Hartmann Report

When a gentle, thoughtful, holy man like Pope Leo XIV denounces what Trump has done by killing thousands in an illegal and unnecessary war of choice — he called it a “scandal to ​the whole human family” yesterday — the world knows our president has descended into something truly and profoundly evil. There’s a single through-line connecting everything happening to us right now, and it all has to do with the damaged, broken, deranged man in the White House.

History shows us that societies that fail to honestly confront (and teach their children about) their darkest chapters are, more often than not, doomed to repeat them. Germany’s unflinching confrontation with its Nazi past—through education, memorials, and legal accountability—stands in stark contrast to Japan’s reluctance to fully acknowledge its wartime atrocities, or to America’s halting efforts to address our legacy of slavery (and the ongoing “Lost Cause” Confederate mythos) as well as the (ongoing) genocide against this continent’s Indigenous peoples. The consequences of this collective amnesia are all around us, from the Confederate flags on January 6th to the new efforts to strip science and history from our schools. When we fail to teach children about the horrors of the Holocaust, for example, anti-Semitism resurges. When we allow Confederate monuments to stand unchallenged, white nationalism finds fertile ground. When we call January 6th “legitimate political discourse” (as multiple Republican elected officials have done) rather than the attempted coup that it was, we prepare the soil for the next, potentially successful insurrection.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — A Dangerous Deal Behind Closed Doors: Is Trump Letting Putin Reshape U.S. Foreign Policy? — Cuban Missile Crisis 2.0: Will Trump Confront Putin, or Fold? — Will Colombia be the next country Trump invades or whose leadership he tries to decapitate? — America’s Healthcare Collapse Is Here, and It Was Written Into Law. — Another death in ICE custody: How many more before anyone is held accountable? — Meet the new Kyrsten Sinema: John Fetterman.

How decades of corporate power and political strategy rewired the country from within… Donald Trump lied us into a war with Iran that now threatens to ignite the globe. He’s been accused of raping 13-year-old girls. He made a shocking joke in the White House yesterday, speaking with the Prime Minister of Japan, about Pearl Harbor, provoking an international incident. He attacked Venezuela and is now threatening Cuba. And whatever Vladimir Putin wants, Trump gives him. The man is poison. But it sure as hell didn’t begin with him.

Or arrested and dragged off by ICE...at least not yet... This afternoon, our internet provider lost all functionality for much of the city of Portland for several hours, business service included, and took us entirely off the air about 20 minutes before the end of the show. A few listeners and viewers were freaking out on social media and in comments, wondering if I’d finally been arrested and dragged off by ICE or worse. And, in fact, I will be gone for a little while and intended to announce it at the end of the show but we crashed before I got to it. Our good friend Jefferson Smith will be filling in for me for the next week. Again, I am not in a detention center! (At least yet.) What’s going on is that I have a brand new book coming out on July 7, and Louise and I have a bunch of details we must take care of so we’re taking a few days off. But don’t worry, we’ll be back on the air a week from Monday.

From red deer to Mesoamerica to America today, the evidence is overwhelming: bottom-up systems endure, top-down systems fail… FCC Chairman and apparent Goebbels fanboy Brendan Carr is suggesting the radio and TV broadcasters he regulates should begin airing more "pro-America" content. What he means, of course, is pro-Trump. This illustrates a much larger reality: Republicans want a top-down, hierarchical political and economic system. Democrats want a bottom-up system with maximum participation and broad sharing of society's wealth. Who is right?

What he saw from inside the system, and why his departure signals that the guardrails are collapsing faster than anyone on the outside fully understands… Trump is dismantling our American democracy with alarming speed and the resignation of the Trump-appointed Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, is a symptom of it. Kent, a hardcore MAGA Republican who ran two failed, Trump-endorsed campaigns for Congress before Trump put him in charge of counterterrorism, was adjacent to the very highest levels of our national security apparatus, had all the inside information, and not only resigned but salted the earth on his way out, writing: "Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby." As I've noted in previous articles, Saudi Arabia and the UAE wanted America to strike Iran and had collectively given billions to Kushner and Trump. Netanyahu desperately needed a war with Iran to insure his re-election this year to keep him out of prison. And Putin wanted the Strait of Hormuz closed so the price of oil would go up and rescue his floundering economy.

How Reagan's secret betrayal of America during the Iran hostage crisis helped him win the presidency, killed Carter's clean-energy revolution, and helped create today's crisis in the Strait of Hormuz… On Sunday's State of the Union show, UN Ambassador Mike Waltz said that Trump was going to reach out to our allies to "demand their participation to help their own economies" by bringing in military hardware and troops to help us open the Strait of Hormuz. Yesterday, Trump whined about it at the White House, saying he is "testing" them. Much to their dismay, the other countries of the world are largely echoing German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who said on Monday, "This is not our war, and we didn't start it." It shouldn't have been our war, either, and wouldn't be if Reagan hadn't committed treason to become president and then sold the GOP to the fossil fuel industry. Today we're paying the price for that Republican perfidy.

As bombs fall and soldiers die, Jared Kushner is reportedly seeking billions from the same Gulf states pushing America toward conflict… There are several clear winners from Trump's attack on Iran: — Russia, who can again fund their violence against Ukraine with new oil revenue and now claims their unprovoked attack on that nation is consistent with this new Trump Doctrine; — Saudi Arabia, which has long hated Iran and lobbied since at least 2008 for the US to attack that country; — the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which has similarly pushed America to attack Iran since at least 2010; — the American defense weapons industry, which is making additional billions; — Don Jr. and Eric who have taken a big position in a drone-manufacturing business, getting them in on the Pentagon gravy train; — Donald Trump himself, who's succeeded in largely pushing Epstein off the front page; — and Benjamin Netanyahu, who's called for American strikes against Iran since 1992 and will stay out of prison as long as the war continues.

Pope Leo XIV labeled AI one of the main threats facing humanity, saying it poses challenges to human dignity, justice, and labor. He’s right, but it’s even worse than that; AI represents, unless it’s rigorously regulated, a threat to democracy itself. In every generation, the enemies of democracy change costumes, nations, and languages, but their playbook remains eerily familiar. They lie, divide, intimidate, and exploit every available tool to consolidate power. In the 1930s they used newspapers and radio, in the 2010s it was social media, and now, in 2025, the newest and most dangerous weapon in the authoritarian arsenal is artificial intelligence. Make no mistake: AI isn’t just another “new technology.” It’s power, scaled. And in the hands of the hard right that is trying to end our republican form of government, it has the potential to become the most effective tool for dismantling democracy ever invented.