Hartmann Report

Donald Trump is a confidence man, a charlatan, an unrepentant liar whose deceits have cost at least a half-million Americans their lives. Why do so many American support him? When Dustin Thompson was hauled before US District Judge Reggie Walton for assaulting the Capitol police on January 6th, his defense lawyer, Samuel Shamansky, argued about Trump: “You had, frankly, a gangster who was in power. The vulnerable are seduced by the strong. That’s what happened.” The jury didn’t buy the argument and sent Thompson to prison, as US District Judge Reggie Walton, who was overseeing the case, said: “I think our democracy is in trouble because, unfortunately, we have charlatans like our former president who doesn’t, in my view, really care about democracy but only about power.” And yet Trump remains popular with about 20 percent of the American public, making up the majority of the Republican primary-voting base. But why?

There is no more powerful urge humans can experience than to protect and defend our children. For most people it beats hunger, sex, and money… I remember when the USSR launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth. It was the fall of 1957, I was six years old, and my dad and I watched it arc over our house from our back yard one clear October night. My best friend’s father, a ham radio operator, let us listen on his shortwave radio to the “beep beep beep” it was emitting when it was over North America. I’d never seen my dad so rattled. That dramatic technological achievement lit a major fire under the Eisenhower administration and Congress. In his January 27, 1958 State of the Union address, Republican President Eisenhower pointed to Sputnik and demanded Congress fund a dramatic transformation of America’s educational system

The day after President Trump was re-elected (with MAGA Mike's help), he invoked the Insurrection Act and began the mass arrests... The day after President Trump was re-elected (with MAGA Mike's help), he invoked the Insurrection Act and began the mass arrests... 4 November 2025 Leavenworth, Kansas Dear Louise, It's been almost a year since the last time I saw you, as they were arresting me on the sedition charge that's kept me in this prison. If the underground network here succeeds, you should get this letter within a few weeks; it's the third I've written you that got out of the prison, but I understand the first two couriers were busted for carrying contraband mail and are now in prison themselves.

When, in the 1880s, the state of Ohio began threatening Standard Oil Trust of Ohio with the corporate death penalty, breaking up and dissolving the corporation and selling off its assets, John D. Rockefeller and his monopolist buddies publicly called for states to change their corporate governance laws to get around all of the restrictions that Ohio and most other states had placed on them. New Jersey heard the call and thus became the first state to engage in what was then called “charter-mongering” — changing its corporate charter rules to satisfy the desires of the nation’s largest businesses. In 1875, its legislature abolished maximum capitalization (size) limits.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Echoing the sentiments of Neil Howe’s new book The Fourth Turning Is Here, President Biden said this week... — What’s the status of the countdown to government closure? — How hate is overwhelming America. — The Texas activist who wants to end the separation of church and state has Mike Johnson’s ear. — The UN called out Amazon and Walmart for the terrible way they treat their employees. — Is the housing market headed for a 1980s style recession? — The “Hunger Games” for Medicaid have begun. — Why Trump is wrong that he’s exempt from the 14th Amendment. — Crazy Alert! MAGA Mike thinks the fall of the Roman Empire was due to “rampant homosexual behavior.”

Nothing, MAGA Mike argued, was more important than cutting back on the IRS’ ability to audit billionaires while reducing social program spending… Yesterday, House Speaker MAGA Mike Johnson gave his first press conference. The billionaires sure picked the right guy: his performance was flawless. Slick, slimy, and unctuous. For example, even though every dollar the IRS spends auditing billionaires produces between $6 and $12 in added tax revenue to our government, Johnson insisted with a straight face that we need to cut over $14 billion from the IRS’ budget to “fully pay for” a package of military aid to Israel. No reporter — as is so often the case when interviewing Republicans — was willing to point out what BS his pitch on behalf of his billionaire owners was. (Nobody wants to be banned from future press conferences or ignored during question time.)

Does the GOP want citizens to die young? Their priority, instead, is the profitability of the companies in their states & keeping the taxes on their oligarchs low… In the 1930s, after FDR rolled out programs to aid the homeless and unemployed across the country, America enjoyed a longer life expectancy — and more healthy years within that life expectancy — than any other wealthy nation. While some of that was due to the public health crisis echoing across Europe in the wake of World War I, it was largely because FDR’s Democrats in charge of the country were building schools and hospitals like there was no tomorrow. Republican President Eisenhower followed in that tradition through the 1950s, and in the 1960s LBJ rolled out Medicare and Medicaid. As a result, we continued to have the world’s best lifespans and quality-of-life. Then came Reagan’s austerity and neoliberalism campaigns in 1981 and America began to become unraveled.

Religious charlatans like Speaker MAGA Mike, exploiting a basic human urge to know the unknowable, to touch the mystery of life, are the most dangerous of all the various types of con men on Earth… Mike Johnson wants a religious litmus test for office holders, and thinks environmentalists are possessed by the Devil himself. This shows that his shtick is about power, not Christian religion. If it were about religion, he would be singing an entirely different tune... For them, it’s rarely about religion: instead, it’s all about controlling others and acquiring wealth and power for themselves. Which is why more people have been murdered in the name of religion than any other single cause. Certainly, charlatans like Johnson surround themselves with the trappings of religion. They pray in public with great fervor. They claim, with absolute certainty, that their particular god or holy book tells them who should be favored and who should be shunned. They know the rituals and behaviors that will give their god a smile or provoke his (it’s almost always a man) wrath.

America’s oligarchs have always known that their warnings about making people “dependent on government” and “lazy” were a scam… Cities across America (and around the world) are proving, with new Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiments, how wrong the old Republican canard really is. And what kind of damage it’s done to America during the 80 or so years it’s held the GOP in its thrall. The first time I heard it I thought it was profound wisdom. Of course, I was only 16 years old, but it still seemed pretty important.

Oligarchy is always a transitional system, typically a mere waystation in the shift from democracy to fascism or some other form of authoritarianism… Many of America’s oligarchs — the people whose great wealth and/or ownership of media properties gives them tremendous influence over our politics — believe they’re arguing for policies that will produce a “better” America. Or at least an America that’s better and safer for oligarchs and their families and businesses. Tragically, they’re wrong. Their support for GOP-aligned racist, “free market deregulation,” and climate denial policies are tearing America apart and will threaten their grandchildren every bit as much as they do yours and mine. Nonetheless, in America and increasingly around the world, oligarchs taking over the political dialogues of nations are all the rage. From America to Turkey to Russia to the Philippines, oligarchs have either risen to near-absolute power or bought off so many politicians that they have effective control of entire political parties and thus entire nations. Increasingly, America’s oligarch problem has become the world’s oligarchy problem, as country after country follows the GOP’s example and sidelines labor rights, women’s rights, voting rights, and democracy itself.