Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Did Trump Just Claim Iran’s Waters As American Territory?
Donald Trump posted a map on Truth Social Tuesday morning labeling the Strait of Hormuz a new U.S. territory. That waterway sits inside the territorial waters of Iran and Oman. It isn’t ours. It never was. Trump floated the idea at a campaign-style event Friday, then claimed Monday that we already control it. Mark Copelovitch, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, said it “should be a huge, presidency-ending scandal.” He pointed to Article 2 of the United Nations Charter, which forbids the threat of force against the territorial integrity of any state. Since January of 2025, Trump has threatened to take Canada, Cuba, Gaza, Greenland, the Panama Canal, Venezuela, and now Hormuz. About two hours after that post, he declared talks with Iran dead and said the naval blockade stays in force. Here’s what nobody in Washington wants to say out loud. Treaties aren’t suggestions. We wrote that charter. We sold it to the world after we buried a generation in Europe and the Pacific. And when an American president treats it like scrap paper, every strongman on earth takes notes, because the rule we break today becomes the rule they use on us tomorrow.
Trump’s Numbers Falling Off A Cliff? Can He Survive?
Reuters and Ipsos put Trump’s approval at 33%, with 64% disapproving. That’s the lowest of his career, tying his worst mark from December of 2017. CNN’s Harry Enten says Trump’s net approval now sits 31 points underwater, a 37-point collapse from the plus-six he carried into this term. Independents are the story. He’s 47 points underwater with them, down 46 points since January of 2025. Enten didn’t soften it. “He is losing.” CNN political director David Chalian says the unpopularity of the Iran war and high gas prices have Republicans in a panic heading into November. Quinnipiac had Trump at 32. AP and NORC had him at 33. And for the first time in roughly a decade, voters trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle the economy. Enten’s parallel isn’t 2018. It’s 2006, when George W. Bush sat 31 points underwater and Republicans lost both the House and the Senate. But polling isn’t power. Republicans have already redrawn congressional maps to blunt the damage and they’ll outspend Democrats this fall. So the question isn’t whether working people are furious. They are. The question is whether that fury can survive the machinery that’s been built to absorb it.
Did Trump Just Blow Up Our Important Relationship With South Korea?
Trump ordered the Pentagon Sunday to substantially reduce joint military exercises with South Korea. He called them costly and said they send a hostile signal to Pyongyang, and he pointed to his warm relationship with Kim Jong Un. Seoul answered fast. President Lee Jae Myung used a Cabinet meeting Tuesday to accelerate two programs Washington has slow-walked for years, the transfer of wartime command over South Korean troops and a nuclear-powered submarine fleet. Right now, if fighting breaks out on that peninsula, an American four-star general commands South Korean forces. That’s been the arrangement since the Korean War. Lee wants it back before his term ends in 2030. He said “a strong alliance makes the foundation of security stronger.” The Ulchi Freedom Shield drills started Monday anyway, and the Pentagon still hasn’t explained what changes. North Korea has run 11 ballistic missile tests this year. Watch what’s actually happening. When you humiliate an ally in public to flatter a dictator, that ally stops planning around you. Seventy years of American standing in East Asia is being traded for a photo op with Kim, and once a country decides it needs its own submarines and its own command, it never unlearns that lesson.
Wall Street Cashes In as Americans Borrow Money to Keep the Lights On
Here’s where Trump’s economy has landed. Companies that sell buy now, pay later loans are now marketing them for your power bill. The New York Times reported Monday that the lending apps Flex and Zip let customers borrow to cover broadband, electricity, health insurance, phone service, mortgage payments, and water bills. Affirm is fronting renters a few extra weeks on rent. Intuit is pushing File Now, Pay Later to people who owe on their taxes. Dentists and veterinarians offer it at the chair. Federal data shows electricity prices are up 18% since Trump took office again, after he promised to cut household power bills in half. A Data for Progress poll for Protect Borrowers found 46% of these borrowers used the loans for groceries and 39% for utility bills. LendingTree found almost half of users have paid late in the past year. Jennifer Zhang of Protect Borrowers put it plainly. “Americans need help.” This isn’t credit really. It’s a country where working people have to finance the electricity that keeps the refrigerator running, at rates that rival a credit card, while the same Wall Street that broke the economy collects on your misery.
Is Chuck Schumer’s Time As Leader Finally Running Out?
A growing number of Democratic Senate nominees say flat out they won’t back Chuck Schumer for another term as leader. Progressive candidates have now won Senate primaries in Illinois, Maine, Michigan, and Minnesota, and several of them campaigned directly against him. Juliana Stratton in Illinois. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been endorsing them. The anger traces back to March of 2025, when Schumer delivered the votes for a Republican funding bill, and it flared again when a 43-day shutdown ended with eight Senate Democrats breaking ranks. More than 50 progressive groups called on him to step down. A Marist poll in February found just 27% of New York voters rate his performance as good or excellent, his worst since 1999. Schumer says the way to counter Trump is to “win the majority in 2026.” Understand what this fight is really about. It isn’t personalities and it isn’t age. It’s whether a party that takes money from the same billionaires and the same corporations as the other party can look a nurse in Toledo in the eye and promise to take those people on. Voters worked that out long before Washington did.
What Happens If The Whole Country Goes Dark?
The New York Times Magazine published a piece Tuesday by Christopher Cox asking a question nobody in power wants to answer. What if America went completely dark? Our entire grid depends on large power transformers. They’re hand-built, custom-made, they weigh hundreds of tons, and you can’t order one off a shelf. Roughly 80% of the big ones used in this country are imported, mostly from Mexico and South Korea. Wood Mackenzie found standard power transformers now average 128 weeks to deliver. The generator step-up units average 144 weeks. Some orders stretch four years. One American company still makes the electrical steel at their core. More than half of our distribution transformers are already past their expected service life. So if enough of them fail at once, from a storm, an attack, or plain old age, the lights don’t come back in days. As the Times puts it, the blackout “could last years.” Think about what that means. No water pumps. No refrigerated insulin. No gas stations. And this is the bill coming due for forty years of letting Wall Street strip this country for parts and calling it efficiency. We offshored the machine that keeps grandma’s oxygen running, and nobody in either party thought to ask what happens when we need another one in a hurry.
And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, August 18, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
