Hartmann Report

Dear friend, I’m on the road this week doing a round of book signings, meeting folks, and talking about how we can keep working together for a fairer and more compassionate America. Today I’m speaking at a No Kings event and fundraiser for our Los Angeles affiliate KPFK. Because of that, there won’t be a Saturday Report this week, but I didn’t want to leave you without a smile. So, here’s a little love and lightness from home. Our two kittens, Jagger and Toshi, have been doing their part to keep things joyful. Jagger’s the light silver one, and Toshi’s darker and spotted, a little living artwork in motion.

The Pentagon's purge of its own legal advisers reveals how obedience is replacing principle, and why that's the hallmark of authoritarian capture… Is the U.S. military already in the early stages of a Trump-led coup against our Constitution? Inside the Pentagon, loyalty is being elevated above law as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth quietly removes senior military lawyers, the very officials meant to uphold legality and restraint, and replaces them with loyalists.

The leaked messages show what happens when cruelty becomes political culture… Just this week, Politico exposed private Telegram chats among Young Republican leaders where they didn't just flirt with Nazi-style extremism, they reveled in it. In thousands of leaked messages from across the nation, rising GOP stars praised Adolf Hitler, joked about sending political rivals into gas chambers, and mocked the very idea of human dignity.

When federal agents turn weapons on citizens, it's not just a local scandal — it's a national reckoning. Yesterday, here in Chicago, where I am today, America caught a glimpse of its possible future, and it was terrifying. Federal agents, dressed like soldiers and armed with the weapons of war, rammed a civilian vehicle on 105th Street, using a maneuver outlawed by Chicago police, and then fired tear gas into a crowd of bystanders and local officers. The air filled with smoke and screams as parents fled with babies in their arms, teenagers were slammed to the pavement, and a young girl was struck in the head by a gas canister. One boy was detained for hours, denied his rights, his family left in the dark. This was not a foreign regime or some distant "law-and-order" fantasy. It was an American city, in broad daylight, and it looked more like a militarized crackdown in a third-world dictatorship than traditional American law enforcement. The question we have to ask is simple and chilling: Is this America that we are becoming, one where democracy dies behind clouds of tear gas?

Kristi Noem's shutdown blame-game video could cost them fines and their livelihood... Airport managers need to wake up fast. With only a handful of exceptions, people running airports across America are risking serious fines and being barred from government work for up to five years by broadcasting political messaging on behalf of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. Federal law — the Hatch Act — makes it a crime, punishable by fines and loss of current and future employment, to use government facilities or taxpayer money for partisan political purposes. Yet Noem, who has earned her national reputation as a puppy-killer and by cosplaying "tough cop" with her alleged boyfriend (they're both married to other people), has pushed out a video to airports across the country blaming Democrats for the current shutdown.

Every raid, every body slammed to the pavement, is a public ritual meant to teach us obedience. The goal isn't enforcement — it's submission... For the Trump regime, the brutality is the point. It's the means to the end of a violent, single-party state that they're openly proclaiming, even though our media insists on turning away from it. Back in the 1980s, I lived with my family and worked in Germany for a bit short of two years. The international relief agency I worked for (and lived at the HQ of) jumped through all the necessary hoops to get me a work permit, but if I'd overstayed my permit/visa nobody would have kicked in my front door or invaded my home with flash-bangs and automatic weapons drawn. Nobody would have smashed in the windows of my car, or shot me with pepper balls or rubber-coated bullets, or snatched our three children and put them into a privatized "Christian" foster care system from which thousands of kids simply vanish.

Pay attention to this professional liar: "I'm the only president in modern history who left office with a smaller national debt than when I came into office." That's quite a whopper. Fact check: "During Trump's presidency, the national debt actually increased by $7.8 trillion, nearly 40 percent and more than any president in history." The fact check is courtesy of Thom Hartmann. Indeed, Hartmann's new book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party and a World on the Brink, is one giant fact check on the Whopper-in-Chief, and much more — a disturbing dive into the roiling miasma of self-aggrandizing, self-deluding, psychologically shattered, wailing man-child who is Commander-in-Chief.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — When Justice Becomes Revenge — Trump and the GOP are losing the shutdown war. — Meanwhile, rumor has it that the reason Johnson is refusing to swear Adelita Grijalva into office is because she’d be the 218th vote for a discharge petition to force a floor vote on releasing the Epstein files — About those “Democrat” agencies that Trump wants to lay people off from. — Norway could feel a chill of revenge soon, now that Donald Trump didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize. — Deep Red Oklahoma’s governor rips Trump and Texas for sending troops to Chicago. — According to reporting by Reuters, Trump is targeting progressive nonprofits for intimidation and punishment. The good news is that they’re fighting back. — Alarm is setting in as Trump mulls “antifa” foreign terrorist designation. — Geeky Science: Find out what the Planetary Health Diet (PHD) proposed to help optimize human health globally: you’ll be shocked. — ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer’s World: ADHD: Hunter's Rest? Hah! — Wisdom School: When the Body Forgets to Ask for Water

How the Insurrection Act could become the 21st-century Enabling Act, with six justices and the GOP standing by… The endgame for Trump, Vance, Noem, and Bondi is coming into clearer focus, and it's nearly a one-for-one, step-by-step implementation of Nazi jurist/philosopher Carl Schmitt's ideas that created and sustained the early Third Reich. Vance has even gone so far as to directly quote Schmitt. The concepts aren't particularly complicated, and it's easy to see how Trump and his enablers are implementing them

As Americans lose faith in capitalism, Trump’s economic nationalism looks less like free enterprise and more like state control… Trump and Miller say they’re coming for the “communists” in America, and they need the military on the streets of our cities to do it.