Hartmann Report

How America’s ultra-rich dismantled democracy, one Supreme Court ruling at a time… There is one thread that ties together Trump’s destruction of American government agencies, his offer to take the Gaza crisis off Israel’s hands and dump it on our military, and senators’ and representatives’ failure to challenge him: This is how kingdoms operate. Rule by decree. It proves that we’re asking the wrong question.

America was built to reject kings, theocrats, and the morbidly rich — It's the same playbook, different century… The author of the Declaration of Independence went to great lengths, on numerous occasions (as I detail in What Would Jefferson Do?), to point out that when he and his colleagues started the United States of America they were explicitly rejecting — in favor of democracy — the men (they were all men back then) who drove the "three historic tyrannies": kings/autocrats, theocrats/popes, and morbidly rich oligarchs. For two thousand years before Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Paine, Adams, Revere, and their colleagues created our checks-and-balances system of republican democracy, every country in the world was ruled by one of those three. Today, of the 167 countries on Earth, only 74 are democracies, and only 24 of those are "fully democratic." And now, because of the GOP, America stands on the verge of losing that status.

The inaction of high profile and leadership Democrats is not just weakness — it's a betrayal of Democratic principles and thus our nation... Is Trump's, Musk's, and Putin's coup against democracy complete? Under the guise of a 44-year campaign to reverse the middle-class advances of the New Deal and Great Society, rightwing billionaires and the Republicans they own have pushed a fundamentally fascist agenda that is now openly at war with America. They are engaging in a coup, finishing the work Trump started on January 6, 2021. Trump is nakedly breaking the law right in front of the entire country, just as progressive Democrats have been predicting. Not a single elected Republican has had the courage to try to stop him or even speak out against his lawlessness, and only a handful of Democrats have found that fearlessness. That has to change.

In the lead-up to the 2018 midterms, the Economist ran an article that clearly laid out how the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the preclearance provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and how states took that to mean that it was open season to purge state voter rolls. The article quotes research from the Brennan Center for Justice that found that “nearly 16 million voters were removed from the rolls between 2014 and 2016. That is almost 4 million more than were purged between 2006 and 2008. The increased purging far exceeds population growth or the growing number of registered voters.” This is a system failure that automatic voter registration would not necessarily fix.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — The GOP's 60-Year Conspiracy to Kill Our Democracy: None Dare Call It Treason—But I Will — This plane crisis shows Trump can't handle a crisis- we're going to have to hold our breath for the next 4 years.... — The FAA report on crash is out - and it's an indictment of Trump... — We have another "hair in fire" moment on with Musk being involved in our Government — People are trying to simplify the message — Is using AI facial recognition to identify, arrest, and deport anti-Netanyahu protestors here in the US, coming up next? — 'They're both dangerous': Senators worried Patel and Gabbard refused constitutional pledge..shouldn't everyone be worried about this?

It all traces back to billionaire-backed fearmongering in the 1960s—weaponizing panic around socialism and communism to crush unions, cut taxes, and hoard profits... In Wednesday's Daily Take here on Hartmann Report, I mentioned Russell Kirk and the origins of today's hard right GOP. A few people replied with, "Who's that?" and similar questions; others were incredulous that Republicans actually believed the middle class created by FDR's New Deal was a bad thing. So, here's the backstory to what I mentioned. I was thirteen years old in 1964 when my dad, a Republican activist, gave me a copy of John Stormer's book "None Dare Call It Treason." The Goldwater campaign had sent it to him, and its claim that the State Department was filled with communists intent on handing America over to the USSR had his friends buzzing. Ironically, Stormer's book and the movement it ignited within the GOP is largely responsible for that party today standing on the precipice of fully endorsing fascism as an alternative to democracy in the US.

The GOP would be screaming "Cop Killer" every single day — so why aren't Democrats holding Trump to the same standard? In your mind, turn the tables for a moment. If Barack Obama had sent a murderous mob against the Capitol and they had beaten and pepper-sprayed Officer Brian Sicknick so badly he suffered two strokes and died the next day, how would Republicans refer to the so-called "J6 rioters"? Is there any doubt in your mind that they'd be calling them "Cop killers"? Every day, day after day, in every venue possible? And if Obama pardoned them, they'd be demanding impeachment right now? If Bill Clinton had denied security to military or intelligence officers like Mark Milley or John Bolton who were under death threats from Iran, what would Republicans say? You know they'd be charging Clinton with attempted murder, saying he was no better than a mob boss who'd sanctioned a hit. If Joe Biden had started shipping white supremacists convicted of criminal acts to Guantanamo, what would the GOP be claiming non-stop? We'd never hear the end about his sanctioning torture, murder, and how the entire offshore enterprise was unconstitutional and illegal. They'd call him Ayatollah Biden. And that's just scratching the tiniest surface of opportunities Democrats have blown in the past week to attack Trump and Republicans for very real violations of law, norms, and the Constitution.

Slashing Medicaid, gutting government, and handing power to billionaires — this is the endgame for a man intent on destroying our country… Yesterday, the Medicaid payment portal was shut down in all 50 states; they came back up when a federal judge put Trump's illegal impoundment of federal funds on hold until February 3rd. And it wasn't just Medicaid. The Trump administration shut down Pell grants, federally supported student loans, veterans homeless shelters, veterans suicide prevention programs, school meals, home heating assistance, housing assistance, food stamps, food for women and infants, childcare, Headstart, child abuse investigations, rape crisis centers, and hundreds of other programs. Why? Because Trump is trying to gut the federal government the same way Mitt Romney gutted Clear Channel when I did my show from one of their studios a decade ago.

A collapsing America is a billionaire's paradise, and Trump's all in… Democrats are warning that Trump's threats to increase our national debt by as much as $7 trillion (with new tax cuts for billionaires), shift billions of Treasury dollars into crypto, and impose tariffs on imported goods risk creating a financial crises and maybe even a second Republican Great Depression. After all, tariffs will jack up inflation, crypto is incredibly volatile, and increasing the national debt will pull hundreds of billions out of the treasury in interest payments that could have otherwise been used to help the American people, rebuild our infrastructure, and upgrade our schools. Any of the three could trip off a national economic emergency: all three could be a perfect storm. Trump, though, seems unconcerned, even though Republican economists are also signaling their alarm. Which raises the question: Why is he so willing to risk an economic crash on his watch with these risky policies?

From fireside chats to Facebook failures: Why Democrats keep losing the media war... Saturday afternoon, Donald Trump held a rally in Las Vegas. It was streamed and mentioned on social media millions of times within an hour of his repeating his "No tax on tips" mantra. By the time Facebook, Meta, X, TikTok, and Instagram were done with the weekend, using their now-heavily-tilted-to-Republicans algorithms, it's safe to bet Trump's rally got hundreds of millions of impressions. Senator Chuck Schumer, meanwhile, read the most boring speech ever on the floor of the Senate condemning Trump, evoking the Democratic version of the old "tree falls in the forest" question. I listened to it online (couldn't find it on social media), but, frankly, it was so deadly tedious that I can't remember a word he said. Being media savvy — and exploiting the hottest new media — isn't a new thing. You'd think Democrats would have figured this out by now; they sure did in past generations.