Hartmann Report

History is filled with politicians who believed they were untouchable. But the pattern always cracks. Always. The lie gets too big. The system bends just far enough. The coverup fails… There's a tape. Not a metaphor, not a rumor, not some fuzzy third-hand whisper passed from burner phone to basement podcast. A real audio recording. Two full days of Ghislaine Maxwell, the trafficker-in-chief of Jeffrey Epstein's underage empire, speaking directly to Deputy Attorney General and Trump former criminal lawyer Todd Blanche. The Justice Department has it. Transcribed, digitized, real. Senior officials have confirmed it exists. And they're sitting on it. Why? The answer, as always, is simple: because the truth is radioactive and most suspect that there's no way she told the truth. And this time, it may not be the crime that blows the doors off. It'll be the coverup.

We Watched Others Fall: Now the Edge Is Beneath Our Feet Putin and Orbán showed us the edge. Trump’s ready to push us over… We watched it happen in Russia. We watched it happen in Hungary. Democracies, once imperfect but alive, were hollowed out from within by strongmen who declared emergencies, rewrote the rules, and convinced enough people that fear was freedom and corruption was strength. We told ourselves it couldn’t happen here. That our guardrails were stronger. That our Constitution was invincible. But now, we stand where they once stood: at the jagged edge of the authoritarian cliff. The wind has picked up, the ground beneath us trembles, and the man leading us forward isn’t walking, he’s charging. Not because he wants to save America, but because he wants to rule it as an absolute autocrat.

Why 51 Texas lawmakers fled the State to stop a power grab, and what it means for us all… The Republican motto — since Nixon sabotaged LBJ's Vietnam peace negotiations and Reagan blew up Carter's deal to get the Iranian hostages back — has been: "If you can't win, cheat." As Republicans rush to redistrict/gerrymander Texas, if enough Dems leave town there won't be a quorum so the redistricting can't happen. Which is why Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was threatening to could lock up Democratic lawmakers to prevent them from leaving the state. Governor Abbott thought he had a pretty slick plan; have Texas: Republicans refuse to consider legislation funding aid to the people stricken by the recent disastrous, climate-change-fueled floods until after the state had been more severely gerrymandered. Because of massive FEMA cuts, those people are pretty desperate. Calling his bluff yesterday, Democrats fled the state to Illinois, where Governor JB Pritzker offered sanctuary to the 51 Texas legislators in need of it.

As predictably as the sun rises, every Sunday a commentator or politician on one of the Sunday political talk shows says — without being challenged —that the Republican Party understands and supports business better than Democrats. The weekend as I’m writing this chapter, it was CNN’s turn. All my life, the media has told us that the GOP is the “party of business.” It may have once been true under Eisenhower when I was a very young child, but today it’s a lie — and has been so in a huge way since the neoliberal Reagan Revolution. Republicans kill economies; Democrats rescue and build them.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Has Trump heralded a new "gilded age?" What comes next? — GOP lawmaker runs into a buzzsaw at town hall. — First it was Nazi salutes; now Elon wants you to know that "women are built to be traded." — Trump wants the federal government to be able to track every one of your medical and health issues in real time, and Big Tech is all excited about being able to get their hands on your private data. — Trump is threatening other countries with steep tariffs if they don't change their sovereign foreign policy decisions. — Where are the 4,725 Epstein wire transfers that Trump, Noem, and Bondi are hiding? — Geeky Science! There was a mass die off of Monarch butterflies is 2024 and we now know why.

Housing bubbles, financial scams, and political sabotage are converging into a historic, preventable disaster. Republicans may be fixing to crash the economy again — Republican presidents oversaw 10 of the last 11 recessions and the Republican Great Depression — and they're doing it to satisfy the greed of the billionaires they serve. Today, for example, is the day that some of Trump's worst tariffs are supposed to go into effect, and many folks on Wall Street are deciding where they want to hide when the ceiling starts falling in. The horrible jobs report just released hours ago highlights not only how bad things were in July, but they had to "revise downward by 285,000 jobs" previous reports; it looks like Trump's people have been cooking the books.

Trump has built a movement that glorifies cruelty and cloaks greed in the language of patriotism and faith… Early this month, ICE agents detained a 6 year old Honduran boy battling leukemia as he left an immigration court in Los Angeles with his mother and sister. A child fighting for his life was ripped from his fragile medical routine and locked away for over a month, interrupting his treatment, crying himself to sleep night after night in a concrete cell instead of a hospital bed. This wasn't a mistake. It was cruelty by design: an intentional act of terror by a government that now treats compassion as weakness and suffering as a political weapon.

A 15% tariff on EU-branded drugs will make medicine more expensive, sick people sicker, and Big Pharma richer. Trump, doing this illegally, calls that "winning"... Americans pay more for medications than anybody else in the world. We're the planet's suckers: although everybody on the planet uses, by and large, the same meds, the drugs that carry the highest prices are — you guessed it — ours, the ones sold here in the USA. And Donald Trump is committed to making it even worse. He's barely been back in the White House six months and he's already lobbed a grenade straight into America's medicine cabinet, and he was grinning when he pulled the pin. Not only that, he's doing it in violation of the Constitution, which gives the sole power to impose tariffs to Congress; Trump's claiming emergency powers to override Congress' authority, but there is no emergency. He's simply breaking the law, and nobody is holding him to account. His administration's newly announced 15% tariff on branded European pharmaceuticals — a framework unveiled just days ago — is already sending shock-waves through the healthcare system. And it will jack up the price of lifesaving medicines for millions of Americans.

Trump is the first president in American history to seize the nation's newsrooms and attack a cartoon in the same week… The media’s job in a democratic society is to speak truth to power, not to suck up to it. But last week, CBS and its parent company Paramount waved the white flag, handing Donald Trump a $16 million bribe and agreeing to censor their own newsroom to curry favor with a twice-impeached, multiply-indicted rapist authoritarian who lost the popular vote twice. That is not journalism. That’s capitulation. And it’s devastating to democracies. The CBS merger with Skydance should never have been a political issue. In normal times, regulatory agencies like the FCC operate independently, applying laws without fear or favor. But these are not normal times.

This is the overlooked role that launched a revolution — and it's still wide open for progressives... What if, lacking an organized resistance to fascism like we have had in previous eras (the civil rights movement, SDS, BLM, the Wobbly's) the Democratic Party itself could play the role of producing radical, positive transformation across America? Sound crazy? It's actually happened twice.