Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful
Is The President’s Brain Broken?
President Trump stormed off an NBC News set on Sunday after Kristen Welker pressed him on his false claims that the twenty twenty election was rigged. Trump raised his voice, attacked the press, declared the interview over, and walked out. He’s done it before, bailing on CBS in twenty twenty and NPR in twenty twenty-two when reporters pushed back. But this time the reaction came fast and hard. Critics called him emotionally unstable and said he’d gone on a paranoid, babbling rant. Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari put it “This man lost his mind a long time ago,” she said. When a president can’t sit through one honest question, that’s not strength. That’s a man who can’t handle the truth about his own defeat.
Whose Side Was Hegseth On At Normandy?
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used the eighty-second anniversary of D-Day to compare migrants crossing the Mediterranean to the Nazi invasion of Europe. Standing on the beaches where Americans died fighting fascism, he asked when Europe would stop the boats and the men arriving. The backlash was instant and bipartisan. A retired British air marshal called it ignorant and disrespectful. A national security writer noted Hegseth had somehow cast the West as the defenders of the beaches, the very spot where the Nazis stood. Commentator Anna Neumann didn’t hold back. “Using D-Day commemorations as a platform for culture-war politics is shameless,” she said. Those soldiers gave their lives to defeat the ideology Hegseth now seems to echo. Honoring them means understanding what they actually fought against.
Are ICE’s “Worst Of The Worst” Really Criminals?
Homeland Security keeps telling Americans it’s hauling killers and rapists off the streets, calling detainees “the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens.” But data obtained by the New York Times tells a different story. Most people locked up at the Delaney Hall facility in Newark, New Jersey haven’t been convicted of any crime. Nationwide, forty-three percent of ICE detainees have no criminal history at all. At Delaney Hall, advocates and state data say roughly ninety percent have no record. The thousand-bed prison, run by the GEO Group under a one billion dollar federal contract, has seen hunger strikes and protests over the conditions inside. When the government smears working people as monsters to justify caging them, every one of us should be asking who’s really being protected.
This is How the Press Dies
Scott Pelley spent thirty-seven years at CBS News. Now, in his first interview since being fired, he says new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss tried to bend a story to match the president. Pelley says a late email about the Sixty Minutes segment on ICE killings in Minnesota, sent after the piece was already approved, asked his team to make the protesters look more violent. She also told him to describe Renee Good, the woman an agent shot dead through her windshield, as driving toward the officer. But the video showed her wheels turned hard the other way, away from him. “But right now, CBS News is on fire,” he said. Pelley refused the changes and was pushed out. When a newsroom rewrites a killing to fit a president’s lie, the free press democracy depends on starts to die.
Why Do Most MAGA Republicans Think Violence Is Justified?
A new analysis published in Injury Epidemiology has a number that should stop you cold. Nearly fifty-six percent of MAGA Republicans said political violence is usually or always justified to advance at least one of twenty-one political goals. Among non-MAGA, non-Republicans, that figure was about twenty-five percent. The good news is they’re no more willing to actually commit violence themselves than anyone else. Researcher Garen Wintemute urged caution about reading too much into any single group. “Looking at only one group can be misleading,” he said. Still, when a movement this large shares a belief that violence can be justified, it builds a climate where violence becomes thinkable. And in a democracy, the ballot is supposed to be the only weapon we ever need, and the surest protection against those who’d rather use force.
And that’s the way it is, Today Monday, June 8, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
