Hartmann Report

A historian's alarm: when these twelve familiar steps appear in a nation, the result is often irreversible—unless citizens rise up and demand otherwise… "A house divided against itself cannot stand." —Abraham Lincoln "The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people. To render us again one people, acting as one nation, should be the object of every man really a patriot."—Thomas Jefferson People are baffled. Why are Trump and his Republican lickspittles so intent on gutting our government, destroying our alliances and reputation around the world, and screwing working class people while transferring over $50 trillion from them to the morbidly rich?

When lies become policy and propaganda becomes identity, democracy itself is put at risk… Recently, I mentioned that when I was 13 years old I went door-to-door with my dad for Barry Goldwater. Three years later I was living on my own in East Lansing getting tear gassed and beaten for demonstrating against the Vietnam War and continuing segregation in the South. In other words, I’ve seen — and participated deeply — in both the right and left sides of American politics. Although his position against the Civil Rights Act was reprehensible, I took Goldwater at his word that it was based on his concern about federal overreach and the 10th Amendment; having read both his books, I came to deeply respect his principled stands, even though I also deeply disagreed with most of them. As most historians will confirm, Barry Goldwater believed what he said, and never, so far as I can find, knowingly lied to the American people. That was my dad’s Republican Party. They’d spin or shade the truth, but rarely told what they knew were naked lies. And many among them deeply believed in the principles they espoused. That party is dead.

History's tyrants followed this same path — and those citizens who failed to resist lost their nations forever… Most jobs have a "playbook," a sort of instruction manual or checklist for how to do the job right, whether it's running an assembly line, piloting an aircraft, or redoing a house's plumbing. Although our media seems oblivious to it, dictators have a playbook, too. It's one that's been carefully followed in recent times by Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan, Duterte, Bolsonaro, and numerous initially-elected leaders of other smaller nations. In previous generations the Dictator's Playbook was followed, step-by-step, by Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Marcos, Pinochet, Stalin, and Tojo (among others). And now it's being followed by Donald Trump and JD Vance, who're a bit more than halfway through the list.

Decades of disinformation have built a rightwing propaganda empire—now it’s aimed at silencing dissent. Trump’s assault on our elections system and the GOP’s successful 2024 effort to deny at least (according to official US government statistics) 4.2 million Americans their right to vote (which gave Trump the election and Republicans the House and Senate) was based on his 2020 Big Lie that our elections were corrupted by “millions” of “illegals” voting, along with “massive” voter fraud. They’re continuing that Big Lie (which the GOP first embraced in the 1960s with Operation Eagle Eye that intimidated mostly Hispanic and Native American voters) going forward, with some observers expecting as many as ten million Americans being denied their vote in 2028. But corrupting and stealing elections was just their first effort, starting back in the 1960s, the one that brought them to power. Now, with that power, they’re doing their best to gut the basic guardrails of our 250-year-old constitutional system with brand-new Big Lies.

Impeachment isn’t just a political strategy; it’s the last defense of our Constitution. Republicans must act now, decisively and unapologetically. If they do, they may yet save America and themselves… Donald Trump and many of the people surrounding him have become explicit threats to what’s left of our democratic republic. And now they’re saying that my (or your) simply saying those words may be enough to get us locked up or otherwise legally, financially, or physically destroyed. In 1964, like Hillary Clinton, I went door-to-door with my dad for Barry Goldwater, and later read both of his autobiographies, Conscience of a Conservative and With No Apologies. There’s no way Goldwater — or any Republican of that era — would tolerate the ways Trump and his toadies are ripping apart our constitutional order and flagrantly violating our laws and traditions. And now he’s trying to pick a Made-For-Fox “News” fight in Portland; if one kid throws a Molotov cocktail, it will become the justification for another massive loss of our constitutional rights of free speech and assembly all across the nation. Cheered on by rightwing media for profit. If Republicans don’t stand up soon and impeach Trump — and demand Vance reflect the traditional values of republican democracy or similarly face impeachment — history will judge them beyond harshly.

Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas. —Lord Acton To say that Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek were both traumatized and influenced by their respective brushes with Nazism would be an understatement. Mises suffered the indignity of Hitler’s gestapo rummaging through his apartment in March of 1938, seizing 21 boxes of his papers and taking over his apartment. Two years later, Mises fled to the United States, where, ironically, he advocated many of Hitler’s racial ideas and even integrated them into his economic ideology.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — On the Democrat's demand that Trump and the GOP undo their cuts to Obamacare and Medicaid to avoid a government shutdown, Trump's White House is giving them (and us) the middle finger. Literally. — Trump outs Elon Musk for being in the Epstein files, according to Congressman Eric Swalwell. — America goes full banana republic as Trump plays dictator and succeeds in finding a lawyer who'll step into the DOJ and prosecute James Comey. More revenge prosecutions are expected. — Wannabee King Trump threatens to relocate the World Cup from Blue states to Red ones. — Every country that's put its central bank equivalent of our Federal Reserve under political instead of professional control has ended up with rampant inflation and economic disaster. — Moldova is getting a 2016 US election-like treatment from Russia . — Arizona Republican Congressman John Gillette calls for Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal to be hanged. Seriously. — Trump shows — with billions of our tax dollars — how wannabee authoritarians like to stick together. — France has figured out how to deal with corrupt former presidents. Somebody should tell Merrick Garland. — Get ready for your drug prices to jump as much as 100 percent next month. — Geeky Science: Contrary to what Trump and Bob Kennedy told us this week, pregnant women who fail to take Tylenol during pregnancy for fever are putting their unborn children at risk. — Crazy Alert! Is your dentist also trying to scare or hurt you because you're a liberal? This one brags about it! — Hunter in a Farmer's World: Tossing: ADHD's Hidden Signal — Wisdom School: Can Silence Be a Kind of Universal Medicine?

The world has often seen great wars ignited not by inevitability, but by weakness, hesitation, and betrayal. Cowards playing with matches. History shows that one of the biggest risk factors for war is an autocratic leader who fears for his own future. Which is why the kind of pathetic incoherence we saw at the United Nations this week should concern us all. This week’s news brings some alarming data points.

Dark money, foreign payoffs, and dangerous lies are pushing what's left of our government to the edge… If his lips move, he's lying. Or trying to solicit a bribe. Or slandering Democrats. Or, today, taking hostages. Most recently, he's started lying about what congressional Democrats are demanding in exchange for giving the GOP the votes they need in the Senate to keep the government open past October 1. And now, just this morning, they've announced that they're taking hostages. Federal employees will be fired, rather than temporarily furloughed, if there is a government shutdown. But I'll get to that in a moment; it isn't where he started lying, bribe-getting, and slandering Democrats this week.

This is not law and order: it's monarchy enforced by fear and lawsuits… FCC Chairman Carr, wearing a gold pin of Donald Trump's head that eerily resembles an old Mao pin I bought in Beijing in 1988, went after Jimmy Kimmel again just hours before he was back on the air last night. He also mentioned station licenses again, in what seems like a thinly-veiled threat, when he tweeted: "Democrats just keep digging themselves a deeper & deeper hole on Kimmel. They simply can't stand that local TV stations—for the first time in years—stood up to a national programmer & chose to exercise their lawful right to preempt programming. We need to keep empowering local TV stations to serve their communities of license." Meanwhile, Trump's revenge prosecutor is reportedly demanding information on the FBI agent who was first to see the Sandy Hook carnage and testified against Alex Jones. As I lay out in my new book, The Last American President, this is how terror and intimidation work. This is how free speech and the rule of law die. It's how kings rule, not elected presidents of democratic republics. And this is how power enforces obedience: by making an example out of person after person, news outlet after news outlet, comedian after comedian, until the rest of us are too afraid to speak.