Hartmann Report

Most Americans just learned, from reporting this week in The New York Times, that Trump, billionaire-funded rightwing think tanks, and some of the leaders of the GOP have a plan to flip America from a democratic republic into an authoritarian strongman-type of government should he or another like-minded MAGA Republican win the White House in 2024. This would be the death-knell of democracy, the crisis I warn about in my new book, and a historic disaster of almost unimaginable proportions given how much influence our nation has on other democracies around the world. This week that new book, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, hits the bookstores.

The GOP is exploiting the structures in our brains that are rooted deep in our DNA, the wiring that says, “I must protect 'us' from 'them,'” the wiring that kept humans tribal for 300 millennia... The American Experiment is facing a new test. Is it possible for a nation to be both democratic and fully integrated (race, religion, gender)? How do we overcome the natural human tendency to self-segregate and to demonize “the other”? It’s an issue that’s not unique to our nation; the question is tearing apart Israel, South Africa, and much of Europe as you’re reading these words (as I wrote about at some length last week).

"At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics." —Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissent in Citizens United

The Best of the Rest of the News. — The Clarence Thomas corruption scandal grows. — Should we protect our great-great grand children’s rights today? — Florida Republican calls for gutting the FBI like a fish and ending all public schools. — In Good News: Biden to forgive student debt in the billions for over 800,000 people. — Florida is going down in flames because the insurance industry is cutting their losses. Who’s next and what will this mean for the future of America? — Would you live in a Red state or Red area? — What!? Are publishers already training AI to write books “from” best-selling authors? — Geeky Science! Climate change is melting down America: we need to nationalize the poison that's killing the planet.

Establishing a political and personal identity in the public’s mind early on is crucial to effective campaigning and to developing a campaign that can withstand both personal and political attacks. Several Fox News hosts were attempting to ridicule Vice President Harris yesterday, essentially making things up. This is just the beginning. When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, most Americans knew very little about his running mate, Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson. Moreover, they didn’t much care. Kennedy was a robust 43 years old and the odds that he’d succumb to disease or old age weren’t even considered (and the last president assassinated was McKinley in 1901, which nobody of voting age then remembered). Therefore, outside of Texas, when JFK campaigned that year, he almost never even mentioned LBJ. Nobody really cared. That won’t be true next year. Regardless of who the Republican nominee is, their line of attack against the Biden/Harris ticket will be simple.

Suddenly things began to change as the federal government stopped trying to save lives and started promoting policies that would eventually kill – unnecessarily – a half-million Americans... Kentucky MAGA Republican James Comer, Chair of the House Oversight Committee, has been exposed as basically a con man with his phony Hunter Biden bribe witness. Now he is trying to rewrite the history of Trump and Covid. Comer’s latest stunt to try to whitewash Trump’s role in the unnecessary death of at least a half-million Americans is to argue — nonsensically — that the virus came out of the Wuhan virology lab and therefore something, something, something Trump is not responsible. He’s doing this with House Oversight Committee hearings this week. The reason Comer and other MAGA Republicans are working so hard to push this perennial theory (which may be true, but so what?) is that they think directing the nation’s attention to the Wuhan lab — which got collaboration and minor funding from Anthony Fauci’s realm of the government — will point us at Fauci and thus distract us all from how many Americans Trump let die and why. And it’s the “why” Trump intentionally let a half million Americans die unnecessarily where our media, and the Democrats, are really missing the story

At the bloody hands of this MAGA insanity we risk going down the path followed by most oligarchies in history: becoming a dictatorial single-party-rule state with a complete loss of civil liberties... In a Yahoo News/YouGov poll last year, 62 percent of Republicans said they preferred Vladimir Putin’s leadership to that of President Biden; only 4 percent saw Biden as a stronger leader than Putin.

Trump may or may not be the GOP’s nominee this time next year, but, whoever it is, now is the time to harden our democracy against a neofascist MAGA Republican rising to that office... Americans need to seriously consider, right now, what life and government in America would look like if a MAGA Republican became president. The lead story across much of the media last night was that Donald Trump might bring Jeffrey Clark — the crackpot lawyer who hatched the phony electors scheme — into the Department of Justice as Attorney General, should he get reelected in 2024. That would be bad, but it’s not where people need to be looking for the most severe danger in a second Trump presidency.

In addition to stepping up to mitigate climate change & green the world’s economy, the free nations must harden our democracies against reactive rightwing violence & hate-based political movements... The government of the Netherlands fell last week. The issue that tipped it over the edge was immigration driven by climate change. If Putin wanted to destroy democracy in Europe (and he does), back in 2015 he couldn’t have picked a better strategy. Odds are, though, he was just trying to protect his deepwater ports; it wasn’t until the crisis developed that he realized how he could exploit it to overthrow liberal democracies in the EU. The way it’s played out gives us a glimpse into our future — and the future of democratic republics all across the world — as the global climate emergency and the refugee crisis associated with it grows more severe over the next few years. The current rise-of-rightwing-fascism crisis building in Europe began in 2010 and started with global climate change.

"The Court would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons, and to authorize this Court to use the common-law process of case-by-case judicial lawmaking to define the contours of acceptable gun control policy. Absent compelling evidence that is nowhere to be found in the Court’s opinion, I could not possibly conclude that the Framers made such a choice." —Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissenting opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller