Home | The Hartmann Report

Posted at Hartmann Report on Aug. 2, 2026

Chapter 9: The Numbers Don’t Lie: Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told

Measuring the Death of the Dream The destruction of the American Dream isn’t just an abstraction; it’s measurable. (See Chart 9.1) In 1980 when Reagan was elected president, at the peak of the American Dream, fully two-thirds of American families were in the middle class. A single income could support a family, buy a house, take an annual vacation, send the kids to college, and even retire with dignity. Today, only 43 to 47 percent of Americans qualify as middle class (depending on whose numbers and what criteria you use). And it takes two full-time incomes today to achieve what a single union job gave a family in 1980.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Aug. 1, 2026

Saturday Report 8/1/26 — Geeky Science: Blue Zone Centenarians Share This Overlooked Trait...

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — Welcome to Trump’s latest billion-dollar scam, this time in the Middle East — A third of Democrats now call themselves democratic socialists, according to a new CNN poll. — Trump wants his $100 million from the IRS and free grifting for his friends and family members for life and, by G-d, he’s going to get it. — Is Trump taking Iran’s side because Putin told him to? Or to prepare us for our losing this war to Iran by saying it’s not such a big deal? — “Elect a clown, expect a circus” alert! — Trump is asking cops to help him continue grifting with crypto. — FCC Chief evokes howls of laughter across the country. — To live long, adopt these habits.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jul. 31, 2026

The Cover-Up Has Begun: First They Put Fauci on Trial, Then They Put History on Trial

The goal isn't to prove Anthony Fauci lied. It's to convince Americans that the racist decisions that cost hundreds of thousands of lives were somebody else's fault… Republicans went totally nutso on Dr. Anthony Fauci this week, trying to catch him with a perjury trap before the US Senate. They called him names, citied lies and pseudoscience, and attacked his integrity. He withstood asinine statements like Josh Hawley, in an extraordinary bit of projection, saying: “You became a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar! You’ve done more to harm science than anybody in my lifetime!” Throughout it all, he retained his composure and refused to take any of their bait. But the larger story here is what these white supremacist MAGA Republicans were trying to cover up with this deflection strategy.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jul. 30, 2026

That Sign in Front of the Smithsonian is More Dangerous Than You Think

Trump's Smithsonian purge follows the same roadmap used by Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and every strongman who came before… Share “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” — George Orwell, 1984 It seemed so trivial. Trump ordered the Interior Department to post signs along the walkways leading up to several of the museums that make up the Smithsonian system in Washington, DC warning people that they’d find “inaccurate information” therein. It was based on a bizarre “report” written by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council and released without fanfare on the 4th of July.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jul. 29, 2026

The uniforms have changed. The technology has evolved. But the mission remains the same: protect power through fear and intimidation… “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation until at last there had sprung into existence a great

The uniforms have changed. The technology has evolved. But the mission remains the same: protect power through fear and intimidation… “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.” —President Woodrow Wilson, who screened the Klan recruiting film “Birth of a Nation” in the White House Trump and the GOP are desperate to hang onto the oligarchy they’ve created, particularly in the face of the upcoming elections. Increasingly — as oligarchies usually do when they decide it’s acceptable to use violence to hang onto power — they’re turning to hate, fear, and terror as their tools. To this end, Trump and his lickspittles are reinventing the old Confederate slave patrols in modern form. Most recently, ICE has begun violently force-feeding and catheterizing people in ICE concentration camps when they protest conditions or the absence of due process by going on hunger strikes.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jul. 28, 2026

If This Is Communism, Then Teddy Roosevelt Was a Communist

The policies under attack today once defined mainstream American leadership from Teddy Roosevelt to FDR and LBJ. Trump’s most recent desperate attempt to change the subject from his involvement with Epstein, Iran, Netanyahu, and the billions he and his grifter sons are making with their skeezy schemes is to call progressive Democrats “communists.” He’s even gone so far as to suggest that some should be stripped of their citizenship and deported or thrown into one of his ICE concentration camps. Meanwhile, open conflict is erupting within the Democratic Party around populist issues. So-called “moderate” Democrats are defending their dependence on corporate and AIPAC money to win elections and arguing for maintaining the status quo that Citizens United has established by legalizing political bribery.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jul. 27, 2026

How Trump Is Driving America Toward a Civil War by Punishing His Political Enemies

From FEMA relief to clean energy funding, government resources are becoming political weapons, creating the kind of regional resentment that has shattered nations before… Trump is now officially allocating federal resources based on whether people voted for or against him: any other president in recent history would’ve been impeached for this. One of the most visible differences between authoritarian and democratic governance is how the government treats parts of the country based on their politics.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jul. 26, 2026

Chapter 8: The Crime Pays Off: Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told

Davis’s fraudulent headnote of 1886 was just the beginning. Over the next 140 years, corporate lawyers would build an empire of constitutional rights on that foundation of fraud. The progression reached its logical conclusion in 2010, when five corrupt Republican Supreme Court justices—several openly on the take from rightwing billionaires and massive corporations—handed morbidly rich oligarchs the power to buy American democracy outright. Citizens United wasn’t just about campaign finance rules or the legalization of bribing Supreme Court justices (although it encompassed both): it was the culmination of a 140-year theft. The oligarchs finally had functionally unlimited constitutional weapons to complete what the southern plantation fascists built prior to the Civil War and the railroad barons started in 1886: the destruction of the American Dream and its replacement with an all-American form of oligarchic feudalism.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jul. 25, 2026

Saturday Report 7/25/26 — Is the Social Security Reckoning Finally Here?

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — Is this going to be Trump‘s and the GOP’s strategy this fall? — Bernie Sanders explains the appeal of democratic socialism to a Fox “News” reporter. — Affordability is tanking under Trump. — Republicans want legislation to force people to work in deadly heat if that’s what their employers demand. — “Explosive Trumparreah” spreads across the US, along with measles, while Bob Kennedy says, “Everything’s under control.” — The Social Security reckoning will become a BFD as the trust fund runs low. — Forever chemicals may be causing ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, and colorectal cancer in young people.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jul. 24, 2026

The Fourth Assault on American Democracy Has Already Begun. This Fall Decides Whether It Ends.

Every eighty years America's oligarchs have tried to bury democracy. Three times they failed. This time they've dismantled the election's guardrails before the votes are even cast… “As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there’s a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.” —William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice 1939-1975 Trump, his billionaire buddies, and his Republican lickspittles appear to be setting up a possible massive fraud with regard to this fall’s election. It could signal the end of American democracy. We democracy-loving Americans have fought oligarchy 3 times on these shores, roughly every 80 years. Each time, we defeated the morbidly rich and established or re-established popular democracy and a government that put working class people ahead of the oligarchs. This time, the oligarchs are behaving like they believe they can win, and the measures our billionaire oligarch-in-chief are taking right now should put every American on alert, if not provoke immediate impeachment.