Hartmann Report

I don’t recall the year (think it was 2008?), but I remember well Louise and I meeting Ben Wikler over snacks and drinks at a small party at John Nichols’ home in Madison, Wisconsin. As we left, Louise remarked to me, “That kid’s going places. Keep an eye on him!” Ben has more than fulfilled her prediction, leading Wisconsin Democrats to victory after victory; this weekend he announced he’s running for head of the DNC. This is a truly big deal. The Democratic Party will decide who’ll lead it in February. Will it be a neoliberal agent of the donor class, another bland technocrat who tries to please everybody and offend nobody, or a true and tested agent of small-d democratic and middle class renewal like Ben? It may be the most important decision Democrats have made in fifty years. This matters because the morbidly rich always screw things up in their eternal quest for more! more!! more!!! wealth and power. And they’re doing it to our country now in a way that may well become irreversible if the Democrats make the wrong choice in February.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Trump is taking off the mask, after lying to us for over a year about not knowing anything about Project 2025 — Trump picks herd immunity advocate to lead National Institutes of Health (NIH). Want more death with your health policy? — Trump Chooses Megadonor Art Collector To Head U.S. Navy. Yep, an art collector and investment guy. To run the Navy. — So much for that "wall of separation between church and state" that Jefferson wrote about. — Musk wants to get rid of the anti-fraud police. Why? — Embarrassed Tesla owners are taking steps... — Jair Bolsonaro - aka "Brazil' Trump" (he fled to Mar-a-Lago when his followers attacked the legislature like Trump's did on January 6th) - thinks Trump and his people will get him back into power. — Crazy Alert! JD Vance posts a re-do of the famous Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving painting with him as Trump's wife - and rightwingers are going nuts with cringe. — Hunter in a Farmer's World: ADHD $ Neurodiversity Is Not a Disorder: India's Radical Respect for What America Loves to Pathologize — The Wisdom School: What it means to be human: From Chaos to Clarity: The Revolutionary Power of Being Alone

From Adams’ Sedition Acts to Trump’s relentless attacks, the war on truth threatens to unravel the very foundation of our republic... Yesterday, for Thanksgiving, I published a short history of Jefferson’s and his Democrats’ reaction to John Adams’ fearmongering for political power around the “XYZ Affair.” I referenced Adams’ shutting down the opposition newspapers in America, but a surprising number of people responded with: “What??? Really????? An American president shut down all the opposition newspapers because they insulted him? That really happened?” So here’s the rest of the story: Some Americans are suggesting that the ascendance of a strongman president who wants to shut down America’s press is totally new in the experience of America and may spell the end of both democracy and the Bill of Rights. History, however, shows another view, which offers us both warnings and hope. Although you won't learn much about it from reading the “Republican histories” of the Founders being published and promoted in the corporate media these days, the most notorious stain on the presidency of John Adams began in 1798 with the passage of a series of laws that would give him virtually unlimited strongman powers to attack his political enemies and, like Trump says he wants to do, end the First Amendment right of a free press.

From Jefferson’s era to today, history proves democracy’s defenders can still win… It’s probably, politically and spiritually, the darkest Thanksgiving for our nation in my lifetime. So how about a quick story out of America’s earliest history that somewhat echoes this moment and may give us some hope? Donald Trump has told us he’s going to use the 1807 Insurrection Act to declare a state of emergency, which will allow him to round up not only undocumented immigrants but also his political opponents, who he refers to as “the enemy within.” He came to power using Willie Horton-like ads trashing trans people and is happy to demonize anybody else who stands up to his hunger for absolute power. In an age-old technique usually employed during wartime, Trump regularly uses the rhetoric America has employed against foreign enemies to characterize Americans who disagree with him and his policies. Remember the “raghead” slurs against Arabs from the Afghan and Iraqi wars? Or politicians referring to Vietnamese in the 1970s as “slants” and “gooks”? My dad, who volunteered to fight in WWII straight out of high school, called Germans and Japanese “krauts” and “Japs” to his dying days; American propaganda during wartime encouraged popular usage of these racist characterizations. In this regard, Trump’s trying to lie us into a war. But not an external war; this time he’s pushing for something very much like a 21st century version of a second civil war. A war by Americans against Americans.

The right approach to tariffs could rebuild American manufacturing and reshape the political landscape… The stürm und drang all over the media this week is about Trump, on Monday, doubling down on his tariffs saying that he'd impose across-the-board 25 percent tariffs on all goods from China, Mexico, and Canada until there's no more fentanyl or undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers coming into the US. That's a substantial lift, and if he follows through with the threat (which seems likely, although I'd bet money that he'll drill lots of holes in those tariffs to satisfy corporate donors) it'll cause a considerable disruption in American commerce. Those three countries, after all, account for more than 40 percent of all American trade. Weirdly, Trump may be doing the Democrats a favor by taking this position, and I don't mean the possibility that he'll wreck the economy and thus his party's chances in 2026 and 2028 (although that's real, too).

Democrats have a long and illustrious history of strong leadership: FDR, Truman, Kennedy, LBJ, Clinton, Obama. Where is this generation's leader? So much for American democracy and the concept that "no man is above the law." There is no law and not a word in the Constitution that requires Attorney General Merrick Garland to order Jack Smith to drop charges against Trump. It's merely a policy written in a letter by Richard Nixon's corrupt Justice Department (whose director, Attorney General John Mitchell, went to prison for his corruption) when Nixon was being investigated…and doubled down on by Bill Clinton's Justice Department when Clinton was being investigated for lying under oath. It has no force of law. It's merely policy. Written by an agency lawyer who was never elected by anybody to anything.

Incompetence and conspiracy theories meet a deadly virus: Will history repeat itself, or will we face an even deadlier disaster with unprepared leaders at the helm? "The political folks believed that because [Covid] was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy." — Vanity Fair's Katherine Eban quoting Jared Kushner's team in March, 2020 Arguably the most important aspect of political leadership is the ability to deal with a crisis. The massive incompetence and malice of the Trump administration in 2020 led, for example, to the unnecessary deaths of an estimated half-million Americans. And now we may well be facing a repeat that could be even worse.

Most of the corruption of our federal and state governments by big money track back to two central pillars of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. They are: “Money is the same thing as speech” and “corporations are persons entitled to rights under the Bill of Rights in the Constitution.” Both are based on lies. I’ll deal with the “free speech” lie in a separate chapter, but first let’s take a deep dive into the history of corporate personhood.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Elon Musk to buy MSNBC? — Here's a link to my 40-minute appearance on C-SPAN last weekend. There were some interesting fireworks — The Morbidly Rich are $276 billion richer just in the two weeks since November 5th, so, of course, Republicans want to give them trillions more in tax cuts. — Pete Hegseth has called for the "categorical defeat of the Left," with the "civil war" goal of "utter annihilation" of progressives. Say what?! — Remember when it was reported that Pam Bondi took a large donation from Trump and then chose not to prosecute him for his fraudulent "university"? — The Washington Post reports that Chinese intelligence has hacked Donald Trump's phone. What do they know? And how will they use it? — The Donald Trump of Brazil was just indicted. Apparently they didn't hire Orrin Hatch's pick for Attorney General. — Geeky Science! Denmark plans to tax farts! — Crazy Alert! Rightwing host says Matt Gaetz' ability to buy sex with underage girls means he's "quite a stud". — Hunters in a Farmer's World: ADHD's Silent Partner: The Sleep Hormone Connection — Wisdom School: Sweet Poison: The Deadly Link Between Sugar and Dementia

Private equity, billionaire agendas, and GOP-funded attacks are driving a stake through the heart of American media diversity… Have you heard that Comcast is planning to sell MSNBC? Is Rupert Murdoch planning to buy it? Will America's media landscape soon resemble those of Hungary and Russia? Without the rightwing media juggernaut, Donald Trump probably wouldn't be president next year and wouldn't have won in 2016. That said, the progressive media landscape looks like it might be about to get a whole lot worse. Comcast, which owns NBC and its subsidiaries CNBC and MSNBC (among other media outlets) announced this week that they'll be spinning off MSNBC (among others) next year. And the consequences are already showing up. It was reported this week that Rachel Maddow just took a substantial annual pay-cut because of the uncertain future of the network.