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Did Trump just hand Iran diplomacy to two real estate guys who flunked out?
Donald Trump’s Iran negotiations are collapsing, and veteran diplomats are calling it a disaster. Speaking to Time magazine, former State Department Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller said Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff get a flat F in diplomacy. Two Manhattan real estate developers, completely out of their depth, trying to navigate one of the most complex geopolitical stages on earth. Their track record? Failed Russia-Ukraine talks. Stalled Israel-Hamas negotiations. Now a nuclear crisis with Iran. Former Ambassador David Satterfield said real negotiators need red lines, realistic assessments, and internal discipline. Kushner and Witkoff have none of it. And here’s the bigger problem. Trump surrounds himself with yes-men who won’t tell him the truth. Four Defense Secretaries. Six National Security Advisors. When nobody can speak truth to power, diplomacy dies, and wars begin. This is how empires stumble into catastrophe.
Trump threatens to fire Jay Powell as Fed showdown explodes
Trump says he’ll fire Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell if the Senate doesn’t confirm his replacement Kevin Warsh by May 15. But there’s a problem. Republican Senator Thom Tillis won’t vote yes until the Justice Department drops its bogus investigation of Powell over Fed renovation costs. On Tuesday, three Justice Department officials, sent by US Attorney Jeanine Pirro, showed up unannounced at the Fed’s construction site to snoop around. Fed lawyers turned them away. A federal judge already quashed earlier DOJ subpoenas, ruling there’s abundant evidence the real purpose is to harass Powell into resigning or bending on interest rates. This is what authoritarian capture of an independent central bank looks like. Trump wants lower rates no matter what it does to inflation, and he’s using federal prosecutors as a political weapon. When the president can fire the Fed chair for not obeying, your savings and your paycheck are next.
Is Trump calling Epstein rape survivors “victims or whatever”?
Trump set off a firestorm Thursday when he brushed off Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors as, quote, victims or whatever. He made the comment outside the White House when asked about public hearings for Epstein survivors, falsely claiming the women had refused to testify under oath. That was a lie. Progressive commentator Aaron Parnas shot back that no one refused. The survivors told Congress it wasn’t their job to testify again after they’d already spoken with the FBI. Commentator Polly Sigh went further, pointing out that at least one of Epstein’s survivors has accused Trump himself of raping her when she was a child. NHL analyst Mike Rifkin put it plainly. Trump may have recently depicted himself as Jesus, but he is the devil. Think about what it says when the President of the United States calls rape survivors victims or whatever. That’s not a slip of the tongue. That’s contempt for women, contempt for the truth, and contempt for justice itself.
Why is ICE hiding how immigrants keep dying in custody?
Sixteen immigrants have died in ICE detention already this year. In all of 2024, eleven died. Last year, thirty-three died. The most in more than two decades. And now ICE is deliberately hiding the details. Until December, the agency released three-page reports on every death with full timelines, medical records, and causes of death. Now you get four paragraphs. At Camp East Montana in El Paso, a detainee’s death was ruled a homicide by the local coroner, but ICE called it suicide. A Nicaraguan man with no criminal record, Victor Diaz, died eight days after being shipped there from Minneapolis. Another man in Georgia was found hanging after being arrested for an expired driver’s license. Sixty thousand people still in custody, nearly double pre-Trump levels. Facilities overcrowded, hot, plagued by illness. When a government kills people and hides the records, that’s not immigration enforcement. That’s cruelty by design.
Clarence Thomas caught running what critics call an outright psyop
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is being hammered by political analysts for a speech he gave at the University of Texas Law School denouncing progressivism as a threat to America. Thomas, 77 years old, told the audience that progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and that our rights come from God, not government. Investigative journalist Jacke Singh called it an outright psyop attempt. Narrative inversion. Manipulation from a sitting justice. Mehdi Hasan said if Democrats had a spine, they’d run on impeaching this financially corrupt justice. Norm Ornstein called Thomas the most corrupt justice in American history. Meanwhile, Trump is openly floating replacing two or three justices before the midterms. Thomas isn’t a neutral judge. He’s a political operative in a black robe who takes luxury vacations from billionaires and then lectures the country about God and freedom. The court has become a wrecking ball aimed at democracy itself.
California’s ocean is cooking, and it’s terrifying scientists
The Pacific Ocean off California is simmering in an extreme marine heat wave that experts say could reshape the coast for months. The Scripps Pier in La Jolla has already broken more than twenty-five daily temperature records this year. Yesterday the surface water hit 68.5 degrees. Almost eight degrees above average. The sea bottom was the hottest April 15 in a hundred years of records. The hot water stretches from San Francisco all the way to Mexico. NOAA scientist Dillon Amaya said it’s reminiscent of what they called the blob, a killer heat wave from 2014 to 2016 that wiped out seabirds, starved sea lions, collapsed fisheries, and destroyed kelp forests. There’s now a 70 percent chance this heat wave lasts through December. And an El Nino is coming to make it worse. Climate scientist Daniel Swain said every marine heat wave from here on will be warmer than the last. This is global warming, live and in real time. And our government is still subsidizing the fossil fuel companies burning the planet.
And that’s the way it is, Tonight Thursday April 16, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
