Hartmann Report

When I was starting and building small businesses, I never relied on a member of Congress or a government agency to do me a favor or bend the rules. I have never given campaign contributions to politicians in hopes of getting favors that would help my business. I have never hired a lobbyist to try to amend laws that would serve my financial interest. And this is generally true of all the hundreds of thousands of sole proprietors and partnerships and small businesses across America. But that is not how big-time corporate America operates. To them making large campaign contributions and spending millions of dollars each year on lobbyists is just another investment that pays off handsomely. Their motto (in behavior, if not in fact) is You’ve got to pay to play.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Vlad gets red carpet, and Trump gets Epstein off the front pages. — Fascism is all about "performances of strength" and masked ICE agents just blew it outside Gavin Newsom's press conference. — California Democrats light the fuse: gerrymander bill rocks the GOP. Newsom's proposed legislation to allow California to gerrymander is called the "Election Rigging Response Act," and it has a few Republicans terrified. — Is the lid coming off inflation? — The hostile takeover of DC is seeing cracks. — Trump tries to strongarm Norway into giving him a Nobel Prize. — Weird Alert! More Than Two Dozen People Linked to Jeffrey Epstein Have Died Under Mysterious Circumstances?

When governments rewrite reality and the press goes along, cruelty becomes invisible and the public becomes complicit… We're all familiar with Trump's famous deportation flights of Venezuelans and Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a concentration camp in El Salvador in violation of a court's order. But did you know there have been over 1,000 such flights in the past few months, some to absolute hellhole countries?

Are Trump and Putin Using Gaza as the Blueprint to Shackle Ukraine? This is what happens when cynical, greedy, amoral billionaires and psychopaths run a country. The Times of London (Murdoch-owned) is reporting that billionaire Steve Witkoff, billionaire Donald Trump, and billionaire Vladimir Putin have worked out a model behind the scenes to solve the Ukraine problem: just make it like Gaza. They’re planning, according to this reporting, to fully respect the borders of Ukraine and the country’s sovereignty, but with one catch. Just like Israel did with Gaza, Ukraine can “self-govern” but all political and economic decisions will be made or approved by Moscow, all funds flowing through Moscow, just like the governments of Gaza and the West Bank are subservient to the whims of Netanyahu and the Israeli Knesset.

Deploying troops without police training, defying the courts, and threatening the media, Trump is importing dictator tactics in plain sight and daring Americans to stop him... He says he's deploying the military to Washington DC because of a "crime emergency," but armies don't do policing: Their job, and their training, is to blow things up and kill people. They have no training in evidence-chain-of-custody, arrest procedures, civil rights protections, criminal investigation, or any other aspect of policing. Sending a militia to do policing is like inviting the neighborhood butcher to perform your brain surgery. In America, it's also illegal. Under Posse Comitatus, the American military is explicitly forbidden from engaging in any police activities against civilian populations. Even though the Trump administration is bragging that the National Guard arrested almost 50 people yesterday in DC, the Posse Comitatus Act consists of just one sentence: "Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both." Armies are really good, however, at facing down large crowds of protestors.

If Republicans are winning by rigging elections, can Democrats really afford to stay 'ethical' and still win? Democrats are at least 17 years late to the party and damn well better catch up soon if they want to win the House (or Senate) in next year's election. The history — and lack of Democratic response — is shocking. While a state must go to court to take away your gun, five Republicans on the US Supreme Court have refused to enforce the "right to vote" provisions of the National Voting Registration Act of 1993 so states don't even have to notify you when they steal take away your vote. And, wow, are Republicans committed to taking away your vote!

As the Nation teeters on the edge of authoritarianism, what will it take to defend democracy and constitutional order? There's no sugarcoating the truth: As fascism's grip tightens under Trump and the GOP, America's government no longer operates as a constitutional republic. The ostensible oaths to "support and defend the Constitution" are hollow, a ghost script read aloud while the regime marches America toward authoritarian collapse in the mode of Russia and Hungary. Every federal institution now performs in synchronous mimicry of Dear Orange Leader's unraveling psyche: false justifications, lop-sided pretenses of accountability, cosplay theater designed more for emotional spectacle than legal legitimacy, accelerating escalation at every turn. Nothing — literally nothing organized or passed by Republicans in the last 44 years — was built to uplift average Americans. It's all been engineered for power consolidation, GOP single-party rule, the wealth of the morbidly rich, and narrative control.

If somebody had set your house on fire, killing your child and pets, and then your city demanded that you give that somebody hundreds of dollars a year for the next decade, how would you feel? Families across America have lost their homes, family members, and livelihoods to wildfires, floods, extreme heat and cold, mile-wide tornadoes, bomb cyclones, heat domes, hurricanes, and drought caused by today’s climate emergency, but nonetheless they have to pay taxes subsidizing the fossil fuel industry that helped cause this global crisis.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — So, let me get this straight: Because of Trump’s tariffs, Americans will pay 18.3% more for food and products while manufacturing is not returning (we’ve lost over 100,000 manufacturing jobs since Trump became president again), and the top 100 big business CEOs and stockholders are raking in an extra $1.2 trillion in personal income because of the new Trump tax cuts while Trump destroys unions for government workers. Does this sound fair? — James Carville tells Democrats to ‘save democracy’ by adding states and packing the Supreme Court. — Texas Republicans are resorting to threats and intimidation in their effort to rig the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential election with their extreme gerrymander. — The Epstein Files: Will Joe Rogan speak truth to power or become Trump’s fixer in chief? — Trump calls for new US census that excludes undocumented immigrants. — Get ready for more expensive gas, more pollution, worse severe weather, and bigger profits and paychecks for the fossil fuel billionaires who own the GOP. — Crazy Alert! All bow to the #2 king? — Video of the Day: The Trump administration is bragging that they’ve put a guy who, on January 6th encouraged rioters to “kill” police officers, into a well-paid senior position.

The battlefield is no longer overseas. It's your city. Your rights. Your voice. And the military is no longer standing guard: it's standing in the way… After a couple of wannabe carjackers punched out Big Balls in DC, Trump used it as an excuse to threaten to take over the city and bring in the National Guard to police it, in a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. This despite the fact that crime in Washington DC is at a 30-year low and the city already has the largest police force, per capita, of any municipality in America. None of that matters; Trump wants to turn America into a police state, just like every other dictator in the world does when they get ahold of a democracy. They steal from the people, enrich their cronies, break laws with impunity, and then use police agencies to terrorize the general populace, judges, and legislators into docility and submission when they object. In fact, they told us this was their goal. They showed us. They planned it in writing. A leaked memo from inside the Department of Homeland Security reveals what many of us feared but hoped we were wrong about: that the military is no longer a last resort in American governance. It's now a first tool. A central player. A political weapon, just like in Russia.