Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Did Trump Just Forget His Own Press Secretary’s Name on Her First Day?
Katie Zacharia took the White House podium this morning as the 37th press secretary in American history. She lasted 14 minutes. She read from a script, took exactly three questions from friendly outlets, and walked off. Critics across the spectrum called it a disaster. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins looked stunned when it ended. One White House official told Mediaite she needs to get much better, fast. Bettors started wagering on whether she’d outlast Anthony Scaramucci’s 10 days. So the White House did what it always does. It blasted out an email calling her debut “commanding” and “powerful,” complete with five bullet points about how Katie “opened the briefing with clear purpose.” Then reporters caught Trump on the lawn heading to Alaska and asked how she’d done. His answer? “Who?” He turned, looked at her, and said she did “very good.” This is the same woman who calls herself a lawyer even though Mediaite reports there’s no evidence she ever passed the bar. The press secretary is supposed to be the public’s window into the executive branch. When that window is a scripted 14-minute hit-and-run from someone the president can’t name, that’s not communication. That’s contempt for your right to know.
Does the Godfather of AI Think Trump Is a Corrupt, Senile Felon?
Yes. And he said it out loud. Geoffrey Hinton is the Nobel laureate and University of Toronto scientist whose work built the foundation of modern artificial intelligence. In a new interview with The Guardian, the 78-year-old called Trump “a corrupt, senile felon” who understands almost nothing about the technology. His proof? Trump recently declared the United States would stop saying “artificial intelligence” and start saying “super intelligence.” Hinton pointed out that superintelligence is a technical term with a clear meaning for 20 years. You can’t make a machine smarter than people just by renaming it. Hinton saved his sharpest words for Trump’s push to let the AI industry police itself. He said oil and asbestos companies would’ve loved that deal too, and asked whether tobacco companies should’ve been allowed to design their own warning labels in six-point grey type on a black background. He compared AI to alien beings arriving on Earth and said we’ve got a couple of years to adapt. When the man who built this technology says the president is too compromised and too clueless to regulate it, working people should ask who exactly is being protected here. It isn’t us.
Did Trump’s Taxpayer-Funded Propaganda Keep Running After a Judge Said Stop?
It did. Hundreds of times. Federal Judge Jennifer Rochon ordered the Trump administration Sunday evening to pull its taxpayer-funded campaign-style ads off the air by 6:45 Eastern. The Justice Department had just told her the ads “will not continue past tomorrow.” Then AdImpact data reviewed by CNN showed two of the spots, “Final Battle” and “Maduro,” airing hundreds of times after the deadline, and a third still running Monday afternoon. A DOJ lawyer later apologized to the court and blamed a missed email. Here’s the money. The White House budget office pulled $20 million out of Customs and Border Protection and labeled it “commemorative events” for the big tax bill. A sworn declaration from DHS official Holly Mehringer admits $19 million of it went to ad buys for at least 13 spots on CBS, CNN, Fox and elsewhere. On October 5th, Trump said he’d pay for them himself through his super PAC. Six days later, you were still paying. The White House now says there’ll be no refund. Common Cause and the DNC are suing because federal law bans using your money for propaganda. This is what it looks like when the Treasury becomes a campaign account.
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Is a Dead Russian Lab Worker Sparking a Plague Panic in China?
On October 2nd, a 28 year old technician named Darya Shipilova died at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Siberia. She’d been hospitalized three days earlier with severe pneumonia. Local reports say a lab accident. Nearly 200 people were put under medical observation. A senior Russian official posted that she died of plague, then quietly edited it to “possibly.” Russia has since told the World Health Organization that testing found no plague and no high-threat pathogens. But the WHO’s own notice Sunday said the biggest uncertainty is that nobody has a confirmed diagnosis, and WHO chief Tedros is pressing Moscow about a second sick employee Russia insists doesn’t exist. Now the fear has jumped the border. Council on Foreign Relations expert Yanzhong Huang flagged posts on Chinese social media urging people in three northeastern provinces to stockpile food and masks and warning of lockdowns. Unconfirmed claims of cases in Shanghai and Chongqing are flying. No Chinese official has confirmed anything. Experts say plague is treatable with antibiotics, and a British virologist says this looks like a rare lab accident unlikely to spread. But here’s the lesson. When governments lie about health emergencies, rumor fills the vacuum. That’s true in Moscow, Beijing, and Washington too.
Did a MAGA Pundit Get a Call From the Lawyers Over the Talarico Smear?
Over the weekend, the right-wing internet went wild over a claim that James Talarico, the Democrat running against Ken Paxton for Senate in Texas, had been treated at a mental health facility in Ohio. His campaign said he was home in Austin with the flu. The story collapsed within hours because the timeline was physically impossible. Now conservative journalist Carmine Sabia has issued a full apology, writing that “the truth matters more than winning on a lie.” He even posted a custom-made retraction graphic. That’s what caught everyone’s eye. Will Sommer of The Bulwark noted the story is so discredited that pundits are designing personalized retraction art. Commentator Adam Cochran suspects Sabia got a call from the lawyers. Author John Daly guessed the same. Even MAGA commentator Eric Spracklen called the whole episode embarrassing and discrediting for everyone involved. Think about what happened here. A fabricated medical smear against a Senate candidate spread across the entire right-wing ecosystem in one weekend. The only thing that stopped it wasn’t honor or ethics. It was the fear of a defamation suit. That’s the state of the information war heading into the midterms, and voters are the collateral damage.
Crazy Alert! Did Trump’s New Press Secretary Land the Job by Stalking His TV Schedule?
Politico Playbook reports that Katie Zacharia didn’t openly campaign for the job after Karoline Leavitt quit in August. She auditioned instead. A person familiar with her strategy says she checked Trump’s public schedule every day, monitored his activity on Truth Social, and then booked herself on television for the exact windows when she figured the president might have the TV on. The Washington Examiner says she managed as many as seven cable hits in a single day. It worked. The Washington Post reports Trump started texting her congratulations over the summer. Anchors at Fox, Newsmax, and One America News lobbied for her. Trump announced her Friday, praising her “unblemished record of support.” Before this, she had a brief stint as a DHS spokeswoman and then went to work for Trump Media, the company that runs Truth Social. So the most important spokesperson in the federal government got hired by talking to Trump through his television set, like a contestant auditioning for a reality show. Then she flopped the moment she had to talk to the actual public. That’s how this White House staffs itself. Not on competence. On who shows up most often on the screen.
And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, October 13, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
