Hartmann Report

The chilling similarities to past tyrants—and why America can't look away anymore… "All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force." — George Orwell It's axiomatic that dictators are corrupt. But understanding the inevitable relationship between corruption and dictatorship — and how it flows in both directions — is essential to understanding the direction the Trump Crime Family is taking America. First, it's important to know that there's no such thing as a dictator who's not corrupt. Every dictator in world history, with the possible exception of Cincinnatus, has been massively corrupt. To defy public opinion while skimming wealth out of the state's coffers and public commons, national leaders must use the typical tools of dictatorship to intimidate good government advocates into silence: violence, threats, capture of police agencies and courts, intimidation of the press, cowing politicians, and prisons.

In 1935, Congress passed, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed, the National Labor Relations Act, often referred to as the Wagner Act, legalizing labor unions in the United States for the first time. It was referred to as “the most radical piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress.”[lvii] New York’s Democratic Senator Robert Wagner was the new law’s main author, and his legislative aide, Simon H. Rifkind, told Theodore J. St. Antoine in 1986 that there were several reasons for the law. First, there was considerable labor unrest across the nation; it had been particularly bloody over the preceding fifty or so years since the labor movement first emerged in a big way in the 1880s. Employers would hire private security companies or pay off local politicians and police to harass, beat, and often even kill workers to prevent unionization.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Trump creates another pump-and-dump opportunity for the billionaires in his cabinet and people close to him (including his kids). — Well, so much for the lie that tax cuts for billionaires — including this $4 trillion one Republicans tried to pass in the dead of night — don’t do a damn thing for the economy other than running up the debt that we and our kids will have to pay off. — “The orgy of corruption…” — Trump amplifies his authoritarian attacks on media he doesn’t approve of, spitting on the graves of the Founders and Framers who wrote the First Amendment’s protection of the press and free speech into the Constitution. — Taking America back to 1950. — Crazy Alert! AI program threatens to blackmail a user about a secret affair when he said he’s going to try to get the program taken offline. — Want to live longer? Take your Vitamin D! — Final note

The billionaires robbed us blind for 44 years — and we thanked them for it... Will it still work for the GOP? We're about to embark on what will be one of the most interesting political, sociological, and media experiments of our lifetimes. It'll answer the question: "Can Republicans still get away with lying to their own voters?" Forty-four years ago, the Reagan administration — after winning the White House because they cut a criminal, treasonous deal with Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to hold the American hostages until after the 1980 election — decided to take a second massive chance at deceiving the American voters.

Dictators don’t go quietly. They orchestrate fear, silence dissent, and distract with spectacle. Trump’s moves in 2025 suggest he’s not planning to lose power — no matter the cost. Trump is starting to lose big, from courtrooms, to the press increasingly calling him out, to millions of Americans showing up in the streets every few weeks. As anybody who’s ever lived or worked in an autocratic state (I have) can tell you, a strongman or wannabe dictator is most dangerous when he’s on his back foot. Trump’s tariffs have put America on the verge of a serious inflationary recession, the Supreme Court and multiple lower courts have repeatedly ruled against him, his public approval polling is in the crapper, and even conservative publications and former Republican politicians (free from the strictures of an upcoming primary) are openly calling him out (including in Murdoch publications). The first lesson they teach in dictator school is that “there must be an enemy within.” Trump embraced this from the first day of his campaign for president when he attacked “Mexican rapists and murderers” he said were “invading” America.

Why the destruction of public institutions, the middle class, and government itself may not be a mistake — but the mission… Neal deGrasse Tyson makes a very relevant point this week: "If a foreign adversary snuck into our Federal budget and cut science research and education the way we're cutting it ourselves — strategically undermining America's long-term health, wealth, and security — we would likely consider it an act of war." Trump's administration just said you can't get the Covid vaccine unless you're over 65 or sick, setting up America for more death and disease.

In a legal sleight of hand, Republicans want to strip judges of their power to enforce rulings — because holding Trump in contempt might actually work… With almost no mention by our mainstream corporate press, Republicans in the House of Representatives are proposing to end all checks on the power of Donald Trump, effectively ending the American experiment of a democratic republic. It's shockingly anti-American. Since the only branch of government standing against Trump right now is the courts, Republicans believe they've found a way to end that resistance. Here's the backstory. The grand invention of our Founders, cribbed from the Iroquois Confederacy and following an outline Montesquieu suggested (based on his reading about Native Americans), was a three-branches-of-government system where each branch would act as a check on the power of the other two.

When greed replaces justice, and cruelty becomes policy, democracy dies not in darkness—but in plain sight, cheered on by those in power… At its deepest level, government is a moral force grounded in a moral view of the world. It may not comport with morality as most of us view it; the Saudi oppression of women, the Russian violence against the queer community, and the Iranian brutal suppression of that nation's democracy movement are all examples of things most Americans consider immoral. But each is grounded in a particular moral worldview that those governments and their leaders have adopted.

In 1935, Congress passed, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed, the National Labor Relations Act, often referred to as the Wagner Act, legalizing labor unions in the United States for the first time. It was referred to as “the most radical piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress.”[lvii] New York’s Democratic Senator Robert Wagner was the new law’s main author, and his legislative aide, Simon H. Rifkind, told Theodore J. St. Antoine in 1986 that there were several reasons for the law. First, there was considerable labor unrest across the nation; it had been particularly bloody over the preceding fifty or so years since the labor movement first emerged in a big way in the 1880s. Employers would hire private security companies or pay off local politicians and police to harass, beat, and often even kill workers to prevent unionization. One of the most infamous examples was the Ludlow Massacre in 1914.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — "Huge scandal": Internal documents catch Trump administration in massive Social Security lie. — How Trump's "Emergency" Powers Could Become Permanent. — Trump orders the FBI to lay off white collar crime in favor of hunting immigrants...Plus, apparently they're now harassing American journalists. — Georgia is forcing a brain-dead woman to complete her pregnancy and making her family foot the bill. — Trump ordered 15K workers to snitch & not a one did. — Geeky Science: Does 7000 steps keeps cancer away? — Crazy Alert! Why is the DHS looking at producing a reality show where immigrants compete for citizenship? — Here's your moment of Zen which provoked an angry rant from Donald Trump yesterday (Bruce Springsteen)