Hartmann Report

A virus needs its host: The Republican Party has provided the platform, the protection, and the power that allowed Trump’s assault on democracy to flourish... We’ve spent years watching Donald Trump attack our democratic institutions, inflame divisions, and corrupt the public discourse. But focusing solely on Trump misses the larger, more disturbing reality: Trump isn’t acting alone. He’s a dangerous pathogen that found the perfect host in today’s Republican Party, an organism already compromised and eager to be infected. The evidence of this dangerous symbiosis is alarming and immediate. Just days ago, America crossed a threshold that should chill every citizen who still believes in the rule of law.

Musk. Trump. Putin. Labor spies. Stolen data. This isn't a thriller. It's what's happening inside your government — right now… America is under siege, but not by foreign armies or rogue terrorists. Instead, the threat is coming from inside the house: unelected billionaires who are quietly hijacking our democratic institutions from within. Although it's entirely possible that they are collaborating with foreign autocrats, including Vladimir Putin, who are also billionaires and thus share their unique authoritarian worldview. And thanks to the bravery of a whistleblower named Daniel Berulis, we now have a window into what may well be one of the most brazen and dangerous power grabs in American history.

Trump defied the Supreme Court and had a lawful U.S. resident deported into a foreign prison. The next one could be you... What distinguishes [a concentration camp] from a prison (in the modern sense) is that incarceration in a concentration camp is independent of any judicial sentence or even indictment, and is not subject to judicial review. —United States Holocaust Museum Yesterday was the day democracy in our nation officially died. We no longer live in the America we grew up in: "The land of the free and the home of the brave." The country the rest of the world looked up to and depended on. The country that claimed to follow the rule of law, and valued compassion and the protection of its most vulnerable people. We are now in the midst of a outright coup against the Constitution, against the United States, and against our founding ideals: Donald Trump proclaimed it yesterday when he openly defied the Supreme Court and our founding documents with a sneer, and his neofascist sycophants chuckled and giggled in the Oval Office.

History warns us: every major economic crash has led to a world war. Trump's corruption, debt, and tariffs may be lighting the fuse… In three weeks, on my birthday May 7th, it'll be exactly 80 years since Germany signed terms of surrender at the headquarters of US General Dwight D. Eisenhower in Reims, France. That year, 1945, also signaled the official end of the Republican Great Depression. And May 7 of this year may well signal the beginning of the Second Republican Great Depression, the fourth major economic crash in our history. Troublingly, every one of the prior three financial crises also tripped off a major war.

Back in the 1980s a lot of us worked like hell to try to stop the Reagan Revolution. We failed. Which is why the next few years may be our last chance to save American democracy, our environment, and what’s left of the American Dream. When my Boomer generation was the same average age as the Millennial generation is today, back in 1990, our generation held 21.3% of the nation’s wealth.[i] Louise and I shared in that wealth; although we were still in our 30s, in 1990 we owned a profitable small business (our fourth) and a nice home in suburban Atlanta. Our own locally owned business, a home of our own, and the knowledge that our kids would have more opportunities than we did: that was, in fact, one common way of defining the “American dream.” It was normal then.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Trump's legal serfs: when law firms bow to the Don. — The Empire shudders: how Trump's trade tantrum could trigger America's fall. — Was there a "lack of urgency" in the Supreme Court deportation ruling about the Maryland father wrongly deported to El Salvador's most notorious prison? You Betcha... Will the Republican justices keep sucking up to Trump? Is a frog's ass watertight? — Seniors are first in the line of fire as Trump's tariff bomb explodes. — Authoritarian Alert! There's a new dress code in Trump's Washington, and it's straight out of a dictator's playbook. — The SAVE Act: What could possibly go wrong with the House-passed bill requiring proof of citizenship to vote — Hillary sends out a warning about it — I've been warning about this for months! — Crazy Alert! The next market crash or maybe even a war may be engineered by a robot — and nobody will be accountable. — Hunter in a Farmer's World: ADHD: Budget in "Blow-Out" Time — Wisdom School: Imprinting Reality: The Mystery of Mental Influence — Disgraced wanna-be dictator quits presidential palace in shame: Could we take some lessons here in America?

Trump's not interested in governing. He's rewriting the rules, tearing down institutions, and replacing democracy with spectacle and submission... Everything Donald Trump is doing and will do makes perfect and sudden sense if you understand one simple fact: For him, it's all a show. He views the White House as a sound stage, like the set made to look like a boardroom where he performed for NBC on The Apprentice. He sees the people around him as a supporting cast, who can each be easily and quickly replaced (and often are) if they fail to play their roles the way he thinks will work best for the program. Partly, this is because this is all he knows how to do. He was a terribly incompetent businessman, pissing away his father's entire fortune on a series of businesses that he ran into the ground, one after the other.

Trump's order to investigate truth-tellers isn't just abuse of power—it's a test of whether we still have a republic… The highest form of freedom in a democracy isn't just the right to vote or protest — it's the right to speak truth to power. To call out corruption. To challenge lies. To stand firm when the powerful demand silence. This is the freedom that sustains all others. And it's the one Donald Trump tried to crush yesterday with the stroke of a pen.

Manufacturing jobs alone didn’t build postwar prosperity — organized labor did. And Trump is killing it... Donald Trump is selling his economic chaos with a simple story: “In the years 1945-1981, before Reagan and Clinton (and pretty much all of both parties) embraced ‘free trade’ neoliberalism, a single worker in an American factory could buy a house, take a nice vacation every year, get a new car every two or three years, put his kids through college, and retire with a comfortable pension. All because we made things in America. “When the Free Trade era began, it took 90,000 factories and 40 million high-paying jobs with it to China and other low-wage countries, which kicked off the immiseration of the middle class. To get back to that prosperity, all we need to do is use tariffs to force manufacturing back to the US.” It’s a story that makes a lot of sense to those who’d lived through that “golden age of manufacturing” era, and the younger workers who see it portrayed in movies and on TV or hear the stories from their grandparents. But it overlooks one massive reality: it wasn’t the factories that created the middle class, it was the unions.

Trump, Musk, and the GOP have hotwired our democracy, stripped it for parts, and are selling the pieces to the highest bidder while telling us to enjoy the ride. What happens when a country stops pretending to care about democracy and just lets the billionaires run wild? Look no further than Putin's Russia — a place where wealth buys protection, loyalty buys power, and corruption isn't hidden, it's institutionalized. Now, under Donald Trump's return to power, Elon Musk's tightening grip on federal spending, and a GOP entirely beholden to dark money, America is no longer just flirting with that model — we're fast becoming it. This is the story of how the U.S. is being hollowed out from the inside, not by foreign enemies, but by our own billionaire oligarchs.