Saturday Report 6/20/26 — Trump hands the spy shop to an arsonist, picks a fight with his last friend in Europe, and a democratic socialist shows Democrats where the exit from Reaganomics is…

The Best of the Rest of the News

Image by Med Ahabchane from Pixabay

— Trump just handed America’s spy agencies to a man with no intelligence experience and no security clearance and that’s the whole point. With Tulsi Gabbard suddenly “stepping down,” Trump installed billionaire homebuilding nepo baby Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence, then delayed the Senate hearing for his actual nominee, Jay Clayton, just so the unqualified Pulte could get his hands on our voting data. This is the same Pulte who, running the federal housing agency, made a name for himself accusing Trump’s enemies — Letitia James, Adam Schiff — of “mortgage fraud.” A former deputy chief of the CIA’s Russia operations went on CNN and called him a political arsonist, and the arsonist showed up early to his first day reportedly eyeing hundreds of firings. Pulte will inherit the Fulton County ballots and voter rolls that Gabbard hauled out of Atlanta back in January; he can then selectively leak whatever he needs to “prove” the fraud that justifies purging more Black voters off the rolls. When this happens, it fits the larger play: Trump is holding FISA renewal hostage to his SAVE Act voter suppression bill and openly warning he’ll “be the last” Republican president if it doesn’t pass. After 45 years of Reaganomics hollowing out the middle class, the GOP can’t win on policy anymore. So they’ve stopped trying to change minds and started trying to change or openly suppress the electorate and Pulte proved at Housing that he is just the hit-man to do it.

— The head of the Justice Department cannot bring himself to tell a federal judge the truth in writing. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — formerly Trump’s personal criminal-defense lawyer — is refusing to commit on paper to Judge Leonie Brinkema that Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization” slush fund is actually dead, preferring the slippery passive-voice dodge that it’s merely “not moving forward.” Analyst Scott MacFarlane summed up the lawyering on MS NOW as “all kinds of sus”: language built to leave wiggle room. Now even Republican Sen. Thom Tillis (who, unlike our Acting AG, manages to keep his story straight from one sentence to the next) says he’s got a slush-fund problem with Blanche heading into the confirmation fight. A man who treats candor as strictly optional is exactly the man you’d want running the Department of Justice if your actual goal was to weaponize it and use it against American democracy.

— Trump’s closest friend in Europe just learned the lesson everyone who has ever worked with him eventually learns: flatter the man-child or get smeared. Giorgia Meloni — the right-wing Italian prime minister who was the only European leader to show up for Trump’s 2025 inauguration — posted a video calling his claim that she “begged” him for a photo at the G7 is completely fabricated. Trump had told Italian TV she “wanted a picture with me so badly” and that he only obliged because he “felt sorry for her.” Meloni’s reply was withering: “Neither I nor Italy ever beg.” Her foreign minister promptly canceled a U.S. trip in protest. Watch the pattern, because it never changes: governing bores him, diplomacy bores him, the entire job is just a mirror that has to tell him he’s right 100% of the time, and anyone who won’t hold it steady, especially a woman, gets recast as weak, desperate, and begging. This is statecraft reduced to ego maintenance, and our closest allies are finally saying so out loud.

— Washington, D.C. just elected a democratic socialist mayor, and the pearl-clutchers are missing the point so completely it’s almost impressive. Janeese Lewis George swept the Democratic primary, making the nation’s capital the latest big city — after New York and Seattle — to pick a democratic socialist, which sent Fox “News” into its usual fainting spell about the Soviet Union. Spare us. Nobody is proposing gulags or breadlines. The “socialist” countries the right loves to wave around — the Scandinavians — aren’t socialist at all; they’re capitalist democratic republics that simply decided their citizens deserve healthcare, childcare, and a wage one can live on. That’s the entire pitch. Echoing New York’s Zohran Mamdani, Lewis George ran on one relentless message: everything costs too much and Trump is making it worse. She ran up the score in working-class Black neighborhoods and lost only the city’s wealthiest enclave. This is what 45 years of Reaganomics actually built: a middle class so gutted that “restore the safety net, the minimum wage, and the right to join a union” now gets branded as dangerous radical socialism. It isn’t radical or socialism. It’s just 1965, when the minimum wage was (in today’s dollars) around $15 and a third of us were union members, and voters remember it was a better time for most all but the morbidly rich (who “suffered” under a 90% top income tax rate).

— A scientist looked at Trump’s new research rule and said the quiet part right out loud: “the purpose of the rule is fascism.” That blunt verdict — from the Guardian’s reporting on researchers mobilizing against the administration’s planned rule — is simply the logical destination of the deceptively named “Restoring Gold Standard Science“ project, which hands political appointees the power to decide which findings get to count as real. Peel off the golden branding and what’s underneath is a machine for making inconvenient facts vanish on climate, vaccines, or anything else that might dent a donor’s bottom line. The American right has been at war with science since the Scopes monkey trial, but this proposed rule — that replaces scientists with political appointees to approve scientific research — is something new: not arguing with the results, but smashing the very tools that produce them. The bill comes due in cures that never get discovered, in America’s scientific edge handed to our competitors, in the talent already packing for Toronto. Destroy the instruments that measure reality, and you get to tell people that reality is whatever Dear Leader says it is. That’s not an accident of the policy. That is the policy.

— Good News Alert! Being out of shape may be deadlier than smoking and, believe it or not, that’s the cheerful part. A new Cambridge perspective paper in Frontiers in Nutrition argues that very low cardiovascular fitness is tied to roughly a 400% higher risk of death, dwarfing the roughly 50% bump you get from smoking. And here’s the genuinely good news buried in all that mortality data: fixing this is wildly easier than quitting cigarettes. A long, brisk walk every day and a few pushups in the morning, and you’re already doing more for your odds of living long and healthy than any nicotine patch ever managed. No superhuman willpower required. Just lace up your shoes and go.

Comments on Friday’s Hartmann Report:

“Shut the F*ck Up,” Joe Rogan

There are “insiders” and there are “outsiders” and that is all that pathetic people like Rogan care about. He just HAS to be invited to the party---that’s his price for covering-up the crimes of the TRump Syndicate.

~ alis

Thom, the thing that bugs me the most about this whole spectacle is that, we the taxpayers, paid for this? Why? didn’t they pay for the whole damn thing themselves? It infuriates me that Trump thinks that he can foot the bill for anything he wants to without any oversight!! It is not his money, it is not his house, but somehow, somewhere, we have completely turned a blind eye to anything he wants to do

~ Paul

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