Good morning, I’m Thom Hartmann.
This morning, Susie Wiles has called an emergency summit of top Republican operatives as Trump’s approval rating hits 37 percent. ICE’s own numbers reveal that 400 people a day are being arrested with no criminal record, more than Trump’s entire first term averaged. Rahm Emanuel just went on Bill Maher and said the U.S. should stop treating Israel as a special case, in what looks a lot like a 2028 trial balloon. And oil prices are back up, markets are falling, and the Iran ceasefire may have just collapsed after the U.S. fired on an Iranian vessel in the Gulf of Oman overnight. Corporate media is softening its coverage of all of it. The FCC chair has made clear what happens to outlets that don’t. And the Ellisons are about to own CBS and CNN. This is what it looks like when independent journalism matters.
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The White House Just Hit the Panic Button on the Midterms
Susie Wiles, Trump’s White House chief of staff and former campaign manager, has summoned dozens of top Republican operatives from across the country to a closed-door summit in Washington this Monday. Sources familiar with the plans described it to reporters as part of a wider push to “intensify preparations” for what insiders are already calling a “challenging midterm cycle.”
The urgency is not hard to explain. Trump’s approval rating now sits at 37 percent. Two-thirds of voters hold a negative view of his second term. The Silver Bulletin forecasting platform has Republicans at nearly a six-point disadvantage heading into November, with Democrats on track to potentially take both the House and the Senate if current patterns hold.
When a sitting White House chief of staff is pulling operatives into a war room eighteen months out from an election, that’s the sound of people who know the floor is tilting underneath them. The Founders built the midterms as the one reliable check the people hold against a runaway executive, and Republican operatives clearly understand that check is still working.
What has driven those numbers down? The Epstein files handling. The immigration crackdown. Tariff-driven economic turbulence. An unpopular war in Iran that has sent gas prices to levels not seen since 1967. And in just the past week, a public meltdown targeting the Pope and a deleted AI image of himself as Jesus Christ that drew denunciations from his own religious base.
This is the second such GOP strategy session since February. The pattern tells you everything about where Republican leadership thinks things stand heading into the fall.
ICE’s Own Numbers Show 400 People a Day Arrested with No Criminal Record
The outgoing head of ICE went before a congressional subcommittee last week and, in the course of asking for $10 billion in additional funding, revealed a number that his own boss probably wishes had stayed out of the record.
Todd Lyons told lawmakers that ICE has arrested nearly 457,000 people since January 20, 2025. He said that more than 281,000 of those had been flagged as having “criminal histories.” That leaves roughly 176,000 people with no criminal record whatsoever, which works out to approximately 405 arrests per day of people who had done nothing wrong under any law.
That 405-per-day figure for people with no record actually exceeds the average daily arrest rate for everyone, criminal history or not, across all four years of Trump’s first term.
The 281,000 “criminal histories” number also deserves scrutiny. ICE includes in that category immigration-only offenses such as unlawful entry, traffic violations, and charges that were filed but never resulted in a conviction. The Daily Beast previously revealed, citing leaked ICE data, that close to three out of every four people held by the agency carried no criminal conviction, and only one in twenty had been convicted of a violent offense.
Every authoritarian turn in American history has started with the same move. Round up people who haven’t broken any law that matters, call them dangerous, and dare the courts to stop you. The Palmer Raids. Japanese internment. McCarthy’s lists. That’s not rhetoric, that’s the record, and we’re watching the next chapter get written in real time with our tax dollars.
Trump has spent two years describing the people in his dragnet as the “worst of the worst.” His own agency’s testimony to Congress tells a very different story.
Rahm Emanuel Just Said the Things Democrats Aren’t Supposed to Say About Israel
Rahm Emanuel appeared on Bill Maher’s show this weekend and said something that landed like a live grenade in Washington’s most carefully managed policy conversation.
“Israel’s a very wealthy nation,” Emanuel said. “There should be no more taxpayer support for what they want to do, and they get the same deal that any one of our allies does.” He added that “the United States should never spill any blood for Israel’s security.”
To be clear about who is saying this: Emanuel is a former U.S. congressman, Barack Obama’s first White House chief of staff, mayor of Chicago, and former ambassador to Japan. He is also widely understood to be testing the waters for a 2028 presidential run. These are not the words of a backbencher. They are, by any reasonable read, message development.
His framing is not anti-alliance, but anti-special treatment. Israel gets the Britain deal or the Japan deal, not a category of its own. Coming from a Jewish Democrat with deep establishment credentials, that lands differently than the same line coming from the party’s left wing.
George Washington used his farewell address to warn the country against what he called “passionate attachments” to any foreign nation, because attachments like that bend American policy toward another country’s interests over our own. For two generations, saying that plainly about Israel inside Democratic politics has been a career-ending offense. Rahm Emanuel just said it on cable, and he said it because he’s betting the ground has moved under the party’s feet.
He is not alone in moving away from subsidizing Netanyahu. More than three dozen Senate Democrats recently backed Bernie Sanders’ resolutions to block arms sales to Israel, a development that would have been nearly unthinkable a few years ago. Axios described Israel’s standing with congressional Democrats as hitting a new low. Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, and Josh Shapiro have each staked out varying positions in this shifting terrain, with Ocasio-Cortez going furthest by opposing all military aid including defensive systems.
Emanuel is trying to occupy a new Democratic lane, tougher-sounding, more transactional, less ideological. Whether that message lands with Democratic voters exhausted by war and chaos is what he seems to be finding out.
The Ceasefire Is Over. Oil Just Surged 7.5 Percent.
The Iran ceasefire may be finished.
Late Sunday, Iran’s military accused the United States of breaking the ceasefire after the destroyer USS Spruance fired on an Iranian-flagged cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman that tried to evade the U.S. naval blockade. Iran vowed to respond.
Markets reacted immediately. America’s benchmark oil contract, West Texas Intermediate, surged 7.5 percent to $90.17 a barrel by Sunday evening. International benchmark Brent North Sea crude gained 6.5 percent to $96.27 a barrel. Both moved on the news within hours.
Every American war of the last half century has turned on an incident somebody found politically useful. The Gulf of Tonkin. The incubator babies story. Iraqi yellowcake. Now there’s a shot fired at a cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman, oil’s up seven and a half percent overnight, and a war that couldn’t be ended by diplomacy may now get extended by a single engagement. It’s always worth asking who profits when a ceasefire falls apart.
The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas normally flows, has been virtually closed since the war began eight weeks ago. The ceasefire had offered a brief window of hope that shipping might resume. That window now appears to be closing.
Iran has said it will not participate in the next round of negotiations the U.S. had been pressing to begin before the ceasefire expiration date. The IEA director warned last week that Europe has roughly six weeks of jet fuel remaining if the Strait does not reopen. And there are growing fears about a downstream fertilizer shortage, as one of the vital commodities that normally transits the Strait remains largely blocked, with serious implications for global food security.
This war entered its eighth week this morning. The peace talks meant to end it may have just collapsed over a shot fired at a cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman.
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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:
Kash Patel Sues The Atlantic Over Report on Alleged Drinking Habit. FBI Director Kash Patel is now suing The Atlantic magazine. Patel said in his lawsuit that he wanted compensation for “false and obviously fabricated” claims in a recent story in which unnamed sources confided to the outlet that he had frequent bouts of excessive drinking that led to multiple absences, jeopardizing “time-sensitive decisions” that required his input. In one of the 17 allegations, FBI personnel reportedly requested “breaching equipment” as they had been unable to reach a presumably intoxicated Patel behind locked doors.
Bishop of Palm Beach Issues Direct Rebuke of Trump. On Sunday, the Bishop of Palm Beach — whose diocese is just 13 miles from Mar-a-Lago — projected a statement in front of his congregation that read that the diocese “stands firm with our Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, and strongly rejects the disrespectful and violent attacks that Donald J. Trump has directed against the Holy Father.” He went on to call Trump’s attacks “a grave violation of the religious freedom enshrined in the Constitution of the United States.” His remarks come after Trump has repeatedly assailed Pope Leo XIV, calling him “weak” and “terrible” after the pope criticized his war in Iran.
BBC Reveals Strong Evidence of Insider Trading at White House. A new investigation by the BBC has honed in on five specific instances of perfectly timed bets on White House policy that resulted in mystery bettors profiting handsomely from Trump’s decisions. In one example, Trump told CBS News the Iran war was “very complete, pretty much,” but 47 minutes before the CBS reporter tweeted about the interview happening, one bettor made a significant bet on falling oil prices. After the interview was published, the bettor made millions of dollars. Donald Trump Jr. is an investor in the prediction market Polymarket and sits on its advisory board. He is also an advisor to prediction market Kalshi.
Trump DOJ Building New Revenge Prosecution with Trump-Friendly Judge. According to the New York Times, the Department of Justice has now hired former U.S. Attorney Joseph DiGenova, who worked in the Reagan administration, to lead an investigation into alleged violations of Trump’s constitutional rights during former President Joe Biden’s administration. Trump is attempting to connect the dots between the 2016 Russian election interference inquiry and former DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith’s two criminal investigations into both the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago as one grand plot to attack him. The investigation is reportedly relying on information obtained via a grand jury convened in Fort Pierce, Florida, where Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon (who threw out the classified documents indictment) is the only federal judge, is overseeing the process.
Trump’s Energy Secretary Admits Gas Prices Will Stay High for Remainder of 2026. During a recent interview with CNN, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told host Jake Tapper that gas prices may not dip back below $3 a gallon until 2027. The current national average for a gallon of gas in excess of $4, according to AAA. Gas prices were just $3.05 a gallon when Trump took office in January of 2025. Gas prices have been steadily rising since Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in March. While Trump officials have been justifying the price spike by pointing to gas prices during the Biden administration, those were a result of demand in the wake of the Covid-19 lockdowns, and dropped back down below $3 a gallon in a matter of months.
