Good morning, I’m Thom Hartmann.
This morning, the ICE agent who shot and killed unarmed Minneapolis mother Renee Good has been quietly moved to a new posting and put back on duty, with his internal review paused indefinitely. Trump’s approval on the cost of living has dropped to negative 40 points, a number so low it broke the scale on a pollster’s graph. The Trump sons have signed their first Pentagon drone contract, selling interceptor weapons for the war their father launched without congressional approval. And a veteran 60 Minutes correspondent accepted a journalism award Thursday night and publicly described what Bari Weiss did to her CECOT prison report as the result of “corporate meddling and editorial fear.” Corporate media is living that story in real time. The FCC chair has made clear what happens to outlets that don’t. And the Ellisons are still buying. Let’s get into it.
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Today at 1 PM ET, Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson will be conducting a live interview with Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried, who will discuss Ron DeSantis’ new gerrymander and how Democrats are fighting back. Watch live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.
The ICE Agent Who Shot Renee Good Is Back on Duty. AOC and Democrats Are Furious
Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who fatally shot Renee Good, an unarmed 37-year-old mother of three, on January 7 in Minneapolis, was moved out of the city after just three days on administrative leave and has now been reinstated to active duty in a new, undisclosed posting, according to exclusive reporting by PunchUp, Raw America’s sister investigations publication.
Senior DHS sources told PunchUp that ICE’s internal review of Ross has been paused indefinitely, held in place by an FBI probe that whistleblowers and a bipartisan Senate letter allege was shut down from the top.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told PunchUp and Migrant Insider the move was deliberate and calculated. “You have an ICE agent who killed a woman in cold blood. The fact that the agency has reinstated him is a direct message from the administration about the impunity they feel.” She warned that every U.S. citizen Ross encounters going forward will be “in just as great danger as she was.”
Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride called it “absolutely outrageous,” saying the administration was “asking for it to happen again.” Illinois Rep. Delia Ramirez asked pointedly: “What state will he go to?” His current posting has not been disclosed.
Renee Good was not the only unarmed person killed. Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old VA ICU nurse, was thrown to the ground and shot to death by Border Patrol agents on January 24, roughly a mile from where Good was killed, after he stepped in to help a woman who had been shoved by agents. The two agents who killed him remain on administrative leave with full pay. No federal charges. No state charges. A DOJ civil rights investigation that NPR reports has gone nowhere.
DHS told the Daily Beast that the agency would not expose Ross’s name and that “he acted according to his training in a manner that ensured his own safety and that of his fellow officers and bystanders.”
Two people are dead. The agents who killed them are collecting paychecks.
When the founders warned against standing armies turned on their own people, this is exactly what they feared, a federal force that kills unarmed citizens and faces no consequence because the men in charge have decided the law doesn’t apply to them. A republic that lets its agents shoot mothers and quietly reassigns them to do it again somewhere else has stopped being a republic in any meaningful sense.
Trump’s Approval on Cost of Living Has Dropped So Far it Broke a Pollster’s Graph
A new Strength in Numbers/Verasight poll shared Thursday by pollster G. Elliot Morris shows Trump’s approval rating on inflation and cost of living has fallen to negative 40.3 points, his lowest figure on the issue during his second term. When Morris charted the numbers across multiple issue areas, the cost of living line dropped so far below every other category that it effectively fell off the graph.
The collapse started on March 13. That is two weeks after Trump launched his war with Iran.
Gas prices hit a nationwide average of $4.30 a gallon Thursday, according to AAA, the highest since the conflict began on February 28. The war is costing U.S. taxpayers an estimated $900 million a day. And the knock-on effects are spreading through every household budget in the country.
A retired Air Force captain who voted for Trump in 2024 told the Associated Press last week that she feels “disgusted with myself” for supporting him. “I feel betrayed, like he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Kathryn Bright, 60, who said she backed Trump for his promises to stop wars and reduce the cost of living. “It’s like high school class president: I’m gonna promise we are going to get pizza every single day. Then as soon as they get elected, they are like, oh, I lied.”
Trump’s approval on deportations, immigration, trade, healthcare, civil rights, and democracy are all declining. But nothing has cratered like cost of living. The war did that.
Every president who’s launched a war without Congress has eventually broken on the home front, because wars don’t stay overseas, they come home in the price of gas and groceries and rent. Working people figure it out fast when the man who promised to end wars and lower costs has done the opposite of both, and Kathryn Bright’s voice is the sound of a coalition coming apart in real time.
Trump’s Sons Just Signed Their First Pentagon Drone Contract for the War Their Father Launched
Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump joined the board of drone company Powerus after a golf club company they backed merged with it in March to take it public. Powerus is based in West Palm Beach, home of Trump International Golf Club. This week, the company announced it had secured its first Pentagon weapons procurement contract to sell an undisclosed number of interceptor drones to the U.S. Air Force.
The drone, called the Guardian-2, is a low-cost, semi-autonomous counter-drone interceptor built specifically to defend against Iranian Shahed-type attack drones in the Middle East. The war that created the demand for this product began on February 28. The sons of the president who launched that war without congressional approval are now selling weapons for it.
The company’s co-founder insists the contract was awarded on merit. “They’re not going to pick a system because of who’s on an investor list,” he told Bloomberg. “They’re picking because they need it now.”
Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, disagrees. “This is going to be the first family of a president to make a lot of money off war,” he said, adding that Gulf states are under “enormous pressure to buy from the sons of the president so he will do what they want.”
Meanwhile, the administration is now arguing that the war has technically ended because no shots have been fired since the April 7 ceasefire, allowing them to sidestep the 60-day War Powers Resolution deadline that has now passed without a congressional vote. A former National Security Council official has already advised the administration on a potential workaround: simply declare a new operation with a new name, which would reset the clock entirely.
The Trump sons maintain they have done nothing wrong because they are private citizens. Their company just signed its first military contract for a weapon designed for their father’s war.
The founders wrote the emoluments clause because they’d watched European courts rot from the inside, and they knew a leader whose family profits from war can never honestly decide when to end one. Eisenhower called it the military-industrial complex and warned us to watch for the day when private fortunes and public wars became indistinguishable, and we’re watching the first family of the United States become exactly that.
A 60 Minutes Correspondent Just Described CBS Exactly as it Is
Sharyn Alfonsi, the 60 Minutes correspondent whose segment on El Salvador’s CECOT megaprison was pulled by Bari Weiss last December, accepted the Ridenhour Courage Prize at the National Press Club Thursday night and spoke publicly about what happened for the first time.
She was careful about the specifics. But she was not careful about the diagnosis.
“It wasn’t an isolated editorial argument,” Alfonsi said. “In my view, it was the result of a more aggressive contagion: the spread of corporate meddling and editorial fear. It’s hard to watch.”
Her CECOT report had been screened five times and cleared by CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. Weiss pulled it anyway, demanding input from Trump administration officials who ultimately declined to participate. The segment eventually aired in January. It later leaked and aired in Canada before CBS ran it, in what Alfonsi described to laughter as something she had nothing to do with.
She described executives at media companies now asking not whether a story is true, but whether it is good for business. She said the industry is worried about the wrong things: offending those in power, losing access, lawsuits. “What we should all be afraid of is silence,” she said, adding that there is “a fine line between being a team player and being an accomplice.”
“My stance did not make my new bosses very happy,” she said. “I believe I was doing my job. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared.”
She said it. Out loud. At the National Press Club. While still employed by CBS.
The First Amendment was written first because the founders understood that every tyranny in history needed a quiet press to function, and what Sharyn Alfonsi just described from a podium at the National Press Club is the quieting happening in real time. When a correspondent at the country’s most storied news program has to win a courage award for telling the truth out loud, the contagion she’s warning us about isn’t coming, it’s already here.
This Is Why Raw America Exists — and Why We Need You
Sharyn Alfonsi just described the American media landscape from the inside. Corporate meddling. Editorial fear. Executives asking not whether a story is true but whether it is good for business.
That is not a description of journalism. That is a description of what happens when billionaires buy newsrooms and install political operatives to run them.
Raw America was built to be the thing that doesn’t work that way.
Because of your support, we have had reporters on the ground at the most important hearings of this political era. We have broken exclusives the corporate press buried. We are joining the D.C. press pool and going after the interviews that hold power accountable, bringing them directly to you unfiltered and unbought. Raw America co-founder John Byrne spoke with former Trump DHS chief of staff-turned-whistleblower Miles Taylor yesterday, where they discussed Taylor’s new anti-ICE initiative. You can watch the interview below.
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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 Threatens to Pull Troops Out of Italy and Spain. President Donald Trump recently announced that he’s considering withdrawing U.S. troops from bases in Italy and Spain, which are longtime allies of the United States, over their refusal to support his war in Iran. As of December 2025, there were more than 12,000 U.S. troops stationed in Italy, and more than 3,800 troops in Spain. Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto was caught off-guard by the comment, pointing out that Italy had offered to use its military to protect shipping lanes, which he said was “greatly appreciated by the U.S. military.”
Nationwide May Day Protests Take Up ‘No Kings’ Banner. Thousands of Americans are taking to the streets on Friday in commemoration of International Workers’ Day (also known as May Day), and many are combining their pro-labor message with the “No Kings” message of the massive anti-Trump protests that have swept the country since summer of 2025. More than 500 labor unions, student groups and community organizations are participating in today’s demonstrations. May Day traces its roots back to the 19th century, when Americans protested for an eight-hour workday.
Doctor Raises Questions About Trump’s Health After Posting Spree. Trump’s recent late-night posting spree on Truth Social — in which he repeatedly boasted about his cognitive health — prompted one doctor to point out that the president is overdue for his annual physical. Cardiologist Dr. Jonathan Reiner agreed with Trump’s call for political candidates to undergo a full medical, cognitive and psychiatric evaluation in order to qualify for the ballot, and then urged Trump to share his own results of those tests with the public. Reiner also observed that Trump’s last physical was in mid-April of 2025, meaning he’s more than a year overdue for another exam.
MAGA U.S. Senate Candidate Hit with Domestic Violence Protective Order. Former NBA player Royce White, who is running as a Republican in Minnesota’s U.S. Senate primary, was recently handed a 50-year domestic violence protective order from his ex-wife, and ordered to stay away from his son for two years. A judge agreed with White’s former spouse that she lives in constant fear of physical harm. The chair of Minnesota’s Republican Party is calling on White to drop out of the race, though White — who is backed by MAGA figures like Mike Lindell and Steve Bannon — is refusing and insisting that the Minnesota GOP is simply trying to push him out in order to clear the field for former ESPN reporter Michele Tafoya, who is also running for U.S. Senate as a Republican.
Koch Network Sounds Alarm Over Senate Control. Americans for Prosperity (AFP) — the Republican-aligned super PAC backed by the powerful and influential Koch network — recently issued a memo warning Republicans that they could lose control of the U.S. Senate in November if they fail to reclaim Americans’ confidence on pocketbook issues. AFP senior adviser Emily Seidel and Executive Director Nathan Nascimento wrote that the war in Iran has driven gas prices to a five-year high, inflation is climbing to unsustainable levels and Trump’s approval rating on economic issues has cratered. A Fox News poll recently found that a majority of Americans now trust Democrats more on the economy than Republicans.
