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Commonwealth Report, Monday, May 4, 2026 - AM edition

Trump goes full Pirate. Cuba, no surrender. Trump owns Supreme Court. RFK vaccine lies. Trump call black Democrat a thug. Trump kills wind power.

Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report. News for the public, not the powerful. Sign up at CommonwealthReport.news

Trump Goes Full Pirate—Diplomacy Walks the Plank. Gas prices go up.

President Trump just lit a match next to the Iran ceasefire. He’s launching what he’s calling Project Freedom, sending the US Navy into the Strait of Hormuz starting today to escort stranded ships through Iran’s blockade. Tehran isn’t buying the humanitarian story. The head of Iran’s national security commission warned that any American interference in the strait will be considered a ceasefire violation. Then there’s Trump himself, bragging at a Florida fundraiser about US forces seizing Iranian tankers. He told the crowd they took over the cargo and the oil, and called it a very profitable business. Quote, we’re sort of like pirates. The president of the United States calling his own Navy pirates while gas hits four thirty-nine a gallon. This isn’t peacekeeping. It’s the pretext for the next war.

Cuba Tells Trump There Will Be No Surrender

While he’s threatening Iran, Trump’s also threatening Cuba. At that same Palm Beach dinner Friday, he told the room the United States will be taking over Cuba almost immediately. He said the USS Abraham Lincoln will swing by Havana on the way back from Iran and force the regime to surrender. Hours earlier he’d signed an executive order tightening already brutal sanctions on Cuba’s energy and banking sectors. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel fired back Saturday with one line that landed hard. Quote, no aggressor, no matter how powerful, will find surrender in Cuba. Senator Tim Kaine called it another illegal regime change attempt and introduced a Cuba War Powers Resolution. Two wars at once isn’t a foreign policy. It’s an empire on autopilot.

Did Trump Just Buy the Supreme Court Over Dinner?

Last Tuesday night at the White House, all six Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices showed up for a black-tie state dinner with Donald Trump. Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett. Every single one. Not a single liberal justice. Hours later that same court released a six to three decision gutting the Voting Rights Act, letting states tear apart Black-majority congressional districts across the South. Trump publicly thanked Justice Alito on Truth Social for authoring the opinion. Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent that the ruling effectively kills the law. Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck said it makes the court look like it’s playing partisan favorites. Six justices wining and dining with the president, then knifing the Voting Rights Act on his behalf. That’s not a court. That’s a wing of the White House.

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Is RFK Junior Drowning America in Vaccine Lies?

A blistering new report says yes. Autism advocates warn misinformation from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior has created what they call a crisis of public trust. The report calls on Congress to hold oversight hearings and consider impeaching Kennedy. He’s spent the last year pushing the debunked claim that Tylenol during pregnancy causes autism, even after a Danish study of 1.5 million children found no such link. He’s stacked the federal autism committee with anti-vaccine activists and conspiracy theorists. He’s even floated sending neurodivergent Americans to work farms. This isn’t health policy. It’s quack medicine running the Department of Health and Human Services. And the people paying the price are pregnant women, autistic kids, and every parent now too terrified to vaccinate.

Why Is Trump Calling the Top Black Democrat a “Thug”?

Friday night, Trump posted a doctored image of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries holding a baseball bat, with a caption calling Jeffries a low IQ Democrat minority leader, a thug, and a danger to the country. For the record, Jeffries graduated magna cum laude from NYU Law and holds a master’s from Georgetown. Trump won’t release his own college transcripts. Imagine for one second if Barack Obama had posted a picture of Mitch McConnell and called him a low-IQ thug. Cable news would have had nervous breakdowns for a month. But when Trump aims the same tired racist dog whistles he’s used for years against Maxine Waters, Don Lemon, and every prominent Black critic, the press shrugs and treats it like Tuesday. Silence is complicity.

Trump Just Killed America’s Wind Power During an Oil War

And here’s where it gets infuriating. While Trump’s Iran war has gas at four dollars and forty cents a gallon, while Spirit Airlines just shut down because jet fuel doubled, while every American is watching their grocery bill explode, his Pentagon just quietly halted approvals for 165 onshore wind farms across America. The Financial Times broke the story Sunday. The excuse? National security. The reality? Trump thinks turbines are ugly. So in the middle of an oil crisis his own war created, he’s strangling the cheapest, fastest, cleanest source of new American electricity we’ve got. Wind developers say they’ve been ghosted since August. Meetings cancelled. Applications frozen. While Big Oil pockets record profits and Americans bleed at the pump, Trump’s torching the one industry that could free us. That isn’t policy. That’s sabotage.

And that’s the way it is, Today Monday, May 4, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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