Hartmann Report

From the halls of Mar-a-Lago to the ruins of Ukrainian hospitals, the toxic bond between Trump, Putin, and Epstein may have reshaped the world and cost the lives of countless children… "Russia unleashed a massive combined attack on Kyiv" last night, The Guardian reports. "Five people were hospitalised, including one man in critical condition and a pregnant woman, after a series of powerful explosions sounded in the city and air defenses were activated. … "Pictures posted on social media showed different sites in flames and residents gathering in rubble-strewn streets outside apartment buildings." The child victims of Jeffrey Epstein's crimes are apparently not the only ones who've paid the price for Donald Trump's long relationship with that notorious pedophile.

This Epstein Affair has shown a pattern where men of wealth and power created a zone of impunity that protected them for decades while destroying vulnerable people like Virginia Guiffrey… The New York Times reported that Donald Trump personally called Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and then had Bondi, Blanche, and Patel take her into the top-secret no-recording-devices-allowed Situation Room to urge her to drop her support for releasing the Epstein files. He apparently also tried to reach Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) for the same reason. Yesterday’s newly surfaced details about Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump again reveal something far larger than the tawdry specifics of their relationship, as grotesque as those are. They point to a structural crisis at the heart of American democracy.

Trump's white supremacist loyalists are rewriting history, erasing Black heroes, and purging diversity, and the politicians who stay silent are complicit in that treason… The American media refuses to call them out, so I guess the job falls to me: you can cut the racism with a knife, it's so thick. With the Trump administration, the Confederacy is actively rising again, using the Lost Cause mythology/lie as its basis. Trump has now, apparently just in time for Veterans Day this week, erased tributes to Black U.S. soldiers who died fighting fascism — removing displays and plaques honoring African American liberators in Europe and removing similar memorial content at home — not merely to rewrite history but to say that only white men's stories matter.

The American people begged their leaders to stand up to Trumpism. Instead, their Senate "leader" sold them out. When courage becomes optional, democracy becomes impossible.. What we witnessed this weekend in the United States Senate wasn't "compromise." It was surrender: the kind of gutless, morally bankrupt capitulation that betrays American families and feeds the billionaires devouring our democracy. Eight Senators who caucus with the Democrats joined Republicans to end the government shutdown, not in victory, not to secure healthcare for millions, but to hand Donald Trump and his morbidly rich cronies a gift-wrapped political win. And standing at the center of this disgrace is Chuck Schumer, the so-called "leader" of the Senate Democrats, who orchestrated — or at least approved or failed to stop — the entire debacle from behind the curtain, then had the gall to vote "no" at the last minute to wash his hands of it. Let's be clear: this was Schumer's deal. He built it, he pushed it, and he enabled it. His fingerprints are all over this betrayal.

The $2,000 “dividend” plan may be the boldest attempt yet to turn democracy into a cash-for-votes transaction… Before I get into today’s story, last night was an absolute effing disaster. Eight Democratic-caucus senators sold us out by voting with the Republicans: Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Angus King (I-ME), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), John Fetterman (D-PA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Tim Kaine (D-VA). And you know none of this could’ve happened without Chuck Schumer agreeing to it. The Vice-Chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Congressman Ro Khanna (a regular on my program) was blunt, saying Schumer “is no longer effective and should be replaced.”

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power. —Abraham Lincoln In the late 1960s, while working as a DJ and news reporter at WITL radio in Lansing, Michigan, I saw firsthand how a democratic government can rapidly erode when it’s corrupted by official lies. As a teenager who’d been expelled from high school for starting an anti–Vietnam War newspaper, and then a member of Students for a Democratic Society at Michigan State University, I was subjected to police surveillance and arrest, experiences that to this day color my understanding of government. Which is why when Louise and I watched the Confederate flag being paraded through the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, I felt a chill. This wasn’t just an insurrection; it was the culmination of institutional erosion I’ve documented for decades on my radio show and in my books, beginning with Johnson and Nixon during the Vietnam era.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Donald Trump calls our concern over the cost of living a "con," but the real con is being foisted on working Americans by the billionaires and corporate monopolies that bankroll him. — Consumer confidence collapses in the face of Trump's incoherent economic and tariff policies that seem driven more by threats he can use to get bribes from foreign dictators than what's best for America and American citizens. — Nothing, it seems, gives "Whiskey Pete" Hegseth a bigger hard-on than threatening war and bloodshed (and sharing it with friends and family on an insecure Signal chat). Unless, of course, it's beating up a woman, as his former sister-in-law alleged in a sworn affidavit. — The election was bigger than we thought: we even won school boards in Texas! — Health insurance prices are exploding: where is all that money going? — ICE agents dragged off a Portland green-card holder — a legal resident of the US — in front of his wife and three children, ignoring his screams that he had documentation and was in the country legally. He's still missing in their byzantine prison system weeks later. — How New York City is quietly preparing for a possibly violent Trump takeover. — U.S. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson published a scathing dissent after six bought-off right-wingers on the Court issued a ruling trashing trans rights.

From eugenics and AIDS denial to border kidnappings, the same cold logic endures: if the victims suffer enough, the powerful can call it order… America has always been proud of its ingenuity: our capacity to invent, to innovate, to solve. But among our most consistent inventions is one we never admit to but the Trump administration is now proudly highlighting: the machinery of cruelty. Generation after generation, we refine it, disguise it, and call it something noble: "law and order," "family values," "national security." Each era congratulates itself for its moral progress while quietly perfecting the tools of human suffering.

Let debate rage for days, then vote, as the founders intended; end the antique veto and force both parties to own their visions before the people… Emperor Trump saw this wipeout election coming and he knew who to blame in advance: the Senate. On Tuesday (election day) morning, he posted to his Nazi-infested social media site: "TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER NOW, END THE RIDICULOUS SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATELY, AND THEN, MOST IMPORTANTLY, PASS EVERY WONDERFUL REPUBLICAN POLICY THAT WE HAVE DREAMT OF, FOR YEARS, BUT NEVER GOTTEN. WE WILL BE THE PARTY THAT CANNOT BE BEATEN – THE SMART PARTY!!!" Republicans yawned and ignored him; they've been hiding behind the filibuster for decades to avoid having to actually take a serious vote on the crazy crap that Republicans in the House keep sending them, like bills to outlaw abortion nationally, end voting rights for married women, or end climate protections and deregulate the fossil fuel industry. Ending the filibuster — even now with King Crazy in the White House — would be a good thing for both Democrats and America. And Trump may actually pull it off.

Behind the rhetoric about 'lazy freeloaders' lies a stunning truth: America's largest corporations depend on food stamps to prop up their low-wage empires... Democrats won big in last night's election, and it's a great sign for the future of American democracy. Voters rejected racism, fear, and cruelty. They said in a loud and singular voice — overwhelmingly voting for moderate Democrats, progressive Democrats, and even a ballot initiative without a single person on the ballot — that they want their democracy back. Nonetheless, Mike Johnson is still keeping the House on vacation and John Thune is still refusing to break a Senate filibuster and reopen the government. And, crucially, Trump is still refusing to fully fund SNAP/food stamps, even though he can easily put his hands on the money.