I was a guest on C-SPAN on Sunday. You can watch the program and all the fireworks with conservative callers here.

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Trump and his legal lickspittles appear — if what Governor Newsom is saying publicly right now turns out to be true — to be playing a very dangerous game with our democracy.

Federal agents have been knocking on the doors of Gavin Newsom’s family, friends, and former employees. Not, according to the Governor yesterday, because they’d found a crime, but because they’re trying to find one.

That’s not my paraphrase; it’s how the Governor of the largest state in the union described what the Trump administration is now doing to him and his wife, and if it’s true it should shock every American who remembers why we built the guardrails we’re now watching get torn down.

“Donald Trump isn’t just coming after me because of my mean tweets,” Governor Newsom said. “He’s coming after me because I am considering running for president.” He then added, “To get me, he’s coming after my wife.”

As my father taught me when I was around 10 years old, the power of a government is awesome. It can legally take everything you own from you, imprison you, and even execute you. No corporation or individual can do any of those things under cover of law, but government — even state and local governments — can.

It can also break you simply by criminally investigating you. The costs of dealing with such investigations can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, as multiple victims of Trump’s witch hunts have now discovered.

This is why it’s so vital — as our nation’s Founders knew when they wrote the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment — that government be constrained by the law and answerable to the largest portion of the people.

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After Richard Nixon’s “Enemies List” was made public with his resignation, the Justice Department in 1976 created, within its Criminal Division, a Public Integrity Section; two years later Congress wrote oversight of it into the Ethics in Government Act.

The theory of its creation was that public officials have been chosen by We the People to represent us and going after them for political purposes is a gross violation of our democracy, essentially a denial of our vote.

The Public Integrity Section’s job, thus, was to first examine every investigation, potential investigation, or potential prosecution of any elected official to make sure there’s no taint of politics corrupting the process as Nixon tried to do.

Trump first gutted the Section, reportedly reducing it from roughly 40 full time prosecutors to a mere two attorneys who were functionally no longer able to oversee anything.

He has apparently, since then, built it back up into a powerful weapon: this is reportedly the group spearheading the investigation into Newsome and/or his wife.

If this reporting is right, it no longer bears any resemblance to its origin or purpose. That said, there is also reporting that this inquiry began last year with a California whistleblower and is confined to his wife and her charity.

Time will tell what the real story is here, but the context and the charge are still alarming because of the long history of this sort of thing.

Bыл бы человек, а статья найдётся — “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” — is usually attributed to Stalin’s state prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky, who ran notorious show trials in the 1930s against anybody who pissed off his boss. (Some sources also attribute it to NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria or even Stalin himself.)

It’s simply a more modern version of 17^th century French Cardinal Richelieu’s famous dictum when he was Louis XIII’s secret service minister:

“Show me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough therein to hang him.”

It’s the cornerstone of every corrupt government throughout history, and now Trump has brought it here. So far, it’s claimed as its victims, through direct investigation, indictment, or loss of clearances or other privileges:

James Comey, Letitia James, Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, Maggie Goodlander, Jason Crow, Chrissy Houlahan, Chris DeLuzio, John Bolton, Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Chris Christie, Jack Smith, Miles Taylor, Christopher Krebs, Hunter Biden, Ashley Biden, Alejandro Mayorkas, Mike Pompeo, Brian Hook, Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, Antony Blinken, Jacob Sullivan, Lisa Monaco, Mark Zaid, Norman Eisen, Alvin Bragg, Andrew Weissmann, Hillary Clinton, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Fiona Hill, Alexander Vindman, Kimberly Cheatle, John Brennan, James Clapper Jr., Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, Thomas Fingar, Richard Ledgett, Michael Morell, Michael Vickers, Douglas Wise, Nicholas Rasmussen, Russell Travers, Andrew Liepman, John Moseman, Larry Pfeiffer, Jeremy Bash, Rodney Snyder, Glenn S. Gerstell, David B. Buckley, and the law firms Covington & Burling, Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Milbank, WilmerHale, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and Willkie Farr & Gallagher.

And now, apparently, Governor Gavin Newsom and/or his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

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Ironically, Trump — who has actually been repeatedly convicted of real crimes — started his second administration falsely claiming that the Biden Justice Department was doing to him and his friends exactly what he’s now doing to those he thinks of as his enemies.

A 2025 executive order claims that Biden’s administration “engaged in a systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents, weaponizing the legal force of numerous Federal law enforcement agencies and the Intelligence Community” and describes those actions as “a third‑world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.”

The problem we face with Nixon’s and now Trump’s “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” is that it doesn’t stop with the famous names: Vyshinsky didn’t run out of defendants, and neither did Richelieu.

And neither will Trump, now that he has already started.

A government that can manufacture a case against a sitting Governor or his wife can manufacture one against a county clerk, a school board member, a journalist, or you and me. And that’s the real danger here.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Show Me the Man”

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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 is already telling us he’s going to try to steal the 2026 election, and the fact that he’s saying it now, months in advance, is the whole tell.

Back in February he stood up and declared that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” floated taking over the vote in fifteen states his party doesn’t control, and returned to the lie he’s been pushing for a decade, that mail-in ballots are crawling with fraud.

They aren’t. Americans have voted by mail for more than a century and a half, and the Brennan Center has shown over and over that you’re likelier to be struck by lightning than to commit mail-ballot fraud.

The fraud claim was never an argument: it’s an excuse for voter suppression, its own form of election fraud. When you convince tens of millions of people that the only way your side can possibly lose is if the other side cheats, you’ve prepared them to swallow whatever you “have to do to protect the vote,” and to reject the result as illegitimate if you lose anyway. That’s the groundwork, and they’re laying it right now in the open.

The measures themselves are extraordinary. This spring Trump signed an executive order trying to seize federal control over how states run their elections, and when the courts blocked most of it, his administration found a back door through, of all places, the Post Office.

The Postal Service has proposed a rule that would let it refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that won’t first hand over its complete list of mail voters to the federal government, a rule the NAACP says is built to disenfranchise voters and that twenty-three Democratic-led states are now suing to stop.

Steve Bannon went on his podcast and promised that “we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” and when reporters asked the White House to rule it out, the press secretary wouldn’t. More than forty-eight million Americans voted by mail in 2024.

These men want the power to decide whose ballot gets carried to the mailbox and who feels safe enough to show up in person.

If you’re wondering why they’re working this hard to keep you from voting, the answer slipped out of Todd Blanche’s mouth this spring.

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Standing on a stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Dallas, the man who’d been Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer and who now runs the Justice Department as acting Attorney General told the crowd that :

“[E]verybody’s afraid that the next administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted.”

He meant it as a rallying cry. What he actually delivered was a confession: you don’t spend your evenings bracing for an indictment unless some quiet part of you already knows what you’ve done.

A reckoning is coming for the people breaking the law for this president, and they can feel it.

And now the White House is even discussing completely blowing up the Constitution and the right of habeas corpus, which dates back to the year 1215 when the British elite forced King John to sign the Magna Carta on the plain at Runnymede. As the New York Times reported this morning:

“Suspending habeas corpus was one of two radical ideas Mr. Miller had been pushing that alarmed Mr. Scharf. The other was invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to enforce the law on American streets as protests grew against deportation sweeps.”

Todd Blanche, in particular, has every reason to be worried: he knows who Trump really is, and what he’s capable of.

He’s the lawyer who defended Trump in the New York hush-money trial that ended in thirty-four felony convictions, and in the federal cases over January 6th and the classified documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago.

He’s also the guy who’s now hiding three million Epstein documents and cut the cushy, puppy-filled deal with Ghislaine Maxwell for keeping her mouth shut.

Now he presides over a Justice Department that he and Trump have remade into a personal instrument of vengeance, complete with a Hitler-like 60-foot banner of Trump’s leering face on its façade, and the president has just nominated him to hold the office permanently.

So when Blanche says out loud that he’s afraid, he isn’t being paranoid. He’s being a good lawyer, reading the room, and the room he’s reading is called “history.”

It reminds me of two lawyers I learned about when we lived in Germany, because the men doing Trump’s legal dirty work today are walking a road that better-dressed men walked ninety years ago, and, as a result, we know exactly where it leads.

The first is Hans Frank, who started out as Adolf Hitler’s personal attorney, defending Hitler and his Nazi thugs in court all through the 1920s the way Blanche once stood behind Trump at the defense table.

When Hitler took power, Frank was rewarded. He became the Reich’s chief jurist, president of the Academy for German Law, and eventually Governor-General of occupied Poland, where he presided over ghettos, mass plunder, and slaughter on a scale that’s still hard to grasp.

Frank was the respectable face of the regime, the man who insisted there was a legal theory for everything. At the Nuremberg trials he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and on October 16, 1946, the respectable lawyer was hanged.

The second man is Roland Freisler, and if Frank shows you what happens to the enabler, Freisler shows you what happens to the judge who decides — like Blanche has argued and John Roberts went along with — that the law is simply whatever Dear Leader wants it to be.

Freisler ran the Volksgerichtshof, the People’s Court, a tribunal stood up outside Germany’s constitutional structure for the express purpose of producing the verdicts the regime demanded. He handed down thousands of death sentences in three years.

He screamed at defendants from the bench, ordered their microphones cut, condemned the young students of the White Rose resistance to the guillotine for the crime of printing leaflets, and sent the officers of the July 20th plot to be hanged within hours of their show trials.

Freisler never faced a Nuremberg of his own, but only because an American bomb fell on his courthouse in February 1945 while he was reportedly clutching a defendant’s case file. The defendant lived; the judge did not. There’s a grim justice in the fact that the one man who most weaponized the law against his fellow citizens was killed holding the very file he was using to destroy one of them.

I stood in the small plaza at the University of Munich back in 1988, the Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, named for Hans and Sophie Scholl, where the two of them were caught scattering their leaflets from the gallery before Freisler sent them to die. They were the Renee Good and Alex Pretti of their time.

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The university has since pressed bronze replicas of those scattered leaflets right into the pavement, so that today you walk over them and have to stop.

You think, standing there, about how ordinary the machinery of all this was. It wasn’t run by monsters in uniform alone. It was run by men like Todd Blanche and John Roberts, men with law degrees, men who told themselves they were just interpreting the statutes, just following the orders, just serving the head of state.

And every honest accounting that came afterward, from Nuremberg onward, rejected that excuse and established the principle that a directive from above does not protect the man who carries it out.

That principle is precisely what must be keeping Todd Blanche awake, because we’re already watching the American version, as Mark Twain once said, rhyme.

When Trump wanted his enemies prosecuted, the career professionals balked, so the administration installed Lindsey Halligan, another former Trump personal lawyer with no prosecutorial experience whatsoever, as a U.S. attorney, and she promptly indicted James Comey and Letitia James.

In a contrast with Germany in 1933, a federal judge threw both cases out, ruled her appointment unlawful, and other judges in the district were so disgusted that one of them now puts an asterisk beside her name on every court filing.

Thankfully, at least so far, these are not the actions of a legal system that’s fully surrendered (although Aileen Cannon may soon have a word). They’re the actions of one that’s still fighting back, and that fight is the whole ballgame.

But it gets worse, because that same executive order about mail-in voting also directs the Department of Homeland Security to build its own state-by-state lists of who’s eligible to vote, exactly the kind of national database you’d assemble if your real plan was to pressure states into purging their rolls.

If that sounds like paranoia, it’s only because we’ve already forgotten that we lived through it. In 2000, Jeb Bush’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, who also happened to be co-chair of his brother George’s Florida campaign, hired a private firm to scrub the voter rolls using a list of supposed felons that included eight thousand names shipped in from Texas.

The matching was deliberately loose, flagging anyone whose last name was an 80 percent match to a felon’s, and the Brennan Center later found that at least twelve thousand eligible voters were wrongly purged, twenty-two times George W. Bush’s 537-vote margin. Black Floridians were eleven percent of the electorate and forty-one percent of the people thrown off the rolls.

Bush took the presidency by that sliver, and the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount that would have caught the theft was shut down by a Supreme Court whose deciding majority included a justice his own father had put on the bench, Clarence Thomas, whose wife was at that very moment collecting résumés for a Bush administration, and Antonin Scalia, whose sons worked for firms representing Bush, neither of whom saw any reason to step aside.

That’s the voter merge-and-purge playbook, and they’re dusting it off on a national scale for this November with new, borrowed-from-Putin tweaks. Or at least they’re trying their hardest to.

When the Reichstag finally voted itself out of existence in March 1933, uniformed storm troopers lined the walls of the chamber so the legislators would understand the price of voting no.

That’s the tradition these men are drawing from, and we’d be fools not to be clear-eyed and ready for just about anything between now and November. After all, we all watched what Trump and his lickspittles did on January 6th, 2021, killing four police officers as they tried to “hang Mike Pence.”

But here’s the difference between Germany in 1933 and America in 2026 and, as Wendy Lawrence argues in a brilliant recent essay, it comes down to timing.

The Germans got their decisive vote after the seizure of power, when a newly seated Reichstag rubber-stamped the Enabling Act and handed Hitler everything. We get ours before. Which is why they’re so frantically trying to suppress the vote.

The November midterms will arrive while the courts are still ruling against this administration, while subpoenas can still be issued, while the power of the purse still belongs to whoever controls the House.

A Democratic majority doesn’t need to convict anyone to change everything. It can deny the appropriations that fund the deployments and the detention machine, it can compel sworn testimony and drag the concealed directives into daylight, and it can restore a Justice Department willing to enforce laws like Section 242, the Reconstruction-era statute that makes it a felony for any official to strip any citizen of their constitutional rights.

The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling shields the president’s official acts, but it shields no one beneath him. The agents, the contractors, the lawyers who signed the unlawful papers, all of them remain fully exposed, and a future attorney general can act on that.

Trump understands this perfectly, which is why he told House Republicans that they have to win the midterms because otherwise “they’ll find a reason to impeach me.” It’s why his people muse about ICE at the polls and write rules to choke off the mail. It’s why Stephen Miller is reportedly pushing to suspend habeas corpus. It’s why Trump promised to “pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval [Office].”

These lawyers and judges aren’t afraid of impeachment as an abstraction: they’re afraid of the reckoning that oversight makes possible, the same reckoning Hans Frank met at the end of a rope and Roland Freisler escaped only by dying.

The coming reckoning — unless they can stop it this fall — isn’t vengeance. It’s the rule of law standing back up after being knocked down, and in this country that recovery still runs through a ballot box which the members of the Reichstag of 1933 no longer had.

So, make sure you’re registered, and make sure everyone you know is too, at vote.org, and if you vote by mail, request your ballot early this fall and send it back early so no postal rule can run out the clock on you.

Save the nonpartisan Election Protection hotline in your phone, 866-OUR-VOTE, and call it the moment anyone tries to intimidate you at a polling place, because no badge and no uniform has the right to stand between you and your vote.

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Call your representatives through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and remind them that funding lawless deployments, gutting oversight, suspending habeas corpus, and letting the Post Office police our ballots are against the Constitution.

Keep an eye on your own statehouse at openstates.org, where this fight is being waged district by district.

And if this piece helped you see the stakes clearly, please share it and support independent journalism here at the Hartmann Report, because the people counting on you to look away are counting just as hard on you to stay home, and the single most dangerous thing you can do to them is to show up.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Will There Be A Reckoning?”

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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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Earlier this week, a Cable TV host did an extended rant about how many cases Trump has lost in court, arguing that “these guys are really bad at what they do” or words to that effect. I beg to differ: they know exactly what they’re doing, and getting convictions to imprison protesters isn’t (yet — they haven’t yet finished building out their network of concentration camps) their real goal.

Stop thinking of it as law enforcement and start thinking about it as punishment and intimidation. That’s their real goal, at least for the moment.

The indictment, the predawn FBI raid, the mugshot, the bail hearing, the ankle monitor, the year of massive, retirement-fund-draining legal bills and sleepless nights, and the GoFundMe that a protestor, politician, schoolteacher, or a local trustee has to set up just to defend herself against the most powerful government on Earth: those are the punishments that Trump and his lickspittles are so gleeful about inflicting on those of us they decide to target.

Former Trump DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor, noting this morning that he’s heard more indictments of Trump “enemies” are coming soon, summarized it this way:

“The Soviet-ization of American life is farther along than most people realize.”

The eventual dismissal in court or quiet non-indictment by a grand jury is just paperwork stapled to the end of a campaign of brutal intimidation that already did exactly what it was built to do.

A prosecutor who only brings cases he expects to win is enforcing the law. But, in Trump’s case, corrupt prosecutors who keep bringing cases that grand juries reject, that judges ridicule, that they themselves abandon the moment real scrutiny shows up, aren’t trying to win at all. They’re trying to make examples of people, to destroy them financially, and to intimidate anybody else who may think of speaking out.

Because making examples of people who criticize those in power is Rule One in the Dictator’s Playbook.

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This isn’t even a new or modern idea here in America.

Back in 1798, President John Adams and his rightwing Federalists pushed through the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to publish anything false, scandalous, or malicious about the president. The most dramatic target was a sitting liberal congressman from Vermont named Matthew Lyon, who went to jail for writing that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp.”

Adams had his federal prosecutors go after more than two dozen people, most of them opposition newspaper editors, for the “crime” of criticizing him. It was such a naked abuse of power that horrified Americans swept Adams out of office in the election of 1800 and handed the presidency to Thomas Jefferson, who pardoned every last one of them and expired most of the law.

The Framers had just finished writing into the First Amendment the right of the people “peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances,” and Adams turned right around and tried to make exactly that a felony.

Everything Trump’s DOJ is doing right now is a sequel to that story, with an even more fascist edge to it.

For example, you can see the whole brutal scam running in a case just outside Chicago. Six immigration-rights allies, including a former congressional candidate, an Oak Park village trustee, and a Democratic ward committeeperson, got hit with a felony conspiracy charge for allegedly surrounding an ICE agent’s SUV at a protest outside the Broadview detention facility.

They were painted as a “violent mob” in the media, each faced up to seven years in prison, and they spent the better part of a year raising money and living with all of that hanging over their heads. It was a living hell, the sort of thing that disrupts lives, loses jobs, and even can stress marriages to the point of breaking, which is exactly what Trump’s malicious legal goons intended.

Then — in a move I suspect they hadn’t anticipated — a curious federal judge pried loose the original grand jury transcripts, and the whole thing came apart in dramatic fashion.

The transcripts show the grand jury had actually refused to indict, returning a rare “no bill,” and that when one juror said out loud that the case was a “crock of shit,” the lead prosecutor simply dismissed him and sent him home.

It took the ethics-free lawyers still willing to work for Trump and Blanche three separate tries before prosecutors finally squeezed out the indictment they wanted, and the judge later said she’d never before seen the kind of misconduct she saw in those pages.

To avoid a public humiliation, days before the trial was set to begin the U.S. Attorney dropped everything with prejudice, meaning it can never be refiled; one of the defendants broke down in tears and cried out loud in the courtroom when she finally heard it was over.

If Broadview was a fluke, you could chalk it up to one rogue prosecutor having a bad year. But it wasn’t a fluke. It’s the template.

Out in Los Angeles, a former Marine and longtime community activist named Alejandro Orellana got indicted on felony conspiracy and civil-disorder charges, facing up to ten years, for the crime of handing out protective face shields to people demonstrating against ICE.

The FBI raided his home and ripped it apart; the U.S. Attorney went on social media to brand him part of a “shadowy network funding riots.” Six weeks later, prosecutors quietly moved to dismiss the case. By then the Los Angeles Times had documented dozens of protest-related arrests that had collapsed or been quietly downgraded, none of them walked back with anything like the fanfare of the original perp walks.

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In each case, people were hit with tens of thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of dollars in legal bills, had their lives and homes turned upside down, and were doxxed in ways that, for many, brought death threats and harassment from Trump’s most violent and fervent cultists.

This Russia-like racket runs all the way up to Capitol Hill.

When six Democratic members of Congress, including Senator Elissa Slotkin from my home state of Michigan and combat hero Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, recorded a ninety-second video reminding service members that they have a legal duty to refuse unlawful orders, Trump called it seditious behavior “punishable by DEATH” and demanded they be arrested and put on trial.

His DOJ actually carried it to a grand jury, which flatly refused to indict anyone. The same thing kept happening to other marquee targets: the cases against James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were thrown out, and a second grand jury refused to charge James even on a do-over, something her lawyer called unprecedented, because it nearly is.

Nonetheless, all of their lives were disrupted, all of them had to raise a small fortune to cover their legal costs, and their reputations were sullied. That was Trump’s real goal.

And it’s not just individuals.

When DOJ leadership went after the Southern Poverty Law Center, whistleblowers inside the department told Congress that senior officials ordered prosecutors to fast-track a “legally deficient” (i.e. “bullshit”) indictment even though they couldn’t point to a single victim or any actual deception, and that the standing instruction was to “go big” and “go loud” against protesters and critics like the SPLC.

That’s why career lawyers — literally thousands — have been resigning from federal positions in waves rather than sign their names to this kind of fascistic, bullying, punitive crap.

The cruelty of the thing is the point: the people running these legal grifts know they’ll lose most of these cases, but they don’t care, because winning in court was never the goal. The goal is to hurt the protestors and intimidate into silence anyone else who may be watching.

It’s the next teacher who thinks about marching in a protest, the next county trustee who thinks about signing an open letter, the next reporter who thinks about publishing a leaked memo and decides it just isn’t worth a year of her life and a hundred thousand dollars in legal fees to find out whether she’d eventually be vindicated.

Joe McCarthy understood this in the 1950s, when he and Roy Cohn (also Trump’s attorney and pre-Putin mentor) barely convicted anybody of anything yet gleefully destroyed thousands of lives. The subpoenas, the televised hearings, and the blacklist did all the work, and careers and lives were turned upside-down on accusations alone.

Watchdog groups like Protect Democracy are now keeping running tallies of these retaliatory cases precisely because the pattern has become too consistent to pass off as a string of honest mistakes like they keep trying to pretend they are.

So let’s name it plainly: when prosecutors keep bringing cases that grand juries don’t want, that judges openly mock, and that they themselves abandon the instant a real court starts asking real questions, they aren’t fumbling.

They’re trying to bleed and then delete the right to peaceably assemble and petition for a redress of grievances, the right to free speech, the right to hold an anti-Trump or anti-fascist opinion right out of the Constitution, one frightened citizen at a time.

The sentence gets served long before any jury votes, and the verdict they’re actually chasing is our silence.

Don’t hand it to them. Call your senators and your representative through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and demand real and serious oversight of a Justice Department that’s being run as a McCarthy-like revenge and intimidation operation, and insist that the people dragged through these sham prosecutions be protected and made whole.

Back the organizations defending them, from Protect Democracy to the ACLU, and stand behind the local prosecutors and judges who’re refusing to go along.

Make sure everyone you know is registered at vote.org and find out who’s actually on your ballot at openstates.org, because the surest way to end a weaponized Justice Department is to elect the people who will dismantle it.

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The Framers gave us the right to petition our own government precisely so that we’d never have to be afraid of it, and the only way to keep that right alive is to use it loudly enough that they’re forced to remember why it exists.

And if this piece helped you see the pattern more clearly, please share it, forward it, and pass it along, because their whole corrupt, evil strategy depends on people feeling alone and outgunned: the simple act of making sure your neighbors understand what’s happening is its own quiet form of resistance.

You can support this work and find more of it at hartmannreport.com, and every time you share it you make the next person a little less afraid to stand up. And that’s how we rescue our democracy.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Crush One to Warn a Thousand”

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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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These people are monsters.

Louise and I know what child abuse can do to children. In our late 20s, back in 1978, we started a residential treatment facility for severely abused children and ran it for five years.

Louise’s first intake was a girl who was the daughter of her sister by her father; he’d then started in on her at age 10. Our second was a boy who came to the attention of the authorities because his older brother had been tied to a pole in the basement by his parents where he starved to death; it was the smell that provoked the neighbors to call the police.

And those weren’t the worse.

We saw kids covered with cigarette burns, the victims of rape and torture, beatings, and human trafficking.

Our job (and that of our professional staff: the program continued for another 30 years) was to help them recover their humanity, to find a meaningful sense of self, to overcome the PTSD and trauma of those early experiences; it was nothing short of herculean.

It takes years and years of intense work, and even at that these kids are scarred for life, leaving them with challenges and memories that will haunt them to their dying days.

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My dear old friend, the late Joseph Chilton Pearce (I wrote the foreword to his internationally bestselling 1971 book The Crack in the Cosmic Egg), wrote a brilliant book on childhood development, The Magical Child, that lays out the vital importance of children feeling safe and loved during their early years. One of his most well-known quotes is:

“All children want to do is play in worlds they create and project on their external world. If allowed to do that, they are constantly building new neural structures for creating internal worlds and projecting them on their external world. And they build up an enormous self-esteem and feeling of power over the external world through their own capacities.”

His observation is corroborated by over a century of science. As researchers at Harvard noted in a paper presented at the National Symposium on Early Childhood Science and Policy:

“The basic architecture of the brain is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood. Early experiences affect the quality of that architecture by establishing either a sturdy or a fragile foundation for all of the learning, health, and behavior that follow.

“In the first few years of life, more than 1 million new neural connections are formed every second.”

Which is why it’s so obscene that the psychopaths and monsters in the Trump administration are gleefully holding brown-skinned babies, toddlers, and young children in brutal, cold, fluorescent-lit-all-night cages for months at a time and longer.

As the Marshall Project documents:

In March, two-year-old Kaleth went with his parents to a routine immigration check-in in California, an appointment the asylum-seeking family had never missed, and ICE jailed all three of them anyway. They handcuffed his father and drove him to an adult facility while Kaleth and his mother were flown to the Dilley detention center in Texas.

Torn from his dad, the boy kept dragging a little table under a wall-mounted internal prison phone, trying to climb up to reach a father he had no way to call. Then he stopped eating for twelve days, vomiting when his mother tried to feed him, his cheeks going hollow and his eyes sinking into their sockets while staff called it “depression.”

Welcome to the work of the Republican hypocrites who piously proclaim their “Christian” commitment to “life” and claim concern “for the children,” even as they refuse to release the Trump-Epstein files and are now working as hard and fast as they can to expand their concentration camp system for kids and their parents.

Just this week they voted to spend another $70 billion to expand their violent, murderous, masked secret police force and its for-profit mass detention system.

Which children, after all, would Jesus lock up?

Hundreds of young children are now victims of Trump’s brutal, vicious system designed to “purify” America of Black, Brown, and Middle Eastern people and their kids and grandkids. Prior to Trump’s second term, there were rarely more than 3 children in the entire nationwide system awaiting deportation, and they were typically held in more humane conditions, with their parents, and for brief periods.

Now they’re in barbaric prisons, often separated from their parents, kept awake all night by the lights and noise, touched by nobody unless it’s to abuse them, their brains being reprogrammed for a lifetime of pain and emotional and spiritual struggle.

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Courts set a 20-day limit on ICE holding young children, but the Trump regime and their for-profit prison partners making $200 per person per day or more routinely ignore those orders.

Alsu and Azat fled Russia with their one-year-old, Amir, fearing that their opposition to the war in Ukraine would send them to prison and their son to an orphanage, but, presumably because of Trump’s affection for Putin, they were locked in American immigration detention.

Inside the concentration camp they watched their once-lively boy go silent, start hitting himself in the face, and lose so much speech that he could say nothing beyond “mom” and “dad.”

Staff forced his mother to wean him off formula and offered only food unfit for a one-year-old, leaving her so desperate she hid cereal in her socks so he wouldn’t go to bed hungry. When the parents complained, Azat says the for-profit guards woke him in the night and threatened to split the family up and send Amir to foster care if they didn’t stop.

Trump signed the $70 billion Secure America Act this week to fund more of these concentration camps over the next three years — to lock up as many as 120,000+ more people — vastly expanding the system.

Trump has already officially designated “leftists” as “domestic terrorists,” just has Hitler did in 1933 and Putin did a decade ago. Monsters, all.

Speaker Mike Johnson said after the House vote that passed without a single Democratic participant:

“It was Republicans and Republicans alone who did the responsible thing and funded these critically important agencies at this critical time.”

Majority Leader Louisiana’s Steve (“David Duke without the baggage”) Scalise reduced the whole fight to a pathetic attempt at a slogan, lying that Democrats didn’t want to fund more arrests and prisons “because they want open borders.”

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Senate Majority Leader John Thune caved in (as usual) and joined Trump at the Oval Office signing; the president praised the Camp agents and guards themselves, with Trump calling them heroes:

“That’s what they are, they’re heroes, what they have to go through to keep us safe, them, heroes for what they go through to keep us safe.”

Monsters.

Amalia was one year old when she spiked a fever inside Dilley, and her parents say every trip to the clinic got them Tylenol and a warning not to complain. When the baby lost consciousness, her mother went back and begged the staff, asking how long they meant to leave her like this and whether they were going to let her die.

Only after the child’s oxygen fell to dangerous levels was she sent to a hospital, where she spent more than a week and was diagnosed with COVID-19, an ear infection, pneumonia, bronchitis, and RSV all at once.

Republican Congressman Tony Gonzales, whose Texas district contains the Dilley facility, is the single largest House recipient of money from the PAC funded by the for-profit company that runs that prison.

This monster told Bari Weiss’s “Face the Nation” on CBS that he said he’d visited Dilley “many times,” called it a “nice facility,” and said it was “nicer than some elementary schools in San Antonio.” He dismissed Democratic critics (who don’t also get money from CoreCivic’s PAC) as “grandstanding.”

Inside Dilley, the children have described the place in their own words. One 14-year-old wrote that there “all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression,” and another child’s drawing carried a plea scrawled across it:

“I am not happy, please get me out of here.”

Health care is also at the heart of the fight over conditions there. The immigrant advocacy group RAICES told a court that families at Dilley had raised concerns about inadequate medical care on at least 700 occasions since August 2025, citing delays and a lack of follow-up on children’s complaints.

Mothers of children held in detention told reporters for Texas Public Radio that their kids were sick again and again, couldn’t sleep on the metal bunks crammed into overcrowded rooms, and at times refused to eat after finding worms or mold in the food.

But, hey, as monsters like Trump, Miller, Hegseth, and Vance will be the first to tell you, they have to save “western civilization” by purging America of those people whose skin is darker than your average European.

Even if it does mean destroying children’s minds and lives forever.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Monsters Among Us”

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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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Against all odds and massive dark money, Graham Platner won. And won big.

The oyster farmer and Marine Corps veteran who turned a long-shot run into a movement just took the Democratic nomination to challenge Susan Collins for her Senate seat in Maine, and he did it the hard way, the clean way, the way that’s supposed to be impossible in this age of unlimited corporate and billionaire money.

He out-raised a sitting governor backed by the entire party establishment and their corporate funders, he packed arenas with Fighting Oligarchy rallies alongside Bernie Sanders, and he built the whole thing out of small-dollar donations from working Mainers rather than checks from corporate political action committees.

He’s been a sharp critic of AIPAC and the river of industry cash that flows through our politics, and he’s pledged to keep that money out of his campaign.

Now look at the woman he’s running against. Susan Collins is the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which means she sits atop the federal spending faucet for defense contractors, pharmaceutical companies, banks, and agribusiness, and wouldn’t you know it, those are exactly the industries pouring money into her reelection.

The single largest organized source of cash in her campaign is AIPAC, the pro-Netanyahu lobby that bundled more than half a million dollars for her in a single filing period and accounted for nearly a fifth of everything she raised last year.

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It’s a nonprofit corporation working on behalf of a foreign government’s leader’s agenda, doing in American elections exactly what Citizens United made legal when Stevens’ dissent pointed out the decision “would have given Tokyo Rose” a voice in US elections during WWII.

Roughly ninety-five percent of Collins’ money comes from outside Maine. And when Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman dropped two million dollars into a pro-Collins super PAC in the summer of 2025, she voted the very next day to advance Trump’s tax bill, stuffed with giveaways to the private equity industry that had just paid to keep her in office. That’s the whole transaction, in miniature, right there in the open.

If you want to see the same machine running at full industrial scale, just watch what Donald Trump and his sons have been doing for the past year and a half.

— A Reynolds tobacco subsidiary gave five million dollars to a Trump super PAC, and five days later the FDA cleared fruit and candy flavored vapes for the American market, with Trump’s own FDA commissioner resigning rather than sign off on addicting kids.

— Bayer and Monsanto wanted protection from the tens of thousands of cancer victims suing them over Roundup, so Trump handed them a February executive order granting glyphosate producers immunity from lawsuits, then sent his own lawyers to the Supreme Court to argue Bayer’s case. And the saddest part of that one is Bob Kennedy, the lawyer who once won nearly $300 million suing Monsanto over Roundup and built his whole brand calling glyphosate a cancer-causing poison, as Health Secretary rolled over and praised the bought-and-paid-for order as “putting America first,” betraying the very people who trusted him.

— Crypto financier Justin Sun poured something like ninety million dollars into Trump family crypto ventures, and the SEC promptly paused and dropped its fraud case against him, part of a pattern in which the agency walked away from roughly sixty percent of its crypto enforcement after those firms donated to the inauguration.

— Big Oil executives gathered at Mar-a-Lago in 2024, where Trump asked them for a billion dollars and promised to gut Biden’s climate rules in return, a promise he’s since kept by killing wind, solar, and EV incentives, opening federal lands to drilling, and even paying a French company nearly a billion of your tax dollars to cancel offshore wind farms.

— And Tim Cook handed Trump a personal million-dollar inauguration check and a slab of gold, and walked away with tariff exemptions worth billions to Apple while the rest of the country pays the price at the cash register.

Every one of those deals is sleazy, and every one of them is also perfectly legal, and the reason they’re legal is a Supreme Court decision that I’d argue is the single most corrupt ruling in the history of the Court.

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In 2010, in Citizens United, five Republican-appointed justices declared that corporations have a constitutional right to spend unlimited money influencing our elections, building on a 1978 case written by Lewis Powell himself (of Powell Memo infamy) called Bellotti that had first cracked the door open.

This, despite the fact that the word “corporation” does not even appear in the Constitution.

In that five-to-four ruling every vote in the majority was a deciding vote, and one of those five was Clarence Thomas, who for decades had been quietly pocketing gifts, luxury trips, private jet and yacht rides, and tuition payments from Harlan Crow, the Texas billionaire whose Dallas mansion famously houses a collection of Nazi memorabilia including two Hitler paintings and a signed copy of Mein Kampf.

Just weeks before the Citizens United ruling, Crow even helped fund a dark money group co-founded by Thomas’s own wife. The man who cast a deciding vote to legalize secret corporate money in our elections was himself bought-and-paid-for, and he never considered recusing himself for a second.

For fifteen years now, we’ve been told there’s nothing to be done about this short of a constitutional amendment, and every attempt at one has died at Republican hands in Congress. But a handful of states have now found a crack in the wall, and it’s so elegant it’s almost funny.

Hawaii just became the first state in the nation to redefine what a corporation even is. States are the entities that charter corporations and grant them their powers in the first place, so Hawaii simply rewrote the definition to say that a corporation operating in the state does not have the power to spend money influencing elections or ballot measures.

It’s not regulation, it’s redefinition, which is the brainchild of Tom Moore at the Center for American Progress, and the beauty of it is that the Supreme Court has held for two hundred years that defining the abilities and powers of corporations is a matter of state law the federal courts have no business touching.

Hawaii didn’t overturn Citizens United: it just made the ruling meaningless inside its borders, where every dollar spent on an election will now have to come from a human being. Montana is gathering signatures to put the same idea on their November ballot, with a measure that would take effect even sooner than Hawaii’s, and at least fourteen states, including New York and California, are today considering versions of their own.

There are limitations to this approach: redefining corporate power at the state level won’t stop the billionaires. It won’t stop Harlan Crow or Elon Musk or the oil and crypto and pharma tycoons who spend as individuals, because they’re flesh-and-blood people, not corporate charters, and reaching them still requires either overturning Citizens United through a constitutional amendment or changing the composition of the Court that handed it down.

But it’s a real start, and just as importantly it drags the whole rotten arrangement back into the daylight, forcing Americans to look at what Thomas and Roberts and the rest of the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court did to us and our democracy, and ask why we ever let corporations buy our government in the first place.

I’ve spent a good chunk of my life writing and broadcasting about how we got here, and in my new book, Who Killed the American Dream, I trace this entire catastrophe back past Citizens United, back past Bellotti, all the way to an 1886 Supreme Court headnote, written not by a justice but by a court reporter, that falsely declared corporations to be persons under the Fourteenth Amendment and threw us to the mercy of the oligarchs. The book lays out the other solutions, too, the ones that reach the billionaires and not just the corporations.

The biggest, most critical crisis for America that Citizens United caused is that the oligarchy it produced isn’t a stable form of government: it’s a transitional one, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

When a tiny class of the very rich — billionaires, corporations, or both — captures the machinery of the state, as they’ve now done in the Trump White House and across the entire Republican Party, the people eventually figure it out and rebel as we’re seeing today with the No Kings and other protests.

At that point, the oligarchs are left with only two choices. They can back down and let the country become less corrupt, the way America did during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, or they can come down with what Democratic President Grover Cleveland, warning Congress about corporate power back in 1888, called an “iron heel,” crushing the opposition rather than loosening their grip.

That second path is the one that Trump’s mentor, Vladimir Putin, chose. Russia had become an oligarchy in the neoliberal chaos of the 1990s, and when Putin took over he gave the Russian oligarchs a simple bargain: keep your billions, pay me off, and don’t challenge anything I do. When billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky crossed that line, Putin destroyed him, seizing his oil company and locking him away for a decade.

That’s the fork in the road we’re approaching, and it’s why what Hawaii just did is so much bigger than just Hawaii.

The Hawaii-style fix doesn’t require Congress, it requires your statehouse, which means your own state representative and state senator are the people who can make this happen where you live.

Look them up and contact them at openstates.org, and tell them in plain words that you want them to do what Hawaii did and what Montana is about to do, and to redefine corporate power so that only human beings can spend money in your state’s elections.

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Make sure you and everyone you know is registered and ready to vote at vote.org, because the same ballot box that elects a Platner can pass these measures. If you’re in Montana, go find the signature drive and sign it.

And on the federal side, the road to actually overturning all of Citizens United, call your senators and representative through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them to back a constitutional amendment and meaningful Supreme Court reform.

None of this current state of corruption fixes itself: it requires citizen action, or the special interests and billionaires will prevail. So, share this piece with the people in your life who’ve given up believing anything can be done about the money, because something finally can, and forward it to the friend who thinks corruption is just like the weather, something about which nothing can be done.

Support independent journalism at the Hartmann Report so we can keep dragging this into the light. The oligarchs are counting on you to believe the game is rigged forever. Hawaii just proved it isn’t.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Islands Rise”

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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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If you’ve wandered anywhere near the White House this past week, you couldn’t have missed it, because there’s now a ninety-two-foot, six-hundred-ton tangle of steel and floodlights squatting on the South Lawn like a carnival ride that ate a cathedral. The UFC calls it “The Claw.”

It’s taller than the White House itself, tricked out like a Fourth of July beer can, and bolted down right over the patch of grass where Marine One usually lands, all so that on Trump’s birthday, June 14th, two grown men can punch and choke each other bloody in front of thousands of howling fans.

Trump liked it so much he floated leaving it up forever, then had his handlers walk it back when somebody gently reminded him the President still occasionally needs a helicopter. Replacing the torn-up lawn afterward will run about seven hundred thousand dollars, which is roughly seven hundred thousand dollars more than this spectacle is worth.

There’s an ancient phrase for governing this way, and it isn’t a compliment. The Roman poet Juvenal, watching his republic rot into empire, sneered that a people who once handed out commands and legions had shrunk their whole appetite down to two things, panem et circenses, bread and circuses.

Keep the mob fed and entertained with a little blood, and they’ll never notice the men in charge stripping the place down to the studs. Nero fiddled, so the story goes, while Rome burned, and Caligula reportedly wanted to make his horse a Consul, which honestly would’ve been a step up in competence from a few of Trump’s Cabinet picks.

The line from those emperors to a reality-show host who wants cage fighters walking to the Octagon from the Oval Office isn’t hard to trace, and I wrote about exactly this hunger, the narcissistic strongman who governs by spectacle, in The Last American President.

The men who built our republic studied Rome until their eyes bled, and the thing they feared most is sitting right where Trump sits now, a demagogue who keeps a restless public dazzled and furious while the actual work of self-government quietly dies of neglect.

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And now a federal judge is being asked to pull the plug on this tacky display. A lawsuit filed this past weekend by the Public Integrity Project, on behalf of an activist and a Vietnam veteran, argues that:

— Staging a private, for-profit prizefight on federal parkland (which is what the White House lawn is) breaks National Park Service rules;
— That the giant cage went up without the congressional sign-off the law plainly requires, and that
— The administration is simply handing the South Lawn and the Lincoln Memorial, where they plan to hold the ceremonial weigh-ins, to a for-profit corporation so it can fatten its bottom line which will no-doubt recycle back to Trump’s personal money bin in some way.

And there’s nothing subtle about whose bottom line will get fattened. Trump’s own financial disclosures from last month show that back in March he bought stock in TKO, the company that owns the UFC.

So the President of the United States is throwing a for-profit cage match, on land that you and I own and pay for with our payroll deductions, promoting a company he’s personally invested in, on his own eightieth birthday, and slapping a “250th anniversary of America” sticker on it as though that fools a single soul.

The lead attorney challenging this money-making spectacle on our property, Brendan Ballou, a former federal prosecutor who spent two years putting January 6th rioters in prison, didn’t bother with euphemism, calling it flatly “a private, commercial, corrupt use of our most sacred national monuments for private gain.”

He went out of his way to say this isn’t a swipe at mixed martial arts, a sport he respects, but at the corruption greasing it, and he pointed to the roughly one-and-a-half-million-dollar sponsorship packages the UFC is hawking, the arrangement that makes fans cough up for a Paramount+ subscription to watch the main card, and the advertising they intend to drape over the Octagon and, I kid you not, the Lincoln Memorial.

Paramount+, of course, is owned by the same nepo-baby billionaire who’s now taking apart CBS News and is trying to get his hands on CNN, all to slobber over and curry favor with Orange Caligula.

The White House waved the whole thing off as “obstructionist, baseless, and dilatory,” which is precisely how self-dealing always sounds the moment somebody catches Trump or any other con artist with his hand in the till.

This is the same tasteless grifter, remember, who’s spent his second term treating the most sacred public building in the country like a distressed property he picked up at a foreclosure auction.

Last summer he paved over the Rose Garden, the one John Kennedy and Bunny Mellon designed in 1962, ripping out the lawn and pouring a stone patio with drainage grates stamped in the shape of little American flags, because nothing honors the republic quite like a Mar-a-Lago veranda with patriotic sewer covers.

Then he bulldozed the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, the quiet, tree-shaded space dedicated to her in 1965, I.M. Pei pergola and all, to clear ground for a ninety-thousand-square-foot, four-hundred-million-dollar ballroom that a federal judge has already ordered halted, at least for now.

And when he was in Beijing last month gushing over President Xi’s roses, he justified the whole demolition by posting that “China has a Ballroom, and so should the U.S.A.!”

That ought to settle, once and for all, the argument about who he’s modeling himself after. Dictator Xi, ever the gracious host, gave him rose seeds for the very garden Trump had just entombed in concrete, a gift so exquisitely polite it doubled as a political and diplomatic knife to the gut.

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Even worse, our country’s 250th birthday was always meant to be run by America250, the official, nonpartisan commission Congress created back in 2016, the one whose honorary co-chairs are George W. Bush and Barack Obama, a Republican and a Democrat lending their names to a shared national milestone, exactly the way the thing is supposed to work.

Trump, though, wasn’t interested in sharing anything with anybody. Within days of taking office he signed an executive order creating his own “Task Force 250,” chaired by himself with JD Vance riding shotgun, and stood up a MAGA-branded operation called Freedom 250, the very name now stamped on his birthday cage match.

His own administration then elbowed the official, bipartisan commemoration into the shadows and shoved Freedom 250 out front as if it were the real thing.

He didn’t just crash our nation’s birthday party. He threw out the hosts and slapped his own name on the invitations!

I take this one personally: back in 2009, when Louise and I were living in Washington and I was broadcasting my radio and television show from there, I was invited into the East Wing for a briefing with the economist Jared Bernstein, who was then working for Vice President Biden.

I still remember the quiet dignity of the place, the beautiful parquet floors, the sense that you were walking through rooms where First Ladies had shaped the country for the better part of a century.

That East Wing is a pile of rubble now. Trump knocked down a hundred and twenty-three years of American history, the offices where every modern First Lady did her work, so he could build himself a gold-plated Epstein Dance Hall, and now he’s going to cram a cage fight into the nation’s birthday celebration before the dust from those rooms has even finished settling.

And nobody, it seems, wants to have anything to do with it. The regime’s Freedom 250 concert series, meant to pack the National Mall in the run-up, came apart at the seams as act after act bolted for the exits. Martina McBride, Bret Michaels, Young MC, the Commodores, and Morris Day and the Time were among them, several of them saying they’d been promised a nonpartisan show and refused to be turned into set dressing for a tricked out MAGA rally.

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Trump took the snub about as gracefully as you’d imagine, hopping on Truth Social to write the performers off as “highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists’” whose music “nobody wants to hear,” announcing that he’d simply replace the lot of them with himself since he pulls bigger crowds “than Elvis in his prime,” and instructing his own people to “Cancel it.”

Nero, you’ll recall, also considered himself the finest performer of his age. He was famously good with the fiddle.

Now the cage match is getting the identical cold shoulder. Dana White mailed invitations to Dwayne Johnson, who literally sits on the board of the UFC’s own parent company, along with Adam Sandler, Jared Leto, and Mario Lopez, and one after another they’ve politely declined, with even Lopez, a self-described conservative, suddenly recalling he had somewhere else to be.

When the A-list names your own promoter is bragging about won’t come within an area code of the thing, and the biggest celebrity willing to show his face is Vanilla Ice, you’ve pretty well answered the question of whether this is a proud national celebration or a pathetic eighty-year-old man’s birthday party draped in a stolen flag.

Americans need to ask ourselves what all of this noise is engineered to keep us from looking at.

Gas, healthcare, and groceries are still gutting working families, which is why even Governor Gavin Newsom’s office cut straight through the racket with one dry line aimed at the White House, “Mr. President, we just want lower gas prices.”

We’re being marched toward a wider war with Iran, with 13 Americans dead, hundreds injured (who Trump refused to visit when he went to Walter Reed), and hundreds of billions in military hardware destroyed along with our reputation worldwide.

And the administration’s grand answer to all of it is a six-hundred-ton fighting cage and a fireworks budget.

When even Joe Rogan, the UFC’s own broadcaster and one of the loudest voices that helped haul Trump back into office, took one look and called the whole thing “odd” and admitted he didn’t like it, you know the carnival has gotten too garish even for the carnies running it.

The Founders didn’t put their necks in a noose fighting a king so that, two and a half centuries later, a grifter president could rent out the People’s House as a self-enriching pay-per-view backdrop for his own birthday.

But this republic still belongs to us and not to him, and the people pushing back are already in court.

Pick up the phone and call your representatives through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121, and tell them in plain words that public land and the People’s House are not props for a president’s birthday or his stock portfolio, and that Congress needs to take back its say over what gets bolted onto federal parkland.

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Throw your weight behind the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is fighting the ballroom demolition in court, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which chases exactly this brand of self-dealing for a living.

Make sure you’re registered and ready to go at vote.org, and find out who represents you back home through openstates.org, because a great many of the people who will either rubber-stamp this circus or shut it down are sitting on your ballot this year.

And if this piece helped you see what’s really going on behind The Claw, share it, forward it, talk about it at the dinner table, and think about subscribing to the Hartmann Report so we can keep doing this work together.

Bread and circuses only work on a crowd that isn’t paying attention to the scheme behind them. Let’s go ahead and ruin the show.

Louise’s Daily Song: “They Built a Colosseum”

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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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Yesterday, Louise and I drove home from a ham radio convention in Seaside, Oregon and on the roughly 2-hour drive listened to rightwing radio. It was like stepping into a time machine tuned to the 1860s.

One host was pounding on how “our tax dollars” are being used to support “those dirty Somalis” in Minnesota who were committing “massive welfare fraud that’s just fine with Tim Walz and the Democrats.”

Louise and I were astonished as we heard another note that immigration across the Southern “open border” during the Obama and Biden administrations not only brought us “rapists and murderers,” but these (mostly Catholic) people carried a “dangerous ideology” to America. They were wiping out our healthcare system and depriving “good [white] Americans” of benefits through their “massive fraud.”

These Black and Brown people are even fraudulently voting, handing elections to Democrats, another ranted, lying that that’s “why Democrats always open the borders.”

Meanwhile, rightwing news sites brag that under Trump, Vance, and Miller, only white people have been legally admitted into the US during the last 6 months (true) because Trump is “protecting the [racial] integrity of America.” It echoed Trump’s false complaint that the white people of South Africa are experiencing a “genocide.”

And one host we heard proudly proclaimed he was an “evil, heartless bastard” for his opposition to social programs that may help minorities, particularly Black Somalis and Puerto Ricans. Callers to his show proudly proclaimed that they, too, were “evil heartless bastards.”

This is the modern version of the language of the white supremacist Confederacy, an oligarchic, fascist, race-based movement/government that had fully ended democracy in the South by the mid-1850s, seized control of the press, imprisoned its opponents, and then attacked the rest of America to end democracy nationally. (I write about this at length in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.)

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And what’s most astonishing is that our mainstream media, much like Confederate newspapers in the 1850s, never, ever call it what it is: racism.

It’s not like it’s not obvious. “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth fired Black and female flag officers and is blocking the promotions of Black and Hispanic officers, and on D-Day went to Normandy to lecture Europeans about the brown hordes they’re allowing to gain refugee status, claiming soldiers like my dad who volunteered for World War II were battling for white supremacy:

“It’s past time we remember what they [who fought at Normandy] knew. Their legacy demands far more than quiet reflection. it requires our active vigilance. Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.”

The Klan, like some rightwing groups today, described themselves as a Christian “political and social” society and justified their terror campaigns as “restoring order” against supposed Black lawlessness and had a famous slogan that “all Black men are potential rapists, all white women potential victims.”

Alexander Stephens, author of the infamous Cornerstone Speech that kicked off the Civil War, referred to the need to enslave Black people and prevent them from participating in society to “protect our form of civilization” because racial equality is “fundamentally wrong” and “a violation of the laws of nature,” sentiments with which Trump et al, appear to agree.

On March 21, 1861, three weeks before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, Stephens proclaimed that the idea of “Negro equality” and Blacks and whites living together was fundamentally wrong, both scientifically and morally:

“Our new [Confederate] government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

His “scientific truth” framing echoes how modern “conservative” movements launder bigotry as hard-nosed realism with only thinly concealed complaints about manufactured outrages including references to “low IQ individuals” (Trump’s favorite phrase for Black politicians and reporters) and lies like “they’re eating our cats and dogs”:

“This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.”

He even explicitly listed Galileo, Adam Smith, and Harvey’s discovery of blood circulation as precedents, positioning racial hierarchy as a “scientific fact” that northern ideologues were trying to “suppress.” He also branded his white opponents as mentally defective zealots:

“Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity.”

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That last quote has a direct lineage to Trump’s constant slander of “deranged leftists” and “insane Democrats.” Speaking of Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, two women of color, he wrote on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site that the two:

“had the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people, LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick who, frankly, look like they should be institutionalized,” adding that they should be “sent back from where they came.”

The foundation of this GOP racism goes beyond skin-color-based tribalism; there’s a widespread belief across white supremacist movements that non-white people are genetically inferior to whites. Trump himself constantly refers to his own “great genes,” as if white racial superiority were a simple fact. As he told rightwing talk-show host Hugh Hewitt:

“We’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

The hosts we listened to yesterday echoed that language repeatedly albeit in a bit more subtle code than the use of the word “genes.”

As did JD Vance when he went to Germany to support the neo-Nazi-aligned Alternative For Germany (AfD) party there, condemning Germany’s laws against open Nazi symbolism and language and their condemnation of Musk’s Nazi salutes and white supremacist rhetoric:

“Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference, even when people express views outside your own country and even when those people are very influential. and trust me, I say this with all humor. If American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.

“But what German democracy — what no democracy, American, German or European — will survive is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns [about whiteness in Europe], their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid, or unworthy of even being considered. Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. there’s no room for firewalls.”

When Putin bombed the crap out of Syria to protect that nation’s dictator (who allowed Russia to use his deepwater ports) against a popular uprising, millions of brown-skinned Muslim refugees fled north into Europe.

Germany took in a million, and most other European countries took in hundreds of thousands as a humanitarian gesture. All those brown non-Christians, at first welcomed, have since become the rallying cry for Europe’s right, arguing that Europe was a white continent and must stay that way for its “civilization” to survive.

From Sweden to France to Germany to Hungary (where Orbán campaigned successfully for prime minister on the slogan of “build the wall” to keep them out), that wave of immigration has led directly to the rise of powerful, racist, rightwing movements across the continent.

Similarly, here in America there’s been a recent change in our racial composition. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act used the census of 1890 — one that preceded most all early 20th century non-white immigration, when America was nearly entirely white (except for “separate but equal” Blacks and Native Americans) — to set specific racial quotas for legal immigration, explicitly to ensure America would stay overwhelmingly majority-white.

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In 1965, President Johnson and a mixed bag of northern Democrats and southern Republicans pushed through the Hart-Cellar Act that ended those quotas; it was followed by an explosion of immigration by Black, Hispanic, and Asian people.

Between then and now the racial composition of America has been so changed that nine states are now majority-minority (Hawaii – 20.7% non-Hispanic white; California – 32.6% white; New Mexico –35.1% white, Texas – 37.8% white; Nevada – 42.8% white; Maryland – 45.3% white; Georgia – 48.0% white; Florida – 49.1% white; New Jersey – 49.5% white), and the entire US is predicted to go that way within two decades.

This explains Trump’s, Vance’s, and Miller’s near-hysterical efforts to rid America of non-white people while they’re also blocking the entrance of anybody except whites. His opposition to birthright citizenship, which the Supreme Court will soon rule on, ties directly to his desire to denaturalize — strip of American citizenship — as many Black, Hispanic, and Asian people as possible.

Today there are an estimated 140 million non-white people in America, the vast majority first- and second-generation American citizens. Thus, Kristi Noem’s DHS’s official twitter feed calling for 100 million Americans to be deported — necessitating massive denaturalization, all to restore America to a supermajority of white people like in the 1890 census — makes a lot of sense to Republicans. Trump himself said:

“We have criminals that came into our country and they were naturalized maybe through [President Joe] Biden or somebody that didn’t know what they were doing… If I have the power to do it — I’m not sure that I do, but if I do — I would denaturalize, absolutely. We don’t want those people… they shouldn’t be in our country.”

This racist, white supremacist movement has even moved from the White House and Pentagon into our media, as Scott Pelley revealed last week that the new CBS News head, Bari Weiss, was demanding that the protesters against ICE treatment of non-white people be portrayed as more violent than they were and that CBS should report that Renee Good was trying to kill a cop when she was murdered. He told The New York Times:

“Two of the things in the email include, ‘Can we make the protesters look more violent?’ Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”

The common thread that runs through all of this is the racism that animated the Confederacy and has repeatedly torn this country apart over the centuries, now officially adopted by the Republican Party in their endorsement of Trump, ICE, detention centers, denaturalization, a freeze on all non-white immigration, and deportations. It’s now amplified by “conservative” media, much like the newspapers in the Confederacy prior to the Civil War.

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It wouldn’t be a stretch to claim — as I’m doing here — that the Trump administration is trying to restore the Confederacy and this time have them finally defeat the United States’ democracy to replace it with a nationwide system of white supremacy using Christianity and “crime” as their foils.

As fascism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, their plan is explicitly for America to become “a White Christian Ethnostate.” Evil and heartless, in other words, as the talk show host so gleefully proclaimed.

The fact that our mainstream media and virtually ever elected Republican across the nation are afraid to explicitly name the racist foundation of so many of these actions, even as the Trump regime trumpets them and strips our history of references to the tribulations or contributions of Native, Black, Asian, and Hispanic people, is a deeply troubling sign that their campaign is succeeding.

So, the next time you see a media outlet whitewashing Trump’s racist behavior and comments, or those of his lickspittles, call them out. Our democracy depends on each us standing up for all of us.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Evil, Heartless Bastards”

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It was January 20, 2025, the day Donald Trump returned to the White House promising the largest mass deportation operation in American history, when a hooded man kicked down the bedroom door of a Mexican immigrant in Greensboro, North Carolina, shouting “ICE! ICE!”

The man raised his hands. He thought he was being arrested. Instead, four assailants robbed the house at gunpoint, pistol-whipped one resident so hard that his split forehead required ten stitches and four staples, and pointed a gun at a baby while demanding cash from the infant’s terrified parents.

They weren’t ICE. They weren’t police. They were criminals who had figured out that in Trump’s America, all you need to terrorize an immigrant family with impunity is a mask, a gun, a camo outfit you can buy on Amazon, and a loud enough shout.

NBC News and Noticias Telemundo just published a sweeping investigation documenting how that Greensboro robbery was not an isolated horror. Reviewing court records, police reports, and news accounts from across the country, they found 31 separate cases in 2025 of criminals impersonating ICE agents to commit violent crimes, up from an average of just five per year over the previous decade.

That’s a 484 percent increase in a single year.

In New York, a Dominican woman was dragged into a basement, beaten, and raped by a man claiming to be an immigration agent. In North Carolina, another woman was raped at her workplace by a fake agent. In Philadelphia, an armed man claiming to be ICE and wearing a vest marked “Security Enforcement Agent” zip-tied a fifty-year-old Dominican cashier and robbed his business.

The FBI quietly warned in an internal bulletin last October that this was happening, but the administration’s response has been to keep keep the bulletin on the QT while telling ICE agents to stay masked up.

My home state of Oregon, at least, is doing something about it. On Wednesday of last week, the Portland City Council voted 8-4 to bar law enforcement officers from wearing face coverings within the city and to require them to display clear identification.

“Secret police have no place in a democracy,” Councilor Sameer Kanal said, and he’s exactly right: The principle Portland is trying to defend is older than the republic itself.

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Walk through any small-town museum in America and you’ll find them in the glass cases: the brass shield, the polished star, the patrolman’s cap with its leather brim. From the moment we started building professional police forces in this country back in the 1830s, the entire visual grammar of American law enforcement was built around one simple democratic idea, which is that the cop should look like a cop and everybody should know who he is.

The badge had a number on it. The uniform was distinctive. The face was visible. Walk up to an officer on the street and you knew, instantly, who he was, what agency he answered to, and how to file a complaint if he stepped out of line.

That wasn’t an accident of fashion. It was the bedrock principle of policing in a free society, the visible difference between an officer of the law and a thug with a gun, the visible difference between an American cop respecting the Constitution and one of Putin’s masked thugs as you can see here from NBC.

It’s probably where Trump got the idea; Russia is the only other developed country in the world that has this practice and Putin telephones with him regularly to offer advice.

Throughout American history, the people who hid their faces were always the bad guys. They were the highwaymen and the bank robbers, the lynch mobs and the bootleggers’ enforcers, and most infamously the Ku Klux Klan, whose white hoods became such a national disgrace that between roughly 1920 and 1960, at least 18 states passed anti-mask laws specifically to strip the Klan of its anonymity.

Alabama did it. Florida did it. Georgia, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, all of them. And the conservative segregationist governors of the Jim Crow South didn’t pass those laws because they suddenly loved Black Americans.

They passed them, as the ACLU has documented, because the Klan’s masked terrorism was making their states look like banana republics, and because they understood, even in their racism, that lawful authority requires a visible face. New York had gotten there a century earlier, making it a crime back in 1845 for anyone, including law enforcement, to appear “disguised and armed” in public.

The logic was so obvious that for the better part of two hundred years nobody seriously challenged it. If you’ve got a badge, gun, and the authority of the state to drag a human being away from his family, you damn well better be willing to show your face while you do it.

That’s the price of the power one gets with a badge and the ability to inflict violence, imprisonment, and even death on others. When you hide your identity, we believed, you’re not enforcing the law, you’re committing a crime under cover of it.

Then came Trump’s lawless ICE thugs, now with a budget bigger than the US Marine Corps, and hundreds of concentration camps today holding more people (~70,000) than Hitler had a year into his administration (~40,000).

I wrote back in October of last year about how Donald Trump’s masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement raiders bear a disturbing resemblance to the Klan of a century ago, complete with the legal arguments their handlers make in court about the agents’ “right to anonymity” being identical to the arguments Klansmen made when states finally cracked down on their hoods.

What I didn’t fully appreciate then is how quickly the rest of my prediction — that criminals would soon be imitating ICE in order to facilitate their crimes — would come true.

Once the federal government normalizes masked, anonymous men in tactical gear kicking down doors and snatching people off the street, every two-bit predator in America with a black ski mask and a fake badge realizes he’s been handed a license to rob, rape, and terrorize with near-total impunity.

The immigrant victims, of course, typically don’t report any of it, because they’re terrified that if they walk into a police station the cop behind the desk will just call ICE on them. The criminals know this; they’re counting on it, in fact.

As Naureen Shah of the ACLU put it, we have never in this country experienced the terrorism of masked agents on this kind of scale, and we have never before experienced this problem of people being able to credibly pose as federal law enforcement, because the entire system was designed for two centuries to make sure it could never happen.

Portland’s new ordinance, sponsored by Councilor Kanal and co-sponsored by Councilors Elana Pirtle-Guiney and Angelita Morillo, directs the Portland Police Bureau to investigate anybody who’s acting like a cop, detaining a member of the public the way an officer would, or refuses to show credentials.

It won’t, by itself, unmask federal ICE agents, because the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause puts federal officers beyond direct city regulation, and Kanal was honest about that limit on the floor. But it’s a clear statement of principle, and it joins similar legislation passed by the Philadelphia City Council last year, along with California’s No Secret Police Act, authored by State Senator Scott Wiener and signed by Governor Newsom last fall.

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The Ninth Circuit has temporarily blocked enforcement of the California law against masked federal agents, an obscenity of a ruling that effectively says the federal government has a constitutional right to deploy hooded paramilitaries in cities that don’t want them.

The Founders, who’d just fought a revolution against George III’s customs men and faceless Press Gangs who’d kidnap (impressment) colonists to take to sea as free labor, would have recognized exactly what’s happening here.

They wrote the Fourth Amendment in part because of it. James Madison would have understood, instinctively, that an armed agent of the state who refuses to show his face is not enforcing the law but undermining it, because the entire premise of self-government is that the people get to see who is doing what to them and demand accountability through their elected representatives.

Hide the face and you cut that wire. You turn cops into the very thing the badge was invented to distinguish them from.

ICE is masked, in other words, for exactly the reason the Klan was masked, and exactly the reason so many common criminals and bank robbers throughout American history have been masked.

These ICE thugs know that much of what they’re doing is either flatly illegal under our Constitution and our treaty obligations, or so morally rotten that the agents themselves would be ostracized from any decent community if their neighbors and relatives saw the videos.

They’re hiding because they have something to hide. And the predictable second-order consequence, the wave of fake ICE agents now robbing and raping immigrant women across America, is a feature of the system the Trump administration built, not a bug.

Call your senators and representatives at the Capitol Switchboard, 202-224-3121, and tell them you want federal legislation requiring every law enforcement officer in the country — federal, state, or local — to operate with a visible face and a readable badge number except in genuine undercover operations approved by a judge.

If your city or state hasn’t passed an ordinance like Portland’s, call your mayor and your state legislators and tell them it’s time. Find your state lawmakers at openstates.org and make sure you’re registered to vote at vote.org so next November you can help throw out the politicians who keep voting to fund this masked terror.

America has spent over two centuries figuring out, through bitter experience, that hooded men with guns are not law enforcement. We can’t forget that lesson now.

If this article moved you, please share it widely, talk about it on social media, forward it to your friends and family, and consider supporting independent journalism by subscribing to The Hartmann Report at hartmannreport.com. The only way writing like this reaches the people who need to read it is if you help carry it there.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Who are the Men Behind the Masks?”

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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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I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capitol city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year.

The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious Democrat, and I was a long-haired anti-war hippie member of MSU SDS.

I did the news there for years, and nobody ever told me how to spin it or what to insert or delete. I knew that I couldn’t bias it to reflect my own opinions: the news — accurate, factual, honest information — was sacred.

It was also the cost of our broadcast license, and we all knew it. The widely misunderstood Fairness Doctrine’s main demand was that radio and TV stations “program in the public interest” and that was widely understood to mean straightforward, reliable, faithful-to-reality news at the top and bottom of every hour on radio and an hourlong news block in prime time on TV.

We did this — and embraced the Fairness Doctrine — because we knew it was part of the price of freedom, of democracy in our republic. When Thomas Jefferson said he’d rather live in a country with newspapers and no government than in one with a government but no newspapers, he wasn’t knocking government; he’d help create ours and was its president for 8 years. He was talking about the vital importance of an honest and free press.

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Part of that honesty came from the competition; there were multiple stations in Lansing and most had an in-house news operation like ours, and the ones that didn’t ran the CBS or AP radio newscast twice an hour. Honesty and clarity were essential to get and maintain an audience, as well as hanging onto our license.

Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and now Trump and his oligarch enablers are trying to bury the entire concept of honest, straightforward news.

Over the past year-and-a-half we’ve watched Brendan Carr, Trump’s hitman at the FCC, go to CPAC conferences and brag about how he’s going to assault stations that say things he and Trump dislike. He’s trying to intimidate ABC affiliates into muzzling Jimmy Kimmel — again. And he succeeded in taking down Stephen Colbert.

And a Trump-adjacent billionaire nepo-baby has acquired CBS and is systematically stripping it of its journalistic integrity, starting with the evening news and now gutting the nation’s number-one news magazine show, 60 Minutes.

Storied journalist and 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley isn’t taking it lying down, even though it’s a virtual certainty that he has the standard non-disparagement clause that most media operations now require for talent which forbid them to ever speak ill of their former employer should they leave for any reason. He’ll probably get sued for it, but he’s a man committed to the truth.

Trump, Ellison, Weiss, the billionaire owners of Sinclair, the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News,” the 1,000+ billionaire-owned radio stations across the country, the billionaire-subsidized podcasters, and billionaire-owned social media sites like Facebook and X that have apparently been algorithmically slanted toward Trump’s neofascist movement are all following an ancient script.

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Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, and Franco all seized control of the news in their countries in their first year in power. It took both Putin and Orbán two or so years, because they wrote a new script for the takeover: sue the news outlets and reporters into bankruptcy for “defamation” or “slander,” then have friendly oligarchs take over the outlets.

Orbán even came to CPAC in Dallas to tell Republicans that they should do the same thing as he had done by turning America’s media over to rightwing billionaires. He also told the American CPAC conference in Budapest four years ago, during the Biden administration, that they should do the same in America when Republicans next seized control of the US government:

“Have your own media,” he said. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”

He added:

“Of course, the GOP has its media allies but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcasted day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.”

Thus, this is now the Putin/Orbán/Trump formula:

— Manufacture a crisis.
— Declare an “emergency.”
— Seize powers the Constitution doesn’t grant.
— Bypass Congress.
— Bully or ignore the courts.
— Use masked, secret police and the military against your own residents.
— Send people to foreign concentration camps.
— Build concentration camps within the United States.
— Prosecute lawyers and judges.
— Assert control over universities.
— Merge corporate and state interests.
— Cow the media into silence about your corruption and crimes.
— Then call it all “law and order.”

Trump is 18 months into his project and he’s already taken down the Voice of America, defunded PBS and NPR, seen the Washington Post and LA Times acquired by sycophantic billionaires, and turned CBS over to a nepo-baby billionaire who’s going after CNN next. As Jefferson pointed out, this is how democracies are fatally corrupted, which is apparently Trump’s and his billionaire enablers’ goal.

Combine that with a capture of the police and prosecutorial agencies of the government so, like in Putin’s Russia, they can harass and prosecute anybody who dares speak up against their destruction of our way of life and you have the classic formula for turning a democratic republic into an oligarchic dictatorship.

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The classic symbol of authoritarian governance dating back to ancient Rome and Caligula — violence as entertainment — will come to the White House as musclebound men will beat each other bloody and senseless for spectacle and the amusement of our 80-year-old “president” on our nation’s birthday.

Masked thugs snatching people off the street without warrants and putting them into concentration camps in violation of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments also plays well for the fascist Klan-remnant Republican base, so long as the people they beat, pepper spray, or murder are either dark-skinned or “liberal agitators.”

We’re now way down the road to the complete destruction of America, all in less than two years, as I wrote and warned of in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy in 2020.

The courts are packed with Trump toadies, thousands of lawyers have been purged from government, the FBI is now weaponized against Americans, Blacks and women are being pushed out of senior military commands by an openly white supremacist Defense Secretary, our history is being whitewashed in national parks, museums, and every federal property, and Trump’s face hangs, 60 feet tall, on multiple federal buildings.

And now they’re coming for the news. If it falls, recovering our republic will be possible — the examples are Hungary with Peter Magyar and Volodymyr Zelenskyy being elected in Ukraine — but very, very difficult. It will take years and cost a fortune both in work, cash, and probably blood, as it did in those two countries.

But we can gain courage from our heroes of this moment. Scott Pelley is unintimidated, telling us bluntly that the new owner and management of CBS tried to force him to lie to us on the air and spin stories so they could please wannabe-Emperor Trump. When they tried to lie their way out of the PR mess Pelley created for them, he immediately called out their falsehoods.

This crisis isn’t limited to CBS: the same nepo-baby billionaire who’s taken over that network also, according to Bernie Sanders, now owns, controls, or soon will control:

“TikTok, Warner Bros., Paramount, DC Studios, The Discovery Channel, CNN, CBS, HBO, BET, Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, Nickelodeon, MTV, Cartoon Network, Food Network, Travel Channel, Investigation Discovery, Animal Planet, Comedy Central, Showtime, TBS, TLC, HGTV, and more.”

Oligarchy and monopoly are two sides of the same anti-democratic fascist coin. They’re always tied together.

As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.

To register our discontent with those outlets. To boycott them. To demand that our politicians start breaking up the monopolies that Reagan legalized when in 1983 he ordered the SEC, FCC, and FTC to stop enforcing the antitrust laws that went all the way back to the 1890s (leading to three decades of “merger mania”).

Monopolies are destructive, but media monopolies are pure Putin-style poison.

We all must become truth-tellers, regardless of whether our platforms are, like mine, on radio, TV, and Substack, or if the place we can make our mark and speak our voice is on social media, the local newspaper’s letters to the editor, financial or volunteer support for a fighting progressive politician, or the town square with a protest sign.

We are all Scott Pelley.

Louise’s Daily Song: “We Are All Scott Pelley”

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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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It’s beyond time for some good-old-fashioned truth telling. There’s a singular cancer at the core of our democracy and it shows up in dozens of ways that don’t seem related to most Americans. It’s tearing our country apart, paralyzed our government, and has gutted our middle class.

That cancer is big and dark money in politics.

The story of how we got here is fascinating and I’ll get into it in a minute, but suffice it to say that fraud, lies, and corruption are at the core of every aspect of it.

Its main cause in the present moment is one of the most corrupt Supreme Court decision in history, where 5 on-the-take Republicans on the Court ruled in 2010 (Citizens United) that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as free speech. The wreckage of this decision is all around us.

Without Citizens United we’d have a national healthcare system like literally every other developed country in the world.

We don’t because the for-profit health insurance industry (which doesn’t even exist at this scale anywhere else on Earth) extracts hundreds of billions in profits from us every year and uses Citizens United’s legalization of bribery to pay off legislators to maintain the status quo. Big Pharma and Big Hospital are also in on the game, and massive New York hedge funds are buying up physician practices as fast as they can nationwide, knowing that people will pay almost anything to regain their health or postpone their death.

Without Citizens United we’d have high-quality public schools in every community in America.

Instead, children who live in poorer parts of America regularly score up to four full years behind children from wealthy districts. Teacher pay has been functionally frozen for decades when you consider inflation; they make on average 26% less than people with comparable degrees. Charter Schools drain money from public schools, making the situation far worse for those families who can’t get their kids into private education. National reading and math scores have fallen to their lowest levels in decades, with only about 28% of 8th graders proficient in math. All approved by politicians “incentivized” by “campaign contributions” to shovel more money into the coffers of a for-profit education industry that wants to take over all of America’s schools after first bankrupting them.

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Without Citizens United we’d have free or affordable college nationwide.

We’re the only developed country in the world with widespread student debt; about half of the OECD nations even pay a stipend to college students to help with books and rent (like we did with the G.I. Bill) and college is free or affordable in every other country. But rightwing ideologue billionaires object to public education, particularly if paid for with their tax dollars, so we have almost $2 trillion in student debt. When Joe Biden tried to do something about the situation, the big banks who profit from this bizarre situation funded Republicans who took the case before the 6 corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, who shot down his efforts.

Without Citizens United we’d have universal suffrage, making it easy for everybody to vote.

The billionaires who control the GOP know that if everybody in America could easily vote like in every other developed democracy in the world their Republican toadies would lose control of both the federal government and many states, so they make it hard to vote. In Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Austria, and Italy, there’s no need even to register to vote, because the country knows you’re a citizen because of your enrollment in the national healthcare system or via similar systems. We could easily do the same here via Social Security numbers, which are now typically assigned at birth.

Without Citizens United we wouldn’t have to pay somebody or buy software to do our taxes.

In Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Chile, and Japan (with pilot programs in a dozen other countries) the government does the tax calculation and sends you a report on what you owe or what refund you’re getting. If you think it’s wrong, there’s an easy dispute process. They even break down where your tax dollars went by categories like health, military, roads, education, etc. in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway. Here, the multi-billion-dollar tax preparation industry gives millions every year to politicians to prevent anything like this, and Trump even killed off Biden’s “free tax preparation” program that was a start in that direction.

Without Citizens United your electric bill would be substantially lower.

Politicians who receive millions every year from for-profit utilities work to keep prices (and thus profits) high, and Republicans who’re heavily funded by the fossil fuel industry and its billionaires actively work to kill off solar and wind projects which are now the cheapest forms of electricity generation. Citizens United allowed Trump to take hundreds of millions from them and recently paid a French company a billion dollars to cancel a wind farm off the east coast.

Without Citizens United you’d have a decent, living wage.

The federal minimum wage is $7.25 and has been frozen there for a generation because Citizens United lets big business pay off politicians to not change it. If the 1968 minimum wage were simply indexed to inflation it would be $15 today. If it were indexed to worker productivity it would be $25, moving large portions of America into the middle class.

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Without Citizens United you’d be able to easily join a union.

Unionization is what built America’s middle class between 1933 and 1981, and Reagan’s GOP destruction of our unions has taken the rate of membership from around a third of us in 1981 to around 6% of the private workforce today (and Trump is stripping union rights from federal workers, as some Red states are also doing). Big companies that fight unions, and the billion-dollar union-busting industry make sure Republicans are well paid to fight things like Card Check, and Republicans on the Supreme Court have amplified a 45-year war against unions.

Without Citizens United, we’d have serious federal climate legislation.

Corporate and fossil‑fuel money has been a central roadblock to decarbonization, and Citizens United made it easier to deploy that money at scale. Fossil fuel–aligned actors now spend on the order of 500 million dollars per year on climate‑related “lobbying.” Without that, we’d have had a federal clean‑energy standard and stronger methane and carbon rules years ago — and fewer deliberate rollbacks — if fossil fuel interests couldn’t so easily flood elections and politicians with money.

Without Citizens United, we’d have more aggressive gun regulation and our children wouldn’t be traumatized by regular active shooter drills.

The NRA and gun‑industry money had clout before 2010, but post‑Citizens United super PACs and dark‑money vehicles exploded their ability to threaten and reward federal and state lawmakers. Post‑2010, pro‑gun outside groups have consistently outspent gun‑safety groups in key federal races, with much of that spending routed through 501(c)(4) and super PAC structures enabled or normalized by Citizens United.

Without Citizens United, you’d pay less for virtually everything.

The “monopoly tax” we pay because Reagan stopped enforcing our antitrust laws in 1983 is estimated to be around $5,000 per family per year. Downtowns and suburban malls that were filled with local, family-owned businesses before the Reagan Revolution are now nothing but chains and franchises. Cell phone service that costs $15 a month in France or $12 a month in Australia bills out at an average of $61.85 per month in the United States. High-speed broadband that’s a bit over $31 a month in France or $36 in Germany (with higher speeds and better reliability than almost anywhere in the United States) averages nearly $70 per month in the US. Similar metrics are found with pharmaceuticals, airfares, and medical costs, among dozens of other product and service categories, all because monopolies destroy competition and thus raise prices (and profits).

Without Citizens United, we’d have fewer voter‑suppression and gerrymandering schemes.

Election‑law groups document massive post‑2010 flows from billionaire‑aligned networks into state‑level races (secretary of state, legislatures, courts) explicitly aimed at shaping election rules, redistricting, and administration to prevent “the wrong people” from voting. These funds move through dark‑money nonprofits and super PACs authorized by Citizens United, which then blanket state media markets with ads framing restrictive laws as “election integrity” while punishing legislators who oppose them.

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Without Citizens United, we’d have more responsive housing and tenant policy.

Real‑estate and landlord groups have become major players in local and state elections, especially after 2010, often outspending tenant and housing‑justice groups by large margins. Developers, real‑estate PACs, and landlord associations frequently use independent‑expenditure committees to back candidates who oppose rent control or strong tenant protections. Where major tenants’ rights or rent‑stabilization measures have been on the ballot, landlord‑backed outside spending has routinely swamped pro‑tenant budgets.

Without Citizens United, we’d have fewer captured state courts and prosecutors.

Corporate, ideological, and billionaire‑funded groups have leveraged Citizens United–style spending not only in legislative races but in judicial and prosecutor elections. Post‑2010, outside spending in state supreme court races has soared, often funded by business lobbies and ideological networks creating courts that will side with corporate defendants, weaken regulation, or uphold gerrymanders. Similar patterns show up in district attorney and attorney‑general races. Without this, state judiciaries and key law‑enforcement posts would be less skewed toward protecting the rich and trashing the poor and dissidents.

Without Citizens United, we’d have elections that are not being bought and influenced by proxies for foreign governments.

Here in Portland, Israel-aligned AIPAC blew Susheela Jayapal out of the water in the 2024 primaries, using a phony front name to avoid identification. They’ve done the same against progressive candidates from coast to coast and are preparing to play a big role in this fall’s elections. Money is almost certainly also being channeled from other governments (think Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China) through opaque corporate chains. When Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his Citizens United dissent that the decision “would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by ‘Tokyo Rose’ during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders” he wasn’t blowing smoke. It’s here.

Without Citizens United, we’d have somebody other than Donald Trump in the White House.

This one doesn’t take a lot of explanation. A hundred rightwing billionaire families publicly raised a half-billion for Trump’s reelection, and corporations have tossed in at least another half-billion. Nobody knows how much they funneled through dark money operations, but it’s probably even greater amounts. Elon Musk functionally bought Pennsylvania for Trump and bragged about it. While there are a small handful of billionaires (Reed Hoffman, Tom Steyer, George Soros) who support Democratic candidates, they’re not as rich and not nearly as numerous as those supporting Trump and the GOP.

Citizens United came about, in part, because of a corrupt conspiracy between a Supreme Court justice (Stephen J. Field) and the Court’s clerk (John Chandler Bancroft Davis) back in 1886. I tell the story in shocking and fascinating detail in my new book Who Killed the American Dream? The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told. From there it migrated through a series of corrupt 20th century SCOTUS opinions (Buckley, Bellotti, Citizens United).

As we move toward this fall’s election and the 2028 presidential campaign, we all need to share this sort of information as widely as we can.

It is possible to excise this rightwing cancer from our body politic, but it’s going to take a serious effort as all these industries and governments want to maintain things as they are.

Louise’s Daily Song: “America Without Citizens United”

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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.

America seems to be failing, both at home and around the world. But why?

David French published a thoughtful op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times titled The Fire of Stupidity Can’t Be Contained, identifying many of the symptoms of our national decline and wondering out loud why this is happening now.

His best guess is that we’re not remembering the horrors of both fascism and communism from the last century, which is why people — particularly young people — are embracing both. He notes:

“A disturbing number of young people on the right are fascinated with fascism. An extraordinary 34 percent of young people overall express a favorable view of communism, and young Americans are far more likely than their parents or grandparents to say that political violence is ‘sometimes OK.’”

Katy Tur opened an hour of her MSNOW show with French’s article; she similarly was wondering what happened that has so torn our country apart. Could it be that we’re just not as well educated about our history as we once were? Is it the economy? Demagogues like Trump in politics?

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Millions of words have been rightly devoted to this sort of inquiry, but most miss the most obvious answer: it’s the billionaires, stupid. Follow along and I think you’ll get it.

When FDR took over America in March of 1933, we’d been a largely laissez faire nation since our founding. There wasn’t much government help for anybody other than the rich and powerful.

Three preceding Republican presidents (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover) had dismantled what little regulation was left from the progressive Republicans (Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft) and dropped Wilson’s 91% top income tax rate down to 25%, kicking off the Republican Great Depression.

In 1933 a third of America was unemployed, hunger and homelessness were rampant, and only about 20 percent of us were in the middle class; the country had never gone above a third of us in that class. So, FDR, his wife Eleanor, and Labor Secretary Francis Perkins set out to reinvent America. They legalized unions, restored the 90% income tax rate on the morbidly rich, made government the employer of last resort, and instituted the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, Social Security, built schools and infrastructure nationwide, etc.

The result was dramatic. By 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, fully a third of us had good union jobs and they set the wage floor for another third of us; as a result, two-thirds of us were in the middle class, and could do it with a single paycheck. A single-family home, a car, an annual vacation, send the kids to college, and retire on a good pension.

But from 1933 forward FDR’s New Deal had been under continuous attack by a handful of extremely wealthy oligarchs who resented capping their paychecks to avoid that top 91% tax rate and hated the regulations that made both consumer products and the workplace safer but cut into their profits.

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That backlash movement found its voice with Lewis Powell’s infamous Memo in 1971, and Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court the following year.

The Memo called for the creation of rightwing think tanks that could influence public opinion, taking over schools and colleges, buying and running media operations, seizing control of the courts (particularly the Supreme Court), aggressive pushback against the Civil Rights movement, and the promotion of “free market” ideology. It was essential, Powell wrote, to “save” America from an incipient communist takeover.

The Memo electrified what we today call the Epstein/Billionaire Class of morbidly rich men. They endowed and built all of that infrastructure, spending literally billions in today’s dollars, putting a rightwing radio station in every city and town, rightwing TV networks, well-paid pundits, “alternative” colleges like Hillsdale, a billion-dollar effort to pack the courts, challenges to textbooks, and an embrace of hard-right Christianity.

Their main message was that government had grown “too big,” a result of the New Deal that must be reversed, and the GOP they own has run with it ever since.

Although the federal government of the US was smaller as a percentage of either population or GDP compared to virtually every other developed country in the world, it was a meme that resonated with average people who were horrified that we’d been lied into the bloody Vietnam War, resented paying taxes, and felt they were being left behind as a result of the severe oil-shock inflation of the Nixon/Ford 70s.

Their plan worked. Trust in the American government went from nearly 80 percent in the early 1960s to a mere 17% last year. And, just like a marriage doesn’t work when the partners don’t trust each other, neither does a society or a government.

Reagan cemented this by declaring in his first inaugural speech that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” It was the perfect encapsulation of the billionaire hatred of taxation and regulation, but was sold so well that a majority of Americans bought it hook, line, and sinker.

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Reagan and the billionaire-owned Republicans in Congress broke the back of the union movement, slashed taxes on the morbidly rich and corporations, stopped enforcing our anti-monopoly laws, sold off federal lands, increased subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, slashed federal spending on education and college, enabled stock manipulation through stock buy-backs, etc., etc.

Five corrupt Republicans who the Powell movement billionaires had helped install on the Supreme Court helped amplify the damage with their 5-4 Bellotti (written by Powell) and 5-4 Citizens United decisions, freeing both billionaires and corporations to buy elections by claiming that “corporations are persons” and “money is free speech.”

As a result, our elections now typically go to the highest bidder and billionaires are the biggest players in our political system. Just 100 billionaires put $2.6 billion into the 2024 election, about a fifth of all spending, and will probably beat that number this fall; in recent elections, roughly nine times out of ten the better‑funded candidate wins, especially in House races.

Meanwhile, 45 years of Powell Memo-style Reaganomics have gutted the middle class. Only around 43 percent of us can now claim that status, and it takes two full-time paychecks today to live like one could in 1981.

Nobody has halted this slide from a highly functioning government and a vibrant, healthy middle class into the mess we have today, all as the result of nearly a half-century of Reaganomics.

And now the billionaires have put one of their own into the White House, with 13 billionaires in his cabinet.

The income tax rates are still stupidly low, incentivizing yachts for billionaires and massive bonuses for corporate executives. Bill Clinton declared “the era of big government is over” as was “welfare as we know it.” Obama turned our healthcare funding system over to a handful of massive insurance companies who are now turning the screws to extract as much wealth from us as they can.

So, people are — quite reasonably — pissed off. Our legislators are bought-and-sold, sometimes even by foreign-loyal entities like AIPAC, our judges are hand-picked by billionaires, and Trump has gutted our “big” government even further.

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By the end of 2025, the federal civilian workforce had shrunk by roughly 300,000+ employees compared with Trump’s inauguration, a drop of around 10% in a single year.

Education Department staff fell by 43% in 2025 alone, the U.S. Agency for International Development was effectively dissolved, the agency housing the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities lost more than half its staff; AmeriCorps shrank by 44%; the Small Business Administration by 33%; the agency overseeing Voice of America and other international broadcasters by roughly 33%; and the National Science Foundation by about 30%.

During the 2025 shutdown, the Trump administration used that crisis they created to carry out at least 4,200 immediate layoffs across seven agencies in a single day, rather than furloughing workers. Cuts hit Treasury (1,446 workers), Health and Human Services (around 1,100–1,200), Education (466 on that day, after earlier large cuts), Housing and Urban Development (442), Commerce (315), Energy (187) and Homeland Security (176), with additional reductions at EPA and the Patent Office.

Laying off over 7,000 people at Social Security has left seniors with frustrating day-long hold times and a lack of in-person appointments, while the feds under Dr. Oz are experimenting with partially privatizing and starting pre-clearances done by big insurance companies and inflicted on traditional Medicare recipients in six states, Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Washington.

As our government is gutted, our social services are crushed, our unions are enfeebled, wages are flattened, and our politicians and judges are wholly-owned properties of a handful of billionaire families and industries, Americans are justified in looking for alternatives.

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Ironically — and perhaps alarmingly — billionaires are now looking for alternatives, too.

Peter Theil, the guy who funded JD Vance’s political career who, through Palantir, has access to mind-boggling amounts of data on us and our future, just moved his entire family to Argentina. Mark Zuckerberg has a 5,000 square-foot doomsday bunker in Hawaii, and Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison are reported to have similar “bolt-holes” in case the public gets too restive or Trump starts a nuclear war.

The bunkers-for-billionaires business is among the fastest-growing in America, with Survival Condo, Oppidum Bunkers and Vivos advertising architect-designed what Oppidium calls “ultra-luxury fortified underground residences.”

Meanwhile, because of Reagan’s cuts to education and civics, two generations have grown up without a good understanding of how government works in a democracy; only 1 in 20 Americans can name the five freedoms protected by the First Amendment, and a third of Americans can’t name the three branches of government. No wonder they’re curious about fascism and communism.

So, the next time somebody asks you why America is in such a mess, why people no longer care or even despair about the future, let them know the simple and real answer: “It’s the billionaires, stupid.”

Louise’s Daily Song: “Why Did America Fail?”

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Donald Trump looked at America’s 250th birthday and neurotically concluded that he’s the main attraction.

A celebration intended to honor the founding of the United States is rapidly being repackaged as a celebration of Trump himself: his movement, his grievances, his white supremacy, his misogyny, and his power.

Every new announcement, from the MAGA rallies to the vanity projects to the carefully choreographed spectacles on the National Mall and White House lawn, reinforces the same message: this is no longer about America turning 250. It’s about Trump making sure America spends its 250th birthday talking about Trump and the power of white men.

And if that sounds familiar, it should. Washington has seen this kind of political pageantry before.

The misogynists, racists, and fascists are taking over Washington, D.C. this summer, and the parallel to the massive Klan rally of August 1925, staged under another Republican president who declined to denounce it is the script.

On that August day a hundred and one summers ago, somewhere between thirty- and forty-thousand Ku Klux Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue twenty-two abreast and fourteen rows deep, ending at the base of the Washington Monument. President Calvin Coolidge refused to condemn them.

Their version of America was defined entirely by exclusion: not Black Americans, not Catholics, not Jews, not immigrants, not organized labor, not anyone outside their narrow tribal vision of who counted. That night they burned crosses in Arlington while the band played “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “America.”

A century later, the same Mall is being prepared for the same kind of show, and the artists scheduled to perform are figuring it out and getting out as fast as they can.

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Within forty-eight hours of the lineup announcement for what Trump’s people are calling the “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall, the Commodores, Martina McBride, Morris Day and the Time, Bret Michaels of Poison, Young MC, and Jodie Rocco of Milli Vanilli all put out statements saying they’d been misled, that nobody told them the event was a Trump-branded MAGA operation.

Young MC told Rolling Stone it was a bait-and-switch. The Commodores said their music has always been their voice and they wouldn’t lend it to a single political party.

Trump’s response was telling. He didn’t try to recruit new acts or apologize for the confusion. He went on his failing Nazi-infested social media site and demanded the whole concert series be scrapped, replaced with what he called “a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250.”

Then he announced he’d personally headline the June 24 opening ceremony himself. The mask came off in about seventy-two hours. The 250th anniversary of American independence has been openly converted into a Trump fascist-fest, and only white MAGA who love to see gladiators beat each other bloody and senseless need apply.

Louise and I lived in Washington during the Obama years, and we visited just about every monument the city has, sometimes more than once. We were invited to the White House, and walking up that long drive past the East Wing (which is now rubble) always felt like walking into something larger than any single president.

The Lincoln Memorial at dusk, when the reflecting pool went dark and the seated figure of Lincoln doubled itself on that still water, was the kind of place where Americans of every stripe stood quietly together and remembered who we were supposed to be.

That reflecting pool, finished in 1923, has held the gravity of Marian Anderson’s 1939 Easter Sunday concert when she’d been denied the stage at Constitution Hall because she was Black, and the gravity of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, and every quiet sunset visit by every family who came to the Mall to feel something solemn about this country.

Trump has now had that pool painted blue at a cost he claims is around two million dollars, the same shade you’d find at the kid’s pool in a discount motel. He calls it “American flag blue.” Right. He drove his motorcade across the wet coating before it set, climbed out, and held a press conference standing in the middle of the pool with his cabinet secretaries around him, and now we’re paying to repair that damage, too.

He told reporters the old gray stone was “never good.” That dark surface that turned itself into a mirror for Lincoln’s face for over a century, he claimed, was “never good.” The Cultural Landscape Foundation has sued to stop his desecration because the project skipped the federal review process that exists precisely to prevent a president from treating a national memorial like the patio renovation at one of his gaudy golf motels.

The June 24 event will be Trump in front of a crowd at the National Mall, hand-picked artists who didn’t pull out, and a brand of “patriotism” carefully scrubbed of anyone who might complicate the picture.

The “State Fair” will run sixteen days. Vanilla Ice and Flo Rida are still on the bill. Behind it all, Trump is preparing to host a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House on July 4, the actual anniversary, with up to twenty-five thousand spectators watching men beat each other senseless in a cage on the same grounds where Lincoln walked. Dana White is producing. Ivanka is helping organize.

The Roman emperors understood the deal they were making with the public: bread and circuses, panem et circenses, the cheap grain and the gladiator games delivered together, because if you fed them and entertained them they wouldn’t ask awkward questions about the empire. Trump has inverted the formula. He’s keeping the circus and taking away the bread.

On July 4, 2025 — exactly one year before this 250th celebration he’s calling a birthday party — Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates will cut at the end of this year federal Medicaid spending by roughly $911 billion, along with $186 billion in cuts to SNAP, to fund their tax cuts.

— The American Medical Association estimates that 11.8 million people will directly lose health coverage.
— The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projects that up to 14.9 million people could be put at risk by the byzantine work requirements alone.
— The Joint Economic Committee found that under the proposed cuts, 10 million children could lose their health insurance, one in eight kids in this country.
— At least two million children are estimated to lose food assistance under the SNAP changes.

All to pay for another massive tax cut for Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet.

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Set those numbers against what Trump’s spending on the spectacle. The ballroom built atop the rubble of the East Wing has now climbed to $300 to $400 million and Republicans in Congress are trying to appropriate a billion dollars for it, presumably so Trump can keep all those “donations.”

The “Independence Arch” — what Washington has already nicknamed the “Arc de Trump,” planted at Memorial Bridge to block the view of the Arlington National Cemetery where American soldiers are buried — is projected at around $100 million, with $15 million of that already pulled from a taxpayer-funded endowment through the Office of Management and Budget.

The pool job is at least $2 million. The UFC fight on the South Lawn is whatever it costs to host twenty-five thousand people for a brutal cage match at the President’s residence.

We’re talking, conservatively, half a billion dollars or more in personal vanity projects from a president who just stripped a trillion dollars from the medical care of poor Americans and a couple hundred billion more from their food. All to glorify himself.

— At the end of this year, a single father in Ohio is going to watch his SNAP benefits drop by an average of $146 a month so Trump can paint a memorial pool the color of a Mar-a-Lago hot tub.
— A grandmother in Kentucky will lose Medicaid coverage so Trump can build a French-style triumphal arch with his name nicknamed onto it.
— A kid in Louisiana — one of the states hardest hit by the Medicaid cuts — will lose her health insurance so Dana White can promote a cage fight on the White House lawn.

Panem et circenses without the panem. Just the circus, paid for by the bread he ripped out of their hands.

The Founders fought a war to be done with this sort of obscenity. They fought to be done with kings who put their names on buildings, with sovereigns who treated national wealth as personal decoration, with rulers who staged spectacles to glorify themselves while the poor lined up at almshouses.

The whole point of the experiment that began two hundred fifty years ago this summer was that we wouldn’t have a man who lived in a palace and stamped his initials on the country.

The arch wasn’t supposed to happen. The ballroom wasn’t supposed to happen. The triumphal procession down a repainted Mall, with the music acts replaced by the leader himself in front of a hand-picked crowd, wasn’t supposed to happen.

The 1925 Klan marchers thought they’d reclaimed the country for the Confederacy. They had a Republican president who looked the other way, a sympathetic press in many regions, governors in their pocket from Florida to Oregon, and a self-image as the only “real Americans.”

Their movement collapsed within a couple of years because Grand Dragon David Stephenson was convicted of rape and murder and the scandal pulled the curtain back on what they really were. Epstein files, anybody?

The lesson wasn’t that fascist movements collapse on their own; it was that ordinary Americans, when they finally saw clearly what was being done in their name, refused to keep going along with it.

Call your representatives at the Capitol Switchboard, 202-224-3121, and tell them you want the Medicaid and SNAP cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reversed before the scam “work requirements” hit on December 31.

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Support the food banks in your community: they’re about to be overwhelmed when the SNAP cuts take effect this winter. And if you live anywhere near Washington this June, you can decide for yourself whether to be on the Mall while Trump turns the 250th anniversary of American independence into a MAGA pep rally with a cage fight chaser.

If this piece spoke to you, please share it widely and consider subscribing to the Hartmann Report. The work of pushing back against the spectacle, the silence, and the slow normalization of all of this depends entirely on readers who refuse to look away and who keep passing the word along.

The 1925 Klan marchers thought the Mall belonged to them. It didn’t then and it doesn’t belong to their heirs now.

Louise’s Daily Song: “King Trump”

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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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Corporations can now vote in Delaware. And they’re doing it.

Seriously. Not dystopian science fiction or a new novel by an AI version of George Orwell. Actual corporations — what America’s first Supreme Court Justice, John Marshall, in 1819 called “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law” — are today voting in elections for everything from the mayor and town council to referendums on corporate taxes and limits on corporate behavior.

What could possibly go wrong?

There are, after all, more corporations than people in Delaware. They can now decide who’s going to run the government, what the laws are, and — through their votes to elect humans who’ll take corporate money to do what corporations want (something else that corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized) — even what regulations companies must follow and what limits there are on their behavior.

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In a few weeks, my next book will be coming out, “Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told,” and the timing couldn’t be more synchronous.

The book, written like a murder mystery but 100% true, tells the story of how a corrupt Supreme Court clerk conspired with a corrupt Supreme Court justice to hand “corporate personhood” to the railroad corporations that were then among the richest and most powerful in the world.

The decision was handed down in 1886; in it, the Court itself didn’t say a single word about corporate personhood. Back then corporations had the rights of “artificial persons” so they could pay taxes, own land, and execute contracts and lawsuits, but nobody seriously claimed they could assert human rights like free speech, privacy, or the right to vote.

But the clerk of the Court, a wealthy plutocrat named John Chandler Bancroft Davis, slipped into the headnote of the case — a commentary for law students and others wanting a summary of a decision, which carries absolutely no legal weight whatsoever — that the Chief Justice, Morrison Remick Waite, had claimed corporations were “persons,” implying they had rights under the 14th Amendment.

The railroads then hired a few retired members of Congress who were on the committees that wrote the Amendment as frontmen and for the next five years they traveled the country claiming that the “actual intent” of the authors of the 14th Amendment was to grant human rights to corporations, not former slaves.

Their efforts worked; just ten years later, in the Covington & Lexington Turnpike v. Sandford case, the Court cited the Santa Clara decision and ruled:

“[C]orporations are persons within the meaning of the constitutional provisions forbidding the deprivation of property without due process of law as well as a denial of the equal protection of the laws.”

That badly abused Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, was written to liberate formerly enslaved people, and its language is pretty clear about that:

“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; 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.” (emphasis added)

The railroad corporations claimed that because they were taxed at different rates on property they owned in Santa Clara and Santa Ana counties in California, they were “persons” being denied the “equal protection of the law.” The Court determined that the California constitution already dealt with tax issues like that, giving the railroad the relief they wanted, but there was no federal action at all.

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However, the lie about corporate personhood buried in the headnote took root and lives on to this day. For example, yesterday afternoon I asked DuckDuckGo’s AI the question:

“Who won the 1886 Santa Clara Supreme Court decision?”

And the answer I got back was:

“The Southern Pacific Railroad Company won the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the railroad, affirming that corporations are considered ‘persons’ under the Fourteenth Amendment.”

None of that is true, but it was nonetheless the basis of the 1978 First National Bank v Bellotti decision written by Lewis Powell himself (of “Powell Memo” fame), claiming that because corporations are “persons” with rights under the Bill of Rights — including the First Amendment right to free speech — they could spend big bucks to swing elections. In that decision, the Court majority footnoted:

“It has been settled for almost a century that corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific R. Co., 118 U. S. 394 (1886); see Covington & Lexington Turnpike R. Co. v. Sandford, 164 U. S. 578 (1896).”

Because corporations don’t have mouths to speak with, Powell reasoned, their money served the same purpose. So they could “speak” freely with millions thrown into elections, corrupting our democracy to their benefit and our detriment.

Two years earlier, in Buckley v Valeo, the Court had struck down the 1970s campaign contribution limits Congress put into law after the Nixon bribery scandals. They ruled that wealthy Senator James Buckley (brother of William F. Buckley) could use his own money to finance his election campaign because his money was functionally the same thing as his First Amendment-protected free speech.

Which led straight to Clarence Thomas — the most corrupt Supreme Court justice in history, then on the take from a Nazi-memorabilia-collecting rightwing billionaire — to cast the deciding vote in Citizens United.

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That bizarre decision blew up hundreds of campaign finance and other good-government laws, claiming that there should be virtually no limits on the money morbidly rich individuals, corporations, and even foreign entities could pour into US elections.

Clarence Thomas even cited the Bellotti case and, thus, its reference to Santa Clara to justify handing our democratic processes over to the richest people and biggest companies in the nation.

And now we’ve arrived at terminal insanity. As Reuters reported on Tuesday:

“A judge in Delaware, where many big U.S. companies are incorporated, ruled ‌on Tuesday that a small town that allows corporations to vote in municipal elections was not violating the state’s constitution.

“Delaware Superior Court Judge Craig Karsnitz said the beach town of Fenwick Island was not diluting human votes by allowing companies ​and other legal entities that own property to cast votes in municipal elections.”

More corporations are incorporated in Delaware than any other state in the nation because of that state’s lax corporate laws and low corporate taxes: there are more corporations in the state than people.

And now they can vote.

I wrote Who Killed the American Dream? to wake people up to the corruption of our democracy by the rich and powerful, particularly the corporate “artificial beings” that keep buying off judges and politicians because of corrupt Supreme Court cases citing that corrupt headnote, starting with Santa Clara and then going to Covington and then straight-lined to Bellotti and Citizens United.

The entire thing is a fraud, a 140-year-long scam, as knowledgeable legislators like Sheldon Whitehouse, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, Mark Pocan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pramila Jayapal, and Elizabeth Warren will tell you in a New York minute.

And it needs to be overturned.

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There are a few ways to do that, the most effective being a constitutional amendment, but reorganizing the Supreme Court and even strong legislation can take a bite out of it. I detail them all in the book, and good government groups like Move to Amend and Public Citizen have been on this case for years.

The situation, after all, has become so bad that I suggested in my book Rebooting the American Dream (which Bernie read from on the floor of the Senate in his famous filibuster) that members of Congress should be required to wear NASCAR-style patches to let folks know which corporations are “sponsoring” them.

If we don’t get active and take back our democracy for humans, corporations may one day vote one of themselves into office and the Republican majority on the Supreme Court will probably simply nod along.

The book, FYI, is now available for pre-order…

Louise’s Daily Song: “Corporations Get To Vote”

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A new national survey of Americans finds that almost half of us (48%) say our lives are “lacking in fun” with fully 12% saying they can’t recall the last time they had an entire day they could simply enjoy. More than half (57%) said this was because they couldn’t afford to have fun, which makes perfect sense when you consider how 45 years of Reaganomics have destroyed the union movement and progressive taxation, and thus gutted the American middle class.

Like idiots, we Americans bought Reagan’s siren song hook, line, and sinker back in 1980. He told us prosperity would “trickle down” if we just abandoned the largely non-profit healthcare system we had nationwide (most states required hospitals and health insurance companies to be nonprofits), the unions that fought for us to have good pay and benefits, enforcement of anti-monopoly laws, free college, and subsidized housing.

Reagan put what’s sometimes called “the neoliberal agenda” (I wrote a book about it: The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America”) into place and no president, Republican or Democratic, has fully repealed it. We still have few union members, low taxes on billionaires and corporations, profitized healthcare and education, and stagnant wages for working class people.

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All because we believed the Republicans and their billionaire backers and media owners. Consider how they’ve played three generations for fools:

Republicans told us if we just cut the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74% it was at in 1980 down to 27% it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else as, they said, the “job creators” would be unleashed on our economy.

Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the world, as over $70 trillion was transferred over 45 years from the bottom 90% to the top .1%, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 65% of us to fewer than half of us. It now takes 2 full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980.

Republicans told us if we just deregulated guns and let anybody buy and carry as many as they wanted wherever they wanted it would clean up our crime problem and put the fear of God into our politicians.

“An armed society is a polite society” was the bumper sticker back during Reagan’s time, the NRA relentlessly promoting the lie that the Founders and Framers put the Second Amendment into the Constitution so “patriots” could kill politicians like they tried to do on January 6th. Five corrupt in-the-NRA’s-pocket Republicans on the Supreme Court even got into the act by twisting the law and lying about history to make guns more widely available.

Instead of a “polite” society or politicians who listened better to their constituents, we ended up with school shootings and a daily rate of gun carnage unmatched anywhere else in the developed world.

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Republicans told us that if we just ended sex education in our schools and outlawed abortion, we’d return to “the good old days” when, they argued, every child was wanted and every marriage was happy.

Instead of helping young Americans, we’ve ended up with epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and — now that abortion is illegal in state after state — a return to deadly back-alley abortions. Women are literally dying in Red states because doctors are terrified to treat miscarriages for fear of being imprisoned for violating abortion laws.

Republicans told us that if we just killed off Civics and History classes in our schools, we’d “liberate” our young people to focus instead on science and math.

Instead, we’ve raised two generations of Americans who can’t even name the three branches of government, much less understand the meaning of the Constitution’s reference to the “General Welfare.”

Republicans told us that if we cut state and federal aid to higher education — which in 1980 paid for about 80% of a college student’s tuition — so that students would have what they told us was “skin in the game,” we’d see students take their studies more seriously and produce a new generation of engineers and scientists to prepare us for the 21st century.

Instead of happy students, since we cut that 80% government support down to around 20% (with the 80% now covered by students’ tuition), our nation is groaning under a $2 trillion dollar student debt burden, preventing young people from buying homes, starting businesses, or beginning families. While students are underwater, banksters who donate to Republican politicians are making billions in profits every single week of the year from these bizarrely non-negotiable loans.

Republicans told us that if we just stopped enforcing the anti-monopoly and anti-trust laws that had protected small businesses for nearly 100 years, there would be an explosion of innovation and opportunity as companies got bigger and better.

Instead, we’ve seen every industry in America become so consolidated that competition is dead, price gouging and profiteering reign, and it’s impossible to start or find small family-owned businesses anymore in downtowns, malls, and the suburbs. It’s all giant chains, many now owed by hedge funds or private equity. Few family or local businesses can compete against such giants.

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Republicans told us that if we just changed the laws to let corporations pay their senior executives with stock (in addition to cash) they’d be “more invested” in the fate and future of the company and business would generally become healthier.

Instead, nearly every time a corporation initiates a stock buyback program, millions and often billions of dollars flow directly into the pockets of the main shareholders and executives while workers, the company, and society suffer the loss.

Republicans told us that if we just let a handful of individual companies and billionaires buy most of our media, a thousand flowers would grow and we’d have the most diverse media landscape in the world. At first, as the internet was opening in the 90s, they even giddily claimed it was happening.

Now a small group of often-rightwing companies own our major media/internet companies, radio and TV stations, as well as local newspapers across the country. In such a landscape, progressive voices, as you can imagine, are generally absent.

One nepo-baby MAGA billionaire now owns, will soon own, or influences, as Bernie Sanders noted: “TikTok, CBS, CNN, HBO, Discovery Channel, BET, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, DC Studios, Fandango, Miramax, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount, PlutoTV, Showtime, TBS, The CW, TNT, Warner Bros., and more.”

Republicans told us we should hand our healthcare decisions not to our doctors but to bureaucratic insurance industry middlemen who’d would decide which of our doctor’s suggestions they’d approve and which they’d reject for payment. They said this will “lower costs and increase choice.”

In all of the entire developed world — all the OECD countries on 4 continents — there are only 500,000 medical bankruptcies a year. Every single one of them is here in America.

Republicans told us if we just got rid of our unions, then our bosses and the companies that employ them would give us better pay, more benefits, and real job security.

As everybody can see, they lied. And are working as hard as they can to prevent America from returning to the levels of unionization we had before Reagan’s Great Neoliberal Republican Experiment.

Republicans told us if we went with the trade agreement the GHW Bush administration had negotiated — NAFTA — and then signed off on the WTO, that we’d see an explosion of jobs.

There was an explosion; lots of them, in fact, as over 70,000 American factories were torn down or left vacant because their products were moved to China or elsewhere. Over 15 million good-paying jobs went overseas along with those factories.

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Republicans told us global warming was a hoax: they’re still telling us that, in fact. And therefore, they say, we shouldn’t do anything to interfere with the profits of their friends in the American fossil fuel industry and the Middle East.

The hoax, it turns out, was the lie that there was no global warming, a lie that the industry spent hundreds of millions over decades to pull off. They succeeded in delaying action on global warming by at least three decades and maybe as many as five. That lie produced trillions in profits and brought us the climate crisis that is today killing millions and threatens all life on Earth.

And then, of course, there’s the biggest GOP lie of them all: “Money is the same thing as Free Speech.”

Five corrupt on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court told us that if we threw out around 1000 anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws at both the state and federal level so politicians and political PACs could take unaccountable billions, even from foreign powers, it would “strengthen and diversify” the range of voices heard in America.

It’s diversified it, for sure. We’re now regularly hearing from racists and open Nazis, many of them elected Republican officials, who would have been driven out of decent society before the Reagan Revolution. American political discourse hasn’t been this filled with conflict and violence since the Civil War, and much of it can be traced straight back to the power and influence of dark money unleashed by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

The bottom line is that we — as a nation, voluntarily or involuntarily — have now had the full Republican experience, and every Zoomer paying attention knows it. It’s why they’re no longer listening to the Republican politicians who are continuing to try to sell us this bullshit.

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We don’t want to hear Republicans sermonizing about deficits (that they themselves caused).

Or welfare (that they damaged and then exploited).

Or even whatever they’re calling “faith” these days, be it the death penalty, forcing raped women to give birth at the barrel of a gun, or burning books.

We’re over it, Republicans; we want fun and meaning back in our lives, rather than just working ourselves to death so Bezos and Zuck can buy new yachts.

A new America is being birthed from the ashes of the Reagan Revolution with Zoomers bringing the energy and Boomers, Millennials, and GenXers bringing the institutional memory and rage.

You can’t stop it much longer.

Louise’s Daily Song: “From the Ashes of the Reagan Revolution”

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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 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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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.