Posted at Hartmann Report on Jan. 11, 2026

Chapter 8: The Heist of Democracy: The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink

How America’s Voting Rights Were Stolen in 2024 The corporate media keeps telling us that Donald Trump won the 2024 election fair and square. They’re almost certainly wrong: Joe Biden was, in my opinion, the last fairly elected American president. Democracy lost big-time on November 5, 2024. This wasn’t because of fancy software hacks or the fever dreams of some convoluted China/Venezuela voting machine conspiracy, but through an old-fashioned, systematic campaign of voter suppression similar to the ones that characterized the fifty years or so following the collapse of Reconstruction. What we witnessed in the election of 2024—and the media still has yet to acknowledge—was Jim Crow 2.0, and it worked exactly as well as it did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Posted at Hartmann Report on Jan. 10, 2026

Saturday Report 1/10/26 — Are We Going to Wake Up to a Bulldozed White House West Wing? Whose House Is It?

The Best of the Rest of the News. — ICE is planning to go door-to-door just like in 1930’s Germany? — How can we stop Trump’s masked, anonymous, secret police thugs from killing us? — ICE may be monitoring your phone and those of your neighbors. — Mainstream news is dying but independent journalism is on the rise… — How Trump has backed himself into a terrible corner in Venezuela. — Is Mexico next? — If you want World War III to begin, just take down the UN. — Is the White House’s West Wing the next to be torn down? — Fascist Alert! Trump apologizes to oil titans for not having a posh ballroom to host them. — Most people are still fundamentally good.
Posted at Hartmann Report on Jan. 9, 2026

“Only My Own Morality”: Trump’s Chilling Confession Demands Impeachment

This is not politics: it's the rise of a strongman. And the Constitution has only one remedy… Democrats should be loudly calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump now, run on it in November, and then, when they take the House, actually do it. Because what he's is doing right now is not "norm-breaking," or "provocative rhetoric," or even the oft-quoted "Trump being Trump." It's an open assertion of unchecked power, limited — in his own words — only by his own "personal morality." Yesterday's shocking interview in The New York Times was decisive; that isn't how a president speaks in a constitutional republic. Instead, it's a classic example of how a strongman, a wannabe Mussolini or Putin, speaks as he tries to reinvent the nation so the law becomes optional when it comes to him, his flunkies, and his billionaire buddies.
Posted at Hartmann Report on Jan. 8, 2026

Renee Nicole Good Is Dead. Benjamin Franklin Warned Us This Would Happen…

The Founders didn't build this country for secret police and point-blank executions… When I read that the young mother who was executed at point-blank range by one of Trump's ICE goons yesterday was named Renee Nicole Good, it sent a chill down my spine. As the pain and outrage was washing through me, it also struck me as almost too much of a coincidence that she was there protesting state violence and Ben Franklin had been using the name "Silence Dogood" — as in "Do Good" — to warn American colonists about the very same dangers of state violence. When sixteen-year-old Franklin slipped his first Silence Dogood essay under the door of his brother's print shop in 1722, America had few police departments, no body cameras, no qualified immunity, and few militarized patrols prowling city streets. But young Franklin already understood the danger.
Posted at Hartmann Report on Jan. 6, 2026

Is Mad King Trump Losing His Sanity?

Mad kings rarely stop themselves: they're stopped when the people around them decide the country matters more than the crown… When Louise and I lived in Germany in the 1980s, we visited Neuschwanstein Castle, the fantasy palace perched on a Bavarian cliff that looks like it escaped from a fairy tale. Tour guides will tell you about its beauty and its role as an inspiration for Disney, but they'll also share a more unsettling story that today echoes Donald Trump. Neuschwanstein was built by King Ludwig II, a ruler who withdrew from reality, governed through spectacle instead of policy, ignored his ministers, and bankrupted Bavaria by indulging his own grandiosity and a never-ending stream of construction and renovation projects. (Neuschwanstein was only one of three castles he built.) Bavaria eventually dealt with Mad King Ludwig: his own government declared him mentally unfit to rule and removed him from the throne.
Posted at Hartmann Report on Jan. 5, 2026

Trump Didn’t Merely Borrow Strongman Tactics: He Imported an Entire Doctrine Built to Kill Democracies

By treating sovereign borders and international law as optional, the Trump regime embraces the worldview that fueled Hitler, fortified oligarchs, and now threatens the American Experiment… When Trump and the buffoons who surround him invaded Venezuela and captured Maduro, they broke with almost a century of American-led respect for the international rule of law and, instead, nakedly embraced the Putin Doctrine.
Posted at Hartmann Report on Jan. 4, 2026

Part III: The Global Damage: The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink

"Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always." —Mahatma Gandhi So far in this book, we’ve explored the making of a young Donald Trump, from the Queens mansion where Fred Trump taught domination as virtue, to Roy Cohn’s ruthless tutelage in shamelessness, to the golden façade he constructed that (with help from NBC and Mark Burnett) masked a lifetime of business failures. We’ve exposed the machinery that propelled him to power: a Republican Party that back during the Nixon and Reagan years first abandoned principle for tribal loyalty, the billionaire donors who funded extremism for tax cuts, and a series of billionaire-funded right-wing media empires that amplify outrage over truth on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis into tens of millions of American cars and homes.
Posted at Hartmann Report on Jan. 3, 2026

Saturday Report 1/3/26 — Trump’s invasion of Venezuela & kidnapping of President Maduro is following the Putin Doctrine...

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Well, that sure ended discussion of the Epstein files: welcome to the Putin Doctrine. — And then there's Iran: so much for the "peace president." Is Trump going full "emperor of the world" or is he just trying to help his fellow war criminal and Kushner family friend Netanyahu (with whom Trump met last week) start another Middle East war to insure the Israeli Prime Minister's political survival? — Surprised? Trump goes shopping for Italian marble as health insurance rises 114% and he freezes all childcare money to all states. — Speaking of grifters, a racist 20-something MAGA YouTube influencer showed up at a bunch of Somali-run daycare centers in Minneapolis, leading Trump to cut off all childcare funding to all 50 states. — Is "Tax the rich" coming soon…let's hope so! — How's Project 2025 going? — Billionaire Trump is destroying Social Security on behalf of his billionaire peers and the 13 billionaires in his Cabinet. — What you need to know about Jack Smith's deposition. — Geeky Science: Want to know what a longevity expert eats in a day?
Posted at Hartmann Report on Jan. 2, 2026

Is the Post Office About to Decide the 2026 Midterms?

A quiet USPS postmark change could turn "on time" ballots into "too late" ballots by the millions… It's not just a brand new year; it's a midterm election year. And the stakes this coming November are mind-boggling, so, of course, Republicans are starting to do everything they can to rig the election. Just a week ago, for example, Trump's Postal Service changed the rules about getting your mail-in ballot postmarked so it'll be counted. Instead of postmarking letters when they're received, Post Offices will now postmark them when they get "processed," which may happen days later. In the 2024 presidential election, the feds estimated that around 104,000 mail-in ballots nationwide weren't counted because they were postmarked late; with this change, the number this fall and for 2028 could be in the millions.

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