Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
How Trump is Planning To Steal The Midterms
Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland went on CNN this week and said the quiet part out loud. He’s watching Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton, a man who sat through his Senate confirmation hearings and refused to say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Trump has also ordered the nation’s intelligence agencies to get more involved in the midterms. Raskin says he’s been out campaigning in upstate New York and rural districts, and he isn’t seeing Republicans campaign at all. No door knocking. No rallies. Not even the red hats anymore.
“We see no evidence of Republican activity anywhere,” Raskin said.
And the intelligence office Clayton would inherit has been hollowed out. Tulsi Gabbard fired hundreds during her stretch as acting director, and the current acting chief, Bill Pulte, has run four more rounds of layoffs. When a party quits trying to win votes and starts staffing the machinery that counts them, that’s not politics anymore. That’s a heist being planned in broad daylight. Raskin also pointed back to 2016, when 17 American intelligence agencies concluded Vladimir Putin had interfered in our election and Trump took Putin’s word over all of them.
China Is Arming Iran While America Bombs It
Reuters reports that Iran will take delivery of its first shipment of Chinese shoulder fired anti aircraft missiles within weeks. The contract covers 300 to 400 launchers, worth 60 to 70 million dollars, signed through a Hong Kong shell company acting as the middleman. These are the weapons a soldier carries on his back and fires at low flying planes, helicopters and drones. Iran’s air defenses got shredded in five months of war with the United States and Israel, and now Tehran is buying replacements from Beijing. China’s Foreign Ministry calls the reporting “completely groundless.”
So look where this war has landed us. Five months into a fight we were promised would be short and glorious, Iran is rearming with Chinese hardware, and it’s American pilots who’ll have to fly into it. Two Western intelligence sources also told Reuters that Tehran is scouting overland routes to move Chinese military parts quietly, out of reach of anybody trying to stop the shipments.
Did The Tariffs Just Hand China A Win?
Here’s the punchline nobody at the White House wants to hear. Trump’s tariffs are pushing American companies back into China. When duties on Chinese goods hit 145 percent last year, brands scrambled into Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia. Now Washington has set the new rate on Chinese exports at 12.5%, about the same as everybody else, and the math has flipped. One Texas flashlight company spent 18 months and millions of dollars certifying new factories across Southeast Asia. Its operations chief says building the same product in Thailand runs up to 15% more.
“Have we pulled back to China? Yes, we have,” he said.
Working people paid for this experiment twice. Once at the checkout counter, and once in the jobs that never came home. A single Chinese town called Xidian still turns out roughly 60% of the world’s flashlights, and an economist at the Peterson Institute says that when the tariff gap closes, the business simply goes back.
How Do We Tax The Billionaires?
Paul Krugman just published the second part of his series on American oligarchy, and the numbers should stop you cold. In 1982, the 400 richest Americans were worth $92 billion combined, less than one percent of the nation’s wealth. By 2025, the Forbes 400 were worth $6.6 trillion, which works out to 26% of everything this country earns in a year. The New York Times found that 300 billionaire families put up 19% of all the political money in the 2024 election.
Krugman’s point is that income taxes can’t touch these people, because their fortunes swell as unrealized capital gains that never get sold and never get taxed. So he’s making the case for taxing wealth itself.
“I’m for whatever we can actually turn into effective legislation,” Krugman writes.
This isn’t envy. It’s arithmetic. A few hundred families now own enough to buy the government, and they’ve gone ahead and bought it. Krugman notes that Elon Musk bought Twitter, dragged it hard to the right, and then spent much of 2025 as the most powerful unelected man in America, tearing apart federal agencies from inside DOGE.
Why Is Rand Paul Putting Fauci On Trial?
Doctor Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security Committee and invoked his Fifth Amendment rights more than 100 times. Rand Paul, who chairs that committee, subpoenaed him and has said out loud he wants Fauci behind bars. Paul had Fauci’s own lawyer removed from the room by Capitol Police. Then he announced the committee will vote next week on holding Fauci in contempt of Congress. Fauci says Paul has an unhinged obsession with him. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called the whole spectacle what it was.
“One of the darkest days in our Senate’s history,” Blumenthal said.
Blumenthal reminded that room that during the worst week of the pandemic, the final week of Trump’s first term, more than 25,000 Americans died. Over one million died before it was over. And a man who gave 54 years to public service is now the villain in somebody’s reelection ad. Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio shouted a profanity at him across the dais. Senator Gary Peters, the ranking Democrat, said one-sided investigations built to confirm what somebody already decided don’t serve anybody.
Russia Wants Telegram’s Founder In A Cage
Russia’s FSB has charged Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, with aiding terrorism and placed him on an international wanted list. The agency claims Telegram refused to delete channels and bots used by Ukrainian intelligence to organize attacks inside Russia. It says a dating chatbot was used to recruit Russians for sabotage, and that 46 users between the ages of 12 and 22 have been rounded up since last summer. Durov is 41, carries French and Emirati passports, and lives in Dubai. If Moscow gets its hands on him, he faces up to life in prison. Telegram’s official response was a photograph of Durov holding up his middle finger.
Durov built Russia’s version of Facebook, then sold out and left in 2014 rather than hand the Kremlin the accounts of Ukrainian democracy activists. Back in April, the FSB delivered a summons to an apartment he had moved out of 20 years earlier. He shrugged it off.
“Proud to be guilty!” he wrote.
This is what dictators do. Putin has been throttling Telegram and walling off foreign platforms ever since he invaded Ukraine, because a strongman who can’t read your mail has a much harder time owning your mind.
And that’s the way it is, Today Wednesday, July 29, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
