Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report. News for the public, not the powerful.
Why Did Ninety-Three Democrats Race to the Courthouse?
It took them no time at all. The Justice Department announced something Monday called “The Anti-Weaponization Fund,” and within hours nearly a hundred House Democrats were filing papers to stop it cold. Here’s the deal. Donald Trump sued the IRS for ten billion dollars over the leak of his tax returns during his first term. Now he’s dropping that suit, and in exchange the DOJ wants to stand up a fund worth one point seven seven six billion taxpayer dollars to pay so-called victims of government “weaponization.” That money comes straight out of the federal judgment fund. Ninety-three Democrats, led by Joe Neguse, Jamie Raskin, Richard Neal, and Hakeem Jeffries, filed an amicus brief warning of “a specter of corruption unparalleled in American history.” They want Judge Kathleen Williams to throw the lawsuit out. Critics call it a slush fund for January 6th rioters and political allies, and they’re not wrong to worry. When a president can sue the government, drop the suit, and then walk away with nearly two billion dollars to hand out to his friends, the line between the public treasury and a personal piggy bank has been erased. Legal experts say it sets a precedent for every future president to file a frivolous lawsuit and cash out. That’s not a settlement. That’s a heist with a court stamp on it.
Is Pete Hegseth Running a Stealth Campaign for President?
Watch where the powerful go and you’ll learn what they want. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took an unusual trip to a Kentucky congressional district, stumping for a Trump-endorsed challenger taking on Republican Thomas Massie. Associated Press reporter Michelle Price told CNN that this odd little detour might tell us something bigger. She said Hegseth “might be potentially interested in running for president,” and called the trip “a very interesting kind of campaign debut.” Massie isn’t buying the friendly act. He told ABC News, “They’re desperate. That’s why they’re sending the secretary of war to my district.” He says AIPAC dumped another three million dollars into the race over a single weekend. So here’s what’s really going on. Trump likes to test his people on the campaign trail, and Hegseth just got handed an audition. When a sitting Defense Secretary moonlights as a campaign surrogate while eyeing 2028, the line between running the Pentagon and running for office gets dangerously thin.
Did Greenland Just Tell Washington to Back Off Again?
Trump’s special envoy to Greenland, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, landed in Nuuk this week, and Greenland’s leaders had a message ready. Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said the meeting was respectful, but he drew a hard line. He said, “The Greenlandic people are not for sale.” He told reporters that Greenlandic self-determination is not something that can be negotiated. This comes after months of Trump openly talking about taking control of the island, and after his administration floated sending a Navy hospital ship to a place that already has free, universal health care. Greenland’s foreign minister, Múte Egede, said a working group with the US and Denmark is still trying to find a path forward, but the message from Nuuk was unmistakable. They want cooperation, not a takeover. When the most powerful country on earth keeps eyeing a tiny island like a piece of real estate, the people who actually live there have every right to say no, and to keep saying it as many times as it takes. Greenlanders are not bargaining chips, and they are not test cases for somebody else’s ambitions. Sovereignty isn’t a negotiation. It’s a fact.
How Many American Children Has the ICE Surge Torn From Their Parents?
The number will stop you in your tracks. A new analysis from the Brookings Institution estimates that roughly one hundred forty-five thousand children have already experienced family separation under this administration’s deportation push. Around four hundred thousand people have been booked into ICE detention after interior arrests since Trump took office. About thirty-six percent of the children whose parents were detained were younger than six years old. Let that sink in. Toddlers. Babies. Kids who can’t tie their own shoes are watching agents handcuff their mothers and fathers. And Brookings warns the threat is far larger than the kids already hit, because millions of US citizen children live in households with an undocumented parent. There are no reliable government numbers on what happens to these children once a parent disappears into detention. A government that loses track of the children it separates isn’t enforcing the law. It’s inflicting trauma at an industrial scale, and it’s doing it to American kids who did nothing wrong except be born to the wrong parents. Those children will carry this for the rest of their lives, and so will the country that did it to them.
What Nine Words Did Mamdani Call Scarier Than Reagan’s?
We’ll end with something different. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani opened the city’s second municipal grocery store this week, and he used the moment to take a swing at an old conservative idea. Ronald Reagan famously said the nine most terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Mamdani disagreed. He said the truly terrifying nine words are, “I worked all day and can’t feed my family.” He’s put seventy million dollars toward a public grocery store in every borough, and this newest one sits on the site of a former youth detention center in the Bronx. As he put it, “It’s not just that government can help, it’s that government must help and our government will help.” For forty years we were told government was the problem. Mamdani just built the answer on the ruins of a jail. That’s what it looks like when somebody actually means it.
And that’s the way it is, Today Monday, May 18, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
