Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Does The World Still Trust America?
A brand new Pew Research survey of more than forty two thousand people across thirty six countries lands like a slap. Just twenty three percent say they have confidence in Donald Trump’s leadership of world affairs. The bigger story is reliability. In Canada, eighty three percent called the United States a reliable partner back in 2022. Today it’s thirty five percent. In Germany, the share who believe America even considers their interests fell from sixty percent to twenty three. A median of fifty seven percent now view the United States unfavorably, and favorable views dropped by double digits over the past year in places like Italy, South Korea and Turkey. There’s no country where opinion of Trump improved. When your closest friends stop trusting you, that isn’t strength. That’s a country burning down the alliances that kept it safe and prosperous for eighty years.
Is Stephen Miller About To Get Caught?
The secrets Stephen Miller has buried may finally see daylight. A federal judge in Alabama now holds an FBI report handed to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the civil rights group the Trump administration indicted on fraud charges. The report reads almost word for word like a letter that conservative groups sent Miller complaining about the SPLC’s Hate Map. Six passages match so closely they’re sometimes identical. After Charlie Kirk was killed, Miller vowed to use every federal resource to, quote, identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy liberal activist networks. Now the SPLC’s lawyers want every message between Miller and the Justice Department. When a grievance from one White House aide becomes a criminal case against his critics, that’s not law enforcement. That’s a hit list with a badge.
Can Mamdani Reshape The Democratic Party?
New York City just sent a thunderclap to Washington. Every single candidate Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed won their Democratic House primary, ousting two sitting members of Congress along the way. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a thirty two year old organizer, knocked off five term incumbent Adriano Espaillat. Brad Lander unseated Dan Goldman. And Claire Valdez took an open Brooklyn and Queens seat. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries campaigned hard against all of them and lost. Mamdani put it simply, quote, it’s not just electing more Democrats, it’s electing better Democrats. For a party that’s spent years chasing the center and losing, here’s the lesson. When you actually fight for working people, working people show up.
Are American Factories Quietly Bleeding Jobs?
Here’s a number the cheerleaders won’t put on television. Job cuts at American factories last month ran at their highest level since 2009, the depths of the financial crisis, leaving out only the Covid collapse. That’s from S and P Global, out Tuesday. Now they’ll wave around a headline manufacturing reading of fifty five point seven and call it a boom. But that bump came from companies stockpiling inventory, not from real demand. Behind it, factories are shedding workers to cut costs as input prices climb. Chief economist Chris Williamson said factory job cuts are running at the highest since 2009 if the pandemic is excluded. Lucid Motors alone just dumped about fifteen hundred people, eighteen percent of its workforce. So much for the manufacturing comeback they keep promising us.
It’s Not Easy Being Green
Donald Trump wanted the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool painted American flag blue for the country’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday. He spent more than fourteen million dollars on a no bid contract handed to a company that does pools at his own golf club. And now that two thousand and twenty eight foot pool is a glowing pond of green algae, with the blue paint peeling off in sheets that tourists are tearing loose for souvenirs. Robert Reich called the mess, quote, a metaphor for Trump’s many other messes. And he’s right. A vanity project, rushed, overpriced, handed to a crony, and falling apart in plain sight while the man in charge insists everything is beautiful. America, look at your reflection.
But Wait. There’s more...
So the green slime pond is winning. Trump can’t fix it, can’t explain it, and can’t produce a single one of the so called vandals he swears wrecked it. His solution? Surround the puddle with a military perimeter. On Tuesday the administration rolled in chain link fencing and brand new artificial intelligence surveillance cameras to guard the algae. And these aren’t ordinary cameras. According to TMZ they come loaded with real time tracking, intrusion detection, strobe lights, automated spotlights, and loud talk down horn speakers. Picture it. You wander up to look at Lincoln, and a robot floodlight blasts you while a speaker barks orders, all to protect a pool of pea soup. Trump claims vandals carved a three hundred foot gash and dumped chemicals in the water, and he’s threatening ten years in prison for anyone who touches it. They already arrested a former Olympic canoer for putting his hand near the peeling paint. Meanwhile, when a TMZ reporter went to the Park Service for the evidence Trump promised, they couldn’t back up a word of it and handed him someone else’s phone number scribbled on a crumpled piece of colored paper. The pool experts TMZ hired had a simpler theory. The paint never bonded. It’s self inflicted. So the most powerful government on Earth is now spending your money to put a slimy duck pond under armed guard and AI strobe lights. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez summed it up best. They turned it into, quote, an actual swamp.
And that’s the way it is, Today is Wednesday, June 24, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
