Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report. News for the public, not the powerful.
Is Kash Patel Setting Us Up for Another 9/11?
A 25-year FBI veteran named Jacqueline Maguire published a blistering op-ed in the New York Times this week. She’s warning that Kash Patel is so consumed by political revenge that he’s left America wide open to attack. Patel fired a dozen elite counterintelligence agents from the unit that tracks Iranian spies on American soil, known as CI-12. He fired them just days before Trump launched bombing strikes against Iran.
Why? Because those agents were involved in the classified documents investigation of Donald Trump. That’s it. Payback. About 300 national security agents have now left the FBI since Trump took office. Former agent Christopher O’Leary called it “institutional decapitation.”
Current FBI officials say the workforce is now “paralyzed by the constant threat of being fired on the whim of a social media influencer.” When a director uses America’s top law enforcement agency to punish his boss’s enemies, the rest of us are left unprotected. That’s not leadership. That’s a protection racket.
They Can’t Win the Vote, So They’re Changing the Rules
Trump allies have seized the Senate floor this week in a marathon push to pass the SAVE America Act, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. It would require documented proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Republicans used a procedural end-run to get the bill to the floor on a simple majority, because they don’t have the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Trump has refused to sign any other legislation until this one passes. Senator Mike Lee is comparing this fight to the battle over the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Let that sink in.
The bill that critics say would block millions of eligible Americans from voting is being compared to the very law it’s designed to roll back. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it one of the most despicable pieces of legislation he’d ever seen. When you can’t win elections fair and square, you rig who gets to show up.
That’s not democracy. That’s its funeral.
Trump Said a Former President Backed His War. Every Single One Just Called Him a Liar.
On Monday, Trump claimed twice that a former president privately told him he wished he’d bombed Iran too. He said it at a Kennedy Center lunch. He said it again in the Oval Office. When reporters pressed him on the name, Trump said he didn’t want to embarrass the man.
Within hours, representatives for all four living former presidents, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden, confirmed no such conversation ever happened. Not a phone call. Not a text. Nothing. CNN, NBC News, and the AP all verified the denials. Trump repeated the claim three times in one day and not one word of it held up.
We have 13 Americans dead in Iran, oil prices spiking, the Strait of Hormuz disrupted, and a president who apparently invents supporting characters for his war story.
If he’s making this up, what else is he making up?
One Billionaire Just Admitted What They All Know: This System Is Going to Break
Peter Mallouk is the CEO of one of America’s largest wealth management firms. He’s a billionaire. And this week he posted a Financial Times chart showing that the top 10 percent of earners now account for nearly half of all consumer spending in America. His own comment on it was blunt.
He called it “100% completely unsustainable as a society.” He’s right, and the numbers back him up. Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi says the economy is now “narrowly perched on the backs of the well-to-do.” The Republican tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill are projected to make it worse, handing outsized benefits to the wealthy while cutting Medicaid and food assistance for everyone else.
Highly unequal countries are seven times more likely to experience democratic backsliding. That’s not a theory anymore.
That’s a description of what’s happening right now, in real time, in this country.
They Ignored 99% of the Safety Data Before Pulling Kids’ COVID Protection
The Guardian is reporting this week that internal government memos show officials missed an estimated 99 percent of available safety data before stripping the COVID vaccine recommendation for healthy children and pregnant women.
RFK Jr. bypassed the CDC’s normal scientific advisory process entirely. He fired the existing expert committee, installed his own handpicked members, and announced the policy change in a 58-second social media video.
Every major medical organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, still recommends these vaccines. Childhood vaccination rates were already at just 13 percent before this. Now they’ll fall further.
Meanwhile measles cases have already topped 1,100 across 27 states in the first eight weeks of this year alone.
When the people running public health don’t read the science before making policy, children pay for it. With their health. Sometimes with their lives.
Trump’s Coalition Is Imploding — Over a Fox Host’s Genitals
While thirteen Americans are dead in Iran and there’s still no exit strategy, the right-wing media universe has descended into a public screaming match about a Fox News host’s anatomy.
Megyn Kelly and Mark Levin have feuded for weeks over the Iran war. Kelly’s against it. Levin cheers it on. Sunday it exploded when Kelly labeled Levin “Micropenis Mark” on social media, a post that racked up 2.3 million views.
Levin called her a “harlot.” Trump himself weighed in with a 348-word Truth Social manifesto defending Levin and declaring his critics “not MAGA.” Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene fired back, writing, “MAGA destroyed by micropenis Mark Levin.”
Tucker Carlson, Matt Walsh, and a wave of libertarian commentators piled on against Trump. One observer noted that we’re in week three of a war, thirteen service members are dead, recession fears are rising globally, and the president is writing novels defending a talk radio host’s honor.
The coalition that promised to save America can’t agree on whether America’s war is worth fighting.
And nobody’s minding the store.
And that’s the way it is, Today, Tuesday, March 17th, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
