Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Is Dissent Now Terrorism in Donald Trump’s America?
Stephen Miller stood at the State Department Thursday and announced that the Trump administration has officially declared left-wing violence a form of political terrorism. Speaking at a conference called the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, Miller said President Trump has issued National Security Presidential Memorandum Seven, directing every law enforcement and intelligence agency in the country to “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute” what he called political terrorists operating in America. Miller claimed left-wing movements always end in gulags and the mass imprisonment of political enemies. Here’s what he never mentioned, not once. Right-wing terrorism, which law enforcement data has repeatedly identified as the deadliest domestic threat in this country. When a government defines terrorism by political ideology instead of violent acts, every activist, every union organizer, every protester becomes a potential target. Miller called all of it a direct threat to the survival of our republican form of government. But the Constitution doesn’t have an ideology exception. Once the government can label the enemy by belief instead of by deed, it’s not fighting terrorism anymore. It’s criminalizing opposition. That’s how police states get built, one memo at a time.
Why Did a Korean Firm Pay Trump Two Million Dollars?
The lead investor in a South Korean aluminum company fighting penalties from Trump’s own Commerce Department paid two million dollars to Trump’s holding company last year. The payment from Base Group showed up in Trump’s annual financial disclosure in late June, described only as a “nonrefundable development fee” tied to a letter of intent. The company and the Trump family say it’s for a golf course project nobody has announced yet. Meanwhile, Base Group’s affiliate, Korea Aluminium, is battling a Commerce Department finding that South Korean firms dodged tariffs by routing Chinese-made aluminum through Korea. A preliminary ruling would slap its exports with a one hundred five percent tax, nearly four times the current rate, and a final decision is coming soon. Base Group has courted the Trump family for nearly a decade, selling Trump-branded wine in Seoul and hosting Eric Trump at its headquarters. The White House denies any conflict of interest. But when the referee’s family is cashing checks from one of the players, working people know exactly what game is being played.
Seven Days a Week? Rick Scott Says You’re Not Working Enough
Florida Senator Rick Scott went on Fox News Thursday to talk tariffs and ended up telling the American people they’re slackers. “The minimum we ought to work is seven days a week,” Scott declared, adding that he’s a business guy and business people have to work every day. The internet lit up. Critics pointed out that the Senate is famously in session about three or four days a week. Others noted that Scott ran the hospital chain that paid what was then the largest Medicare fraud fine in American history, and he walked away a very rich man. One former Senate staffer said he’d laugh if he didn’t want to cry. Think about what Scott is really saying. No weekends. No rest. No time with your kids. The forty-hour week wasn’t a gift from businessmen like Rick Scott. Union members fought and bled and died for it. And there are politicians in Washington who’d take it all back tomorrow if we let them.
Susan Collins Funded ICE and Won’t Say She’s Sorry
Two days after a federal immigration agent shot and killed twenty-six-year-old Johan Sebastián Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, Senator Susan Collins refused to say whether she regrets voting to shower ICE with money. A reporter from Zeteo News asked her directly at the Capitol Wednesday. Do you regret giving ICE more money, given the killings, including the one in your state? Collins said nothing while her aide hustled her away. Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant, was driving to work Monday morning when agents opened fire. He wasn’t the target of their warrant. A witness says his young daughter saw it happen. The agents weren’t wearing body cameras. Collins chairs the Appropriations Committee and cast the deciding vote for roughly seventy billion dollars in homeland security funding, thirty-eight billion of it for ICE, with almost no strings attached. Protesters swarmed her Biddeford office chanting vote her out. One Democratic candidate for her seat put it plainly, saying “Maine does not need a senator who signs the checks and hopes for the best.” This is the second fatal ICE shooting in a week, and it’s renewing demands for body cameras and real accountability at the agency. A man is dead. His family is shattered. And the senator who signed the checks won’t even answer the question.
Who’s Afraid of the Truth About George Washington?
Under cover of darkness Tuesday night, the Trump administration ripped out the slavery exhibit at the President’s House in Philadelphia, the site where George Washington held nine human beings in bondage while serving as president. Workers swapped in eleven new panels that historians say sanitize Washington’s role as an enslaver, claiming he felt discomfort about slavery and that the people he owned enjoyed a measure of autonomy. Gone are headlines like The Dirty Business of Slavery. Gone is the map of slave trade routes. Critics quoted by the Guardian called the move “a first step to fascism.” Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker vows to keep fighting to restore the original exhibit, which activists spent decades winning. The swap came just weeks after a federal appeals court cleared the way, overturning a judge who had compared the administration to Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. It’s all part of Trump’s executive order to strip what he calls anti-American ideology from parks and museums ahead of the nation’s two hundred fiftieth birthday. Washington enslaved more than three hundred people at Mount Vernon. That’s not disparagement. That’s history. And a government that erases the ugly parts of its past is a government preparing to repeat them.
Could Cutting Junk Food Save Thousands of Lives?
A major new study out of Canada says ultra-processed foods may be driving up to a third of all heart disease. Researchers at the University of Montreal, publishing in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that between twenty-three and thirty-eight percent of cardiovascular deaths can be attributed to ultra-processed foods. Things like sodas, packaged snacks, processed meats, and ready meals. In Canada alone, that meant as many as ninety-six thousand new cases of heart disease and over seventeen thousand deaths in a single year. Cut consumption in half, the researchers say, and up to eight thousand three hundred of those deaths could have been prevented. The scientists call it a “substantial and potentially preventable” contributor to heart disease, and they expect similar numbers in other wealthy countries. Here in America, more than half the average diet is now ultra-processed. That’s not an accident. It’s a food system engineered for corporate profit, not human health. The fix isn’t lecturing families at the checkout line. It’s taking on the companies that made junk the cheapest thing on the shelf.
And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday, July 16, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
