Hartmann Report

Once a government convinces its people that what they saw with their own eyes never really happened, what’s left of democracy in that republic is already on life support… The Trump regime rolled out a new, lie-filled website yesterday purporting to tell the history of the January 6th insurrection attempt. It opens with bullshit...

Mad kings rarely stop themselves: they're stopped when the people around them decide the country matters more than the crown… When Louise and I lived in Germany in the 1980s, we visited Neuschwanstein Castle, the fantasy palace perched on a Bavarian cliff that looks like it escaped from a fairy tale. Tour guides will tell you about its beauty and its role as an inspiration for Disney, but they'll also share a more unsettling story that today echoes Donald Trump. Neuschwanstein was built by King Ludwig II, a ruler who withdrew from reality, governed through spectacle instead of policy, ignored his ministers, and bankrupted Bavaria by indulging his own grandiosity and a never-ending stream of construction and renovation projects. (Neuschwanstein was only one of three castles he built.) Bavaria eventually dealt with Mad King Ludwig: his own government declared him mentally unfit to rule and removed him from the throne.

By treating sovereign borders and international law as optional, the Trump regime embraces the worldview that fueled Hitler, fortified oligarchs, and now threatens the American Experiment… When Trump and the buffoons who surround him invaded Venezuela and captured Maduro, they broke with almost a century of American-led respect for the international rule of law and, instead, nakedly embraced the Putin Doctrine.

"Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always." —Mahatma Gandhi So far in this book, we’ve explored the making of a young Donald Trump, from the Queens mansion where Fred Trump taught domination as virtue, to Roy Cohn’s ruthless tutelage in shamelessness, to the golden façade he constructed that (with help from NBC and Mark Burnett) masked a lifetime of business failures. We’ve exposed the machinery that propelled him to power: a Republican Party that back during the Nixon and Reagan years first abandoned principle for tribal loyalty, the billionaire donors who funded extremism for tax cuts, and a series of billionaire-funded right-wing media empires that amplify outrage over truth on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis into tens of millions of American cars and homes.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Well, that sure ended discussion of the Epstein files: welcome to the Putin Doctrine. — And then there's Iran: so much for the "peace president." Is Trump going full "emperor of the world" or is he just trying to help his fellow war criminal and Kushner family friend Netanyahu (with whom Trump met last week) start another Middle East war to insure the Israeli Prime Minister's political survival? — Surprised? Trump goes shopping for Italian marble as health insurance rises 114% and he freezes all childcare money to all states. — Speaking of grifters, a racist 20-something MAGA YouTube influencer showed up at a bunch of Somali-run daycare centers in Minneapolis, leading Trump to cut off all childcare funding to all 50 states. — Is "Tax the rich" coming soon…let's hope so! — How's Project 2025 going? — Billionaire Trump is destroying Social Security on behalf of his billionaire peers and the 13 billionaires in his Cabinet. — What you need to know about Jack Smith's deposition. — Geeky Science: Want to know what a longevity expert eats in a day?

A quiet USPS postmark change could turn "on time" ballots into "too late" ballots by the millions… It's not just a brand new year; it's a midterm election year. And the stakes this coming November are mind-boggling, so, of course, Republicans are starting to do everything they can to rig the election. Just a week ago, for example, Trump's Postal Service changed the rules about getting your mail-in ballot postmarked so it'll be counted. Instead of postmarking letters when they're received, Post Offices will now postmark them when they get "processed," which may happen days later. In the 2024 presidential election, the feds estimated that around 104,000 mail-in ballots nationwide weren't counted because they were postmarked late; with this change, the number this fall and for 2028 could be in the millions.

Billionaire cash steers the agenda, military and police power set the boundaries, and religious messaging sells it as virtue, all while taxpayers fund the very system that excludes them… The turn of the calendar is more than a ritual. It's a reminder that democracy is not self sustaining, not guaranteed, and not permanent unless we choose it again and again. If we want this new year to be about renewal rather than retreat, we need to give some serious thought to what it'll take to reclaim and defend the democratic republic that generations before us fought, organized, and sacrificed to build. The American Revolution was not just a revolt against British rule. It was a revolt against three ancient tyrannies that had dominated human society for thousands of years. Warlord kings. The morbidly rich. And theocrats.

The clock is ticking, and cynicism isn't a strategy. Here's the concrete, local, Tea Party-style roadmap to rebuild Democrats into a fighting progressive party… "You don't change a party from the outside lookin' in You don't win a war just complainin' again They took the house by the keys and the locks While we were shoutin', they were claimin' the blocks If you wanna turn the tide, if you wanna redeem it It's precinct by precinct Or you don't mean it" — from Louise's Daily Song "Precinct by Precinct"

A warning to every progressive voter: In America's election system, your third-party vote can be a gift-wrapped victory for the GOP… Here we go again, only this time it appears to be the Working Families Party that's fixing to help elect Republicans. They're proudly proclaiming that by the 2028 presidential election they hope to have candidates on the ballot in 18 states.

From 50-year mortgages to paywalled car features, the rental economy is replacing ownership with lifelong monthly bills... Yesterday, both Trump and his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development told us that 50-year home mortgages may soon be a thing. While seemingly insane (you could end up paying more than three times the cost of the house and never escape the burden of debt before you die), this is just the latest iteration of one of American businesses' most profitable scams: the rental economy. It's a growing threat to the American middle class that rarely gets named, even as it reshapes our lives every day. Over the past two decades, it's snuck in quietly, disguised as convenience, efficiency, and "innovation." As a result, nothing is "ours" any more. Instead, we're renting our lives away.