Hartmann Report

He's learning what every would-be king learns: fear works only until people remember who they are… Trump and his people, with all their strut and swagger, want you to think he's the most powerful man in America and will continue in power indefinitely. Don't believe it. The reason he's rushing so hard and fast to spread his secret, masked police across American cities while mobilizing the military against civilians is precisely because he's so extraordinarily weak.

The movements of the 1960s built lasting institutions. Today's movements need more than moral clarity: they need leadership and coordination... The No Kings Day protests last weekend were breathtaking. Seven million or more Americans filled streets across the country explicitly condemning the way Trump has been running our country. They carried handmade signs, sang freedom songs, and for one afternoon reminded the nation that resistance still burns hot. But here's the hard truth: that energy, that passion, that righteousness means very little if it doesn't translate into structure and leadership. Movements that fail to coalesce around leaders and build institutions typically die in the glare of their own moral light or fail to produce results.

Friedrich August von Hayek studied at the knee of Mises during what Mises called his “private seminars” in the offices of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce on that city’s Ringstrasse (Grand Boulevard) between 1920 and 1934. Out of this developed both a lifelong friendship, the formation of the Mont Pelerin Society, and the new economic religion of neoliberalism. By 1940, the year Mises emigrated to the US, Hayek had also fled the Nazis, although he’d moved to London (he became a British citizen in 1938) which was then being regularly bombed by Hitler’s Luftwaffe. As the bombing campaign, the Blitz, became more aggressive that year Hayek began to seriously worry about the possibility a bomb could kill his children. This was a turning point for his family and he thought that America, daily becoming more egalitarian and leading the world out of the Republican Great Depression with FDR’s New Deal, would offer them the best opportunities.

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.