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The war Donald Trump started with Iran in February is now collapsing, slowly and predictably, into the same theater of fraud he’s run his entire life. So get ready for the next Big Lie: it’s coming as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning.

Three months in, his bombing campaign has done less damage than he claims, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, gas is pushing five bucks a gallon, his own Pentagon admits Iran’s nuclear program was only set back a few years rather than “completely obliterated,” and the negotiations he’s been bragging about in Islamabad are, by Iran’s own foreign ministry’s careful phrasing, simultaneously “very far and very close” to a deal.

Translation: there is no deal and it’s unlikely there will be one anytime soon, at least on terms Trump can honestly defend. And so, just as Wall Street learned to call his serial lies, bluffs, and retreats on tariffs the “TACO trade” — Trump Always Chickens Out — we’re about to watch the wartime version of the same play.

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He’ll declare “Total Victory” (complete with the caps), the billionaire-owned right-wing media will trumpet it as the greatest foreign policy triumph since Yalta, and the rest of us will be expected to swallow this newest Big Lie and just shut up about it.

But a brutal reality is still there, even if the White House won’t acknowledge it. Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that Obama signed in 2015, Iran shipped 98 percent of its enriched uranium out of the country, capped enrichment at 3.67 percent (what was needed for their one nuclear power plant), dismantled thousands of its most advanced centrifuges, redesigned the Arak reactor so it couldn’t produce weapons-grade plutonium, and accepted IAEA cameras and inspectors at every nuclear facility on its soil.

The deal pushed Iran’s breakout time back hard and was verified by international inspectors who reported to the world every ninety days. Trump stupidly tore it up in 2018 because Black President “Barack Hussein Obama” had negotiated it, and within three years Iran was enriching to 20 percent and barring inspectors.

Then Trump bombed the sites he himself had freed Iran to build, and now he’s trying to negotiate his way back to something resembling what Obama already had, except he doesn’t have the leverage Obama had, because he’s shown the world he’d rather bomb than talk and he’s already used used up so many of our munitions that it’s become a crisis for the Pentagon.

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As a result, what he’ll come up with, if he comes up with anything, will be a fraction of the JCPOA dressed up in red, white, and blue bunting and sold to the rubes as a miracle produced by a “true genius.”

Just ask any of his Cabinet members, who spend one in every six sentences during their “Apprentice” TV meetings slobbering over how wonderful, strong, and manly Trump is.

Like so many of this newsletter’s readers, Louise and I have children and grandchildren who’ll inherit the consequences of this man’s foreign policy, so when we watch him repeat the same pattern across continent after continent it doesn’t feel like ordinary political disagreement. It feels like watching someone systematically dismantle the country they’ll grow up in.

Consider Afghanistan. Trump blamed the chaotic exit from Kabul in August 2021 on Joe Biden because Biden was the one in the chair when the helicopters lifted off, but the deal that forced that timeline was Trump’s.

On February 29, 2020, in Doha, Trump’s envoy Zalmay Khalilzad signed a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban that excluded the elected Afghan government entirely, freed 5,000 violent Taliban fighters from prison, and set a hard deadline of May 1, 2021 for full American withdrawal.

If Hillary Clinton has put together such as surrender on the Taliban’s terms, we would’ve had hearings for a decade, but the GOP pretended it wasn’t happening. Biden inherited that contract, extended the deadline by a few months, and got blamed for the wreckage Trump had wired to explode.

The pattern’s identical to what we’re watching now with Iran: Trump makes a catastrophic decision, walks away, and either he or his Fox “News” chorus blames the cleanup crew. This time, since Trump’s in the White House instead of Biden, my bet is he’ll find a way to blame Whiskey Pete or maybe his Joint Chiefs.

Now layer NATO on top. While the Iran war drags on and the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, Trump’s been quietly gutting the most successful peacekeeping military alliance in human history. He’s already pulled 5,000 troops out of Germany and is threatening deeper cuts in Spain and Italy.

Most recently, his envoy Alexander Velez-Green told NATO allies behind closed doors that the U.S. will slash its fighter jet commitment to the alliance by a third, withdraw destroyers from NATO’s naval pool, and pull every single American submarine out of European waters. This is a major disaster for the alliance, as these American military assets are irreplaceable over the short term.

The single biggest beneficiary of every one of these moves, without exception, is Vladimir Putin. The Butcher of Moscow now watches the alliance built to contain him hollowed out by an American president whose family business was, according to investigative journalism by Craig Unger, kept solvent through the 1980s and 1990s by what amounted to billions in today’s dollars from Russian organized crime laundering money through Trump real estate after Donald had bankrupted himself repeatedly.

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Now he’s bankrupting the rest of us, taking the nation down with him, with economists around the world predicting a severe recession or even a second Republican Great Depression. America is the newest version of Trump University, Trump Steaks, and the Trump Casinos.

We don’t need to draw a complicated chart to see what’s happening, this treason in plain sight, and neither do the leaders of the world’s other countries. Look at the foreign policy moves and ask one question: “Who benefits?”

— An Iran war that goes nowhere and leaves Tehran’s mullahs in charge? Russia and China both win, because the U.S. is bogged down and gas prices spike.
— This insane NATO drawdown? Putin wins, openly and obviously.
— Cruelly abandoning Ukraine? Putin.
— Trashing USAID and creating the conditions for the Ebola outbreak now spreading through East Africa? China expands its influence into the void.
— Killing the Voice of America and shuttering Radio Free Europe? Putin and Xi both throw parties.

Meanwhile the Trump family is taking a $400 million 747 from Qatar, cutting $2 billion crypto deals with the UAE, and pocketing additional billions from the Saudis. Every single move on the international chessboard either lines Trump’s pockets, advances Putin’s interests, or both.

This man Eisenhower would have called a traitor and Reagan would have called an obvious Russian asset is now running the country after having seized control of the party those two built.

Most Americans are watching this with a growing sense of helpless horror — the deconstruction of USAID, the killing of Voice of America, the abandonment of allies, the protection rackets dressed up as diplomacy, the construction of hundreds of concentration camps, the lies stacked on lies, the arming and masking of lawless thugs who’re literally killing American citizens, the self-dealing grift — and the Republican Party, the party of Eisenhower and Reagan and even the patrician George H.W. Bush, can’t find ten senators willing to stand up and say “enough.”

Republican senators and members of Congress know what’s happening. They know who Trump is really working for. Many have even said so, albeit before Trump had power. They’ve read the same intelligence we have, but they say nothing because they’re afraid of a primary challenge funded by the same billionaires who’re profiting from the wreckage.

So get ready. The Big Lie about Iran is coming, and it’s going to be loud. Trump will declare a “total and complete victory” he didn’t win, just as he declared one he didn’t win in 2020. Hegseth will hold a Pentagon presser and tell us, as he already has, that America won “a capital-V victory” and Fox “News” will run the chyron in bright red.

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The rest of the press, terrified of Trump’s lawsuits, his FCC, and his street thugs (who he’s now trying to pay off), will increasingly fall in line.

And the truth — that Trump started a war he couldn’t win, lost it, walked away with less than Obama had a decade ago, gutted NATO in the process, and handed Putin his greatest geopolitical prize since the fall of the Berlin Wall — will be told only by writers and reporters operating outside the captured corporate press.

Which is why what you do next matters. Call your senator and your representative through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them you expect them to demand congressional oversight of any Iran deal Trump signs, to defend NATO and stop his military hardware withdrawal, and to investigate the financial ties between Trump’s family and the foreign governments he’s enriching.

Find your state legislators at openstates.org and make sure they’re on record. Register everyone you know to vote at vote.org, because the 2026 midterms are now the firewall. If you can support independent journalism — including this newsletter — please do so, and please share this piece widely.

The billionaire-owned media won’t tell the truth about what Trump is about to claim. That job falls to us.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Next Big Lie is Coming”

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America has 51 billionaires who made their money from our profit-driven healthcare system, the only one in the developed world. It’s not only obscene that they’re taking so much money from so many of us who have so little; it’s also killing all of us.

We’re among the worst — and most expensive — healthcare systems in the developed world, with Thailand and Ecuador even beating us out.

And the reason it stays that way, according to a shocking new study, is because about half of all white people would rather inflict pain on all of us (including themselves) than allow for a system which may also benefit Black people.

If that sounds irrational, it is. But it’s also completely consistent with a history that includes white communities closing their own schools and swimming pools back in the 1960s when LBJ forced them to allow Black children in.

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Sixty-six years ago, on a campaign swing through Tennessee, Lyndon Johnson turned to his press secretary Bill Moyers in a hotel room and explained, with the bluntness of a man who’d grown up watching it work in Texas, why America couldn’t have nice things.

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man,” LBJ said, “he won’t notice your picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Moyers wrote about it years later in The Washington Post, and the line has been quoted ever since because it explained, in one sentence, the entire arc of “conservative” behavior from Reconstruction to Nixon to Reagan to Trump.

Last week, a pair of political scientists at the University of Delaware put empirical meat on the bones of what Johnson learned the hard way. Sumeyye Mine Iltekin Gocer and Joanne M. Miller, writing in the peer-reviewed journal Research and Politics, surveyed more than 700 white Americans and split them into two groups.

One group was asked whether white Americans were winning or losing politically. The other was asked whether white Americans were winning or losing compared to racial minorities. Both were then asked how they felt about economic redistribution programs like food stamps and Medicaid, the things that put food on tables and keep people from dying of treatable diseases.

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The first group’s answers tracked roughly with their income and ideology. The second group, the ones prompted to think about race before answering, turned against redistribution across the board, even programs that would obviously benefit them, even when they themselves were poor.

The mere act of comparing themselves to Black and brown Americans made them willing to sacrifice their own healthcare, their own paycheck, their own kid’s future, as long as people of color were sacrificed too.

That’s the trap. That’s how a country with the largest economy in human history ends up as the only developed nation on Earth without universal healthcare, the only rich country where 600,000 people a year still go bankrupt because somebody in the family got sick, and where, alone among our peer nations, we’ve built an entire group of healthcare billionaires on the simple business model of denying claims and pocketing the difference.

There are now fifty-one of them. Fifty-one Americans whose ten-figure fortunes exist because we refused, decade after decade, to do what every other developed country figured out by the 1970s.

Becker’s Hospital Review crunched the latest Forbes list and counted them up: hospital chain heirs like Thomas Frist Jr. at $41.1 billion, medical-device dynasties like the Cooks and the Strykers, pharma fortunes, insurance fortunes, and a long tail of executives who got fabulously wealthy off the misery of people trying to pay for chemo.

Some who became morbidly rich off healthcare even went into politics like Senator Rick Scott, whose company committed the largest Medicare fraud in American history when he was CEO. Others simply pour millions into buying Republican politicians and judges to maintain the profitable status quo.

These billionaires exist nowhere else in the developed world for a simple reason: no other developed country has set up its healthcare system so that human sickness is a profit center.

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From Nixon‘s Southern Strategy to Bush’s Willie Horton ads to Trump’s racist birtherism, scaring White people about Black people has been the go-to position of the GOP since the 1960s. And stopping “socialism” that may benefit Black or Hispanic people is at it’s core.

Canada doesn’t have hospital billionaires. France doesn’t have insurance billionaires. We do, and we have fifty-one of them, and the reason we do is the reason LBJ named in that hotel room.

The people who’d benefit most from a national healthcare system are the people who keep voting against it. Look at the map. Of the ten states that still refuse to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, seven are former Confederate states with large Black populations.

Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have together left billions of federal dollars sitting on the table, billions that would have built rural clinics, kept hospitals open, paid for prenatal care, and saved roughly 1.5 million of their own citizens from going uninsured.

Their Republican legislators won’t take the money, their Republican governors campaign against the money, and their Republican voters keep electing the people who refuse the money, all because that money would also benefit the Black and Hispanic people who live in those states.

And the bodies pile up. Tennessee has the highest maternal mortality rate in the United States, 42.1 deaths per 100,000 live births averaged across 2019 to 2023, with Louisiana and Mississippi right behind.

The Commonwealth Fund found this past summer that Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee all have maternal death rates more than double those of California, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Minnesota.

Mississippi just declared a public health emergency over infant mortality because the state’s babies are dying at the rate of 9.7 per 1,000 live births, nearly double the national average, and for Black babies in Mississippi the rate is 15.2, which would be a national emergency in any country that wasn’t busy looking the other way.

Life expectancy tells the same story in the same racist handwriting. Mississippi sits dead last in the country at around 71 years, followed by West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Kentucky.

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The Princeton economist Angus Deaton, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on poverty, has observed for years that life expectancy in much of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta is now lower than in Bangladesh or Nepal. White working-class men in the Mississippi Delta and the West Virginia coal country can now expect to live fewer years than men in countries we call “impoverished.”

And the political response from the Republicans? They keep electing racist white politicians to refuse Medicaid expansion, slash food stamps, hand tax cuts to their morbidly rich white men, and triple down on the very cultural grievances that the Delaware study just demonstrated, in laboratory conditions, are the precise mechanism by which they’re being conned.

I grew up in Lansing, Michigan, where in 1956 my father finally got a job at a tool-and-die shop with a union contract and health insurance that covered the whole family without a copay. None of us got rich, but none of us went bankrupt when somebody got sick, either.

The country my dad worked in had marginal income tax rates above 90 percent on the very wealthy, no billionaires to speak of, and a healthcare system that, for everyone covered by a union job or a public employer, looked something like what Canada or Germany has today.

In Michigan, like in most states of that era, hospitals and health insurance companies were required to be non-profits, run for the public good and heavily regulated.

Then Reagan came in, busted the unions, slashed the top rates, deregulated the insurance industry, and let the banksters loose on what had been a largely nonprofit hospital and insurance sector. The fifty-one healthcare billionaires we have today are the direct, foreseeable result of those choices.

I wrote a book about all of it, The Hidden History of American Healthcare, and the math hasn’t changed: every dollar in the bank account of a Frist or a Stryker or a UnitedHealth executive is a dollar that didn’t go to a nurse, a clinic, or a sick kid in Tupelo.

The Delaware study explains why we can’t seem to vote our way out of it. The morbidly rich Republicans who actually benefit from the system know exactly what they’re doing when they fund Fox “News,” Heritage, Turning Point USA, and the entire infrastructure of right-wing media that pumps racial grievance into white American living rooms twenty-four hours a day.

They’re running LBJ’s con at industrial scale. Convince a guy in Tupelo that Medicaid expansion is a handout to Black people in Jackson, and he’ll vote to keep his own daughter uninsured.

Convince a retiree in The Villages that single-payer means giving healthcare to dark-skinned immigrants, and she’ll defend, with every breath she has left, the very system that’s overcharging her for the drugs keeping her alive.

It works because “conservatives” have found it’s a very useful con to make themselves rich and maintain political power, and the fifty-one billionaires it produced are the ones writing the checks to make sure it keeps working.

Every other developed country has figured out that healthcare works better, costs less, and produces longer lives when it’s run as a public good rather than a profit center.

Bernie Sanders, Pramila Jayapal, and Debbie Dingell have a Medicare for All bill sitting in Congress right now, with hundreds of co-sponsors and the active support of National Nurses United and most of the rest of organized labor.

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Californians are about to vote on a billionaire wealth tax that would partly fund healthcare and education by clawing back a five-percent slice of accumulated wealth from people who’ll never feel its absence.

The arguments are made, the policies are drafted, the funding mechanisms are costed out. The only thing missing is enough Americans willing to recognize the con LBJ named sixty-six years ago and refuse, just once, to fall for it.

If this article helped you see the con for what it is, please share it as widely as you can, forward it to the in-law who tells you Medicare for All is communism, and consider subscribing to the Hartmann Report so we can keep doing this work.

LBJ laid out the con in a Tennessee hotel room in 1960. The Delaware researchers just confirmed it in 2026.

The only question left is whether we’ll act on what we now know, or whether somebody like me in the next generation will be writing the same article about the seventy-fifth healthcare billionaire and asking the same exhausted question about why we still can’t have what every other developed country built two generations ago.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Con”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Donald Trump knows his time is running out, both personally and politically, so he’s doing a smash-and-grab, making off with as much of our (and others’) money as he can. And his family is in on it.

Even though he’s not particularly bright, Trump’s no idiot. He knows his stupid mistake in attacking Iran, his war crimes of murdering unarmed fishermen in the Caribbean, his on-again-off-again tariffs, his massive tax cut for himself and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and now his grift where Todd Blanche gifts him the $100 million the IRS was trying to collect while making him eligible to draw from his own $1.776 billion Thug Fund, are all catching up with him.

Inflation is exploding, America is humiliated, working people are furious, and his own Republicans in Congress are starting to rebel. If he’s going to add a few billion more to his family wealth, he has to do it now, because, he knows, the window will be closed after next January when the new Congress is sworn in. And maybe even before then.

Trump’s grifts are running so fast and furious that the media can’t keep up. When Todd Blanche put together the “settlement” of Trump’s phony $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, “resolving” the case by handing Trump’s hand-picked panel $1.776 billion to distribute as they see fit (including to both J6ers who killed 4 cops and to Trump himself) Blanche included a huge Easter Egg for Trump and his kids: he forgave $100 million the IRS has been trying to collect from Trump and his boys for over 15 years.

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The New York Times exposed this in an article with the headline “With Trump’s Deal, a Possible $100 Million I.R.S. Penalty Melts Away.” Back in 2010, the IRS busted him for allegedly claiming a deduction against the losses from his failing Chicago tower twice, a crime called felony tax fraud, and has been trying to collect around $100 million (plus interest) from him ever since.

But this new Thug Fund will eliminate all claims against him, his kids, and his “affiliated entities” and businesses, for all past, present, and future times. So he gets to keep the $100 million (plus interest). And the media — other than that one reference in the Times — seems to have completely ignored it.

There’s just so much. Dissing our allies and embracing Putin and his oligarch and autocrat friends. Going to China where his company owns multiple trademarks he can turn into business opportunities. Betraying Ukraine and Taiwan. Getting back the top-secret documents he stole, which he’s said he wants to sell to the highest bidder like Nixon did. Burying the Epstein files and the charges that he raped multiple 15-year-old girls.

But Wendy Lawrence over at Glass Empires suggests something even darker is going on. She looks at Trump’s behavior and compares it to historical mass murderers like Jim Jones and Hitler who saw the end coming; invariably, they tried to take as many people with them as they could.

I wrote about this back in the summer of 2023 in an article titled, “Will America Face ‘Narcissistic Collapse’ as Trump Descends into Legal Hell?” Narcissistic collapse is what happens when psychopathic narcissists face defeat and humiliation and strike out against the world around them.

Think Hitler in his bunker when my old friend Armin Lehmann, then a 16-year-old Hitler Youth, handed him the news that the war was lost. He wrote a book about his experience, In Hitler’s Bunker: A Boy Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of the Fuhrer’s Last Days, which we discussed extensively when he was first writing it and during the three years Armin and I traveled the world together, lecturing mostly across Europe and the Far East.

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Hitler, in those final weeks — Armin told me and the historical record verifies — actually welcomed the destruction of Germany by American and Soviet bombs and tanks.

He hadn’t failed: his narcissism and the cult he had created and surrounded himself with wouldn’t let him confront that.

Instead, in his mind, the German people had failed, his generals had failed, his soldiers had failed. They had failed Germany, but, more importantly they had failed him and his cult — and he wanted them punished for failing him.

I mentioned the stories Armin told me to psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee on my program, and she confirmed that this is, indeed, a common pattern and Trump could decide to take out as many people as possible when he goes down.

Christopher Armitage, at The Existentialist Republic, notes, as his headline reads, that “Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump Are Running a $1.2 Billion Felony Fraud Scheme that is Fully Prosecutable in New York.” More smash-and-grab and, so far, they’re getting away with all of it.

Armitage suggests that New York Attorney General Letitia James could prosecute the Trump boys, but so far she’s shown no inclination to enforce the law in her state when it comes to the Trumps. And given the levels of “militia” death threats and DOJ revenge prosecutions that even minor attacks on the Trumps provoke (think pictures of seashells, for example), her reticence is easily understood.

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Armitage noted in a previous post that James could also put Elon Musk in prison for over 100 years and offers “the receipts.” And James is only one of multiple state AGs who could conceivably prosecute Trump and his sons as well as Musk and his Doge boys.

So, what’s to be done about this greedy, criminal, treasonous attack on American institutions and the rule of law? Can we even stop Trump after he’s already pulled in billions in his crypto and alleged insider-stock-trading schemes?

Democrats need to start drawing harder and clearer lines, and do so in ways the press can no longer ignore.

When Congressman Ted Liu held a press conference to say he’d seen evidence suggesting Trump raped young teenagers in the Epstein files, most of the media ignored it. And, as noted, they’re ignoring the $100 million gift Blanche gave him and his boys last week.

So, how do we get the word out?

Political theater works. Fossil fuel billionaires funded the Tea Party to do just that, challenging the legitimacy of our first Black president and telling lies about the ACA, and the DNC and related entities should be thinking of ways do something like it.

And Republicans need to hear from us, to buck up their courage. While Trump could do anything — from sucking up to Putin to stealing from the treasury to raping teenage girls — and his MAGA base would forgive him because he’s done so much to harm Black people and women, the base is only a real factor in primaries. That’s why post-primary-elections we’re seeing a few Republicans turn on him. They need to hear from us.

Call your two senators and your member of the House at 202-224-3121 and let them know what you think. Share this newsletter with everybody you can. It’s entirely possible we won’t have to wait until November/January for change to come; let’s begin pushing for it now.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Cashing Out”

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Obama rescues neoliberalism from itself

The following year Barack Obama was elected to the presidency. In his inaugural address he told the American people that markets needed supervision to work.

“Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill,” President Obama said, looking into the camera. “Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched. But this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control. The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.”

Americans who were hopeful that the age of neoliberalism was coming to an end (even if they didn’t know there was a name for it) cheered: Obama’s popularity soared above 60 percent.

Instead of ending neoliberalism, though, Obama expanded it dramatically with the Affordable Care Act, putting the nation’s healthcare needs in the hands of billion-dollar insurance companies and extending the privatization of Medicare through the Medicare Advantage scam that George W. Bush had brought to being.

He refused to regulate the nation’s monopolies, instead extending George W. Bush’s Emergency Economic Stabilization Act and the Troubled Asset Relief Program that poured ever-more money into the pockets of Wall Street banksters.

Advised by notorious neoliberal Larry Summers (formerly Clinton’s Treasury Secretary) and former Wall Street banker Timothy Geitner (as Obama’s Treasury Secretary), Obama passed on the opportunity to re-regulate the banks or push for legislation like a revisited Glass-Steagal to prevent checkbook banks from gambling in the stock market with your and my deposits. Instead, he went with the watered-down Dodd-Frank legislation championed by two noted neoliberal legislators who were both deeply in the pockets of Wall Street banks.[cxiii]

Bankers are still running many of their old scams even as I write these words in 2022.

Meanwhile, President Obama oversaw without objection the explosion of the neoliberal dream of a so-called “gig economy” where companies relabeled their employees as “independent contractors” to avoid insurance, taxes and the regulations and liabilities that come as an employer.

Even his smallest pushbacks against neoliberalism – including an attempt to raise income taxes on the morbidly rich and advance universal pre-K – were shot down by Republicans and neoconservative Democrats in Congress.

Dissatisfied, Americans decided to try the Republicans again.

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— Why doesn’t anybody mention that Trump himself is the biggest recipient of his “settlement” $1.776 billion fund? The New York Times exposed this in an article with the headline “With Trump’s Deal, a Possible $100 Million I.R.S. Penalty Melts Away.” Back in 2010, the IRS busted him for allegedly claiming a deduction for his failing Chicago tower twice, a crime, and has been trying to collect around $100 million (plus interest) from him ever since. But this new Thug Fund will eliminate all claims against him, his kids, and his “affiliated entities” and businesses, for all past, present, and future times. So he gets to keep the $100 million (plus interest). And the media — other than that one reference in the Times — seems to have completely ignored it. Where’s the outrage? Can you imagine what would happen if Obama had tried to give himself $100 million out of our Treasury?

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— America is officially traumatized, and the diagnosis is in. Robert Reich, writing at Raw Story this week, points out what every therapist, primary care physician, and exhausted spouse already knew: we are a nation with full-blown PTSD. The American Psychological Association now reports that 76 percent of Americans cite the future of the country as their leading source of stress, outpacing the economy, work, and money. As Reich notes, “anxiety has moved from being a psychological disorder to becoming part of a seemingly natural order.” After 45 years of Reaganomics gutting job security, shredding the safety net, and concentrating wealth at the top — followed by a decade of Trumpism’s daily firehose of cruelty, corruption, and constitutional vandalism — the American nervous system has simply checked out. Marriages are postponed, births are falling, and pharmacy shelves groan under the weight of antidepressants and stomach pills. The Founders wrote in the Preamble that the goal of the rule of law outlined in the Constitution is there to “ensure domestic tranquility.” That bargain has been broken by a strongman who promised to fix the anxiety and instead became its single largest source.

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— Welcome to the Golden Era, where six in ten Americans can’t afford lunch. A grim new New York Times analysis finds that 61 percent of Americans are cutting back at the grocery store — skipping the meat, downgrading the produce, swapping name brands for generics, and in some cases just skipping meals — while a companion interactive Times piece lays out exactly what Trump’s Iran war is costing every American household at the pump and on the dinner plate. Brent crude is hovering around $110 a barrel, gas has rocketed from $2.98 to over $4, and diesel — the lifeblood of every truck hauling lettuce from California to your Safeway — is up more than 45 percent. The American Enterprise Institute, hardly a leftist outfit, estimates that gas alone will cost the average household an extra $550 by the end of September. Trump, who once promised to lower prices on Day One, shrugged this off as “a small price to pay” for doing whatever it was that Netanyahu wanted him to do to Iran. But the cost of groceries and gas is no big deal for the guy who’s golfed 21 percent of his second term on the taxpayer dime, had a chauffeur since he was a toddler, and always had the maid do the shopping. It’s far more problematic, though, for the family rationing pizza to pay for the war he started.

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— The Trump administration tried to ban voting machines in half the country, and we’re only finding out now. A bombshell Reuters investigation, summarized at the New Republic, reveals that White House adviser Kurt Olsen — whose actual job is finding ways to retroactively prove Trump’s stolen-election fantasies — spent last year pushing Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to declare Dominion Voting Systems software a “national security risk” in order to force 27 mostly blue states into hand-counting ballots, which would have slowed down returns and produced chaos in those states. The plan only collapsed because Lutnick’s team couldn’t manufacture even a fig leaf of justification. There is, of course, zero evidence that any voting machine has been hacked in recent days. But why let facts get in the way? The same administration sued and raided the Fulton County, Georgia election office in December, and has filed lawsuits demanding voter rolls from more than 30 states. The Trump/GOP strategy is transparent: poison the well in advance so that any Republican loss in November can be declared fraudulent on cue, and then they can refuse to seat in the House any Democrat from a “fraudulent” district next January. This isn’t election security. It’s a slow-motion coup with paperwork.

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— Marco Rubio is about to inherit a starved island, and he’s calling it a legacy. The Guardian reports that Secretary of State Rubio — the Cuban-exile hardliner who built his entire career on the dream of toppling Havana — is now days or weeks away from achieving it through what his own staff calls a “starvation campaign.” One former Rubio chief of staff told reporters that regime change would be “the capstone of his political career.” Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Cubans rallied at the U.S. Embassy in Havana on Friday, as the government distributes evacuation maps and stages civil-defense drills. “Cuba is a small and poor country, but one with experience confronting US imperialism,” said lawmaker Mariela Castro, daughter of Raúl. Trump, never one to dial down the menace, floated a “friendly takeover” in February — the same word “friendly” he used about Venezuela right before Maduro was hauled off. We’ve seen this movie before. It opens with sanctions, builds through CIA cables and oil embargoes, and ends with body bags. Forty-five years of Reaganomics taught us nothing about Latin American adventurism; apparently, neither did sixty years of Cuba policy.

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— If you wanted a green card, the new rule is: leave the country to get it. On Friday afternoon — the timing was not accidental — USCIS quietly issued a memo requiring nearly all green card applicants already inside the United States to pack up and finish their applications from their home countries. Mediaite reports the new rule guts the “adjustment of status” process used by 820,000 of the 1.4 million people who got green cards in 2024: the spouses of American citizens, the H-1B engineers, the farm workers, the nurses. USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler insists the policy will stop people “incentivizing loopholes.” Translation: “Since the law changed in 1965 and we ended racial immigration quotas, the majority of immigrants are not white people, and that’s all the Trump administration wants to come into the US. Too many Black and Brown people have already arrived, and it’s time for them to leave.” Sarah Pierce, a former USCIS analyst now at Third Way, warned the New York Times that the already-overburdened consular system “could have families separated for months or years.” Years. Of separation. By design. Stephen Miller’s white supremacist project to ethnically re-engineer the country runs faster every week, and the courts are the only thing left standing between a child in Pittsburgh and a parent stranded in Karachi.

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— Trump, acting like a 10-year-old bully, posted an AI video of himself beating up Stephen Colbert and throwing him in a dumpster. The White House posted it too. As Mediaite documented, the president of the United States — and then the official @WhiteHouse account, with the chipper caption “Bye-bye 👋” — distributed a fake clip showing Trump physically assaulting the Late Show host just hours after Colbert’s emotional final episode with Paul McCartney. Earlier that morning, Trump posted that other late-night hosts would “soon follow” and added: “May they all Rest in Peace!” Amazing: if you posted that about Trump, you’d probably get booted off a social media channel and possibly have a visit from the Secret Service. The president of the United States is publicly fantasizing — in AI-rendered video, on official White House channels — about violence against a private citizen who told jokes about him. And this is the same administration attempting to jail James Comey for posting a picture of seashells. The asymmetry isn’t a glitch; it’s the entire system. In an autocracy, the strongman’s violent fantasies are policy, and the citizen’s beach photo is a federal crime.

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Over at her Substack, the cartoonist and writer Aubrey Hirsch took a look at Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded “anti-weaponization” slush-fund and did something that should make every Republican in Washington squirm. She started doing the math. What if, she asked, we put that money toward something other than enriching Trump, his family, and the mob he summoned to the Capitol on January 6th, 2021?

Her list is devastating. With that $1.776 billion we could, she writes, replace 150,000 lead pipes in hundreds of communities, build 10,000 new affordable housing units, establish hundreds of community-owned grocery stores in food deserts, fully fund 70 community mental health clinics for a decade, support tens of thousands of foster youth aging out of care, erase all the school lunch debt in this country for the next nine years, or pay the salaries of 2,500 new teachers for ten years.

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Instead, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche blatantly refused to rule out paying chunks of this money to January 6 rioters who assaulted police officers or to Trump himself, and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, sentenced to serve 22 years for seditious conspiracy until Trump pardoned him, told Reuters he’s planning to apply for between $2 and $5 million.

Two Capitol Police officers who defended the building that day have sued to block the payouts, describing the fund as a “taxpayer-funded slush fund” for Trump followers who engaged in violence against cops.

Aubrey’s framing got me researching what else $1.8 billion in actual public money could do. Let me extend her list, because the media is failing entirely to put this into a meaningful context.

— That $1.8 billion could cover the average cost of weatherizing and insulating roughly 200,000 low-income homes, dropping monthly heating and cooling bills for working families through the kind of winters Louise and I weathered up in Vermont, New Hampshire, Michigan, and now here in Oregon.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Jeff Bezos to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

— It could fund a year of high-quality universal pre-K for roughly 144,000 three- and four-year-olds, the single most cost-effective investment we know of for closing achievement gaps and giving working parents a fighting chance.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Elon Musk to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

— It could cap the out-of-pocket cost of insulin at zero for every Type 1 diabetic in America for years, ending the rationing that is killing young people whose parents can’t choose between rent and a vial.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Mark Zuckerberg to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

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— It could pay for a full course of trauma-informed counseling for every one of the roughly 400,000 American children currently in foster care, with money left over to pay the social workers who are quitting in droves because their caseloads have become unmanageable.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Miriam Adelson, the casino heiress who gave more than $100 million to put Trump back in the White House, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

— It could fund the entire National School Lunch Program’s free-and-reduced shortfall for a generation of poor kids, ending the practice of stamping a child’s hand or throwing their tray in the trash because Mom is two weeks behind on the cafeteria bill.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Timothy Mellon, the reclusive railroad heir who gave $165 million to elect Donald Trump, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

— It could let the EPA replace something on the order of 380,000 lead home water pipes at the agency’s $4,700 average cost, getting toxic plumbing out from under hundreds of thousands of homes whose kids are right now being poisoned every time they drink from the tap.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, the Uline shipping magnates who poured over $133 million into MAGA-aligned causes in 2024, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

— It could retrofit every elementary school in America that still has lead paint, asbestos tile, or a roof that leaks every time it rains, the buildings where we are right now sending kids to learn to read.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Ken Griffin, the hedge-fund billionaire who spent $12 million just to kill a marijuana legalization initiative in Florida, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

— It could let the VA hire enough mental-health professionals to clear the appointment backlog for every veteran in this country, the men and women we sent to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan and then expected to wait six months for a counselor.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Peter Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir founder who personally manufactured the political career of J.D. Vance, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

— It could buy enough domestic-violence shelter beds, hotline funding, and transitional housing to clear the wait list that every shelter in this country runs every single night, the battered women and abused children currently sleeping in cars because there’s no room and no money.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Stephen Schwarzman, the Blackstone CEO who has spent tens of millions propping up the Republican Party while his firm gobbles up American housing stock and rents it back to working families at extortionate rates, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

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— It could extend rural broadband to every last farm, hollow, and reservation in America that still doesn’t have it, the kind of investment Dwight Eisenhower would have signed in a heartbeat and that today’s Republicans have repeatedly blocked.

But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Jeff Yass, the trading-firm co-founder who gave more than $100 million to Republican causes in 2024 and who happens to hold a major stake in TikTok’s parent company, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

That’s the choice in front of us, and it is not theoretical. A real $1.8 billion sits in a real account, taken from real taxpayers, and it’s going to be handed to people who tried to violently overthrow an American election.

It’s not being handed to the children currently drinking lead in Newark and Flint and Chicago, or the working mother in Louisville who skipped her insulin doses last month, or the veteran in Phoenix who hanged himself in March while waiting for a VA appointment.

The Trump regime and the GOP have made a choice, openly, brazenly, on camera, and the choice is to compensate the rioters and let the rest of us drink the lead.

The fix isn’t complicated, and the ProPublica reporting is now five years old and still ignored. When the twenty-five wealthiest Americans grew their wealth by $401 billion over five years and paid a true federal income tax rate of 3.4 percent, the money to do all of this exists.

It’s sitting in unrealized capital gains the IRS isn’t allowed to touch, in family trusts and step-up-in-basis loopholes, and offshore shell companies. It’s the money that built the slush fund (Lawrence O’Donnell calls it a “Thug Fund”) that Trump is about to hand to his rioters, and it’s the money our kids are not getting because the Mellons and Adelsons and Uihleins and Yasses paid for a Republican-controlled Congress that promised it would never come for them and their money bins.

Call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and representative that you do not want one penny of your tax money paid to the people who beat Officer Brian Sicknick and the four other cops who died as a result of the riot.

Tell them you want a billionaire wealth tax of the kind Bernie Sanders and economists Saez and Zucman have already costed out. Check your registration at vote.org, find your state lawmakers at openstates.org, and start showing up, because the 2026 midterms are coming and this is the fight.

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And if this piece moved you, share it. Send it to the friend who tells you both parties are the same. Send it to the cousin who thinks Trump is “draining the swamp.” Consider subscribing to the Hartmann Report so Louise and I can keep doing this work the way it has to be done.

The billionaires already have their voice and their advocates. We have to be ours.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Found $1.8 Billion”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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The fourth richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, told CNBC yesterday that he doesn’t think people making $70,000 a year should pay a penny in income taxes. For him, that’s a threefer.

First, it gets millions of Americans on the “we shouldn’t ever pay any income taxes at all” train that’s been rolling for billionaires ever since Reagan first gutted our tax code, leading to an explosion of the morbidly rich.

Second, it gets those same average, tax-paying voters on board with Bezos’ second claim, that America’s debt problem isn’t because we’re taxing too little but because we’re “spending too much.”

If we just got rid of — or privatized/profitized — all those pesky “socialist” programs like Medicaid, food stamps, free public highways, fire and police departments, Social Security, food and drug regulation and inspection, air traffic control and TSA, housing subsidies, Pell grants, free public schools, etc., then even billionaires could safely live tax-free.

Third, it means that Bezos will be able to reduce his own labor costs, because the marketplace in which pay rates exist are always exclusively reacting to “after tax” dollars.

Here’s how it works: If Bezos is paying an Amazon programmer $70,000 a year and that programmer then pays $12,000 a year in income taxes (his example, only for “a nurse in Queens”), their after-tax take-home pay is $58,000. That $58K is what they’re actually living on, and Bezos knows it.

So, if their income tax payment goes away, Bezos can drop their pay from $70K to $58K and they won’t notice any change at all in their lifestyle. And Bezos gets to keep the difference.

But there are even more fundamental problems with Jeff’s little tax scam. Back in 1904, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Homes Jr famously said, “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” He was right, and it works in two dimensions.

The main one is that taxes represent the money government must collect to cover the cost of the services its citizens have demanded of their elected representatives. With the exception of emergencies like the Civil War and World War II, the money coming into government and the money spent out should pretty much be in balance. And, with the exception of the period since 1981, they historically have been.

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When Ronald Reagan first put into place the GOP’s infamous “Two Santas” strategy of running up the debt during Republican presidencies and squealing about the national debt to block legislation during Democratic presidencies, he broke with an understanding and tradition that dated back to George Washington’s presidency.

Reagan tripled what was left of our WWII national debt, which Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, and Carter had all paid down to a mere $800 billion by 1981. He deficit-spent like crazy, producing an illusion of good times because of the stimulus of all that purchasing, and left us a $2.4 trillion national debt when he handed the reins of government over to GHW Bush.

While both Democratic Presidents Clinton and Obama tried to go along with the GOP and balance or near-balance budgets during their presidencies, the Two Santas spending of GW Bush and Trump has exploded our national debt to $39 trillion, about the same as the sum of all economic activity in the country (our GDP).

As I noted a few weeks ago, if we weren’t paying a trillion dollars a year in just interest on that debt, we could have a national healthcare system and free college education right now.

But keeping us from having nice things — from healthcare to education to housing to an electrified grid — is one of the main goals of the GOP’s Two Santas deficit-spending program.

Each of those programs has to be paid for with tax dollars, and morbidly rich people who are obsessed with making more, more, more want them all killed off.

“We can’t afford it because of the national debt!” is their favorite mantra. “Democrats must shoot their Santa of Social Security and other programs in the face by ‘cutting spending’ before we can talk about taxes!”

The simple reality is that income taxes are largely irrelevant to the lives of working class people. If they got a big tax cut, as noted earlier, their employers would simply reduce their pay to make up for it, or at least freeze it until inflation caught up. If their taxes go up, on the other hand, pressure falls on employers to raise gross (before-tax) pay enough to keep take-home pay where it had been.

Tax increases on working class people, in other words, lead to pay increases, while tax cuts on working class people inevitably lead to pay freezes or cuts, as the history of every tax increase since 1913 and every tax cut since Reagan’s first in 1981 proves.

On the other hand, the rules are completely different for the morbidly rich. If they pay less in taxes, they keep more money for themselves because they’re generally the ones determining how much they take out of their businesses or trust funds, not some employer. When taxes go up, they have less to throw into their money bins.

Which brings up the second and really most important dimension of taxation: it’s supposed to incentivize behaviors society wants and discourage behaviors that harm the rest of us.

When we wanted people to buy cars to increase the mobility of Americans and jump-start the car industry after WWII, we made the interest on car loans tax-deductible. Ditto for house purchases. When the auto industry matured and there was no longer a reason to encourage new car purchases, we did away with that tax deduction.

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The things people call “loopholes,” in other words, should be carefully designed to encourage behaviors we want, and historically have been.

We want companies to do research and design to develop new products and make our economy vibrant, so we offer R&D tax deductions. We don’t want companies “making money” by manipulating their own stock prices, so we attach a huge penalty to companies buying back their own stock (or we did until Reagan legalized this form of stock price manipulation in 1983).

And tax rates should be high enough to discourage the kind of hoarding and other antisocial behavior we don’t want rich people engaging in. Prior to Reagan shattering our tax system, people at the top of the economic pyramid generally weren’t in a bizarre competition to amass and display conspicuous levels of wealth.

Certainly, there were dynastic families and people who had fancy houses in the Hamptons, but by and large people with control over their own income (the CEO class) maxxed out their annual take-home around $2 or $3 million because above that the 74-90% tax rate began to bite. The Hearst Castle was the exception that proved the rule; most of the “wealthy” lived in nice suburbs like Beverly Hills and Long Island.

Republicans have been playing cynical tax games with the American public ever since Jude Wanniski invented his Two Santas strategy for the GOP back in the 1970s, and our media generally plays along both to keep in good Republican graces and also because so few people (including reporters) actually understand taxes and taxation theory.

There’s a popular internet meme where an American asks a European, “How can you be happy when you pay so much in taxes?”

The European replies by calmly listing everything those taxes pay for — free health care, free college, inexpensive childcare, quality public transit, a strong social safety net — and then says, “You have to pay a billionaire and his markup for all of those things; we get them for free.”

Keep corporate money out of the news

Similarly, years ago I was up late one night watching, as I recall, Bloomberg News on a hotel TV in Asia. The American host was interviewing a very wealthy German businessman at a conference in Singapore.

Amidst questions about the business climate and the conference, the host asked the German businessman what tax rate he was “suffering under” in his home country. As I recall, the businessman said, “A bit over 60 percent, when everything is included.”

“How can you handle that?” asked the host, incredulous.

The German shrugged his shoulders and moved the conversation to another topic.

A few minutes later, the American reporter, still all wound up by the tax question, again asked the businessman how he could possibly live in a country with such a high tax rate on very wealthy and successful people. Again, the German deferred and changed the subject.

The reporter went for a third try. “Why don’t you lead a revolt against those high taxes?” he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American rebellion-making.

The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.

He stared at the man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, “I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country.”

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There are a few wealthy Americans, like Tom Steyer, who understand this. But the billionaires and foreign oligarchs who fund the Republican Party and right-wing media think it’s perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation and turn its people against each other if it lets them keep a few extra bucks.

And Jeff Bezos is just the most recent to publicly try to run this scam on us.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Jeff Bezos’ Tax Scam”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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In November of 1973, with Watergate closing in around him and his approval rating in free fall, Richard Nixon stood in front of four hundred newspaper editors at Disney World in Orlando and said something that, whatever else you think of the man, revealed an instinct that has gone entirely extinct in today’s Republican Party. He said, in the words that became his epitaph, that “people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.”

He was lying, of course, when he added, “Well, I’m not a crook.” But notice the premise underneath the lie. Nixon understood, even as he was going down, that a president owes the American people an accounting, that accountability is the price of the office, and that the public has a right to know who’s running their government and how.

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That premise is the thing that’s dead now, and a dear friend of mine put his finger on exactly why in an email he sent me yesterday morning. He’s a very smart guy, careful with his words, not given to hyperbole, and he wrote:

“Trump, as we well know, is a brazen crook. But never have I seen corruption as flagrant as the $1.8 billion slush fund that Trump is stealing from taxpayers to reward, in part, the Jan 6 rioters. Imprisoned by a jury of their peers, Trump pardons them and where was the outrage. Now this? Is there no way it can be stopped? So far I haven’t heard anyone suggest how. Why do I even pay my f...ing taxes? I have always committed to honesty in my tax returns. Perhaps I should find ways to cheat as so many of my acquaintances have.”

I’ve been getting versions of that email all week, and that last line is the part that should worry every one of us. This is a man who has spent his entire adult life filing honest tax returns out of a sense of basic civic obligation, and he’s now openly wondering, in writing, to a friend, whether he’s been a sucker. That’s what corruption at the top actually does to a nation.

It isn’t just the money. It’s the slow poisoning of the idea that the rules apply to everyone — the idea that holds a self-governing republic together — and once enough honest people conclude that only chumps pay full freight, we don’t have a country anymore. We have a kleptocracy with a flag.

So let’s look at what actually happened, because it’s somehow even worse than the email suggests.

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On Monday, the Justice Department announced that Trump was dropping the ten-billion-dollar lawsuit he’d filed against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns, and in exchange the government would create a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate people who claim they were wrongly targeted by the Biden administration, a category that, by design, makes eligible for “compensation” the very January 6th rioters Trump already pardoned as well as Trump himself.

By the way, the entire frame — picked up and dutifully repeated by the corporate media — was a lie. Trump’s lawsuit was about to be thrown out by a skeptical judge, so he simply killed it. There’s no “settlement.” No “in exchange” for dropping the suit, none of that. Instead, Trump wants us to think that, but in reality — as Rachel Maddow pointed out — Trump is just forcing us taxpayers to give him a $1.776 billion slush fund.

On top of that, we learned Monday that Trump has made hundreds of millions of dollars trading on the stock market with stocks that he is recommending or promoting as president. Martha Stewart went to prison for making $45,000 off insider information; Trump adds a billion to his portfolio.

Then on Tuesday it got worse. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who you’ll remember was Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer before Trump installed him atop the Department of Justice, signed a one-page addendum declaring that the IRS is “forever barred and precluded” from auditing or pursuing any tax claim against Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, the Trump Organization, and an unspecified circle of “related or affiliated individuals” and entities, for any return filed before May 18th or for any matter that “could have been raised.”

Any past Trump tax crime, or any other crime involving financial fraud against the government, is now officially forgiven, forever, including over $100 million the family currently owes the IRS for previous attempts at tax fraud. Crime on, Trump’s!

Blanche handing Trump $100 million along with immunity makes Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell — who went to prison for his corruption on Tricky Dick’s behalf — look like a choir boy.

A man found liable in a New York courtroom for years of business fraud, who spent three campaigns refusing to release his returns by claiming he was perpetually under audit, has now had his own lawyer, running his own Justice Department, issue him and his children a permanent, retroactive get-out-of-jail-free card on every tax crime they may have committed, including the ones we know about and the IRS has been trying to collect since 2010.

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And he did it while simultaneously arranging for the Treasury to hand nearly two billion dollars of your money to Trump’s violent foot soldiers who killed four police officers, tried to lynch Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, literally shit on the Capitol, and did their best to overthrow our government at Trump’s behest.

Congressman Richard Neal, the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, put it as plainly as it can be put when he said Trump has turned the federal government into his personal protection racket.

Meanwhile, Don Jr. isn’t waiting around for the compensation checks to show up. Days after his father won the 2024 election, Don Jr. joined a venture firm called 1789 Capital as a named partner, and the firm proceeded to invest in a two-year-old critical-minerals startup called Vulcan Elements.

That company then somehow received the single largest loan the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital has ever issued, $620 million, with another $50 million in equity from the Commerce Department as the cherry on top.

At least three more 1789 Capital portfolio companies pulled down federal contracts in 2025, and Don Jr.’s personal net worth has grown sixfold, to roughly three hundred million dollars, since the day his father was elected.

When my friend asks why he should bother paying his taxes honestly, this is the answer he’s really wrestling with. His money is being routed, through the machinery of the United States government, into the private fortune of the president’s son.

And the corruption and the danger to American democracy are not two separate stories; they’re the same thing.

While Trump is busy looting the Treasury for his family and his rioters, he’s also systematically taking apart the alliance structure that has kept the free world — those countries that respect the rule of law and democracy — relatively safe since 1945. Even worse, he’s doing it at the precise moment our adversaries are knitting themselves together for exactly the confrontation he’s leaving us unprepared for.

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Olga Lautman has been documenting this with the rigor it deserves, and her latest reporting, drawing on Reuters and the German paper WELT, lays out how China covertly trained Russian troops, drone operators and electronic-warfare specialists, on Chinese soil in late 2025 under a secret military agreement that explicitly barred any disclosure, with those troops later deployed into occupied Ukraine.

The cooperation runs in both directions, she writes, with Russia also training Chinese forces for a potential seizure of Taiwan, and the whole apparatus is increasingly wired into Iran and North Korea.

And what was Trump doing while this alliance hardened into an axis that looks like it’s preparing for World War III? He flew home from Beijing, lavished praise on Xi, and then mused aloud that the congressionally approved fourteen-billion-dollar weapons package for Taiwan might just be a “negotiating chip.”

NATO formally calls China a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war, but our idiot president calls Xi a “friend” and treats our treaty commitments like old MAGA hats on a clearance rack.

So my friend’s question, “is there no way it can be stopped,” deserves a real answer rather than a shrug, because the shrug is precisely what the people doing this are counting on. Yes, there is a way, and it doesn’t require waiting until 2029.

House and Senate Democrats should be holding shadow hearings right now, on the record, with witnesses named and a documentary record being built in real time, so that the day the gavel changes hands there is no two-year Merrick Garland-style delay while everyone studies their shoes.

And the Blue states’ attorneys general, who answer to their own voters and not to Todd Blanche, should be opening criminal inquiries into the Trump organization’s conduct under state law, where no federal addendum and no presidential pardon can reach.

Letitia James already showed in New York that state fraud statutes have teeth. There’s no reason the attorneys general of at least a dozen blue states couldn’t be coordinating that work this afternoon.

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Here’s the bottom line. We have a professional conman and career criminal — who has even gleefully engaged in murder in the Caribbean — in the White House.

And the Trump family sweetheart tax deal and the ~$2 billion for insurrectionists and the Trump family is a done deal; Todd Blanche has put it into writing and it doesn’t require Congress or anybody else for it to go into effect. If we don’t keep speaking out, it will soon become yesterday’s news for the mainstream media.

This adjudicated rapist and convicted fraudster now sits beyond the reach of the tax law, his family enriching itself directly from the public Treasury (and millions for Melania from Bezos and political money from other billionaires).

He’s turned our Justice Department into his personal law firm, and the Republicans in Congress are too frightened of one man’s Nazi-drenched social media account to so much as clear their throats (just ask John Cornyn), all while the dictators Trump admires, Putin and Xi, draw up the plans to end America’s role in the world.

Nixon at least understood that the people had a right to know. This crowd has decided the people have no rights the president needs to respect, and they’ll keep believing that exactly as long as we let them.

So don’t let them. Call your senators and representative through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them you want shadow hearings on this corruption now, not next year. That Todd Blanche should share John Mitchell‘s fate.

Contact your state attorney general, whose office you can find through openstates.org, and ask them point-blank what they are doing about the Trump organization’s conduct under your state’s laws.

Make sure you and everyone you know is registered and ready to vote in 2026 by checking at vote.org. If you live in a Red state where they’re purging millions of voters as you read this, check your registration every few weeks; Republican Secretaries of State are particularly fond of bouncing people off the rolls in the weeks before the re-registration deadline closes.

And if this piece said something you think your neighbors need to hear, share it, forward it, post it, and send people to hartmannreport.com, because the single thing this administration most depends on is your silence and your exhaustion, and the most radical thing you can do in a moment like this one is to refuse to provide either.

My friend is right to be furious. The answer to his question is that yes, it can be stopped, but only by us, and only if we start now.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Trump the Crook”

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Your Daily Meme, suitable to copy and paste into social media or email:

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Back when I was a kid in Lansing, Michigan, my father used to tell me that the difference between America and the places his Army buddies had fought through in Europe and Asia wasn’t the size of our buildings or the strength of our army.

It was, he said, that here a cop couldn’t kick in your door without a judge first deciding there was a good reason, a president couldn’t help himself to the treasury, and he can’t take a king’s gift or send soldiers overseas to kill people without the people’s representatives saying yes. Even the cop shows we watched on TV had police regularly being turned away from people’s doors for lack of a warrant.

Dad believed that with the uncomplicated faith of a man who’d watched what happened when those rules disappeared in other countries, and he passed that faith on to me as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, which, for an American of his generation, it was.

I’ve been thinking about my Eisenhower Republican father a lot lately, because the thing he assumed could never happen in America is now happening here, openly, daily, and with a kind of swagger that suggests the people doing it don’t believe there will ever be a price to pay.

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Consider what we learned just yesterday morning. The Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund to compensate Donald Trump’s allies who claim they were unfairly targeted by the previous administration. It’s an unprecedented mechanism that lets the president pay his own supporters — or fund his own private army — out of a government agency he controls with taxpayer money, with no functional constraints on who he can give that money to.

Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called it plainly what it is, a political grievance fund Trump can use to pay off his friends, and the obvious beneficiaries are the roughly fifteen hundred people he already pardoned for storming the Capitol on January 6th.

The Fourteenth Amendment, written in the blood of the Civil War, says in Section 4 that this is blatantly illegal:

“[N]either the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”

The men who stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of a presidential election engaged in exactly the kind of insurrection that language was written to address — several were even convicted by juries for seditious conspiracy — and now Trump wants to write them checks that could be as much as $1 million per person.

This isn’t some obscure or gray area of the law or the Constitution: that’s the document telling us all “No” in language a child could understand, and the answer coming back from the Trump regime is a number chosen, with a wink, to evoke 1776.

It would be one thing if this were an isolated outrage, but it isn’t. Instead of the exception, this kind of criminal activity is now the norm: this is the most corrupt, lawless administration in American history and, so far, they’re getting away with almost all of it. For example:

— Article I of the Constitution gives the power to make war exclusively to Congress, not the president, and the War Powers Act that Congress passed over Richard Nixon’s veto in 1973 spells out the only exception, which is that a president may use force when the nation has been attacked or such an attack is imminent, and even then he must come to Congress within sixty days for permission to continue.

Iran represented no threat to the US, there was no attack or imminent attack, and yet Trump bombed the country anyway without even notifying, much less asking permission from, Congress. And now far more than 60 days have passed and he and the toadies in his regime are giving the middle finger to us, the Constitution, and the law.

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— Trump’s also been bombing small boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific since September of 2025, killing well over a hundred people he’s never bothered to identify, charge, or even produce a shred of evidence against. This is a naked violation of both US laws against murder and is an explicit war crime under international law and treaties.

When the Senate unsuccessfully tried to rein him in, he posted on his failing, Nazi-infested social media sewer that the War Powers Act is “unconstitutional” — as if he’s ever read the Constitution — and that the five Republicans who voted to constrain him should never be elected to office again.

Human Rights Watch described these strikes flatly as a campaign of “extrajudicial executions” carried out “without any credible legal basis.” The worst of them, the September 2nd strike, became what military lawyers call a double-tap, because after the first missile left two men clinging to the burning wreckage for forty minutes, the order came down, according to the ACLU’s account of the reporting, to hit them again and finish them off.

Killing shipwrecked survivors is a war crime under treaties we wrote and signed, and the Pentagon’s own manual says so, but we did it anyway, and the men who ordered and carried it out went on television and bragged about it.

— Similarly, the Constitution forbids in two separate places, Article I and Article II, the acceptance of gifts from foreign governments without the consent of Congress, a provision the framers wrote because George Washington’s generation understood, having just thrown off a king, exactly how a foreign prince could buy an American official’s loyalty one favor at a time.

Trump accepted a four-hundred-million-dollar Boeing 747 from the royal family of Qatar, a flying palace destined for his presidential library, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner took a two-billion-dollar investment from a Saudi sovereign wealth fund run by Mohammed bin Salman within months of leaving his White House job.

When Congressman (and constitutional law professor) Jamie Raskin pointed out that the Constitution says no present of any kind whatever may be accepted from a foreign state without congressional permission, the White House press secretary called the very question ridiculous. She literally laughed at the law and the Constitution.

— The Fourth Amendment says no home shall be entered and no person seized except on a warrant issued by a judge after sworn testimony about a crime:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Nonetheless, a leaked internal ICE memo, revealed by the Associated Press through a whistleblower, instructs agents that they may break down the doors of private homes on the strength of an “administrative warrant” ICE writes for itself, with no judge anywhere in the process.

This is precisely what the founding generation called a “general warrant” that the Fourth Amendment was written to forbid, and a Minnesota judge has already ruled that one such raid violated a man’s constitutional rights. They keep doing it anyway.

— The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 requires the president to spend the money Congress appropriates, and the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has now found the administration in violation of the law at least six times. The GAO’s general counsel has testified in dozens of open investigations and wrote that the Constitution grants the president no unilateral authority to withhold funds Congress has commanded him to spend.

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Ignoring it all, Trump is withholding money from disaster aid to Medicaid funds to states and laughing at the law.

— The Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump himself signed in November and which passed the House with only one single dissenting vote, required the full release of the files by last December 19th and explicitly forbade withholding anything to spare a public figure embarrassment.

Trump’s Justice Department, though, released fewer than half of the records, then quietly went back and added new redactions to documents it had already posted. You don’t have to wonder very hard why a president whose name reportedly appears in those files more than thirty thousand times might want them buried.

I could keep going, and that’s the part that would have blown my father’s mind. There’s the Logan Act being violated by Kushner, there’s the Hatch Act being trampled by Hegseth campaigning in Kentucky, there’s the Take Care Clause of Article II that obliges a president to faithfully execute the laws rather than treat the ones he dislikes as suggestions.

Several ICE agents are accused of murdering Renee Goode and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, but the state has been unable to investigate and prosecute the case because Trump is hiding the evidence from them. That’s a felony reminiscent of the old Confederacy.

Pile them up and instead of a handful of unrelated scandals like during Nixon, we see a method, the same method Hannah Arendt described when she wrote about how authoritarian movements don’t merely break individual laws but work to destroy the very idea that law constrains power at all, so that eventually the only question anyone bothers to ask is what dear leader wants.

Germany and Japan were here before, in the last century, and we didn’t like how it ended up requiring us to sacrifice blood and treasure to restore democracy and the rule of law to Europe and Asia.

The deepest damage, however, isn’t to any single statute. It’s to the thing my father believed in, the global understanding that America was the country where the law applied even to the powerful, even to the president, especially to the president.

Every dictator and strongman on Earth is watching the most powerful office in the world demonstrate that constitutions can be treated like paper tigers, that war crimes carry no consequences, that a leader can pay his own mob and pocket a king’s airplane and the system simply absorbs it.

They’re taking notes, and the next time an American diplomat lectures a foreign despot about the rule of law that strongman is going to laugh out loud.

What chafes me the most is the hypocrisy, because I remember, and you do, too. When Barack Obama used prosecutorial discretion to shield DREAMers from deportation, Republicans fought it in court; Speaker Paul Ryan declared it a major victory in the fight to restore the separation of powers and warned that the president is not permitted to write laws, only Congress is.

When Obama delayed an Obamacare employer mandate, Jonathan Turley warned that if a president can suspend federal laws then the legislative process becomes a pretense, and the Heritage Foundation thundered about “lawlessness” and “dangerous precedents” that weaken our constitutional balance.

Those same voices, confronted today with a president paying off insurrectionists, taking foreign jets, ignoring six GAO impoundment findings, violating the Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments, breaking the law on war, engaging in insider trading, and defying a transparency law he signed himself, have gone silent or, worse, become his cheerleaders.

For Republicans, apparently the principle was never about principle. It was, instead, always about whose side you were on.

American democracy can’t survive this sort of assault for long; it has to be stopped. And Democrats can’t afford to repeat the paralysis of the first two years of the Biden administration, when Merrick Garland’s Justice Department moved with such deliberate caution on Trump’s crimes that the clock simply ran out.

Democratic members of Congress should be forming investigative working groups right now, today.

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One for the boat killings, one for the emoluments, one for the impoundment defiance, one for the Epstein noncompliance, one for the warrantless raids, one for tearing down part of the White House, one for his insider stock trading, one for taking us to war illegally, etc., gathering the documents and the testimony and the timelines while memories are fresh and witnesses are reachable.

They should be holding public hearings on each of these issues now, in the open, not as a campaign promise but as the constitutional oversight that is literally their job, so that when power changes hands, as it always eventually does, there’s no eighteen-month ramp-up and no excuse for one.

You have a role in this too, and it isn’t a small one. Call your senators and representative through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them you want public hearings on these violations of the law and you want them now, not after the next election.

Make sure you’re registered and that everyone you know is registered at vote.org, because elections remain, as the law professors testifying about presidential power keep reminding us, the ultimate check on a lawless executive.

Track what your state legislature is doing at openstates.org, because the defense of constitutional government is being fought in statehouses too.

And if this piece said something you think other people need to hear, please share it, and support independent journalism at hartmannreport.com and elsewhere, because the work of holding power accountable has never depended on the powerful; it has always depended on ordinary citizens who refused to look away.

My father’s generation believed America was the country where the rules apply to everyone, and fought a brutal war to defend that ideal. Whether they were right is, finally, now up to you and me.

Louise’s Daily Song: “What Happens When a President Stops Obeying the Constitution?”

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Your Daily Meme, suitable for cutting and pasting into social media and your emails:

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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The United States and the Republic of China (the official name for Taiwan) — one of the world’s most vibrant and functional democracies — have had a formal defense relationship since 1955. Last week, Donald Trump — who’s been withholding since last year two shipments totaling $25 billion worth of US military hardware Taiwan has purchased — said that relationship is now a “bargaining chip” to get what he, his oligarch friends, and his family want from China.

America was founded on the idea that democracy — a form of government that our Founders discovered functioning well among Native American societies, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living — was our north star, the core concept around which all our actions revolved.

We fought Great Britain to establish democracy, fought against the fascist Confederacy to preserve democracy here in America, and helped fight German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese fascists to preserve and restore democracy in Europe and Asia.

After winning each battle, we became a little more democratic, enfranchising women, formerly enslaved people, and even 18-year-olds. We welcomed the diverse people of the world, groaning under oppression and poverty, to share our democracy and the free enterprise system it enabled.

Help to keep up the fight!

Most of the countries in today’s world, however, have little use for democracy. Certainly, Putin, Xi, and the Middle Eastern sheiks view it as a threat to their wealth and power. Most of the smaller countries across the world are dominated by wealthy families (oligarchy) or violent warlords (autocracy); during the decades I did international relief work, I spent time in many of them.

And yet we always fought for democracy, even though we started out imperfectly. We helped create the United Nations, a democratic institution. We fought and died for European and Asian democracy. We encouraged democracy around the world through foreign aid programs like USAID and through pro-democracy advocacy operations like the Voice of America.

Until Trump.

Today, we have a president who holds democracy and democratic nations in disdain. He openly ridicules our democratic allies while sucking up to and praising autocrats and oligarchs. He gutted USAID, killed Voice of America, and even tried to overthrow our own democracy and will probably try again.

Help to keep up the fight!

His racist, homophobic, and “poorly educated” followers agree with his disdain for democracy, openly embracing his despotic proclamations because he hates the same people they hate. Republican politicians who once defended American democracy cow before his threats of revenge when, like Senator Bill Cassidy, they don’t join him in embracing Putin and fail to nakedly cheer Trump’s violations of international law.

Foreign billionaires like the Fox “News” Murdochs and the Middle Eastern sheiks who’ve poured billions into Trump’s family are apparently happy to see our democracy under assault. About a hundred domestic billionaire families are enthusiastically willing to trade democracy and the free press it requires for tax cuts and deregulation.

So, what happens if they win?

What happens if America finally, fully abandons the alliances we’ve built up over 250 years and instead embraces this autocratic new world order of Putin, Xi, and the corrupt billionaires who run most of the world’s autocracies?

If we formally pull out of NATO or simply, quietly continue the process of abandoning the alliance? If we leave Taiwan, Japan, Australia, and South Korea to the tender mercies of the Chinese Communist Party? If we continue our embrace of “America’s coolest dictator” Bukele in El Salvador and Rodriguez in Venezuela and let their authoritarianism continue to metastasize across our hemisphere?

If the GOP and its billionaire owners manage to muzzle all but a token remnant of our once-vibrant free press, if ICE becomes Trump’s and Vance’s personal Schutzstaffel and throws open their “detention centers” to the “liberal” Americans they’ve already designated as “domestic terrorists”? If they continue to follow Putin’s system of tightly regulating who’s eligible to vote (while corrupting Democrats like Fetterman) so Republicans never lose?

Help to keep up the fight!

What happens if they win?

Then the wealthiest people on Earth finally get the world they’ve always wanted, from the days they opposed the American Revolution, to fighting against Lincoln, to “America First” billionaires trying to hire Smedley Butler to assassinate FDR, to now supporting Trump:

A world where democracy is weak.
Labor is powerless.
The press is controlled.
Religion is weaponized.
Elections are managed.
Fear keeps people obedient.
And billionaires rule without accountability.

That’s the oligarch’s endgame and has been for millennia. It’s why they bought off Sinema, Manchin, Golden, and Fetterman and are inserting themselves in elections across the nation. It’s why they’re buying our media. It’s why Republicans in Congress keep sending more and more of our taxpayer money to ICE while ignoring Trump’s multiple impeachable offenses from war crimes to emoluments violations to the open betrayal of our democratic allies.

Not “making America great.”
Not patriotism.
Not Christianity.
Not freedom.

Power.

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Raw power for a small handful of morbidly rich men, enforced by propaganda, corruption, and violence, both committed by agents of the state (against Comey, James, Schiff et al, and soon to be directed against you and me) as well as J6 freelancers Trump is trying to pre-pay with $1.7 billion just in time for this fall’s election.

Roughly every 80 years, it seems, the battle to preserve democracy comes back around and confronts the generation then living. And here it is again.

The generations that defeated fascism in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1940s understood something simple but profound: democracy survives only if ordinary people are willing to defend it.

Now it’s our turn.

Louise’s Daily Song: “What Happens if They Win?”

I was on MSNOW with Ali Velshi yesterday. You can watch it here:
https://www.ms.now/ali-velshi/watch/good-times-for-billionaires-thom-hartmann-on-trump-admin-ignoring-the-crisis-2500392515599

Your meme for the day:

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.