Hartmann Report

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Donald Trump just openly threatened to nuke Iran on national television. — GOP-dominated courts have decided that “voting” is now optional. — Sam Alito’s voting-rights ruling was based on data Pam Bondi’s DOJ apparently cooked. — A billionaire is reportedly negotiating with Trump over which CNN anchors he should fire. — ICE apparently just murdered a man in custody and we only know because a witness refused to be silenced — Forget corporate Democrat Rahm Emanuel: Maine’s Graham Platner is what the future of the Democratic Party actually looks like. — While the FAA was collapsing, the Transportation Secretary was filming a reality show. — Ted Cruz just admitted out loud what Republicans have been whispering about Social Security for 50 years.

While Americans were trained to fear immigrants, trans kids, and each other, the billionaire class quietly extracted trillions from the middle class and captured the nation’s politics, media & courts… For decades, many Democrats have suspected what’s now being confirmed in plain English by a Trump insider. Ashley St. Clair — the 27-year-old former Turning Point USA brand ambassador and mother of one of Elon’s 14 kids who built a million-follower platform on X and became one of MAGA’s most visible young women — has spent the past few weeks blowing the lid off the entire racket. In a series of TikTok monologues and a recent feature in The Washington Post, she’s describing in detail how the Republican’s right-wing influencer economy actually works, and her bottom line is brutal: she estimates that “roughly 99 percent” of the largest right-wing influencers are compensated in some form, most of it locked behind nondisclosure agreements so airtight that anyone who tries to talk about it will get buried under litigation they can’t afford.

New data suggests social media algorithms didn’t just influence voters; they may have tilted the entire outcome… It sure looks like tech billionaires and foreign dictatorships gave us Trump in 2024. This is as bad as the massive Russian bot presence on Facebook and Twitter back in 2016 that Robert Mueller documented gave Trump the presidency the last time. A peer-reviewed study released yesterday in Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal, has finally put hard numbers to what a lot of us suspected the moment the 2024 election was called for Trump (and Republicans in Congress) by the big networks: the algorithms that control our largest social media platforms intentionally and explicitly tilted the playing field, and they tilted it for Donald Trump and the GOP.

Discover how America’s debt crisis was built by the GOP and why everyday people are now stuck paying the price… Republicans yesterday proposed an appropriations bill that will allocate a billion dollars to pay for Trump’s Golden Epstein Dance Hall (aka “Ballroom”). Every penny of it will be borrowed and we’ll be paying interest on that money for the rest of our lifetimes unless something dramatic changes. This year, America will spend over a trillion dollars just to pay interest on the current $39 trillion national debt, a debt entirely the result of a 45-year-long GOP scam designed to make the rich richer and elect Republicans, all while simultaneously screwing Democrats and average working class people.

The decades-long strategy that gutted the middle class and then turned Americans against each other to cover it up… In a recent podcast interview with The New York Times, political science Professor Robert Pape pointed out that acceptance of political violence is today higher than it’s been in generations. Tens of millions of Americans, his research shows, are now accepting of things as extreme as assassination as a way to change politics. This follows the third attempt at Trump’s life, the murder of prominent Democratic politicians in Minnesota, the murder of Charlie Kirk, and the ICE assassinations of at least three US citizens in the past year. We’re also seeing an increasing acceptance of violence toward minorities and women.

From NATO withdrawals to gutted agencies, U.S. policy is giving Putin exactly what he wants—while America grows weaker… Nikita Khrushchev famously said “We will bury you” (“My vas pokhoronim“) to Western ambassadors in Moscow on November 18, 1956. Seventy years later, it appears that Russia’s goal is being realized. Putin called Trump last Wednesday and they talked for almost two hours; fewer than three days later, America announced we’re pulling 5,000 US troops out of the NATO forces in Germany, accomplishing a 60-year-long Russian goal. Trump also ended sanctions on Russian oil, handing the Putin regime billions in revenue, while continuing to block US weapons delivery to Ukraine.

In America it was inflation that opened the door to Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism. Inflation is usually caused by one of two things: international devaluation or internal dilution of a country’s currency, or widespread shortages of essential commodities that drive up prices enough to echo through the entire economy. The early 1970s got both, one deliberately and the other as the result of war. Between 1971 and 1973, President Nixon pulled the US out of the Bretton Woods economic framework that had been put together after World War II to stabilize the world’s currencies and balance trade. The dollar had been pegged to gold at $35 an ounce, and the world’s other currencies were effectively pegged to the dollar.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Russia’s main goal for years has been to cripple NATO by getting US troops out of Germany — Thanks to six corrupt bought-off Republicans on the Supreme Court, Louisiana Republicans are colluding in broad daylight to rig this fall’s election and silence the voices of Black voters. — The Trump regime is the most lawless in America’s history. — Americans of all stripes and political affiliations agree: Data Centers are a plague. — The Trump grift is multigenerational. — Democracy around the world is under assault by rightwingers who get themselves elected and then flip their nations into autocracy and oligarchy. — Joe Walsh UNLEASHES Tea Party smear machine on a Democrat fighting for us working people.

Candidates who take on power and promise real progressive change are the ones voters are rallying behind, because anything less isn’t worth showing up for… Today is the May 1st National Day of Action; I’ll be wearing a black armband on TV and millions will be skipping school, work, and shopping to protest Trump and his fascist policies… Maine just handed Democrats a wake-up call that they’d damn well better actually listen to this time. Governor Janet Mills suspended her Senate campaign yesterday, leaving Marine veteran and oyster farmer Graham Platner as the presumptive Democratic nominee to take on Republican Senator Susan Collins in November. The message Maine voters are frankly shouting is the same one I’ve been hearing from listeners on my radio/TV show for years and the same one that pollsters across the spectrum keep picking up across the country: people are sick and tired of mealy-mouthed corporate Democrats who run on focus-grouped slogans and govern like they’re scared of their own shadow. They want fighters.

While Putin, the Trump kids, and their fellow billionaires are rubbing their hands in glee, it’s going to be a hell of a year or three for the other 99% rest of us… The Wall Street Journal reports in an article titled “Trump Tells Aides to Prepare for Extended Blockade of Iran” that: “President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iran, U.S. officials said... In recent meetings, including a Monday discussion in the Situation Room, Trump opted to continue squeezing Iran’s economy and oil exports by preventing shipping to and from its ports. … “For now, Trump is comfortable with an indefinite blockade, which he wrote Tuesday on Truth Social is pushing Iran toward a ‘State of Collapse.’” So, Putin — who Trump took orders from for a full 90 minutes yesterday — and America’s billionaires who religiously read the WSJ are officially tipped off to prepare for what may well be a worldwide repeat of the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s.