Hartmann Report

The masks are off, the excuses are gone, and the regime is testing how much terror the public will tolerate. What happens when the public finally refuses to be afraid? "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…" —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities They're doubling down because they know their time is limited. Their attempt to turn America into a Russia-like police state is suddenly failing, and a reckoning is coming. Trump and his lickspittles look at the horizon and see mushroom clouds rising against a red sky, suggesting their season of power and brutality is about to turn on them. As Mike Brock notes over at his excellent Notes from the Circus newsletter: "The United States is experiencing the greatest political emergency since the Civil War. Right now." Sunday, masked ICE goons were going house-to-house in Minneapolis kicking in doors without search or no-knock warrants in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, federal law, state law, and local law. When a woman — a US citizen — whose home was being invaded and was trying to protect her children from the assault asked the secret police who'd just destroyed her front door to show her a warrant, they shot her with a Taser and zapped her with tens of thousands of volts of electricity.

The psychology of domination, cruelty, and control that defines both men is now shaping the fate of entire nations… This past week, Donald Trump demanded that the Pentagon produce an invasion plan for Greenland, an action that would have world-changing consequences to the benefit of Putin and the detriment of Europe, democracy, and America. He followed that by suggesting that Marco Rubio should be the next president of Cuba, the same way Putin had promised his generals and oligarchs that they could have Ukraine. Step-by-step it appears that Donald Trump is trying to turn America into Russia. We saw the latest and most gruesome example this weekend as Kristi Noem — who shot her puppy in the face and then bragged about it — went on national TV to defend Jonathan Ross shooting Nicole Good in the face for being a "fuckin' bitch." What's becoming increasingly clear to Americans — which is why so many millions were in the streets this weekend — is that Trump is trying to use ICE as his own private version of the Schutzstaffel (SS), a secret, unchallengeable police force loyal to him rather than the law, whose job is to terrify and pacify the population so they won't object to having their pockets picked and their freedom taken.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Once a government convinces its people that what they saw with their own eyes never really happened, what’s left of democracy in that republic is already on life support… The Trump regime rolled out a new, lie-filled website yesterday purporting to tell the history of the January 6th insurrection attempt. It opens with bullshit...

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.

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.

"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.