Hartmann Report

How authoritarian regimes fool their supporters — until the cost comes due… A new poll from CBS News finds that most Americans agree with Trump's policies of gutting protections for women and Black people while arresting and deporting Brown people here without documentation. Roughly two-thirds of respondents called him "tough," "energetic," "focused" and "effective." They think they are free.

Welcome to James Madison's nightmare: The very definition of Tyranny... So, JD Vance is now saying that he and Trump don't have to obey federal judges, tweeting, "judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power." This is how autocrats run things; it's an extraordinarily dangerous moment.

If the United States can get every eligible citizen registered to vote for a given election, the next hurdle is to make sure that voters are able to go to a polling place and actually cast a ballot. Fully 14 percent of registered voters who did not vote in the 2016 election reported that they were too busy or had a conflicted schedule, with another 12 percent reporting that they had an illness or disability, and another 8 percent reporting that they were out of town or away from home, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data in 2017. The US Constitution doesn’t specify when elections are to be held. Until 1845, each state was able to set its own date for elections. Before 1845, states held elections in the 34 days before the electors in the Electoral College voted.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Why every American should care about CBS settling 'dangerous' Trump lawsuit, even MAGA. — Elon Musk demands firing of 'disgusting and cruel' WSJ reporter who uncovered DOGE employee's racist tweets. — Trump tries to intimidate The Washington Post and columnist Eugene Robinson. — Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor calls out the Court's rightwingers on presidential immunity. — GOP bill bans prosecutors from going after officials who refuse to certify elections..say what?! — Trump administration orders states to halt EV charging programs.

Spies, secrets, and sabotage: America's adversaries couldn't have scripted a better betrayal than what Musk and Trump are doing… Donald Trump and Elon Musk have created a national security nightmare. On purpose. An unelected billionaire and his merry hacker band are rooting through our nation's secrets, poking around in your personal financial and medical records, and reportedly altering the computer code involved in paying our nation's bills. Most recently they gave a 23 year-old working for Musk access to our Department of Energy, which manages America's nuclear weapons arsenal. One of his teenage colleagues who is also rummaging through our nation's secrets reportedly runs websites in Russia.

He's firing the FBI, silencing the press, and dismantling Democracy: The window to fight back Is closing quickly... Trump wants FBI agents who investigated his coup attempt, his facilitating espionage, or his other financial and criminal activities fired. Let's be very clear: this is how dictatorships start. A guy who wants to be a dictator always begins by changing how the government works. Even though the majority of the nation had agreed previously that the government should do certain things in certain ways, he reassures everybody he's got a better way and it'll all work out. In the process, he breaks a bunch of laws, but people mostly shrug because they don't directly affect them. Pastor Niemöller wrote about this in 1930s Germany: "First they came for the government workers…"

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.