Hartmann Report

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.

He's learning what every would-be king learns: fear works only until people remember who they are… Trump and his people, with all their strut and swagger, want you to think he's the most powerful man in America and will continue in power indefinitely. Don't believe it. The reason he's rushing so hard and fast to spread his secret, masked police across American cities while mobilizing the military against civilians is precisely because he's so extraordinarily weak.

The movements of the 1960s built lasting institutions. Today's movements need more than moral clarity: they need leadership and coordination... The No Kings Day protests last weekend were breathtaking. Seven million or more Americans filled streets across the country explicitly condemning the way Trump has been running our country. They carried handmade signs, sang freedom songs, and for one afternoon reminded the nation that resistance still burns hot. But here's the hard truth: that energy, that passion, that righteousness means very little if it doesn't translate into structure and leadership. Movements that fail to coalesce around leaders and build institutions typically die in the glare of their own moral light or fail to produce results.

Friedrich August von Hayek studied at the knee of Mises during what Mises called his “private seminars” in the offices of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce on that city’s Ringstrasse (Grand Boulevard) between 1920 and 1934. Out of this developed both a lifelong friendship, the formation of the Mont Pelerin Society, and the new economic religion of neoliberalism. By 1940, the year Mises emigrated to the US, Hayek had also fled the Nazis, although he’d moved to London (he became a British citizen in 1938) which was then being regularly bombed by Hitler’s Luftwaffe. As the bombing campaign, the Blitz, became more aggressive that year Hayek began to seriously worry about the possibility a bomb could kill his children. This was a turning point for his family and he thought that America, daily becoming more egalitarian and leading the world out of the Republican Great Depression with FDR’s New Deal, would offer them the best opportunities.