A new Economist/YouGov poll of registered voters that just came out this week found that the top two words that Americans across the board endorse to describe Donald Trump are “corrupt” (53%) and “dangerous” (51%). Not even half of registered Republican voters were willing to call him “honest.”
This is consistent with Gallup’s finding earlier this month that fully 89 percent of Americans now believe that corruption in our government is widespread, the highest number in the two decades the polling company has been asking, and a higher number than in any other advanced, industrialized democracy.
The same day that poll came out, yesterday, CBS News published photos that American service members smuggled out of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia showing extensive — massive — damage to barracks, facilities, and even US aircraft, all done by Iranian drones and missiles. The Pentagon’s own Inspector General just reported that there has been $3.7 billion in equipment and building losses and around 60 aircraft destroyed or severely damaged.
This follows Trump, last week, lying through his teeth on, saying that the Iranians had inflicted “no damage” and “no nothing” on US facilities and troops, 18 of whom are now dead with hundreds more hospitalized.
Trump calls that “small potatoes and refused to visit the wounded troops when he was at Walter Reed a few weeks ago. One soldier, his identity concealed, told CBS News, “We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”
Not only is Trump regularly — arguably, daily — lying to America and the world about what’s happening in the Middle East (and dozens of other things), but that polling shows that most Americans have figured it out. Which raises a vital question for our country at this pivotal moment:
What happens to a country when it loses trust in its government and leaders, and what can be done to restore that trust?
I’ve seen the consequences of this sort of loss of trust up-close-and-personal in the years I traveled the world on behalf of a German international relief organization, and the lessons I learned are both important and grim.
In the 1990s I made several trips to Bogotá, Colombia on Salem’s behalf, as I wrote about in The Prophet’s Way; I remember the immigration officer at the airport stamping my passport, saying “Mister Tourist, be careful.” At dinner that first night, after being warned not to take taxis or trust the police, a German woman who’d lived there for 15 years flinched every time the doorbell rang.
Her husband’s office manager, an ordinary middle-class guy, had been forced to watch helplessly at gunpoint as 15 armed men broke into their house looking for their 16-year-old daughter; when they discovered she wasn’t there, they took his wife, a friend of my dinner companion.
Every night for a month they called the husband and made his wife cry into the phone as he systematically drained every credit card, bank account, and retirement account he had; she was only released when he’d finally mortgaged his condo and given them the last of his money and credit. She was a shell of a person afterward, barely able to speak, and the family was desperately trying to borrow enough money from friends to leave the country and go back home to Germany.
The nun who ran the church where we were staying (locked into cells with steel doors and cement walls) warned us against going to a restaurant after dark and wrote down the phone number of the only trustworthy cab company in the city. Off-duty cops and soldiers had organized “hunt clubs” to shoot street children for sport.
One morning, as Horst Von Heyer and I drove past a billboard advertising a gated community of upscale homes with smiling guards carrying AK-47s, we passed a teenage boy sprawled on the sidewalk in a spreading pool of blood, a uniformed man standing over him with a gun still in his hand. Nobody in the car said a word; it was just too ordinary.
This is just one small example from my own experience of what happens when people no longer trust their own government. Into that vacuum of trust rush two types of people.
The first are the predators, who correctly figure that it’s now open season. We’re seeing that right now as corporate America fleeces us, banks rip us off, health insurance companies deny us care to fatten profits, and oil companies and their wholly-owned GOP shills lie to our faces about climate change.
The second are the strongman politicians, who promise that only violence and an iron fist can “restore law and order.” I saw that in Kaliningrad, Russia in the 1990s when four Russian cops pulled our car over for speeding and then let us go when we gave them with a case of high-end chocolates, a town where the mob-run kiosks around Lenin Square were “the safest parts of town” (and vodka was cheaper than bottled water).
Six years later, Russia — by then exhausted by the crime and grifting oligarchs — handed their country over to a KGB colonel who promised to make the trains run on time. There hasn’t been a free election in that country since.
Recently, El Salvador ran that same script. A corrupt, on-the-take government of grifters and hustlers so ripped off the country and gutted the middle class that Salvadorans voted in Nayib Bukele, a guy who describes himself as “Central America’s coolest dictator.” He proceeded to arrest and lock up about two percent of the entire country, cutting crime but also ending democracy altogether.
That’s the warning for us. When trust is gone, wild stuff happens to countries and I’ve seen it in person from Peru to the Philippines to Uganda to South Sudan and Darfur and elsewhere. And now I’m seeing it here as the predators and fascists are running amok in America.
Trust is the single most vital component of all human relationships. With it, you can create miracles; without it, it’s hard to do anything productive.
Just ask any marriage counselor; to recover trust after a betrayal can take years and requires both full disclosure, real contrition (or at least explanation), and a genuine change in behavior.
And that’s exactly what Americans are struggling with right now. In a republic like ours, trustworthiness necessarily begins at the top, and Donald Trump is an utterly un-trustworthy man.
He cheated on every one of his wives. He convinced his followers to give him a combined $3.81 billion for his $TRUMP and $MELANIA digital coins before their value fell 97 percent and he pocketed the difference. He’s made another $1.4 billion from crypto just in the first year of his second presidency.
And then there are the jailings and murders being carried out in Trump’s name and under his direction.
In January his masked thugs murdered Renee Good (a mother of three) and Alex Pretti (an ICU nurse at the VA), both American citizens, on the streets of Minneapolis. For six months, the administration refused to hand the evidence of the murders over to state prosecutors and physically blocked state investigators.
As of today, nobody has been charged with these crimes. That’s the Bogotá sidewalk, the uniformed men with high-powered rifles who know nobody will ever hold them to account for their killing sprees.
This is a pattern that’s been over 50 years in the making.
— Nixon committed treason, blowing up the Vietnam peace talks to win the 1968 election, and then repeatedly both broke the law and took bribes while in office. Ford pardoned him, telling us our “long national nightmare” was over, when he was simply setting up its next phase.
— Reagan cut a deal with the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the 1980 election to screw Jimmy Carter and, when a special prosecutor began a serious investigation of that treason, GHW Bush’s Attorney General, Bill Barr, advised him to pardon the six Iran-Contra defendants on Christmas Eve of 1992, just months before he left office. Bill Clinton chose to ignore it all and “look to the future.”
And when George W. Bush’s brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, purged around 100,000 Black Floridian citizens from the voter rolls in the months before the 2000 election so his sibling could “win” the state by 537 votes and their father’s appointee to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, cast the deciding vote to stop the recount that would have revealed the crime, Al Gore just let it slide.
Which brings us to the Democrats. It’s long past time when they have to say, in one loud voice, “No more! We are finally going to hold these criminals to account!”
Most recently, Trump committed a whole bunch of crimes both during his first term as president and, particularly, when he lost the 2020 election and demanded that Georgia’s Secretary of State “find” another >11,000 votes and sent a mob to the Capitol to murder the vice president and speaker of the House.
Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, waited fifteen long, painful months before appointing Jack Smith and getting serious about holding this serial criminal to account; it was too little, too late.
Every one of those decisions, from Ford through Clinton to Gore and Garland, was made by decent people who told themselves that they were protecting our nation’s institutions by letting a little Republican crime slide by.
Unfortunately, that’s not the way this works.
Instead, what they told the next Republican criminal (or, in Trump’s case, himself) was that they, too, should go ahead and crime because if they get caught they’ll get off with a slap on the hand or maybe, at worst, lose their office.
Every one of these Republican presidents, in other words, showed the next that the price of crimes against our democracy was negligible.
That’s how we got from Nixon hiding his bribes in the Oval Office to Reagan committing treason with the Iranians to the Bush brothers rigging Florida in 2000 to Trump selling meme coins from the White House and implicitly encouraging his agents to shoot citizens in the street.
Other democracies have gone down this road and figured out how to recover from a political party becoming so corrupt it sanctions theft from, and even the open murder of, its own citizens.
— In Argentina, they put the ruling junta on trial in a civilian courtroom in 1985 just two years after the dictatorship ended and during a time when the generals still almost certainly could have re-taken the government.
— South Korea impeached, removed from office, and sentenced President Yoon Suk Yeol to life in prison just 15 months after he tried to declare a state of emergency and martial law to avoid the consequences of his party’s electoral losses, the same crimes Trump is openly contemplating now.
— Brazil arrested and convicted former President Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a January 6th style coup and sentenced him to 27 years in prison; they also convicted his generals alongside him.
None of these countries collapsed; to the contrary, the democratic fabric of each was strengthened by holding their former political criminals to account. All are still democracies, and it looks like the same process will soon play out in Hungary.
Even South Africa’s “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” — which people think of as a “gentle alternative” to criminal prosecution — wasn’t designed to be gentle. People who failed to make full, public confessions of their crimes were supposed to be imprisoned; the cautionary tale is that none were, which is a good part of why many South Africans will tell you the wounds are still open. The government broke trust even as it was trying to restore it.
Increasingly, Americans get this. There have to be consequences for:
— betraying America, Ukraine, and democracy on behalf of Putin,
— looting our treasury and handing no-bid contracts to friends and business associates,
— traveling the world on our dime while picking up billions from dictators on the pretense of negotiating peace,
— killing unarmed civilians in the Caribbean and children in Iran,
— poisoning our air in exchange for campaign contributions,
— trying to overthrow out government and fix the 2026 election,
— sending armed masked thugs into our streets to intimidate and kill us while organizing them into the country’s largest domestic spying operation,
— handing trillions in tax breaks, all borrowed from the rest of us, to billionaire donors who are now trying to buy this 2026 election,
— and all the other crimes that you’re welcome to list in the comments to this article.
If Democrats want to earn the votes of that 89 percent of Americans who’ve lost faith in their government, they must — every one of them who wants our vote — publicly promise to prosecute these people.
No more Garland pauses, no more Ford pardons, no more Clinton, Gore, and Obama looking the other way. Not for Trump, Miller, Noem, Hegseth, the ICE agents, the crypto bagmen, the Abu Dhabi royals, or the pardon-buyers who’re cashing in on Trump’s corruption every day.
On Day One, the subpoenas must begin: Legislation mandating an independent counsel with a real budget and open trials in open court the way Argentina, Brazil, and South Korea did it. Impeachment of every corrupt Cabinet billionaire and associated lickspittle, from Trump on down. Revealing the complicity of Congressional Republicans.
Democrats don’t get to run on “restoring trust” and then govern like an abused spouse who keeps offering “just one more chance.” We’ve had four Republican presidents openly break the law or even commit treason just for political power; it must come to an end.
So, be sure you’re ready to vote and make sure your friends are, too.
And please share this piece and support hartmannreport.com, because the only reason I can still say these things out loud is that people like you help keep the lights on.
Louise’s Daily Song: “No More Looking Away”
Comments on Wednesday’s Daily Take:
Trump Took Control of Another Country’s Oil Fortune. Where the Hell Is the Money?
The whole Trump regime is so evil, it is impossible to find words that adequately describe it, let alone condemn it. They are not only destroying democracy, they are destroying the notion of the nation-state.
~ Jeffrey Hobbs
I keep scratching my head - I know there are lies on both sides. Mr. Trump gets away with so much and I don’t understand how the R, I and D legislators can’t or will not do anything. It’s so clear how corrupt he is and everyone around him eventually pays the price. Where are the sane people that follow the law? How can folks be this afraid - especially those in power? We the USA can do better.
~ Charlotte
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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club
The September book of the month is Looking Backward, From 2000 to 1887, by Edward Bellamy. Buy a copy or download it for free here.
This is a utopian science fiction novel published in 1888. When Julian West falls into a hypnotic sleep in 1887 Boston, he awakens 113 years later to find America transformed into a socialist utopia. Through conversations with his guide, Doctor Leete, West discovers a radically reimagined society where industry is nationalized, goods are equally distributed, and citizens retire at 45. This bestselling novel sparked a political mass movement and inspired over 162 discussion clubs across America.
Tom, I am now at the point where I feel an American Nuremberg will not be enough justice against these criminals. As they seek to destroy the rule of law, let them not be allowed to hide behind the law when brought to book. I say set up French Revolution-style tribunals for the lot of them with the implication for the highest-placed that Madame would like to meet them and that may well happen.
Corporate money being our one true God, we need to have a wall of separation between this religion and our government. Only public funding of elections should be allowed. No more corporate lobbying. All communication by business with government officials must be on the record. No stock trading by public officials, and no accepting gifts or trips to sponsored events. Cut the cord of corporate corruption, and you restore trust in government as an instrument of the people.