Posted at Hartmann Report on Jun. 17, 2026

For Decades, Americans Learned the Treasonous Truth After the Votes Were Counted. This Time Is Different.

For half a century, the evidence surfaced after the winners took office. This election may be the first where the public sees it beforehand… Republicans have gotten away with it four times now, in a big way. Each time it was because Democrats didn’t realize — until it was too late — the crimes the GOP was willing to perpetrate just to seize and hold power. In August of 1968, President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey negotiated an end to the Vietnam War with both the North and South Vietnamese. Humphrey was running against Richard Nixon for president in that year’s election and planned to announce the deal in September or early October. He was running ahead and would’ve easily won the presidency with the peace deal.
Posted at Hartmann Report on Jun. 16, 2026

Trump Targets Newsom's Inner Circle as Critics Warn Democracy's Guardrails Are Collapsing

As federal investigators knock on doors tied to California's governor, critics warn America is sliding toward the politics of Nixon, Richelieu, and Stalin… 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.
Posted at Hartmann Report on Jun. 15, 2026

What Desperate Regimes Do Before They Fall

History leaves behind a pattern: attack the courts, discredit elections, intimidate opponents, rewrite the rules, and cling to power at any cost. The question is whether America recognizes it in time… 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.
Posted at Hartmann Report on Jun. 14, 2026

Chapter 2: The Courtroom Showdown: Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told

The Old Senate Chamber in Washington was warm for January, the heavy air thick with coal smoke and anticipation. On January 26, 1886, two men prepared to argue before the most powerful court in America. One represented the largest corporation on the continent. The other represented a small California county fighting to collect its taxes. The outcome would shape American democracy for the next century and a half.
Posted at Hartmann Report on Jun. 13, 2026

Saturday Report 6/13/26 — We minted our first trillionaire the same week the White House floated loaning you money to survive a hospital stay

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Forty-five years of Reaganomics finally rolled off the assembly line this week with its crowning achievement: the world’s first trillionaire. — The Trump administration has a bold new idea for Americans who can’t afford their medical bills: borrow the money from the very insurance company that’s already refusing to pay them. — It turns out the “Advantage” in Medicare Advantage belongs entirely to the insurance companies. — A federal judge just slammed the brakes — again — on Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund for his violent, murderous cult members. — Nothing says “law and order” quite like masked federal agents tackling a man to the pavement at his kid’s preschool graduation while toddlers scream. — Citizens United Alert! — Strange Alert!
Posted at Hartmann Report on Jun. 12, 2026

Rule #1 in the Dictator's Playbook: Crush One to Warn a Thousand

You don't need to win the case when the raid, the indictment, the legal bills, and the public humiliation have already delivered the message to everyone else… 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.
Posted at Hartmann Report on Jun. 10, 2026

How Dark Money Captured America — And How Hawaii Just Declared War on It

From Citizens United to Trump-era oligarchy, the billionaire takeover of American politics seemed unstoppable. Then Hawaii found a way to strike at the heart of the system… 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.
Posted at Hartmann Report on Jun. 9, 2026

While America Burns, Trump Builds Himself a Colosseum

The UFC spectacle is more than a cage fight: it's a monument to corruption, self-enrichment, and the imperial Roman politics of bread and circus… 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.
Posted at Hartmann Report on Jun. 8, 2026

Are Today’s “Evil, Heartless Bastards” Rebuilding the Confederacy?

How white nationalism, anti-immigrant fear mongering, and open racism are reviving the politics that once tore America apart… 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.”