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Welcome to Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club, one of the perks of your subscription to the Hartmann Report. We’ll be meeting live on the last Sunday of every month at noon ET, 9 am PT. One book a month.

And the timing couldn’t be better.

On July 30th, a federal appeals court gave Arkansas the green light to start arresting librarians. Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin enthusiastically praised the neo-Nazi-style book-banning ruling, saying it “allows Arkansas to move forward in enforcing a law that protects children from obscene materials while increasing accountability for public-library curation decisions.”

Act 372 makes it a crime to hand a minor any “harmful item,” is punishable by up to a year in jail and a $10,000 fine, and it lets city and county rightwing politicians decide what books, newspapers, and magazines are “harmful.”

And it doesn’t name or define books, so librarians are stuck guessing what some rightwinger is going to be offended by. Caution, of course, will be the word of the day, and kids will be the ones suffering.

PEN America counted 6,870 rightwing book bans in just one single school year, 2025, across 23 states. The American Library Association identified 4,235 titles challenged by these neo-Nazis in 2025: 92% of those challenges came from hardcore rightwing pressure groups and hard-right politicians.

Under 3% of the calls to ban books came from an actual parent worried about an actual kid.

PEN’s newest report found bans on nonfiction more than doubled this year, with over 1,100 history books, biographies, and memoirs pulled off shelves. They’re not chasing Lady Chatterly’s Lover; they’re going after books that warn about what’s happening right now in this country. Books like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451.

When I was a kid in Lansing, the library was just a few miles from our house and there was also a great library in my school. While librarians were happy to make recommendations and check me out, nobody ever questioned what I took home or asked my parents to sign off.

Upper- and middle-class kids will be able to get around these bans by simply buying their own books, but rural, Black, and lower-income children will be hit hard as our libraries become more and more anodyne. Researchers went through 20 years of federal time-use data covering 236,000 Americans and found that daily reading for pleasure has dropped from 28% to 16% over just the past 20 years.

So let’s do something about it together.

Some months will be my books, and on others I’ll try to bring the author on and you’ll get to talk directly with them. Some months we’ll take on something written 50 or 150 years ago, other times brand new releases, and every book we discuss will have one thing in common: it made somebody powerful uncomfortable.

Our first book is my most recent one, Who Killed the American Dream? The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told, which came out July 7th. We’ll meet to discuss it in 2 weeks, on the morning of Sunday, August 30th.

In 1886 — contrary to what many lawyers learned in law school — the Supreme Court did not rule that corporations are people. The justices ducked the question entirely. But the Court’s reporter, a former railroad president and Very Wealthy Guy named J.C. Bancroft Davis, wrote a headnote saying they had.

That one sentence — which had no legal stature — became the foundation for American corporate power in the 1980s during the Reagan Revolution, continued straight through to Citizens United, and legalized the billions that the morbidly rich are right now showering on their toady politicians.

Get the book however you like. Your free local library probably has it or can order it, and your local independent bookstore will order it happily. Or use Powells.com, our local bookstore here in Portland, which is a real gem, unionized, and has a huge inventory (it’s literally an entire city block and 4 stories high, all filled with books!).

They’re banning books because books have been foundational to positive political change from the beginning of our republic to today. So let’s read the dangerous ones together, and discuss them in a room they can’t close.

I’ll see you in the chat. Let’s all be troublemakers together. Here’s an excerpt from:

Chapter 11: The Deflection Playbook

Culture War as a Substitute for Economic Reform

The most sophisticated deflection program that today’s oligarchs are using to conceal their corporate theft of human rights is their so-called culture war itself.

“Woke” has become their all-purpose slur. They slap it on civil rights advocacy, diversity initiatives, LGBTQ equality, labor activism, honest history, and even environmental protection.

The brilliance of this kind of “anti-woke” propaganda is that it helps politicians and the people who design their political ads create what looks like a widespread voter backlash while never having to talk about the real issues that actually affect average Americans like taxes, wages, monopolies, or healthcare.

Instead of debating whether hedge funds should be allowed to buy up single-family homes (as is happening today, driving our housing crisis), the nation is forced to fight over whether schools should have books on the shelves that talk about about diverse families or the difficulties Black people have faced throughout American history.

Attacks like these on America’s schools, libraries, and public institutions like this work well for both the oligarchs and their predatory corporations. When America’s oligarchs can convince people that schools are “indoctrinating” or “mutilating” their children, that libraries are “grooming” them, and that universities are “brainwashing” them, they succeed in delegitimize the very institutions that traditionally have taught people to question oligarchic power.

The goal of these memes and the billionaire-owned rightwing media’s constant flood of moral-outrage stories isn’t really to protect children or preserve “family values.” Instead, it’s done explicitly to prevent any sort of economic solidarity from forming through keeping people battling each other over phony issues of “cultural identity.”

“Fraud” Narratives That Justify Voter Suppression

The deflection playbook being run by America’s oligarchs even extends to our democracy itself.

When elections are framed as inherently fraudulent—when Republicans claim “illegal votes” explain every Republican loss—it gets a whole heck of a lot easier to justify restrictive voting rules that drive down turnout. Voter ID requirements disproportionately affect poor voters, while the GOP has been on a fifty-year voter roll–purging binge going back to the days of William Rehnquist’s Operation Eagle Eye that mostly targets communities of color.

Reporter Greg Palast reports that Black people are 400 percent more likely to have their ballots thrown out than white people; months before the 2000 election in Florida, Governor Jeb Bush had around ninety thousand Black people purged from that state’s voting rolls, giving room for his brother George to win the state by 537 votes.

Using data from the US Elections Assistance Commission, Palast discovered that voter suppression led to 14.1 million voters having their ballots disqualified in the 2024 election that Trump “won” by a margin of only two million votes.

Around five million voters were purged from voter rolls without credible justification in the months leading up to the election, and another two million mail-in ballots were challenged by Republican “poll monitors” and then disqualified for minor clerical errors (e.g., postage due). Another roughly eight hundred thousand ballots were disqualified or rejected for other, non-credible reasons, and over 3.24 million new registrations were rejected in 2024 without credible evidence.

“Fraud” also supposedly justifies reducing polling places in urban areas and doing away with drop boxes, while also limiting early voting and vote by mail.

The actual evidence of voter fraud in America is vanishingly small, as study after study has found that fraudulent voting is extremely rare and there’s not a single election in our lifetimes that’s been flipped because of it. But evidence isn’t the point for the oligarchs. The goal is to make voting itself suspect, to thus create a pretext for rules that make it harder and harder for working-class people and minorities to participate in our democracy.

Corporations support these policies because if working-class people voted in proportion to their numbers—if they weren’t suppressed and gerrymandered and discouraged—they’d almost certainly vote for economic policies that threaten oligarchic power. As we saw in New York City in 2005, they’d vote to tax wealth, strengthen unions, regulate corporations, and rebuild the social contract.

War, the Ultimate Deflection

In 1999, when George W. Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his family hired ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz to pen the first draft of Bush’s autobiography, A Charge to Keep.

Although Bush had gone AWOL for about a year during the Vietnam War and was thus apparently no fan of combat, he’d concluded (from watching his father’s “little three-day war” with Iraq) that being a “wartime president” was the most consistently surefire way to get reelected (if you did it right) and have a two-term presidency.

Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004:

I’ll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999. . . . ​One of the things [Bush] said to me is: “One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait), and he wasted it. . . . ​If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.

The attack on 9/11 gave Bush his first chance to be seen as a commander--in-chief when our guy Osama bin Laden—who the Reagan/Bush administration had spent $3 billion building up in Afghanistan—engineered an attack on New York and DC.

The crime was planned in Germany and Florida. On 9/11 bin Laden was, according to CBS News, not even in Afghanistan: “CBS Evening News has been told that the night before the September 11 terrorists’ attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the US war on terror in Afghanistan.” When the Obama administration finally caught and killed bin Laden, he was again in Pakistan, the home base for the Taliban.

But attacking our ally Pakistan in 2001 would have been impossible for Bush, and, besides, nearby Afghanistan was an easier target, being at that time the second-poorest country in the world with an average annual per-capita income of $700 a year. Bin Laden had run al-Qaeda training camps there, unrelated to 9/11, but they made a fine excuse for Bush’s first chance to “be seen as a commander-in-chief” and get some leadership cred.

Trump reprised the strategy in 2025, becoming the first American president to bomb seven different countries in one year prior to his 2026 invasion of Venezuela and bombing of Iran. Keep them occupied with the external enemy, and they’ll fail to notice who’s draining their bank accounts and stealing their wages.

Breaking the Spell

Every element of this oligarch’s deflection playbook serves a single purpose: preventing working-class solidarity.

The oligarchs know that they’re outnumbered and that if working people across racial, religious, and cultural lines ever united around their shared economic interests, oligarch power would crumble. The deflection playbook was created and is maintained to make sure that never happens.

White workers are taught to resent Black workers. Native-born workers are taught to fear immigrant workers. Rural workers are taught to despise urban workers. Christian workers are taught to distrust Muslim workers. Straight workers are taught to feel threatened by LGBTQ workers.

All of us are taught by oligarch media to blame each other for the declining American Dream, while never, ever mentioning the actual oligarchs and their corporations who actually killed it.

Corporate constitutional rights gave the oligarchs the legal weapons they needed to destroy unions, slash taxes, offshore jobs, and capture control of our government. The deflection playbook and Reagan’s ending the Fairness Doctrine gave them the necessary propaganda tools to prevent working-class people from ever launching a democratic response.

While the constitutional amendment we need to pass will strip corporations of their legal weapons, we also need to strip the oligarchs of these propaganda weapons.

That means calling out and naming these types of deflections when we see them.

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— Trump stuns 5,000 exhausted Sailors: nine months at sea isn’t “nearly long enough.” Roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines have been stuck aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln for over 250 days leading some to suicide attempts, but Trump says they haven’t suffered nearly long enough. When reporters asked him about the deployment that’s making headlines in the wake of reports of moldy showers, broken toilets, weeks without laundry, and one dinner that amounted to two tortillas and a half-cup of rice, Trump’s response was blunt: “No, no, no. [They’ve been there] Not nearly long enough.” Senator Richard Blumenthal says being without a port call in over 200 days is “a modern record” for the Navy, and families say shipboard doctors have warned that the crew is “coming apart.” Whiskey Pete tells Newsmax that it’s all lies, “completely misrepresented,” but nobody ever really took him seriously; the guy’s a completely unqualified C-list Fox weekend host with a short stint in the National Guard who destroyed two small vets organizations he tried to run. Remember all those years that Republicans kept reciting “thank you for your service” every time a member of our armed forces showed up? It was all performance art. These guys don’t give any more of a damn about our troops or our military than Trump did when his daddy paid a corrupt podiatrist for a phony X-ray showing somebody else’s bone spurs that got this pathetic coward out of Vietnam.

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— Trump‘S DOJ is building a shield against Democratic investigations before the midterms. Blanche and Trump are getting ready for Democratic investigations if the GOP loses control of either the House or the Senate this fall. Step one was to extend Trump’s executive privilege beyond the traditional and legal government-employed advisors to anybody he chooses, including friends, donors, business contacts, and even people who have never held a federal job or taken an oath. Blanche’s DOJ memo essentially says that shielding a buddy billionaire from having to testify to Congress is a public service to all of us. No questions asking how much money they gave Trump personally in exchange for pardons, tariff exceptions, or other goodies; no questions about contracts his sons have managed to get from the Pentagon; no questions about his billion dollar crypto scams or, frankly, anything else. Under this new memo, Trump can basically say that any of his buddies or partners in crime who could testify against him are now “advisors” and immune from having to spill the beans. Even Richard Nixon is rolling over in his grave at this level of corruption, lawlessness, and unaccountability.

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— AI crosses a terrifying line, and researchers are debating hitting the brakes. OpenAI stopped internal work on their new Astra model after discovering it was capable of attacking hardened computer systems all on its own, without anybody telling it how to do it. Anthropic documented three cases of Claude invading the live systems of three actual external organizations when it was supposed to be confined to its own sandbox. Meta’s model launched an actual attack on a third party, and one of the new OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face. Days earlier, the UK’s AI Security Institute nailed Anthropic’s Mythos model, turned loose in a test environment, for researching an open-source project’s human maintainers, fabricating multiple online identities, and useing them to con a real human being into signing off on its code. When the Mythos model was challenged publicly, it went back and edited its own trail to look innocent. And this is just what they’ve told us about; there’s no regulation of this industry, at least here in the US (the EU is getting closer), for devices that have been compared to nuclear weapons in terms of their potential to create widespread destruction of infrastructure and systems. Congress is starting to wake up, but the industry has pulled together a multi-hundred-million-dollar war chest to buy legislation and pay off legislators, a practice that was legalized in 2010 by five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court. So much for Reagan’s repeated assertion that industry self-regulation is the highest form of governance…

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— Trump’s team targets nursing home voters with chilling new election rules. As he privatizes Medicare and threatens big cuts to Social Security, Trump is trying to make sure people in nursing homes can’t easily vote. Dr. Oz’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services just published new guidelines for America’s long-term care facilities that deleted — entirely — their previous instructions that nursing homes should have a plan to make sure residents can vote. Instead, they pushed out dire warnings to nursing home staffers about how long they could end up in prison if they help somebody vote in the wrong way. Thirteen Senate Democrats, led by Alex Padilla and Elizabeth Warren, wrote to Oz pointing out that the memo is apparently designed to intimidate staff out of helping the country’s 1.2 million nursing home residents cast a ballot. Given how many immigrants work in nursing homes, this will hit hard. Republicans in Texas have already test-run this, which is probably where Oz got the idea: Texas social worker Kelly Brunner made clerical errors registering disabled residents in 2020, although no improper vote was ever cast, and Texas Attorney General (and now Senate candidate) Ken Paxton charged her with 134 felonies anyway. She spent $50,000 on lawyers and lost her teaching license. Republicans are getting desperate: first it was Black voters they were purging and gerrymandering into irrelevance, then Hispanics they’re terrorizing and threatening to bring ICE to the polls, then shutting down voting operations in college towns, and now it’s the elderly as they’re working to destroy Social Security and Medicare. These people are sick.

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— Big Pharma hits jackpot as record 59% of Americans struggle to afford prescriptions. A record 59 percent of Americans say they can’t afford their prescriptions while ten massive drug companies pulled in $298 billion in just the first six months of this year. Comparing the first six months of this year to last year, Protect Our Care’s latest Greed Watch report found that the top ten drugmakers raked in $24 billion more this year than in the first half of 2025. That let them give their shareholders $63 billion in buybacks and dividends. And thanks to the tax provisions Republicans stuffed into the first Trump tax cut bill, J&J, AbbVie, Pfizer, Amgen, and Merck have paid nothing in federal income tax since 2018. Zero. Not reduced — zero. And all of this while the White House Council of Economic Advisers falsely insists Trump’s “most favored nation” unenforceable and largely PR-only “handshake deals” will save Americans $529 billion. When Senator Ron Wyden tried to check their claimed numbers, nobody in the administration would give him any information whatsoever. This is what forty-five years of Reaganomics has given us: record corporate profits, zero corporate taxes collected, and a third of Americans forced to cut their pills in half.

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— Putin tests NATO again, as Trump burns through America’s weapons. For the second time in ten weeks, NATO has had to scramble fighters to deal with Russian incursions into their territory. This time it was Lithuania’s turn, as NATO confirmed Italian and Turkish F-16s based out of Estonia responded, neutralizing the Russian drone over an unpopulated area. The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania don’t have any of their own fighter jets, so the Italians and the Turks had to step in. Last month it was a Russian missile landing in Poland, and to the south, Moldova recalled its ambassador from Moscow after a drone exploded near the village of Crocmaz on August 9. Moldova has had 1,500 Russian troops squatting in their Transnistria region for three decades, as they try to fend off a Kremlin operation that, per newly surfaced files, recruited 150,000 Moldovans and spent $20 million to subvert its elections. As Trump burns through American munitions and JD Vance brags that stopping US weapons from going to Ukraine was one of the “proudest moments” of his vice-presidency, Russia appears to be testing NATO defenses in preparation for an actual assault. If that were to happen, do you really believe that Trump would order US NATO forces to intervene? I’m not holding my breath; this is a very, very dangerous sign for world peace.

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— Geeky Science Alert! Scientists make a stunning discovery about how birth order may affect your health. Where are you in your family’s birth order? It may make a big difference. A new study published in Nature Health looking at insurance claims of 10,270,012 children from 5.1 million two-child families, spanning 2003 to 2024, found some surprising results having to do with birth order. Of 418 diseases with enough cases to test properly, 150 of them showed “statistically significant birth-order associations” with 79 connecting conditions to first-borns, and 71 toward second-borns. Firstborns had higher odds of autism, ADHD, Tourette’s, OCD, food allergy, and hay fever; second-borns were more likely to be afflicted by shingles, substance use disorder, gastritis, and/or migraines. Now, if we could just make sure that everybody — regardless of their position in the family’s birth order — could have inexpensive healthcare, maybe we could use this data to start some programs that anticipate these trends in a preventative way.

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— Trump guts America’s firefighting capabilities as historic heat and hurricane threats explode. As Hawaii is bracing for the first hurricane ever to make landfall on the Big Island and the strongest heat dome on the planet is squatting over the American South, Trump is firing the people who fight fires. After all, climate change is a hoax, right? Hawaii Governor Josh Green declared a statewide emergency Thursday as Tropical Storm Lala churned over unusually warm water toward the Big Island, which would make it the first hurricane landfall there since records began in 1900 and only the state’s second ever. Forecasters are warning of at least 8 to 12 inches of rain with isolated totals hitting a life-threatening 25 inches. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports the planet’s strongest heat dome will hit the continental United States this weekend, mostly in the South, with anticipated temperature records being broke in nineteen states. And out West, more than 12 million acres have already burned in 2026 — more than all of 2024 — while the Forest Service has shed roughly 5,900 people, absorbed a $438 million budget cut, and shut down 55 of its 77 research stations. Given this assault against our forest service and firefighting capabilities, three of four federal wildland firefighters are reportedly thinking about quitting. The oil companies knew this would happen way back in the 1970s and spent the next half-century telling us lies, paying off corrupt scientists, and buying the loyalty of corrupt Republicans who’re now dismantling the fire crews as they insist the climate change is a hoax. Somewhere in hell, Ronald Reagan is giving Trump a big thumbs-up.

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Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how 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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Trump just took steps to make it very difficult to prosecute money laundering, a crime he and his real estate buddies may well have been committing much of their felonious lives.

Last week we learned that Capital One Bank closed over 300 Trump Organization accounts back in 2021 because, they said, their internal fraud department had flagged illegal money-laundering activity. But on who’s behalf?

We know from the Mueller Report and public reporting that Putin spent millions and did his best via social media and hacking the DNC to get Donald Trump into the White House in 2016, and was probably doing the same in 2020 and 2024.

But what if there was a way for him to simply drop, say, $100 million right into political campaigns here in America that would back up or benefit Trump and his notorious crime family? Or simply give the money to Trump himself as thanks for screwing Ukraine and destroying America?

While federal law prohibits foreign governments, citizens, and corporations from spending money to influence our elections, the reality is that laws only work when there’s somebody to investigate crimes and enforce them.

And Trump is, right now, tearing apart the very institutions and transparency rules that we’d need to expose such a crime.

Specifically, our Treasury Department — run by Trump’s billionaire crony Scott Bessent — just this week put into place a new rule that would hand Putin that ability. Or any other foreign oligarch who wanted to use a shell corporation to buy his very own American politician.

Senator Sherrod Brown’s Corporate Transparency Act required corporations and LLCs to tell the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, FinCEN, who actually owns or controls them. That remote control, often handed through multiple shell companies, is called “beneficial ownership.” It’s all about finding out who, ultimately, benefits from the corporation or LLC’s activities.

This week, though, Bessent issued a new rule that not only ends that requirement but also directs the agency to delete all the beneficial-ownership information they currently hold on US persons (like Donald Trump and his kids) that could be used to prove past money laundering crimes.

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This is critical stuff because money laundering is how drug money, bribes, stolen government money, tax evasion proceeds, or money belonging to a sanctioned oligarch can be pushed through corporations, trusts, real estate, banks, casinos, and multiple transactions until figuring out who originally supplied it becomes extraordinarily difficult if not impossible.

And money laundering via real estate in America is a big, big business. As the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project notes in an report titled “U.S. Real Estate is No 1 Destination for Laundered Dirty Money,” we have “the weakest regulatory framework to counter real estate money laundering” among all of the G7 nations. They add:

“At least US$2.3 billion has been laundered over the past five years through U.S. real estate…” and “More than 80% of all U.S. cases involved money coming from abroad, and in 82% of cases, anonymous shell companies or complex corporate structures helped mask the identity of the property’s real owners.”

Most countries made this illegal decades ago, in some cases generations ago. And in the past decade Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom have tightened their own requirements to prevent this kind of money laundering, which in each of those countries and the US was mostly done through anonymous or all-cash real estate transactions done by shell companies.

And Trump and Bessent just killed off the cops on the beat here.

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Trump’s apparently been up to his eyeballs in money laundering for much of his business career. As he pissed away the ~$400 million he got from his father, he repeatedly turned to Russian and other oligarchs to prop him up after multiple bankruptcies via these very kinds of real estate transactions that Treasury will no longer be looking at.

In 2015, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino admitted to willful and repeated violations of federal anti-money-laundering laws. FinCEN fined Trump $10 million because, for some unknown reason (wink, wink), he failed to even bother to keep the required records that would have revealed criminal money laundering being done through his casinos.

Then there’s all that Russian money. Back in 2008 as Putin was consolidating his iron grip and quickly becoming a billionaire bloated with ill-gotten gains himself, Uday — er, Don Jr. — bragged to an audience at a real estate conference that Russians were “a pretty disproportionate cross-section” of the money flowing into the Trump Organization, adding:

“We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Qusay — er, Eric Trump — similarly bragged to Golf writer James Dodson, according to Dodson, that:

“We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

Reuters looked into it all in 2017 and found that at least 63 people with Russian passports or addresses had bought $98.4 million worth of property from Trump, roughly a third of that being owned by LLCs that were so impenetrable that Reuters couldn’t discover who was actually behind the Russian front men. (This sort of deal is exactly why Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act in 2021.)

Trump’s SoHo property is another example. A lawsuit brought by Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank alleged that Trump associate Felix Sater helped Ilyas Khrapunov disguise about $3 million as down payments on three Trump SoHo condominiums as part of an alleged international money-laundering scheme involving money stolen from Kazakhstan.

And now the Trump administration is weakening the exact system designed to tell investigators who is actually behind these opaque corporations that serve as real estate money-laundering fronts for offshore criminals like Putin and his cronies.

Treasury has now not only eliminated their previous domestic beneficial-ownership reporting, FinCEN has also given banks a pass on beneficial-owner verification requirements when companies open additional accounts, and Bessent delayed until 2028 a separate anti-money-laundering rule for investment advisers.

And if a foreign actor wants to use his ill-gotten gains to influence an American election? Thanks to Trump refusing to appoint a needed member, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) doesn’t even have the quorum it needs to conduct its own enforcement of rules against foreigners jumping into our elections. Its own website repeatedly says it can’t function again until “the Commission regains a quorum.”

So, suppose Putin or one of his buddies throws millions of dirty Russian money into a corporation in that country, which then transfers that money into an American shell company run by a Trump crony, which then “legally” (under Citizens United) puts that money into a Trump-aligned SuperPAC, say “Patriotic Americans for Freedom LLC,” to pay for political advertising, on-the-ground operations, etc.

The required FEC filing says that the money came from “Patriotic Americans for Freedom LLC,” but who’s behind that company that’s funding the campaign? That’s exactly the question that the “beneficial ownership” laws were designed to answer, and will now lead to a door slammed shut in the face of any reporter, investigator, or law enforcement agency that tries to look into it. And the FEC itself is paralyzed from doing anything about it.

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So, here we have a regime headed by a guy who made much of his fortune via opaque foreign money — apparently much of it from Russia — and now he’s dismantling our ability to see who’s behind it. And deleting all the previous records that might have offered a clue to his own past crimes.

For Putin, throwing a few hundred million dollars into an American election would be pocket change, as it would be for the murderous dictator of Saudi Arabia or any other country that wanted a particular outcome from Trump or his corrupt lickspittles in the GOP.

And we know these foreign billionaires and dictators have a vested interest in how our system works; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be throwing literally billions of dollars into Trump family operations, from Trump’s crypto to Jared’s investment fund.

Forget making America great again; Trump is doubling down on making money laundering — which may have been the source of his financial survival throughout his 90s and early 2000s bankruptcies — great again.

This is truly the single most corrupt administration in American history.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Trump is Making Money Laundering Great Again”

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Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Subscribe to the Commonwealth Report

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how 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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Authoritarianism doesn’t just begin when a government embraces brutality. It steps in on cats’ feet when brutality becomes politically useful, legally routinized, and morally acceptable because a government has first declared its victims undeserving of our empathy. When average people in the bureaucracy just “do their jobs” inflicting horrors on other humans simply because they’ve been declared “the other.”

Outside of military coups like Pinochet’s Chile, countries don’t generally slide from republican democracies into totalitarianism and fascism in a single step. There’s a process, and it always begins by the government deciding that some people simply don’t deserve the basic human rights that have been foundational to western civilization for centuries.

The Trump regime’s treatment of Roberto Mosquera, profiled at length in yesterday’s New York Times by Nicholas Casey, shows just how far down this terrible road we’ve already traveled.

Mosquera has been held for a year without trial or legal due process in a maximum security prison in the tiny landlock southern African country most people have never heard of, Eswatini, one of the world’s few remaining pure kingdoms that was formerly known as Swaziland. The 59-year-old father of four is slowly going blind from untreated glaucoma, and apparently will be held there for the rest of his life.

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He first came to America at the age of 12 as part of the 1980 Mariel boatlift from Cuba, fell in with a local Hispanic gang and ended up being accused of shooting a member of a different gang in the leg (he insists he didn’t do it and wasn’t there at the time). He served his time in an American prison and, when he got out, reinvented his life.

He became a born-again Christian, got married and had four American citizen daughters, and became a plumber, rising through the ranks to foreman. The Times quoted his former boss as saying he’d turned his life around and:

“He wasn’t just a hard worker; he inspired the guys around him,” he said.

He was also in the United States legally (in part because Cuba isn’t accepting deportees), and checked in with the feds every year to renew his work permit. The last time he showed up, however, he was told his permit was being withdrawn and he was seized and taken through a series of brutal detention facilities and eventually put on a plane to Africa, a continent he’d never visited. As the Times notes:

“That was more than a year ago. Mosquera still sits in that same maximum-security prison with nowhere to go. No charges against him. No way to appeal his predicament. No sign that he will ever be freed. Cuba has not signaled any willingness to take him, and Mosquera says he has no desire to go there. Eswatini will not release him from prison, even though he served his time in the United States and committed no crime in Africa.”

In other words, we’re watching the creation of human beings who can be pushed outside the normal protections of law, geography, community, and ultimately even public attention. Roberto has been “disappeared” by Trump and Miller and is now in prison for what may be the rest of his life, and this all happened without his ever having stood before a judge or jury.

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Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution were grounded in the idea that all humans are born with human rights, even though it took this nation centuries to get seriously close to living by its own creed.

Instead of referring to “citizens,” the Constitution repeatedly mentions “persons,” a word that encompasses all humans. Consider, for example, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, part of the Bill of Rights:

4th Amendment: “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.”

5th Amendment: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury…; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” (emphasis added)

These, in part, constitute what’s called due process, which is repeated in the Fourteenth Amendment’s first section “…nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Most of the tens of thousands of people ICE is now holding in its custody or have been deported are there without ever having stood before an actual Article 3 judge. Their rights are being ignored.

The process the Trump regime is now pursuing is to obliterate what Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt called, “The right to have rights.” In Chapter 9 (“The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man”) of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, she elaborated on what happened when the butchers, bakers, and shop keepers got jobs in the Nazi detention camps:

“The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.”

She realized that the gravest crisis of human rights is grounded in a government arguing, in its behavior, that some humans aren’t fully human and therefore aren’t entitled to basic human rights. A stateless person herself for 18 years, this idea of governments denying the basic humanity of less-favored groups was at the core of much of her writing.

With Roberto Mosquera and the thousands of others Trump and Miller are paying millions of our taxpayer dollars to foreign prisons to hold until they die, we’re watching play out here in America that very transition from a decent, rights-respecting government into a rogue and lawless regime.

We’ve danced with this before, of course. The entire history of the institution of slavery was grounded in the proclamation of the southern states that Black people weren’t fully human. More recently, George W. Bush humiliated America on the world stage by sanctioning torture and murder in Abu Ghraib and other foreign prisons and black sites, along with its assertion that Gitmo was beyond the reach of American human rights law or the US Constitution.

But this is a modern, whole-of-government approach to dehumanizing nonwhite people in the name of immigration enforcement, with a hundred-billion-dollar budget. And now ICE is buying electric shock gloves for themselves, to ratchet up the brutality.

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Republicans in Congress funded, and the Trump regime has built, a massive machine to Make America White Again, considerations of “woke” concepts like rights be damned. And it’s growing and becoming more hostile to average Americans and their concerns by the day.

Nobody in a democratic republic should have the power to make people disappear. It’s antithetical to the very idea of our form of government.

When this regime has been relegated to the dustbin of history, we’ll have a hell of a big job reestablishing this country’s once-vaunted embrace of human rights. There will have to be either full-on trials or something like the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

We should be doing the planning now.

Louise’s Daily Song: “When We Let Monsters Make People Disappear”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how 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 in the days when conservatives were so hungry for media platforms that they’d come on progressive shows, I used to regularly debate Wayne Allen Root (here and here, for example). Instead of trying to convince me, though, Root has recently taken to giving Trump ideas about things to do, like stealing the election this fall.

On his show on “Real” America’s Voice, Root told Trump:

“Let me put an idea in your head. Because it’s so hard to get the Senate to do anything, now they’re on recess, they never get anything done. If they never get the SAVE America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections. …

“And the Supreme Court ruled in 1983, under Reagan, in INS vs. Chadha that if you declare a national security emergency as the President of the United States, they can’t challenge it. It can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.

“So if you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail-in ballots, and you don’t even need the Senate’s vote.”

Trump seemed both unsurprised and unfazed, as if this were a regular topic of conversation in the White House.

“Let me just say that stranger things have happened,” he replied, adding, “OK, I’ll leave it at that.”

Since 1968, stealing elections has become a sport for Republicans. That was the year that Nixon was running for president against VP Hubert Humphrey — who had just successfully negotiated peace between North and South Vietnam — when Nixon had his people reach out to the leaders of South Vietnam and promise them riches if they’d refuse to go to Paris and sign the deal.

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When the FBI informed President Johnson about it, he correctly called it “treason,” although we didn’t learn about it until years later when the LBJ Library released the tapes.

In 1980, it was Reagan’s turn to steal an election. Jimmy Carter was riding high in the wake of Nixon’s resignation and VP Agnew’s stepping down to avoid a bribery prosecution, but then the Iranians seized the American embassy in Tehran.

The president of Iran, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, wanted to release the hostages and had worked out a deal with Carter to do just that, but the Reagan campaign met with the Ayatollah’s people and promised to sell them weapons and military spare parts if they’d just hold the hostages until after the election, destroying Carter’s re-election chances.

The hostages were released, by way of sealing the deal, at the exact moment when Reagan put his hand on the bible to be sworn in, and for years Reagan shipped them banned weaponry until the deal was busted wide open as the Iran-Contra Scandal.

In 2000, Republicans knew the election would probably come down to Florida, the state then run by candidate George W. Bush’s brother Jeb, so Jeb had his secretary of state purge at least 50,000 Black people from the voting rolls just months before the election. His brother won the state, and thus the White House, by 537 votes: it would have been an epic loss without that last-minute voter purge. And then five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court shut down the Florida Supreme Court-mandated recount, which would’ve revealed the purge.

None of these Republican election thefts are controversial; all are well-documented.

As was Trump’s willingness to see his own Vice President, Mike Pence, hanged by an angry mob if that was what it’d take to keep Donald in the White House for another four years. It’s safe to assume that if he was okay with that, there’s nothing off the table for this fall.

While Trump’s legal power to seize control of our election this fall is in dispute, his ability to disrupt it isn’t.

— He’s already issued an executive order directing the Post Office to refuse to deliver ballots to or from citizens not on his approved voter list or in states that refused to give him their voter rolls. Postmaster General David Steiner says he’s willing to do what Trump wants.
— A federal judge back last October ordered ICE to provide his court with the details of ICE’s plans for this fall’s election and ten months later they’re still stonewalling, refusing to turn over any internal documents.
— Reuters reported last month that White House officials had already discussed declaring a national emergency and creating a federal voting task force, including ways of bypassing the Election Assistance Commission and seizing control of voting and vote-tabulating machines.
— Voters in 41 states have election deniers on the ballot this fall, while dozens of known election deniers have taken control of election-running positions across the country.

So, given that the feds are not only not going to help but are actively working toward rigging or even seizing control of this November’s election, it’s going to be up to us and the individual states to make sure our voices are heard and our votes are properly counted.

We should be thinking of this as an election continuity exercise that may not be necessary but, like wearing a seatbelt, could be essential if Trump tries to repeat 2020 in some way. At the moment, he’s essentially a cornered rat.

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Therefore, Democrats must:

— Educate Americans about the Constitution, which hands elections off to the states exclusively with only minimal federal standards.
— If Trump tries to claim a national emergency — even if it has a real basis, like Iran hitting us hard or some other 9/11-type event — Americans need to know that we held elections through the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Republican Great Depression, both World Wars, and through other times of national crisis, and 2026 must not be an exception.
— States need to prepare for litigation with complaints, TRO motions, and even appellate briefs composed and ready to file on a moment’s notice. Taking days to fully respond to a Trump attempt to blow up our elections could be disastrous, as Al Gore learned 26 years ago.
— Involve Republicans when we can find the rare ones who will put country above party. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia pushed back in 2021 when Trump tried to get him to “find” roughly eleven thousand ballots; we must be looking for other Republicans who may have enough integrity to resist a Trump-led coup attempt.
— Steel the spines of our election administrators by having their backs, both legally and physically. Secretaries of state, county clerks, election boards and governors should all know in advance exactly who has authority to order what. The last thing we want are thousands of local election officials asking, “Are we supposed to comply?” on Election Day. When coup attempts work it’s typically because they used the element of surprise to their benefit; we need to blunt that weapon.
— Prepare for Trump’s goons — federal (like ICE or the National Guard) or Proud Boys/Klan-types — around polling places. This is a violation of a federal law that dates back to the Civil War; it’s illegal for “troops or armed men” to show up at any polling places in the country, and the penalty is five years in prison.
— Encourage early voting and other ways to build redundancy into our election systems, and tell people to check their voter registration now at vote.org, particularly if they live in a Red state, as those states have been actively and aggressively purging their voting rolls for months now, especially in their blue cities.
— Be prepared for the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court to intervene, as they did in the 2000 election, to try to hand various elections to Republicans. They’ve already granted Trump sweeping immunity from criminal acts, presumably including election fraud.
— Finally, as Al Gore can tell you from sad experience, we need to prepare for the inevitable onslaught of rightwing propaganda calling elections into question and claiming fraud.

People old enough to remember how the GOP gamed this in Florida in 2000 know what I’m talking about; Republican congressional staffers flew down to Florida (along with John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) to pound on counting center windows and demand the election Al Gore won be given to the “rightful winner,” George W. Bush.

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While Trump can’t legally cancel the election, the more he and his toadies can cast doubt on its legitimacy, the more likely it is that they can pull off the same type of coup as Republicans did in 1968, 1980, and 2000.

For over a decade now, close races immediately produce Republican claims of fraud: lawyers, election officials and communications systems must be fully prepared to deal with lies and propaganda long before November.

Contact your local elections office and volunteer to help out if you can; rightwingers are doing so right now, particularly in places where they can challenge mail-in vote signatures. We need to be there, too.

Better safe than sorry, as the old saying goes. Pass it along…

Louise’s Daily Song: “Never Underestimate A Cornered Rat”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how 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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With all but 2 Republican senators voting to make Todd Blanche our Attorney General, Donald Trump just walked away from a $100 million fine for tax fraud that the IRS has been trying to collect from him for over a decade. This was the centerpiece of the “settlement” that Blanche wrote up that says that Trump, Uday and Qusay, Jared and Ivanka, Tiffany and Boulos, and even Barron will never again have to worry about paying taxes or ever being audited. It may well even extend to their business partners.

Meanwhile, last week Capital One bank submitted sworn testimony to a court that back in 2021 they shut down and closed 385 Trump-owned businesses because their fraud department — and its leader, a man with “extensive financial fraud law enforcement experience” — believed Trump’s businesses were engaging in illegal money laundering and the bank wanted nothing to do with it.

Even more astonishing, neither of these revelations from the past two weeks made more than the tiniest stir in our corporate media, which is increasingly afraid of crossing Trump or his neofascist billionaire buddies. There’s a meme that’s traveling around the internet right now that’s shockingly on-the-nose:

“It’s so weird how everybody simply accepts that Trump is a criminal and a Russian stooge and then goes on about their days.”

Setting aside the legal horror show this all represents for a moment, this mind-boggling level of corruption could be political gold, and today’s Democratic leadership is pissing it away.

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Democrats are (continuously, it seems) debating what should be their campaign strategy, their main through-line message, for the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Every faction and special interest group in the country is pushing their own idea, but there’s one overarching concept — one word — that can encompass most all of them and do so with a proven political punch:

“Corruption.”

At every level, ever since the Reagan Revolution, the heart of Republican policies has been the naked corruption of our American political and economic systems by billionaires and giant corporations. Since the 1980s, Republicans have sold their corruption with slogans like, “Government is the problem, not the solution,” and “Let the market decide,” but their real message is, “Turn it all over to billionaires and their corporations.” The result has been:

— Tax cuts and loopholes for billionaires and big corporations that, in aggregate since 1981, add up to more than our total national debt of $39 trillion (in other words, Republicans borrowed $39 trillion in our names that our kids will repay and gave all of it to the morbidly rich).
— Reagan’s 1983 suspension of enforcement of the anti-trust laws that has caused every industry in America to become a form of monopoly dominated by five or fewer massive corporations, gutting small business competition and raising prices.
— Five on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court ruling that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as “free speech,” handing our elections over to the highest bidders.
— Virtually every legacy federal regulatory agency being run today by industry insiders working on a revolving-door basis.
— Members of Congress and the corrupt Trump regime engaging in insider trading with impunity; for $100,000 a month, Trump‘s Nazi-infested social media site will even sell you insider information.
— A GOP-aligned military-industrial complex that’s essentially taken over Pentagon procurement.
— An anti-labor Labor Department; an anti-education Education department; an anti-civil rights Civil Rights enforcement agency; an anti-environment Environmental Protection Agency; etc…
— Trump’s mysterious pardons that always seem to go to people who’ve given him millions of dollars (after Giuliani claimed he and Trump were selling pardons for two million each and splitting the money).
— Gutting of the Internal Revenue Service so that wealthy tax cheats and multinational corporations can more easily evade taxes with near-impunity.
— The systematic sabotage and even privatization of public institutions — from the US Postal Service to public schools to prisons — so Republican-donor corporations can profit off the essential services that used to be considered part of the commons.
— The rivers of dark money after Citizens United that’re letting billionaires and corporations secretly pour functionally unlimited amounts of cash into our elections with zero accountability.
— Using the Federal Communications Commission to loosen media ownership rules for Trump’s billionaire and nepo-baby buddies while, at the same time, threatening to shut down or force sales of those outlets that don’t sing Trump’s praises.
— Red-state and federal voter suppression laws that make it harder for poor, young, female, and minority voters to have a say in our democracy.
— The Republican Party’s multi-decade refusal to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices causing Americans to pay the highest prescription costs in the developed world.
— Paralyzing the Federal Election Commission so even the most bizarre and blatant violations of what’s left of our election laws by Republican politicians are never even investigated, much less prosecuted.
— The use of tax havens and trade policy to encourage offshoring American jobs while bigshot executives reap record profits and bonuses, hollowing out the American middle class.
— The Republican normalization of lobbyists literally writing legislation via groups like the Koch-funded ALEC, ensuring laws are crafted to benefit industries and billionaires rather than the public.
— Rewriting environmental and labor rules for the benefit of polluting industries, often done brazenly and in the open by Trump appointees with direct financial stakes in the companies or industries they’re supposed to regulate.
— The strategic packing of the federal courts with hardcore rightwing/neofascist judges that ensures decades of rulings that favor corporate and billionaire power, weakens labor and consumer protections, and shields Trump’s corruption from any kind of meaningful accountability.

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Republicans understand the power of mobilizing the public’s outrage against the corruption that they themselves have participated in for over 40 years. Astonishingly, cynically, that’s the meta-message to Trump’s main campaign slogan each of the three times he’s run for president: “Drain the swamp.”

And it worked, even though it was an outrageous lie.

Democrats, who have actually been trying to do something about corruption for years, need to appropriate the anti-corruption theme as their main message for 2026 and 2028. Because, universally, it works.

— When working in Russia, I witnessed the way Alexi Navalny came so close to taking down Putin that the Russian dictator ordered him murdered; it was done via Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. It systematically and relentlessly exposed the ways Putin and his cronies were looting their nation’s government while passing out favors to oligarchs willing to align themselves with them.

— In the 1980s, I was working for a German international relief organization in The Philippines when Cory Aquino mobilized an anti-corruption message against the Marcos dynasty; the week Marcos and his wife fled the country I was bumped off Philippine Airlines flights five days in a row because so many of their cronies were appropriating all the seats (the airline was run by a crony).

— When Jair Bolsonaro first successfully ran for president of Brazil it was on a campaign against the corruption that “Operation Car Wash” had exposed in the Lula administration. When elected, Bolsonaro, instead of ending the corruption, slid right into the system and expanded it, leading to his own ultimate downfall and current imprisonment.

— In Delhi, activist Anna Hazare’s 2011 anti-corruption hunger strike ignited a nationwide movement that helped spur passage of India’s Lokpal anti-corruption law and led his former allies to found the Aam Aadmi Party, which rose from scratch to power in Delhi on a clean-government platform.

— And, of course, it was the anti-corruption message of the EuroMaidan “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014 that lifted then-comedian and TV star Volodymyr Zelenskyy into the presidency of Ukraine.

From Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Era of the early 20th century to the present, anti-corruption messages have repeatedly proven to be one of the most potent forces in American politics, too.

— In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt built a foundation of mass support by casting monopolies as a “corrupt alliance” between the morbidly rich and our government, while the exposure of William M “Boss” Tweed’s graft by Thomas Nast’s biting cartoons helped bring down New York’s Tammany Hall.

— The Watergate scandal turned corrupt abuse of power into a national reckoning that forced Richard Nixon from office and fueled sweeping electoral gains for reformers like Jimmy Carter, while more recent scandals like George Santos’ lies and loss reinforced “clean government” as a winning local message.

— At the national level, Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” campaign and the “rigged system” critiques by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren show that, across the ideological spectrum, framing political battles as struggle against entrenched, self-dealing elites remains one of the most consistently reliable ways to get energized voters to the polls and win power.

It makes perfect sense that this should be the Democrats’ main strategy: the core philosophy of the GOP that was first made explicit by the Reagan administration — “greed is good” — openly invites corruption.

As we’ve seen in virtually every congressional vote over the past four decades, Republican politicians are now entirely in the pockets of the fossil fuel, health insurance, tax preparation, and weapons industries, among others.

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Whether it’s the corrupt collusion between the Kushner and Netanyahu families that helped lead us into an illegal war against Iran, the billions Trump’s family has made in crypto and other schemes, the insider trading on the war, putting industry insiders in charge of regulatory agencies, or the DeSantis and Paxton/Abbott corruption scandals, there are vivid examples of Republican corruption laying on the public ground all over the country in plain sight.

Every Democrat in America should scan their local horizon for examples of corruption they can use against Republicans because, for the GOP, corruption has become a way of life.

The words “Republican corruption” should be continuously on Democrats’ lips, whether campaigning, speaking to constituents, or making media appearances.

Hammer these corrupt SOBs with their own crimes against democracy and the middle class, and Democrats will see results like Magyar, Zelenskyy, Aquino, and so many others have achieved.

It’s simple, easy, and powerful: “It’s the corruption, stupid!”

Louise’s Daily Song: “When Did Trump’s Corruption Stop Being News?”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how 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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If Trump wants Republicans to win this fall, all he has to do is endorse Medicare For All and call it a Republican policy.

After all, conservatives across Europe are generally quite happy with their national healthcare systems and definitely don’t want them going away or to be replaced by for-profit insurance companies.

When I did did my show from Denmark’s Danish Radio’s studios, I interviewed multiple conservative politicians and to a person their response to my question, “Do you want to get rid of your healthcare system?” was, “Are you nuts?”

This may not even be all that radical by today’s Republican standards: after all, Trump’s embraced the purely communist idea of the federal government taking control of the means of production and distribution — the textbook definition of communism — by having our government take stock in over 30 companies over the past 18 months.

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Odds are high, though, that he won’t go anywhere near MFA, mainly because the trillion-dollar healthcare industry gives hundreds of millions of dollars every year to mostly Republican politicians (thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court).

But the times are changing and, as we’re seeing with progressive primary victories by Medicare For All advocates across the country, people who didn’t just support it, but ran on it. American voters may now be ready for Democrats to again throw their weight behind the plan like Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy did.

There are two reasons for this.

I’ve written at length about the cycles of history, both in my books and the Hartmann Report: Strauss and Howe documented 80-year cycles that have repeated themselves since the founding of our republic.

There’s a financial crisis, followed by a war, followed by a revolution within America that leads to a Great Leap Forward (to borrow from Mao) in progressive policy.

— In 1771, for example, there was a worldwide depression that provoked the East India Company to get the then-biggest tax cut in history from Britain’s government; it led straight to the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution.

— Eighty years later, the Panic of 1856 helped set the stage for the Civil War which, when resolved, led to the end of chattel slavery (other than for convicted criminals).

— Eighty years after that, the Republican Great Depression led straight to World War II, followed by the fulfillment of FDR’s New Deal and the creation of the American middle class.

— And today we’re eighty-one years out from the end of WWII, which is causing a lot of observers to note that we’re ripe for another “revolution” after being battered by 45 years of the Reagan Revolution.

Along a similar vein, Peter Turchin writes about a cycle he identifies with his “Cliodynamics” system, where roughly every 40 years control of the country transfers back-and-forth between conservatives and progressives, all the way back to 1776.

But setting aside the calendar part of this (which is fascinating in its own right), I believe there’s a bigger factor we can see in these sometimes-revolutionary changes to the American political landscape: crises.

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— The 1773 Tea Act and Boston Ports Act (among others) inflicted a crisis on the early colonists; creating the United States was their reaction to it.

— The attack on America by a few hundred Confederate oligarch families and the army they’d raised created a crisis for Abraham Lincoln and our government; ending slavery and writing the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments into our Constitution expanding the rights of all Americans was the result.

— And the Republican Great Depression that started in 1929 was arguably the biggest economic crisis the American republic had ever faced, leading straight to World War II and FDR’s New Deal that legalized unions, created Social Security and the minimum wage, and built the world’s first more-than-50%-of-the-population middle class.

But outside of those 80-year cycles, President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs — civil rights, voting rights, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, housing support, Pell grants, etc. — were passed in the wake of the crisis created by the assassination of JFK. Johnson relied heavily on the memory of President Kennedy to push through those bills, saying that they’d complete the memory and legacy of his predecessor.

Today, America is facing another crisis that I believe is every bit as dangerous and threatening to our republic as were the Tea Act, the Civil War, the Republican Great Depression, and the death of President Kennedy. Trump’s presidency threatens to literally end democracy in America, the exact goal of the Confederate oligarchs 165 years ago.

He’s not only grifted billions for himself and his corrupt family, and handed other billions to the morbidly rich who surround and support him, but has now identified people who don’t agree with his idea of “traditional American values” as terrorists, throwing one man in prison for 40 years for simply moving a box of progressive literature from one home to another.

He’s openly plotting to rig this fall’s election and installing election deniers in key positions around the country to insure that the 2028 presidential election will be neither fair nor free.

He’s started a foreign war that’s exploded inflation and destabilized the entire Middle East.

And since JD Vance said recently that his proudest accomplishment was blocking US military aid to Ukraine, his and Trump’s fealty to Putin have further destabilized Europe.

Thus, we’re now again at an economic and political crisis point that’s not that different from those that provoked the America Revolution, Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society.

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That’s why any Democratic candidate who runs primarily on putting into place Medicare For All will probably win in 2028 and will be positioned to be this generation’s Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, or LBJ. And it represents a strong opportunity for candidates running in this year’s midterms.

Every other democracy in the world has Medicare For All or its equivalent, as do most other countries that aren’t yet democracies or where democracy has backslid as you can see from this map that’s all over the internet right now:

The guy who brought Medicare to Canada, Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas known as the Father of Canadian Medicare, was voted “The Greatest Canadian” in a nationwide CBC poll nearly two decades after his death.

Giving everybody affordable healthcare is popular everywhere in the world, and this time the scare-mongering by the billionaires, the health insurance industry, and their bought-and-paid-for Republican shills won’t work.

While President Harry Truman was the first to specifically call for healthcare for all Americans (it was implied in FDR’s Second Bill of Rights), President Kennedy also campaigned for it:

Polling also backs up this idea that Medicare For All is possible now. KFF (formerly Kaiser Family Foundation) found that 77% of Democrats today support “a national Medicare-for-all health plan”; overall public support is 56%.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found 67% of Democrats supported Medicare for All. And a 2026 Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 71% of Democrats said universal health care is “an essential Democratic policy position.”

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FDR’s new Deal and LBJ’s Great Society both came about as the result of national crisis pushing down opposition to their plans while encouraging an embrace of reform and new progressive programs.

This is one of those unique moments in history. We’re right on top of both Strauss and Howe’s 80 year cycles, Turchin’s 40 year cycle, and an American crisis right up there with the severity of the JFK assassination.

Thus, we’re at one of those moments again, with the Trump presidency having created a series of national crises, that the first Democratic candidate for president who actually runs on Medicare for All (and those calling for it now in races for the House and Senate) will have the best chances of winning and bringing America fully into the 21st century.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Heal Us All”

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Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

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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 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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