Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Did Trump Just Call His Own Peace Deal a Hoax?
Donald Trump erupted on Truth Social Monday night. Axios reported U.S. officials say he’s prepared to ease sanctions and unfreeze Iranian funds if Tehran makes concessions on its nuclear program. Trump’s response? He called it a hoax and wrote, “I offered them NOTHING!” Yet one of his own officials told reporter Barak Ravid the talks have been positive and Iran has signaled flexibility on nuclear issues. Qatari mediators met with Iran’s foreign minister in New York Monday and are expected to sit down with Trump’s team next. Just Friday, Trump rejected an Iranian offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a week after he stood at the United Nations and wondered whether to annihilate Iran. Speaker Mike Johnson is begging him to end this war. When a president calls his own diplomacy fake news, who is running our foreign policy?
Renewables Bury Trump’s Fossil Fuel Crusade Under 88 Gigawatts
The Trump administration has spent 18 months trying to strangle clean energy. Canceled projects. Blocked permits. And it hasn’t worked. New numbers from the government’s own Energy Information Administration show that from February of last year through this July, solar, wind, and battery storage added nearly 89 gigawatts of capacity. Fossil fuels and nuclear combined? Just 2.6 gigawatts. That’s 34 to 1. Utility scale solar alone grew 33%. Battery storage doubled. Coal capacity shrank. And over the next 12 months, renewables and batteries are projected to add another 83 gigawatts while fossil fuel capacity falls. Ken Bossong of the SUN DAY Campaign put it plainly. “Clearly, the White House has bet on the wrong horse.” Every dollar Trump spends propping up fossil fuels is a dollar stolen from the workers who’ll build America’s future
Who Was Rummaging Through the Pentagon’s Personnel Files for Nine Months?
The Pentagon has confirmed a breach of one of its biggest personnel databases. Nearly 2.8 million living people and another 294,000 deceased had their information exposed. Names. Dates of birth. Social Security numbers. And the military jobs they held. The Defense Manpower Data Center keeps more than 60 million records on troops, veterans, and their families. A defense official says “a small number of unauthorized users” had access from October of last year until this July. That’s nine months. The files weren’t encrypted. Officials say there’s no evidence the data has been misused, and they’re offering 12 months of credit monitoring. And the FBI just told employees its own jobs portal was breached too. Think about what an adversary could do with a list of who does what inside our military. It’s a national security failure, and somebody needs to answer for it.
McMahon Guts Title IX, and Trans Kids Pay the Price
Education Secretary Linda McMahon made it official Monday. The Trump administration threw out the Biden era Title IX rule that protected students from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Schools now go back to the 2020 Betsy DeVos rule. McMahon previewed the move on a Fox sports show, calling it a return to boys in boys’ sports and girls in girls’ sports. What she left out? The DeVos rule also narrowed the kinds of sexual harassment complaints schools have to investigate, and required live hearings where survivors face cross examination. Shiwali Patel of the National Women’s Law Center said the administration is “weaponizing Title IX to attack trans students.” A planned amendment would define sex as an immutable biological classification, and the public likely won’t get to comment. That’s not protection. That’s a political weapon aimed at children.
Will Vance’s Child Care Plan Push Single Moms Out of Work?
Trump wants to raid the Child Care and Development Fund. It’s the program that lets low income parents afford care so they can work. The plan, championed by JD Vance, would take that money and hand it to married couples where one parent stays home. The fund is so starved it reaches 16% of eligible kids. And 82 percent of the families it serves are headed by a single parent, mostly mothers. The Economic Policy Institute calls the plan “effectively an attack on single parents.” Without subsidies, a minimum wage worker in Alabama would spend every paycheck from January to July to cover care for one infant. Prices rise for everyone and some centers close. Want to help stay at home parents? Great. Fund it. Don’t steal it from working moms.
Food Banks Sound the Alarm as Trump’s War Empties the Shelves
Trump’s policies are crushing America’s food banks. His Iran war has pushed diesel to record highs, so it costs more to truck food to hungry people. Families left with less for groceries line up at the pantry door. Craig Rice of Maryland’s Manna Food Center says he’s seeing salaried workers, not just hourly ones. In North Carolina, Amy Beros reports demand up 20% to 60% in a year. “It’s really hard for people in the United States to understand the scale of hunger,” she said. In Kalamazoo, requests for help are up 56 percent. Next month, states must cover a bigger share of SNAP administrative costs under Trump’s big ugly bill. This is what a war economy looks like when the bill comes due. Hungry families pay it.
And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, September 29, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
