Hartmann Report

From John Adams to Kent State to the Insurrection Act, history warns us what happens when power fears the people more than the enemy… Will the 2028 election even happen, or are we watching the slow-motion rehearsal for its cancellation? Every signal from Trump's orbit points to a deliberate strategy to turn fear, chaos, and manufactured crisis into political weapons. History tells us how these stories end. From John Adams jailing his critics under the Alien and Sedition Acts to Nixon's troops gunning down students at Kent State to crackdowns by Orbán and Putin, authoritarians have always wrapped repression in the language of patriotism. Today, with talk of "domestic enemies," "rapid reaction forces," and "nuclear demonstrations," the groundwork is being laid again, not to protect America, but to control it. Why is it that dictators and wannabe dictators — both historic and now Trump — always attack their own countries' people while saber-rattling about war against other countries?

Algorithms are not tuned for what is best for society. They don't follow the rules that hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution have built into our cultures, religions & political systems… Some data points for your consideration: — On Saturday in Chicago's affluent Old Irving Park neighborhood, Trump's secret, masked police violently pulled a 67 year old U.S. citizen — a member of a local running club returning to his home from a run — out of his car and threw him to the street, where they assaulted him with such force that they broke six ribs and left him with internal bleeding. — Donald Trump is openly taking bribes, publicly ordering political prosecutions, murdering people in naked violation of both US and international law, all while claiming the Supreme Court gave him absolute immunity from prosecution for any crime. — An MIT study finds that lies presented as news travel six times faster across social media than truths. — While over 75% of Americans trusted the news fifty years ago, today that number is a mere 28%, with only 8% of Republicans believing what they see or read in mainstream outlets. These are all the same story, and they all largely derive from a single source, a mind poison that was introduced into the American (and world) mindstream in a big way about two decades ago.

The strongman act is cracking, but as the cops, the crowds, and even the cult start to walk away, is this finally the moment his empire begins to fall? “No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.” —Edward R. Murrow Kids and cops got tear-gassed in Chicago, a judge is holding ICE/CPB officials to account, Americans are horrified by the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, and even UFC fighters are starting to turn away from Trump. What’s going on? Is he really as strong as he appears to think?

Dark money, captured courts, and media empires are quietly doing what dictators once could only dream of... Trump and the billionaires and foreign fascists he's aligned with are both stronger than most think and weaker. Today I'll deal with the stronger part; tomorrow, the weaker. We're living in a moment when the line between democracy and dictatorship is far less clear than we like to believe. As a recent analysis by Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die, puts it, we've already moved onto the midpoint along the spectrum between democracy and dictatorship where "competitive authoritarianism" lives. That's the world of regimes that hold elections but use their control over the nation's systems to skew the rules, restrict opposition, weaponize institutions, vandalize the truth, and destroy/ignore democratic norms. We're more than halfway down that road in just ten short months.

Where honesty is punished, power is bought, and every rule has a price, Trump's turned the dream of opportunity into an industry of deception… When corruption becomes endemic, democracy dies from the inside out. Trump's family's grift is teaching America's elites that power can be bought, just as it is in Putin's Russia and Orbán's Hungary, and it's already distorting our economy.

The American among the Three Musketeers of neoliberalism was Milton Friedman, who taught for years at the Chicago School of Economics and has become a figure of cult worship on the economic and political right in America. He was a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater’s 1960 campaign for president, and a formal advisor to, among others, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Donald Rumsfeld (who he pushed Reagan to take on as his VP instead of GHW Bush in 1980). Friedman was the functional theologian among the three; he absolutely believed that there was a near-mystical power to unregulated markets and that virtually any sort of governmental intervention in or regulation of the marketplace produced economic distortions that prevented capitalism from working its magic.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Big Brother's Doorbell: The FBI Comes for Thought crimes. — The Great Maple Divorce: Trump's Trade Tantrum Goes North. — Inflation Nation: Trump's MAGA-nomics Hits Main Street. — Trump's Ministry of Injustice just issued a lengthy Orwellian manifesto. Surprised? — States are pushing back against Trump's new masked police state. — War Is Peace (Again): Trump's Caribbean Crisis Theater. — Geeky Science! How to find happiness and stay sane in a World of Doublethink & MAGA-stan.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, presumably on the orders of Donald Trump, has unconstitutionally shut down the House of Representatives for over a month. The result is that Trump can now do pretty much whatever he wants without restraint. He’s effectively King of America, at least for the moment. No limits, no constraints, no oversight. It’s the coup that finally worked. If there is any one principle the Founders of this nation agreed on, it was that the first and primary function of Congress is to prevent a president from seizing king-like powers. It’s repeated over and over throughout their writings and carved into the Constitution itself.

Amy Wallace says the FBI and DOJ have the list. Twenty abusers. Zero accountability. How long will we tolerate this cover-up? When Emmett Till's mother lifted the veil from her son's mutilated body in 1955, she forced America to face itself. She knew that if the nation could see what had been done to her child, it could no longer pretend innocence. That open casket was a moral explosion: it turned private grief into a public reckoning. The same courage is needed now. Amy Wallace, the co-writer of Virginia Giuffre's memoir Nobody's Girl, has said she knows the names of the men who raped and trafficked children with Jeffrey Epstein. She says the FBI — and, presumably, its director Kash Patel — knows the names of those men.

Trump is now trying to extract a quarter-billion dollars from the American treasury — our tax dollars — to compensate himself for the troubles he faced when Merrick Garland belatedly tried to hold him to account for criminally stealing classified documents, trying to overthrow the 2020 election, and his explicit, public outreach to Putin to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails and make them public that helped him win the 2016 election. The decision about whether to give him the $230 million will largely fall to Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice she heads, assuming no Republicans in Congress dare challenge him. The obscenity of his former private attorney — who looked the other way for eight years in Florida when she was Attorney General there and Trump and Epstein were up to their dirty deeds — ratifying this demand is astonishing.