Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Will Iran Answer Trump’s Economic War With a Real One?
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stood up on August 24th and announced what this administration is calling economic D-Day for Iran. Sweeping secondary sanctions aimed at Iran’s shipping fleet, its technology sector, and its digital assets, along with a hard push to enforce every sanction already on the books. Tehran’s answer came fast. Mohsen Rezaei, who runs Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, warned that “we will retaliate in an earthquake-like manner,” and said that if the squeeze continues, not a single drop of oil will be exported. Foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei went further, saying Iran has what he called the legitimate right to target the point of origin and source of any act of aggression. That’s a threat pointed straight at Europe. Iran has already published a list of 45 vessels it says are violating its rules in the Strait of Hormuz, and its hit targets in 11 different countries during this war. The Saudis are now rerouting five million barrels of oil a day through their East West pipeline, and another two million barrels are moving around Hormuz. Meanwhile Iran’s parliament is debating whether to walk out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and Iran still has roughly half a ton of highly enriched uranium sitting somewhere. We bombed a country to stop it from building a bomb, and now that country is openly debating building one. Congress never declared this war and you are paying for it every time you fill your tank.
Why Is Your Post Office Suddenly in the Election Business?
The US Postal Service says its new mail ballot rules are now in effect, and that’s a big deal heading into November. This all traces back to the executive order Trump signed on March 31st. On August 23rd the Postal Service dropped a 95 page final rule that orders postal employees to check that mail ballots meet new requirements on envelopes, barcodes, and data reporting before they’ll even accept them from your county election officials. The Postal Service would keep state-by-state lists of who got a ballot, assign unique identifiers to ballot envelopes, and coordinate with Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to verify citizenship. Federal Judge Indira Talwani has already blocked the heart of this twice, in June and again on August 11th, and on August 25th she ruled the administration violated her injunction by finalizing the rule anyway. Her words were blunt. “Defendants cannot contend that they misunderstood the scope of the court’s order.” Michael McNulty of the group Issue One says this is an attempt to weaponize the Postal Service as part of a takeover of American elections. Here’s what matters. The Constitution gives states, not presidents, the power to run elections. Call your member of Congress and get our mail carriers to stop being a voter checkpoint.
Who Was Buying Oil Stocks While the Bombs Were Falling?
New financial filings show Donald Trump kept right on trading oil and gas stocks while his war with Iran was killing people. His investment accounts ran roughly 3,600 stock trades in the first quarter of this year alone, worth somewhere between $212 million and $695 million. Democratic analysts say his oil and gas holdings grew from between $13 and $46 million early this year to between $7 and $61 million by the middle of this month. Then there’s April 7th. That’s the day Trump declared a ceasefire, and it’s also the day he sold between half a million and a million dollars worth of ExxonMobil stock. The next day Exxon dropped 6.5%. He was also buying and selling Chevron and ConocoPhillips along the way. White House spokesman Davis Ingle says the portfolio is independently managed by third party financial institutions. Ethics watchdog Donald Sherman put it plainly, saying Trump’s war of choice in Iran has cost Americans in higher energy prices. Bush did a blind trust. Obama did a blind trust. Biden did a blind trust. This president holds individual stocks while personally deciding when the shooting starts and stops, and nobody in Congress is stopping him.
Two Children Are Dead. His Answer Was “We Don’t Know.”
Pennsylvania just buried two unvaccinated people killed by measles, the state’s first measles deaths in 35 years. Lancaster County alone has 177 of the state’s 393 cases, and not one of the people who got sick was fully vaccinated. One of the dead was an infant who tested positive for measles. So what did Dr. Mehmet Oz, the man Trump put in charge of Medicare and Medicaid for all of us, have to say about it? He said, and this is a quote, “We don’t know if the children died from measles or had another condition that was already attacking them.” He then compared it to Covid, claiming deaths back then were erroneously attributed too. Doctors are calling that insane, and they’re calling it lying. Two doses of the measles vaccine are about 97 percent effective, and before that vaccine existed this country logged hundreds of deaths a year, mostly children. This is a disease we beat. We declared it eliminated in the year 2000. Now the men running our health agencies are on television casting doubt on dead babies, and the price of that doubt gets paid in tiny caskets.
Four Point Seven Billion Dollars, Gone. Who Ate the Loss?
Public Citizen dropped a report yesterday putting a number on the Trump family’s crypto operation, and the number is ugly. Investors are down $4.7 billion across Trump’s various crypto schemes. The president’s own meme coin, the one he launched days before he took the oath of office, has left the people who bought it $3.2 billion underwater all by itself. The rest came from governance tokens, from NFTs, and from the family’s World Liberty Financial venture. And while ordinary people were losing their savings, a Trump appointed regulator went ahead and approved the Trump family crypto firm’s application for a bank charter. Think about the machinery here. The president of the United States sells a digital token backed by nothing but his own face, small investors buy it because they trust him, the insiders cash out, and the regulators who are supposed to police it work for the guy selling it. That’s not a market. That’s a shakedown with a website, and $4.7 billion of other people’s money is the receipt.
Is This What They’re Doing With Your Health Care Money?
Here’s one that should make every taxpayer sit up. The Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that’s supposed to be fighting measles outbreaks and funding cancer research, paid for a study claiming that supporting transgender rights makes people more likely to support political violence. It came out Wednesday, built on a survey of a little over 1,200 American adults, and it was produced by researchers connected to Rutgers, the right leaning Manhattan Institute, and the Network Contagion Research Institute. Respondents were asked how they felt about violence aimed at six targets, including Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump, the murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, ICE facilities, police, and rich people’s property. The study concludes that gender ideology may work as what it calls an ideological accelerant, telling left wing authoritarians who the enemy is. Lead researcher Colin Wright then admitted the whole conclusion is speculative and needs follow up research. So your health agency spent public money manufacturing a talking point against a tiny minority of Americans, then labeled it science. That’s not research. That’s propaganda with a footnote, and it’s the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook. Pick a group nobody will defend, call them dangerous, and see who flinches.
And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday August 27, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
