Hartmann Report

Louise and I watched on MSNBC as President Trump, on April 9, 2025, signed executive orders targeting two former officials who dared to defy him during his first term. “I think he’s guilty of treason, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said as he signed an order stripping security clearances from Miles Taylor, the former Department of Homeland Security official who had written critically about the Trump administration under the pen name “Anonymous” in 2019. Next came an order targeting Christopher Krebs, whom Trump had fired by tweet in November 2020 when, as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA, now gutted by Musk), Krebs had declared the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history” and refuted Trump’s claims of fraud. In an act of pure malice, in April 2025 Trump stripped Krebs of his access to the Global Entry system that lets people speed through Customs when entering the United States.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Corrupt adjudicated rapist brags that he's going to rig the November elections to prevent millions of women and minorities from voting, even if Congress won't help him. — Convicted felon brags that he's willing to destroy our grandchildren's lives in exchange for a few hundred million dollars from the fossil fuel industry. — Cruel psychopaths in the Trump regime have figured out a new way to waste taxpayer dollars to make the lives of migrants miserable. — One of Trump's top allies and private-White-House-dinner guests is now calling for all American women to be imprisoned in the ICE Concentration Camps and only let out when he and his friends personally approve of them. — The Trump Housing Crisis is now officially here. — A Congressman who examined the Trump/Epstein Files (why don't we all start calling them that? After all, Trump's name is in them more than a million times according to Congressman Swalwell) says there's a report of allegations that Trump and Epstein raped and murdered a young girl. — Once again, we have evidence that DHS/ICE has lied about an American citizen they shot five times trying to kill her. — Crazy Alert! Bob Kennedy boasts that he's "not scared" of germs because he "Used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats."

Can we reject the politics of concentration camps, election denial, and oligarchy by showing up in numbers too large to ignore? Forget about "left or right," there's only one thing on the ballot this fall: democracy (Democrats), or oligarchy that leads to tyranny (Republicans). Trump, the GOP, the 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and the ~150 billionaires who made him president again are all on the side of oligarchy. And we're already most of the way there, thanks to five corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court.

From France to Germany to Canada, governments are recalibrating their security, technology, and defense policies around one unspoken reality: America can't be counted on… Donald Trump is doing something to America that no foreign adversary has ever managed, something Putin's been dreaming about for decades: he's convincing our oldest and closest allies — countries we fought wars to defend and liberate, and with whom we share a democratic system of government — that the United States can't be trusted. For example, France's government just announced it's ripping U.S. videoconferencing platforms — Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and others — out of its government offices nationwide and replacing them with a new French-created system called "Visio." That's roughly 2.5 million French public employees who'll no longer be using American digital products because the French have concluded that U.S. tech — and the Silicon Valley billionaires' pathetic fealty to Trump, bringing him bribes and gifts and groveling in front of him — is a national security risk.

Why does a lie that has never been proven, never worked, and never been real still hold the power to undermine an entire democracy? Get ready. At yesterday's hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee, Arizona Republican Congressman Eli Crane lied through his teeth, saying of Democrats' opposition to the SAVE Act: "They let millions of illegal aliens into the country. They set up sanctuary cities so you can't enforce these federal laws that are on the books that Congress has passed. "Now they won't vote to stop these illegals from voting in our elections. If the American people don't understand what this is about, it's about one word. It always has been. That is power. "They want power and they need illegals to vote in our elections. That's why they don't care about fraud either. They need those votes as well." And it's not just a lone crackpot congressman from Arizona.

If this feels uncomfortable to read, that's good. It should. From Colombia's death squads to America's detention camps, this is how societies relearn the cost of calling some lives disposable… Donald Trump's presidency now has a human body count. "We really feel like we're being hunted, we're being hunted like animals," an undocumented farm worker in Ventura county, California, told a reporter for The Guardian. I've seen this movie before. Or at least where it leads.

The NFL proves that rules, referees, and "redistribution" are the only way any game, including the American economy, actually works… Last night's NFL Super Bowl game was great. The guys wearing blue beat the guys wearing red, and Bad Bunny and Lady Gaga made MAGA snowflakes cry. But the NFL can also teach Americans a huge lesson about economics, "socialism," and the differences between Republican "free market" nuts and FDR's re-regulation of the American economy that created the largest middle class in history and the first in the world to include more than half of a nation's citizens.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing". —Edmund Burke. "Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness." —Desmond Tutu. May 2, 2025, was a bad day for the news. Trump proudly announced his executive order kneecapping NPR and PBS, both trusted sources of independent journalism, in a brutal rhetorical attack.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — These people are monsters. — Trump's racist attack on the Obamas highlights his alleged lifelong racism. — Senator Gallego calls for a national strike when Trump tries to steal this November's election. — Non-citizen voting is a GOP scam the NY Times just busted wide open. — Let's not forget the Epstein files! — Trump killed the Voice of America, our messenger to the world, and is replacing it with US taxpayer money for racist rightwing think tanks in Europe. — Incompetence Alert! — Surprise, Surprise?! TrumpRX is a fake: read the fine print. — Crazy Alert! 'Mortifying': Fury as Trump demands Dulles and Penn Station renamed after himself.

This wasn't a joke or a mistake but a warning about how racism, silence, and abuse of power are eating away at democracy… I've been talking into microphones since I did the morning news on WITL in Lansing Michigan in the late 1960s, and I've seen a lot of ugly moments in American politics. But every so often something happens that still takes your breath away, not because it's surprising, but because it's so painfully revealing. This latest racist stunt by Donald Trump — reposting a meme on his Nazi-infested social media site in which the Obamas' faces are superimposed onto the bodies of primates in the jungle set to the 1961 song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" by The Tokens — is one of those moments. That a popular pro-Trump account on X created this video and it has lived on that platform without consequence is disgusting in and of itself. But Trump — as our president, speaking in our voice — made it infinitely worse last night by promoting it to millions around the world.