Hartmann Report

As Trump demands sweeping new resources in the name of war, the scale of funding raises a chilling question: is this about national security or consolidating power? On Easter Sunday, Donald Trump posted to his failing, Nazi-infested social media site a rant that has shocked the world, threatening multiple war crimes with a level of obscenity that no Republican would have tolerated from President Obama or any other Democrat: "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"

"If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide." —Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum Address, 1838 Trump isn’t the first Republican president to have seized the White House by fraud. In fact, the historical pattern is far more disturbing: every Republican president since Eisenhower has either directly stolen the presidency or inherited their position from someone who did.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Sure is starting to smell like Vietnam… — Who was General George, who Whiskey Pete just fired? — Is the Supreme Court about to become even more bizarre and corrupt than it already is? — Gas prices got you down? — JD Vance (or whatever his name is this week) is now in charge of Project Screw Blue States. — Is Vance now the Vice President of Hungary? — The West is drying up and Republicans who take money from the fossil fuel industry are trying to ignore it. — Trump has released his budget and wants $500 billion more for the military to pay for his war against Iran.

As war sends oil prices soaring, fossil fuel giants rake in billions while Americans get stuck with the bill, even though EVs already offer a cheaper way out… Trump’s and Netanyahu’s insane war against Iran has caused gasoline prices to skyrocket here in the United States. The Financial Times yesterday published an article titled, “‘Pump anxiety’ from soaring fuel prices prompts surge in EV interest.” Even The New York Times has noticed, with Michael Grunwald writing in an article titled Now is the Perfect Time to Buy an Electric Vehicle.

His escalating contradictions are forcing a question about congressional and cabinet powers designed for moments like this… Well, I guess it’s reassuring to learn that gasoline prices have nothing to do with Trump’s war. And that we’re winning against Iran. In fact it’s won! Better than anybody could ever have imagined!!! Although we’ll be there another few weeks... And maybe we’ll bomb them back to the Stone Age… And he needs another $200 billion… And let’s activate the draft (except for Baron, who has congenital bone-spurs.…) One day, we’ll look back on last night’s speech as the moment it became impossible to ignore. Not just the policy or the war, but the man and his growing mental and emotional disabilities.

How Republicans turned misinformation into a system for seizing power and reshaping reality, and the damage those lies are doing to our democracy… I still remember the day, back in 2009 when we were on speaking terms, when Alex Jones showed up naked for a live simulcast of our two shows. It’s one of those pictures that my staff and I have worked for years to get out of our heads. It was for a stunt, of course; if nothing else, Alex has always known how to be a showman. It was April 15, Tax Day, and he wanted to emphasize how the IRS had “taken the shirt off my back.” Point made. And a largely harmless one (other than that $38 trillion national debt that’s 100% derived from tax cuts for billionaires and corporations we were lied into by Reagan, Bush, and Trump). But when he filmed a phony, staged “ISIS beheading” that he claimed happened on the southern US border, it was far from harmless, according to a new book by one of his former employees, Josh Owens, titled The Madness of Believing: A Memoir from Inside Alex Jones’ Conspiracy Machine.

The line between church and state is collapsing at the hands of hypocrites and fanatics who use religion to seize power —and history shows the cost... Our alcoholic, serial adulterer, wife-abusing “Secretary of War” just led a prayer service in the Pentagon calling on the brutal, demonic force he calls his god to help our US military strike down Iranians with “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” Presumably this includes the hundreds of Iranian schoolchildren he’s already criminally murdered. It was so morally and spiritually obscene that Pope Leo XIV felt it important to repudiate, saying: “This is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, ​whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.’”

In dark times, hope isn’t a passive emotion: it’s a discipline, a practice we must cultivate daily through action and solidarity, a discipline that keeps us moving forward no matter how hard things get. It keeps us grounded and focused on a positive future. Mariame Kaba, the prison abolitionist and organizer, puts it perfectly: “Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline. . . . we have to practice it every single day.”

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Is the Supreme Court preparing to take a knife to mail-in voting just in time for the midterms? — Trump’s war against Iran to help Putin, MBS, Kushner, and Netanyahu rolls on, and the risks to America and world peace get worse every day. — Trump’s war on Iran is the best gift he’s given Putin in years, even better than when he hung Putin’s picture in the White House with the former American presidents. — Donald Trump, according to his alcoholic, woman-abusing “Secretary of War,” doesn’t “want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events.” — In his best imitation of one of Stalin’s or Putin’s toadies, FCC Chairman and Trump brown-noser Brendan Carr bragged about his role, and rightwing billionaire’s help, in censoring major American media. — Our grifter billionaire president offered “anything you want” to morbidly rich fossil fuel executives if they’d just give him piles of campaign money and backdoor dark funds for his own use, and is now following through by blocking the Endangered Species Act.

The shift to fascism isn’t loud or obvious; it’s gradual, justified, and dangerously easy to accept... The Minnesota Star Tribune reports that ICE thugs have been following anti-ICE state legislators around in their cars and standing in front of their homes taking pictures, clear intimidative threats.