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A Republican senator is panicking after Trump threatened one of his state’s biggest employers. Another GOP senator is now being exposed for building his personal fortune by suing patients who couldn’t pay medical bills. He even continued some of those lawsuits after he was sworn into Congress. A former Ron DeSantis staffer who was fired for posting a Nazi symbol just landed a big job at Marco Rubio’s State Department. And Iceland just summoned the American ambassador after Trump posted a map that showed an outline of the country covered in the American flag.
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Trump’s trade war with Canada escalated once again when he demanded that Canadian aircraft manufacturer Bombardier be barred from doing business in the United States altogether. On his Truth Social platform, Trump claimed the company’s products “aren’t good enough.” He then accused our northern neighbor of treating America like a piggybank.
But while Trump attacked Bombardier, he seemed to have forgotten that the company has a U.S. headquarters in Wichita, Kansas, where it employs more than 1,000 people.
Republican Senator Jerry Moran has represented Kansas since 2011. And Trump’s threat to eliminate over 1,000 jobs in the “Air Capital of the World” sent Moran and his team scrambling.
Moran posted to his official social media account that he’d already reached out to the White House to make sure the president understands how significant Bombardier is to Kansas’ economy.
In his X post, Moran noted that the company’s local workforce includes more than a thousand of his constituents whose skills help the country’s aerospace and defense capabilities. He also promised he’d not only keep working to make sure Bombardier stays in Kansas, but that its presence continues to expand.
In its own statement, Bombardier praised its American workers not only in Kansas, but in more than 20 states including Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois and Texas.
Trump’s tirade against the company comes as trade relations between Washington and Ottawa hit a uniquely fractious point. Canada turned down a deal meant to head off Trump’s threatened 50 percent tariffs, saying it was completely one-sided. Trump responded by imposing tariffs on roughly $20 billion worth of Canadian imports.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney returned fire by doubling tariffs on American steel and aluminum products, and implemeting new trade duties affecting approximately $20 billion in U.S. exports.
Trump then, of course, announced that he was now calling Lake Ontario “Lake America,” which doesn’t make goods any cheaper but at least makes him feel like he did something important.
Trump has repeartedly antagonized Canada by calling it “the 51st state,” and he’s poisoning a relationship that used to be one of the easiest to maintain in all of American foreign policy. Now the president’s trade war is threatening American jobs, and even a loyal Republican senator is begging him to call off his attack.
Back in 1911, Canada and the United States had a free trade deal on the table until House Speaker Champ Clark boasted that he hoped to see the American flag flying over every square foot of British North America. Canadian voters heard that, threw out the government that negotiated the deal, and killed reciprocity for decades, which is the lesson Trump apparently never learned about telling your neighbor you plan to swallow them whole.
Jerry Moran isn’t the only Kansas Republican senator in the news today. Roger Marshall, who is the Sunflower State’s junior U.S. senator, is in the hot seat for how he built his fortune on the backs of his constituents.
Marshall was a key figure in the unsuccessful 2017 push in the House of Representatives to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Before he ran for office, he spent decades as an OB-GYN. Marshall also co-founded a surgical center that grew into a hospital, pulling in tens of millions of dollars every year.
A bombshell investigation from the New York Times found that Marshall and his practice sued more than 700 patients over unpaid medical bills over the course of his career. Some of those bills were as small as $101, meaning he paid his lawyers more to harass patients than the money they actually collected.
At least 81 of those patients were even arrested for missing court dates tied to Marshall’s lawsuits. Their wages and bank accounts got garnished. And to add insult to injury, Marshall’s firm even charged patients 18 percent annual interest on what they owed.
Marshall’s cruelty and greed were on full display after January of 2017, with the senator’s company still filing lawsuits against patients even after he was sworn into Congress. The lawsuits continued all the way up until he sold his ownership stake in the company a few months later.
This is the epitome of corruption: a sitting member of Congress had a financial stake in lawsuits against sick and poor people while he was actively working to repeal the law aimed at helping poor people afford healthcare.
During the ACA repeal fight, Marshall repeatedly brought up his medical experience, at one point proclaiming that he might be the only physician in Congress who ran a hospital. His campaign branded him “Doc Marshall” and highlighted his work treating low-income patients in rural Kansas who were insured by Medicaid.
Experts say Marshall went well out of his way to pursue poor patients who couldn’t afford the cost of care. One Stanford economist who researches hospital litigation told the New York Times that only 1.7 percent of hospital stays nationally result in lawsuits filed against patients, and said Marshall’s office represented an extreme case of excessive litigation. A George Washington University health law professor said arresting patients for missed court appearances and garnishing their wages are particularly extreme when comparing how most providers collect on unpaid balances.
Marshall’s office responded by saying the senator spent the bulk of his career caring for patients who couldn’t afford the cost of care, and that judges, not doctors, are the only ones issuing arrest warrants. But court records show Marshall’s own lawyers often asked judges to those warrants directly, and filed multiple briefs arguing for arrests because patients missed their court dates.
Keep in mind that debtors’ prisons have been illegal for a long time, and yet there are still plenty of people who get arrested for skipping court dates in lawsuits over missed medical payments. And a Republican senator has exploited that loophole all the way to the bank.
In 1983, in Bearden v. Georgia, the Supreme Court ruled that the government can’t jail someone simply because they’re too poor to pay, because punishing poverty itself violates the Fourteenth Amendment. Marshall’s lawyers found their way around that principle one missed court date at a time, and now he gets a vote on healthcare policy for everyone else.
Back in 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ short-lived presidential campaign employed a staffer named Nate Hochman, who was fired after he posted a campaign video that included the Sonnenrad, which is a symbol used by neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
Now, the New York Times is reporting that Hochman has been hired as deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning office. And according to Hochman’s email signature, he’s also serving as Rubio’s chief speechwriter. The policy planning office is a big deal, as it directly advises the Secretary of State on broad strategic priorities.
Hochman claimed he didn’t actually create the Sonnenrad video, and that he took the video down and told his supervisors after he understood what the symbol actually was. Hochman notably didn’t name the name of the person who created the video.
Before joining the DeSantis campaign, Hochmann worked at the conservative National Review and the far-right Claremont Institute. He also contributed to the New York Times’ opinion section. He eventually lost a journalism fellowship after publicly praising white supremacist commentator Nick Fuentes.
After DeSantis fired him, Hochman joined America 2100, which is a conservative group founded by Rubio’s former chief of staff. He later found employment in the office of Missouri Republican U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt’s office as a policy adviser before his latest role in Rubio’s State Department.
Hochman has apparently been writing Rubio’s speeches since July and has been listed as a senior adviser since June, according to public records. The State Department both confirmed and defended hiring Hochmann, calling him a trusted staffer who has helped advocate for the Trump administration’s foreign policy agenda.
This is all part of a pattern seen throughout Trump’s second term. People with a documented history of racist and extreme rhetoric keep getting hired and/or promoted into influential roles in the federal government. Hochman went from being publicly fired from a losing presidential campaign to a top-level job in the State Department in less than three years.
Charles Lindbergh was one of the most admired men in America until September of 1941, when he stood up in Des Moines and blamed Jews for pushing the country toward war, and the backlash ended his public career almost overnight. That’s what accountability used to look like in this country, and the distance between then and now is that a firing over a Nazi symbol has become a speed bump on the way to writing the Secretary of State’s speeches.
Trump recently posted an image on Truth Social with no caption or context that depicted a map labeled “United States of America” in which the U.S., Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean were all colored in the American flag.
Iceland viewed the post as a serious offense. The country’s foreign minister, Thorgerdur Gunnarsdottir, issued an official summons to U.S. Ambassador to Iceland Billy Long, who had only started his job there in August, to register Iceland’s extreme disapproval.
Iceland’s foreign ministry told a local broadcaster that the they communicated to Long that Trump’s post was completely inappropriate and risked causing significant harm to American-Icelandic diplomatic relations.
Trump’s post is significant when considering the context that he’s refused to let up about wanting to buy Greenland from Denmark. And just last month, Icelandic voters rejected reopening talks to join the European Union, with many pointing to Trump’s rhetoric about Greenland as a key factor.
The timing of the post is also pretty hard to miss. Trump posted the map mere hours after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen went to Greenland and announced a €200 million investment initiative in the region.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen also made a point of recently telling a Danish news agency that both the Greenlandic government and its people have said repeatedly they have no desire to be American.
Trump has had a hrd time telling Greenland and Iceland apart. He confused the two countries during this year’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Icelandic officials went on to hire a Washington lobbying firm, paying it $25,000 a month to help them deal with the Trump administration. Ambassador Long himself also put his foot in his mouth, posting about Iceland becoming America’s 52nd state with him as governor. He later apologized for that remark and insisted it was a joke.
Article IV of the Constitution says new states are admitted by Congress, not by a president posting a doodle with no caption, and the founders wrote it that way because they’d just fought a war against a king who thought the map was his to redraw. Iceland has been a sovereign republic since 1944, and it shouldn’t have to pay a lobbying firm $25,000 a month to remind the United States of that.
David Ellison’s CBS will never tell you that Trump’s State Department gave a top job to a right-wing activist who once posted a video with a Nazi symbol. And Rupert Murdoch’s Fox ever talk about a sitting Republican senator making millions by suing people too poor to afford healthcare. But because Raw America doesn’t answer to them, we can report on these stories without being censored by a MAGA oligarch.
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