Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report. News for the public, not the powerful.
Is Trump’s Iran War a Five Alarm Fire for American Economy?
Wholesale prices in April exploded six percent over the past year. That’s the biggest annual jump since December 2022, and it blew past every economist’s forecast. The Producer Price Index rose 1.4 percent in a single month. Core wholesale inflation hit 4.4 percent. Wholesale gasoline shot up more than 15 percent in April alone. Jet fuel jumped over 36 percent. Diesel climbed nearly 13 percent. All of it driven by Trump’s war on Iran, which has kept the Strait of Hormuz blockaded for more than two months. Gas at the pump is now north of four dollars a gallon. Consumer prices last month hit their highest level in nearly three years. And paychecks aren’t keeping up for the first time since 2023. Congressman Brendan Boyle put it plain. “The only thing Trump has made great again is inflation,” he said. A new CNN poll shows 70 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy. Seventy-seven percent say his policies are driving up the cost of living. Trump’s response? He told reporters he doesn’t think about Americans’ financial situation. Not even a little bit. The richest president in history just admitted he doesn’t care if you can afford eggs.
Is Argentina Rejecting libertarian President Javier Milei?
Down in Buenos Aires yesterday, tens of thousands of Argentines flooded the streets to defend their public universities. It’s the fourth massive march since libertarian President Javier Milei took power. Argentina’s university system has been tuition-free since 1949. It produced five Nobel Prize winners. It’s the pride of the country. But Milei is taking a chainsaw to it. Professor paychecks have fallen 33 percent since he took office, after you adjust for inflation. At least 580 research professors at the University of Buenos Aires have already quit and walked away for private jobs or work overseas. Milei vetoed a law that would have guaranteed university funding. He calls campuses centers of woke indoctrination. Sound familiar? It’s Trump’s playbook. One law student at the protest said it cold. “This government is determined to defund public education.” Here in America, Trump is running the same operation. Gutting the Department of Education. Stripping federal funds from Harvard and Columbia. Hounding professors and students by ideology. When billionaires want to rule, the first thing they destroy is an educated public.
ICE Just Locked Up an 85-Year-Old Grandmother and Yelled at Her Constantly. Really?
Marie-Thérèse Ross is eighty-five years old. She’s a French widow. Her late husband was a U.S. military veteran she met at NATO in the 1950s. They reconnected after both lost their first spouses and married last year. She moved to Alabama to be with him. He died in January. On April 1, ICE agents arrested her and shackled her hands and feet like a violent criminal. They flew her to a Louisiana detention center. They held her for 16 days. She was crammed in a dormitory with 58 other women, mostly mothers. At night, she could hear babies crying. “The guards could not speak without yelling,” she told the Associated Press. The other detainees called her Grandma. Someone tucked her blanket back when it slipped at night. She’s now home in France. Her family says she’s still struggling with memory gaps and emotional distress. This is what Trump’s mass deportation machine actually does. It cages elderly widows and breastfeeding mothers. It punishes paperwork mistakes with handcuffs and shouting. And it does it in our names, with our tax dollars. We aren’t a serious country anymore. We’re a cruel one.
Is Tucker Carlson Now a Terrorist for Crossing Trump?
Ken Klippenstein dropped a bombshell yesterday. Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s top counterterrorism official at the National Security Council, has publicly floated Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes as possible domestic terrorists. Yes, that Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who carried water for Trump for years. And Fuentes, the far-right streamer. Their offense? Both broke with Trump over the Iran war. Carlson called the war the biggest mistake any modern American president has ever made. So Gorka, on a friendly Breitbart show, dismissed them with this line. “I’m not sure that Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson are conservatives.” See the trick? The administration’s new National Counterterrorism Strategy claims to target the left. But Gorka just told us it can target anyone who steps out of line with MAGA. First they strip you of your conservative credentials. Then they redefine you as a foreign-aligned threat. Then they come after you with the full weight of the national security state. If it can happen to Tucker Carlson, the most famous right-wing voice in America, it can happen to anyone who criticizes this president. That’s not law enforcement. That’s a political purge.
Did a Congresswoman Really Just Bully a Fourth Grader?
Christian Mango is a ten-year-old fourth grader from Greensboro, North Carolina. For a school assignment, he wrote a persuasive essay about electric vehicles. He suggested a five thousand dollar tax rebate for new EV buyers. He mailed it to his congresswoman, Republican Virginia Foxx, in a school envelope. Foxx is 82, a former chair of the House Education Committee. And she sat down and wrote that fourth grader a scathing reply. She told him he and his classmates would be stuck paying off the national debt by 2038. She accused his teachers of indoctrination. She wrote, quote, “Please ask your teacher to explain propaganda to you.” His mother Emily was furious. She said Foxx crossed a line. She said no one talks to a child like that, and no one attacks teachers like that. North Carolina ranks fiftieth in the country for education funding. Foxx was a college professor before she went to Congress. She’s running for a twelfth term with Trump’s endorsement. This is MAGA leadership. An 82-year-old congresswoman bullying a fourth grader for caring about the planet.
And that’s the way it is, Today Wednesday, May 13, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
