20 years. Then 10 years. Now, by his own account, the uranium demand is largely symbolic.
The ceasefire remains fragile. Gas is above $4 a gallon. The Strait of Hormuz is still effectively closed. And the president is in the air, calling reporters traitors and describing his war aims as public relations.
The founders gave the war power to Congress in Article I because they’d watched European monarchs march men to their graves for vanity, and James Madison warned that of all the enemies of public liberty, war was the most to be dreaded. When the man who started this war tells Sean Hannity his stated objective is mostly for public relations, every service member in harm’s way and every family paying four dollars a gallon deserves to hear that admission repeated under oath in a congressional hearing room.
This Is Why Raw America Exists — and Why We Need You
A president calling journalism “treason.” A $1.7 billion fund to pay political allies with public money. A war being prosecuted for goals the president describes as theatrical. And a media landscape being bought, threatened, and handed to people who have agreed to look away.
Raw America was built to look directly at it.
Because of your support, we have reporters in the halls of Congress at the most important hearings of this political era. We recently brought you exclusive interviews with experts like MS NOW Melissa Murray to break down news from the Supreme Court. We are joining the D.C. press pool and going after the conversations that hold power accountable, bringing them directly to you unfiltered and unbought.
That coverage, coverage that challenges power, refuses to sell wars, and won’t propagandize for billionaires, requires your support. We have no corporate backer, no billionaire pulling our strings. We rely entirely on our readers to deliver the independent reporting this country needs. We have bold plans to hold this administration accountable, but we cannot do it without you.
If you’ve been meaning to subscribe, today is the day.
This is Thom Hartmann for Raw America. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Trump Defends Giant Gold Statue of Himself. President Donald Trump recently defended the 22-foot statue of himself that a cryptocurrency group built at his Doral, Florida golf resort. The statue, which is covered in gold leaf, is of Trump holding up his fist from the 2024 attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania. At its dedication ceremony, MAGA-aligned pastor Mark Burns insisted the statue was “not a golden calf,” in reference to a passage from the Book of Exodus. The president said the statue would become a “landmark” over time.
Jim Jordan Confronted After Dismissing Americans’ Concerns Over Gas Prices. During a recent interview with CNN host Kaitlan Collins, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said “that’s life” when asked about rising gas prices. Jordan insisted that preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon was more important that gas prices rising to more than $4.50 per gallon on average. Jordan’s comments come just days after Trump said he didn’t consider Americans’ finances “even a little bit” when negotiating with Iran.
ICE Turns Violent Arrest of U.S. Citizen Into Propaganda Video. Despite being a native-born U.S. citizen, 28 year-old Christian Cerna was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last June while driving with his partner and their two children in Los Angeles. ICE was also traveling with a film crew during the arrest, and later posted video of Cerna’s arrest to social media. A federal judge said ICE’s tactics were part of a “vindictive effort” to “impose extrajudicial punishment.”
Arizona Cop Who Brought Gun to Teens’ ICE Protest Fired. Phoenix Police Sergeant Dusten Mullen has been fired after being caught bringing a gun to an ICE protest conducted by high school students. Mullen — who was off duty at the time — could be heard on video telling officers that he planned to provoke the teens into a physical confrontation so officers standing by could arrest them. One teen was arrested for throwing water on Mullen, though the charges were later dropped.
Bari Weiss Humiliated Yet Again in Massive Overseas Blunder. CBS Nightly News anchor Tony Dokoupil was recently forced to move from his backup location while covering Trump’s visit to China from Taiwan. Status reported that Dokoupil’s initial setup on a Taipei hotel balcony had to be relocated elsewhere after the hotel was “appalled” at how Dokoupil framed the geopolitical situation between China and Taiwan. This is the latest blunder for CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss — the right-wing opinion columnist with no prior TV news experience who was hand-picked by pro-Trump billionaire donor David Ellison after he bought the network — after she failed to obtain a visa for Dokoupil to enter China.
