Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report. News for the public, not the powerful.
Could Your Kids Be Drafted to Fight in Iran?
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt went on Fox News Sunday morning and said something that stopped a lot of parents cold. Maria Bartiromo asked her directly: are mothers right to worry about a draft? Are we going to see American sons and daughters sent into Iran? Leavitt didn’t say no. She said the president “wisely doesn’t remove options off the table.” She said a draft is “not part of the current plan right now.” Right now. Those two words are doing a lot of heavy lifting. That’s not a reassurance. That’s a door left wide open. The last time America had a mandatory draft was Vietnam. More than 58,000 Americans died. Tens of thousands more came home broken. Critics immediately lit up social media after Leavitt’s remarks. One geopolitical commentator pointed out that once the children of congressmen and Ivy League families start getting draft notices, the politics of this war will change overnight. A progressive activism group with over a million followers on X put it simply: “They won’t even promise your kids aren’t next.” Trump’s war in Iran has so far been an air campaign. But the White House just told us that doesn’t have to stay that way. Every American parent should be paying attention.
Trump’s War is Blowing Up the Economy
Oil hit $110 a barrel Sunday night. That’s 50 percent higher than before the U.S. and Israel began striking Iran on February 28th. The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway on Iran’s southern coast, has been effectively shut for more than a week. One-fifth of the world’s oil moves through that strait every single day. So does a huge portion of the world’s natural gas. With that chokepoint closed and no sign it’s opening anytime soon, prices are going to keep climbing. Gas at the pump is already up 16 percent since the war started, hitting a national average of $3.45 a gallon according to AAA. Diesel is up 22 percent. Natural gas is up 17 percent. Stock futures fell 1.5 percent across the board Sunday evening. Investors now expect inflation to reach 4.5 percent over the next year. At the start of 2025 they were projecting 2.3 percent. That’s not a small shift. That’s a alarm going off. Trump called all of this “a very small price to pay for safety and peace.” The Fed is now caught between keeping rates high to fight inflation and cutting them to rescue a weakening job market. There’s no clean exit. And the people who feel it first and hardest are the ones who can least afford it.
Is Trump Losing His Biggest Bet?
Trump built his entire political identity around one core promise: he’d make your life cheaper. Groceries, gas, housing. He’d fix it. That promise is now collapsing in real time. The economy shed 92,000 jobs in February, when economists had expected a gain of 60,000. That’s not a rounding error. That’s the third time in five months the labor market has actually contracted. His tariffs, sold to working Americans as the path to prosperity and manufacturing jobs, have delivered rising prices and manufacturing job losses in 13 of the past 14 months. Now add a war that’s sending oil prices through the roof and rattling global markets. Early polling on the Iran strikes shows just 38 percent of Americans in support. That’s lower than retrospective support for the Iraq War, one of the most unpopular conflicts in modern American history. There’s been no rally-around-the-flag effect. The first 100 hours of war alone cost an estimated $3.7 billion. Trump told Axios he intends to be personally involved in choosing Iran’s next leader, while in the same breath acknowledging the nightmare scenario: that whoever comes next could be just as bad. Six American service members have already died. When asked if Americans should worry about retaliatory attacks at home, Trump said, and I’m quoting here, “I guess. When you go to war, some people will die.” That’s the president of the United States. This is not a strategy. This is a high-stakes gamble being played with your money, your job, and your family.
Trump Threatens to Shut Down Congress Unless They Suppress the Vote
While the country is watching oil prices spike and a war unfold, Trump took to Truth Social on Sunday with a demand that should alarm every American who believes in the right to vote. He said he will refuse to sign any legislation whatsoever until Republicans pass the Save America Act. What’s in that bill? Mandatory voter ID. Proof of citizenship to register. The elimination of nearly all mail-in ballots except for military, illness, and travel. A ban on transgender athletes in women’s sports. And a ban on gender-affirming care for minors. Trump called it an “88 percent issue with all voters.” That number is not supported by credible polling. He’s threatening to hold the entire legislative agenda of the United States government hostage unless Republicans ram through a bill specifically designed to make it harder for millions of Americans to cast a ballot. Voter ID laws and citizenship requirements disproportionately affect the elderly, the poor, people of color, and young voters. This isn’t about election integrity. It’s about who gets to vote and who doesn’t. When a president uses his veto power as a weapon to restrict voting rights, that’s not governing. That’s the slow dismantling of democracy.
Trump’s Own Cabinet is Buying Nuclear Bunkers
Here’s the one that should keep you up at night. Two senior Trump Cabinet members have secretly ordered nuclear survival bunkers since the U.S. attack on Iran began, according to The Telegraph. The owner of Atlas, a Texas company that builds shelters designed to withstand biological and nuclear fallout and EMP attacks, says inquiries have gone up tenfold since the war started. One Cabinet official texted him asking when his bunker would be ready. His recent clients are almost all, in his words, “Christian, conservative CEOs,” including several of the wealthiest men on the planet. The revelation alarmed even conservatives. The senior editor of The American Conservative asked publicly why senior Trump officials are urgently ordering Armageddon-proof bunkers for themselves. It’s a fair question. These are the people who launched this war. These are the people telling you it’s under control. And they’re quietly making sure they’ll be safe when it isn’t. If the architects of this conflict are preparing for nuclear fallout, the least they could do is be honest with the rest of us about what they’ve started.
And that’s the way it is, Today is Monday, March 9th, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
