Hartmann Report

Yule fire, candlelit pines, and the old northern promise that if we hold each other close, the light returns… Today is Christmas, a connection to some of the most ancient of all known northern European shamanic traditions. Like people living in the north for millennia, we continue to embrace them with regional, national, and religious tweaks. It occurs during the week of the shortest day and longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere, when ancient holy men and women lit "yule logs" to push back the darkness and implore the gods or nature to bring back the light of summer.

The playbook that showers the rich, spikes the debt, then demands you sacrifice Social Security and healthcare… "The only thing wrong with the U.S. economy is the failure of the Republican Party to play Santa Claus." —Jude Wanniski, March 6, 1976 The Washington Post published an article this week titled A Middle-Class Family's Only Option: A $43,000 Health Insurance Premium about how the GOP's refusal to extend ACA/Obamacare subsidies means that Stacy Newton's family in Jackson Hole, Wyoming will have to pay $43,000 a year for health insurance if they want to stay covered. If, however, the United States had an extra trillion dollars a year — the amount we're now spending every year on interest payments against the GOP's $38 trillion national debt — the Newtons would only pay a few hundred dollars a month and we could also have Universal Childcare & Pre-K, Paid Family & Medical Leave, Tuition-Free College, Affordable Housing & No More Homelessness, End Child Poverty & Hunger, and, as mentioned, Affordable Healthcare for all Americans.

They turned clean air into "socialism," turned polluters into victims, and turned America into a profit center with our kids as casualties… Given how the Republicans who run Congress let health insurance premiums for over 24 million Americans explode by not acting last week before going on vacation, it appears former Congressman Alan Grayson was right. The GOP Healthcare Plan is simple and straightforward: "Don't get sick. "If you do get sick, die quickly." And it appears Trump is handily helping us all along with that "die quickly" part, promoting both cancer-causing chemicals in our environment and food supply as well as pushing for more greenhouse gasses to kill more of us with droughts, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires via climate change.

The commons, unions, and a livable wage built the first mass middle class. Now younger voters want to reboot that machine at full throttle… The media is freaking out over a new Rasmussen poll that found: "A majority of voters under 40 want a democratic socialist to win the White House in the next presidential election. "… 51% of Likely U.S. Voters ages 18 to 39 would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election. Thirty-six percent (36%) don't want a democratic socialist to win in 2028, while 17% are not sure. … "Among the youngest cohort (ages 18-24) of voters, 57% want a democratic socialist to win the next presidential election… "Among those who voted for Kamala Harris in last year's presidential election, 78% would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election…" (emphasis added) I was on Ali Velshi's MSNOW show yesterday morning discussing this, along with Michael Green who recently wrote a thought-provoking article about how the official poverty line in America is completely out-of-date and out of touch with the needs of most Americans. I shared a few statistics from my recent book The Hidden History of the American Dream: the Demise of the Middle Class and How to Rescue Our Future:

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both." —Louis D. Brandeis, Other People’s Money. Jakelin Caal Maquin was only seven years old when she died in the custody of our government.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — How do we save journalism and democracy? — Is Our Gun Culture Grooming People to Kill? — Does Trump's Chief of Staff have Russia ties? — The Billionaire Protection Program at the Department of Justice rolls on — Jack Smith has the goods on Trump's criminal activity and Republicans in the House don't want you to hear the details. — How strange is it that the GOP has the urge to jump off the health-care cliff? — Bob Kennedy's Children's Health Defense anti-vax group is circulating disinformation at the height of a measles outbreak, according to reporting in The Guardian. — Geeky Science. Feeling awe and wonder actually improves your health, both mental, emotional, and physical.

A palace rising on public ground while the affordability crisis tightens its grip isn't just bad optics, it's a betrayal of the idea of America… The White House has always mattered because of what it represents. It was never supposed to be a palace; it was meant to be the people's house, a physical reminder that power in America is borrowed, temporary, and accountable. That's why the news that Donald Trump is turning it into a 400 million dollar monument to himself should stop every American cold. This isn't a routine renovation. What Trump first floated as a ballroom has ballooned into a massive two story complex with sweeping staircases, private residential quarters, and a secure bridge connecting it directly to the presidential residence.

A stark look at the speech that blurred the line between leadership and losing control on the world stage… Let me take off my psychotherapist hat and simply speak as a parent, an adult, a businessman, a citizen, and a human being. There is something deeply and fundamentally wrong with Donald Trump,

When politicians hand the gun industry a liability shield, they're not "protecting freedom,"they're protecting a business model built on body counts… America's 465th mass shooting in 2025, this one at Brown University in Rhode Island, should remind us all that it's insane that the GOP passed and Bush signed into law the so-called Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) in 2006 that largely gives immunity from liability lawsuits to the gun industry (and only the gun industry). It's time to end the predator-state coalition in America, of which this is just one glaring example.

Trump calls it "Trump Derangement Syndrome" when we object to cruelty and division. The real story is what that hate is doing to America's democracy, and when we finally push back… I have Trump Derangement Syndrome and so does much of America and much of the world. That's not a confession of mental illness: it's an indictment of a political era defined by cruelty, division, and the deliberate poisoning of democratic life. "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is the phrase Donald Trump and his followers love to fling at anyone who dares to object to his behavior. But the truth is simpler and far more damning: if millions of Americans and people across the globe are reacting with alarm, anger, and outrage, it's because Trump has spent years earning that reaction.