Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Did ICE Just Confess to Hiring Whoever Showed Up?
A career ICE official just blew the whistle on his own agency, and what he described should scare every American. This man spent seventeen years at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He knows how the place is supposed to run. He told the New York Times that ICE deliberately gutted its hiring standards to slam thousands of new agents into the field. Recruits got job offers before fingerprint checks came back. Before identity checks came back. Before credit checks came back. Political appointees skipped background investigations altogether. Training got chopped from ten weeks down to six. The whistleblower filed a formal complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general last August, and it’s now part of an active audit. He put it simply. “We chose as an agency to be more convenient rather than thorough,” he said. This isn’t a paperwork problem. These are the people showing up at your door with guns and the legal authority to use them. Senators are already demanding DHS explain why recruits with failed drug tests and pending criminal charges got sent out on the street. When a nation lowers the bar for who gets to carry a badge, it isn’t protecting anyone. It’s building a force that answers to no one but itself.
Hegseth Bets America’s Troops on a War with No End
Pete Hegseth told the country the Iran war would be quick. Six months later, he’s quietly signing paperwork that says otherwise. The Wall Street Journal reports the Pentagon chief is extending deployments of American troops, fighter squadrons and warships across the Middle East all the way into 2027. Right now there are fifty thousand American troops sitting in that region. Elements of the Army’s 82nd Airborne could stay there deep into next year. Nineteen warships. Air defense units. A maintenance backlog the military itself says could take years to unwind. Letters sent to military families admit as much, with one acknowledging that a longer tour weighs heavily on every household. Meanwhile Trump is privately floating the idea of just declaring the war over, even while the bombing continues. So which is it? Is this war winding down, or is Hegseth locking in another year and a half of it? Families deserve a straight answer, and so do the troops standing watch in the Strait of Hormuz while their commander in chief tries to figure out how to spin an exit. Wars that drag on quietly are still wars. They just get easier for Washington to ignore.
Robert Reich Demands Congress Impeach Hegseth Now - I agree!
Robert Reich isn’t mincing words anymore. The former Labor Secretary says Pete Hegseth is the most incompetent person in the entire Trump regime, and he’s only counting Trump himself as worse. Reich points to the record. Hegseth pushed for the Iran war when Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance and even Tulsi Gabbard warned against it. He’s lied his way through six months of Pentagon chaos. And now Dan Driscoll, the Secretary of the Army and an old friend of Vance’s from law school, just resigned after clashing with him over how badly Hegseth is damaging military modernization. Reich’s answer is simple. If Trump won’t fire him, Congress should impeach him and the Senate should convict. That’s not a fringe position anymore. House Democrats have already filed formal articles of impeachment against Hegseth this year. Progressive groups have sent close to eighteen thousand letters to Congress demanding action. The man running America’s military keeps failing upward while service members pay the price on the ground. At some point accountability has to mean something, or the title Secretary of Defense stops meaning anything at all.
Does Howard Lutnick’s Family Get Rich Off Your Tariffs?
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick spent the past week screaming at Canada on television. He says Prime Minister Mark Carney blew up “the greatest trade deal in the world” for political reasons. Here’s what he’s not telling you. His own family stands to make billions if the tariffs he’s defending stay in place as long as possible. Before Lutnick joined the cabinet, he ran Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm now run by his sons Brandon and Kyle. Reporting last year revealed Cantor was buying up companies’ tariff refund claims for pennies on the dollar, betting the Supreme Court would eventually strike the tariffs down and pay out in full. In February, the Court did exactly that, ruling six to three that Trump never had the authority to impose those tariffs. The refund pool could top a $170 billion. The longer the tariff chaos drags on, the bigger that payout gets for the family firm. Congress noticed. Jamie Raskin opened an investigation. Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden sent their own letters demanding records. So when Lutnick blames Carney for walking away, ask yourself who actually benefits from the deal collapsing. It’s not American steelworkers. It’s not Canadian autoworkers. It’s the Lutnick family bank account, and that should make every one of us furious.
Is America Trading Its Allies for Satellites?
Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf laid out something chilling this week. He wrote that Donald Trump doesn’t believe in allies anymore. He believes in satellites, countries that exist to serve one purpose, obeying whatever Washington demands.Look at the evidence. Trump slashed joint military exercises with South Korea. He’s demanding a veto over which countries Canada can even trade with. He wants first right of refusal on Canada’s natural resources. That’s not partnership. That’s the language of an empire, not an alliance. Wolf compares this moment to the era after World War Two, when leaders like Truman and Marshall built a system of shared power that helped rebuild a shattered world. Trump, Wolf argues, sees all of that as naive. He wants a world where America alone holds the cards and everyone else falls in line or gets left behind. But empires built on fear don’t hold. Allies who feel treated like vassals eventually look for the exit, and once they leave they don’t come back easily. If the United States spends the next few years bullying the very countries that trusted it since 1945, what happens when we actually need them? Power without partnership isn’t strength. It’s isolation wearing a crown.
Trump’s Ag Secretary Invents an Imaginary Kamala Crime Wave
Time for your Crazy Alert, and honestly, this one’s a doozy. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins went on Fox Business and delivered a truly wild bit of alternate history. She told viewers that if Kamala Harris had won in 2024, she would have thrown America’s ranchers in prison. Not fined them. Not regulated them. Imprisoned them. Rollins pointed to a South Dakota ranching family who got hit with federal charges under the Biden administration, charges the Trump administration later dropped. From that one case, Rollins built an entire fictional dystopia where President Harris personally hunts down cattle ranchers over fence lines and irrigation pivots. She didn’t stop there. Rollins also warned darkly about Democrats pushing Americans toward “fake meat” and “lab grown meat,” as if a soy patty at Whole Foods was one election away from replacing the family cattle ranch. Never mind that Trump’s own administration briefly lifted tariffs on imported ground beef last month because prices got so high, a move that drew furious complaints from Republican senators representing actual cattle states. So there you have it. In Brooke Rollins’ imagination, the real threat to American ranching wasn’t record beef prices or tariff chaos. It was a woman who never even got the chance to be president. That’s not agriculture policy. That’s science fiction with a cowboy hat on.
And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday, September 3rd, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
