Hartmann Report

He hasn't grown or developed new routines; he's just daily reliving his old hits, playing to a nostalgic and mostly elderly audience who fondly remember his glory days... I hear it frequently on my radio/TV program: Americans are baffled about what's happened to Donald Trump. He used to seem so formidable, a very real threat to American democracy, the pal of dictators around the world. Now even Putin is dissing him, cutting the very prisoner deal with President Biden that Trump said a few weeks ago the Russian dictator would only do with him. He's gone, in the minds of many Americans, from being a danger to being merely weird. What happened? The simple reality is that Trump has entered the Fat Elvis phase of his career. He hasn't grown or developed new routines; he's just reliving his old hits every day, playing to a nostalgic and mostly elderly audience who fondly remember his glory days.

If you think it should be harder to take away your vote than your gun, double-check your voter registration (especially if you live in a Red state) and show up this fall! Republicans in Georgia have been champions at pioneering new ways to disenfranchise Democratic voters. Their latest scam is breathtaking. First, the background.

How long will it take us to reject this new McCarthy era that Trump, Vance, and their allies are hell-bent on inflicting on us? It appears that groups aligned with Donald Trump and JD Vance are preparing to reboot an American version of the old East German Stasi, this time with government workers in their crosshairs. I remember the Stasi well.

The work of our day is to restore the idea of America — an egalitarian democratic republic — and then help it realize its full potential after all these many long years… What is the “idea” of America? The core of the American identity? Trump, Vance, and the GOP say they’re all about patriotism; in fact, they’re promoting a white Christian identity form of nationalism, which is an entirely different thing. A dark, dangerous, and deadly thing. Incompatible with our Founders’ idea of America.

For the past forty-plus years, Republicans — just like dysfunctional HOAs — have been stealing from America's future… The GOP's 43-year tax-cuts-for-billionaires-while-we-ignore-the-needs-of-the-country grift has an analogy in condos and homes across America that might help voters understand how it works and how they've gotten away with it. Fully 84 percent of all homes and apartments built and sold in 2022 came with a homeowner's association (HOA), and an estimated 27 percent of all homeowners nationwide currently live in a property controlled by an HOA. And many are very unhappy about the experience.

Wealthy white men have had the right to vote in America since the beginning of our republic. It’s been a very, very different story for women and Native Americans. Women’s voting rights took a long time. Native Americans’ took longer. The struggle for women’s voting rights began in April 1776, when 32-year-old Abigail Adams sat at her writing table in her home in Braintree, Massachusetts, a small town a few hours’ ride south of Boston.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Project 2025 mastermind's alarming ties to radical catholic sect Opus Dei revealed. — Is JD Vance the new Dan Quayle? — House Democrats Launch Bold Crusade to Elevate American Workers to New Heights — Trump runs afowl: Chickens out of debate with Kamala — United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called out the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Norway for expanding fossil fuel production. — Shocking Murder of Sonya Massey Exposes Urgent Need for Police Reform. — Hunter In a Farmers World Alert! ADHD As Hypervigilance Run Amok — Wisdom School Alert! Why Humanity Has a Deep and Ancient Connection to Water

It's being reported that after a steady, 25-year decline in infant mortality, America saw a full 3 percent increase in dead babies during the first Dobbs year… Newborn babies are the latest victims in the ongoing Republican War On Women™. The most recent deadly aspect of the crisis started with Donald Trump proudly putting three anti-abortion Catholics on the Supreme Court, promising America that they'd overturn Roe v Wade. He sure delivered on that; it was probably the only promise he's kept in his entire life. Multiple pregnant Red state women have, over the past year or so, told harrowing stories about almost dying before doctors were willing to give them healthcare for fear of going to prison because of draconian state abortion bans. But now we learn that GOP policies aren't just capable of killing women; they appear to have killed at least 20,000 newborn babies in 2022, as Red states across the country instituted abortion bans in the wake of the Dobbs decision by six Republicans on the Supreme Court. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics reported that after a steady, 25-year decline in infant mortality, America saw a full 3 percent increase in dead newborn babies during the first Dobbs year. (Statistics for 2023 will come out next year.)

Trump is right now following a road blazed before him by multiple authoritarians and dictators who took over democracies in recent years… Donald Trump took the first step to extinguishing the free and independent press in American yesterday, when federal judge and Bush-appointee Cecilia Altonaga ruled that his defamation lawsuit against George Stephanopoulos and ABC News could go forward. She ruled that "a reasonable jury could conclude Plaintiff was defamed and, as a result, dismissal is inappropriate." (emphasis hers) Stephanopoulos had asked Republican Representative Nancy Mace how she could continue to support Trump when he had been "found liable for rape." Trump is claiming that question libeled him and asking for damages that could run into the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.

Vance's career and his life story are a grift. Just like most all of Donald Trump's businesses. Republican policies, in fact, have been one long grift for more than half a century… Minnesota Governor Tim Walz yesterday blasted JD Vance for being a "grifter," because Vance claimed he was some sort of a hillbilly who grew up in rural Appalachia when, in fact, he grew up in the suburbs of Cincinnati. Governor Walz, on the other hand, grew up in a town of 400 people with "24 kids in my graduating class" where "12 were cousins." In Vance's autobiography Hillbilly Elegy he trash-talks his poor relatives, essentially accusing them of not being successful in life because of moral defects like laziness and addiction; he doubled down on these memes in his RNC speech, pointing out his own mother's drug use. In fact, they're victims of Republican policies that make the rich richer and keep poor people poor; his mother's addiction is a symptom, not a cause. Vance, of course, "nobly" rose above it all with the help of our socialist GI Bill (which Republicans opposed) paying his way through Yale, and with help from rightwing billionaires who took Vance under their wings and helped him set up a hedge fund that made him fabulously rich.