Hartmann Report

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — Is this going to be Trump‘s and the GOP’s strategy this fall? — Bernie Sanders explains the appeal of democratic socialism to a Fox “News” reporter. — Affordability is tanking under Trump. — Republicans want legislation to force people to work in deadly heat if that’s what their employers demand. — “Explosive Trumparreah” spreads across the US, along with measles, while Bob Kennedy says, “Everything’s under control.” — The Social Security reckoning will become a BFD as the trust fund runs low. — Forever chemicals may be causing ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, and colorectal cancer in young people.

Every eighty years America's oligarchs have tried to bury democracy. Three times they failed. This time they've dismantled the election's guardrails before the votes are even cast… “As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there’s a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.” —William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice 1939-1975 Trump, his billionaire buddies, and his Republican lickspittles appear to be setting up a possible massive fraud with regard to this fall’s election. It could signal the end of American democracy. We democracy-loving Americans have fought oligarchy 3 times on these shores, roughly every 80 years. Each time, we defeated the morbidly rich and established or re-established popular democracy and a government that put working class people ahead of the oligarchs. This time, the oligarchs are behaving like they believe they can win, and the measures our billionaire oligarch-in-chief are taking right now should put every American on alert, if not provoke immediate impeachment.

For 45 years, billionaires and their political allies have weaponized hate, divided Americans, and quietly dismantled the middle class while we fought each other instead of them… In his 1961 Farewell Address to the Nation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said: “America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.” Apparently “dreadful fear and hate” have won. A new Lloyd’s Register (the institution dates back to the 1760s) Global Risk Poll of citizens of 140 countries around the world found that one-in-ten (10%) Americans say that politics represents the biggest risk in their lives (above disease and accidents, even).

Every authoritarian system begins by targeting someone else, until the circle widens to include critics, opponents, and ordinary citizens… We have a lot of metaphors for it; the camel’s nose under the tent, the foot in the door, where there’s smoke there’s fire, and the handwriting on the wall, among others. Every police state in history started this way. As the White House declared last week in a press release: “Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.” First, they built the infrastructure based on what the public widely perceived as a real public safety and economic problem.

The lettuce outbreak is just the beginning. This is the story of how, thanks to GOP politicians, corporate cash rewrites America's laws and why ordinary people keep paying the price…. As I write this, federal investigators are chasing the worst cyclospora outbreak in decades, thousands of people across more than thirty states doubled over with what the CDC delicately calls “frequent and sometimes explosive diarrhea,” and they still can’t tell you for certain which farm it came from. Over the weekend, after the $7 billion company’s CEO visited the White House, the FDA walked back a positive test on lettuce from Taylor Farms, the largest salad producer in North America, announcing that its own earlier finding of cyclospora had somehow turned out to be a false positive. That leaves thousands of sickened Americans with no confirmed source at all, which is a peculiar place to land in a country that once prided itself on knowing where its dinner came from. The reason nobody can trace it back isn’t much of a mystery. Back in March of 2025 Trump’s FDA and it’s boss, Bob Kennedy, delayed its new Food Traceability Rule by thirty months, shoving the deadline to track high-risk foods like leafy greens from the field to your plate all the way out to 2028. Six days after that delay went public, Taylor Fresh Foods, the parent company of Taylor Farms, cut a million dollar check to Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC, part of the $2.2 million it has steered to Republican committees this cycle.

From Zeus to Abraham to modern Iran, Christopher Nolan's film illuminates the timeless warning against turning trust into a weapon… When you go to see Christopher Nolan’s new epic film The Odyssey (as Louise and I did on Saturday), you’ll be bathed in the revelation that Trump and his military lickspittles are breaking the most ancient law that created what we today call western civilization. The movie even explains Iran’s rageful response to Trump’s violations of “Zeus’ Law” and tells us of the possible consequences of his illegal and morally criminal attack on that country (which had not attacked us first) as his war of choice plays out.

The colonists who fought the American Revolution and wrote our Constitution knew well who and what were the most dangerous enemies of democracy. It wasn’t just King George III; it was his British East India Company, the most powerful corporation in the world. This is why the Constitution never mentions corporations and why our nation’s Founders would have been horrified by corporate constitutional rights. Instead of a nation ruled by oligarchs and their businesses, the Founders and Framers of the Constitution envisioned a nation of independent citizens, small farmers, entrepreneurs, and journeymen who owned the fruit of their labor and enjoyed a continually improving standard of living. Although Hamilton’s vision was more industrial and Jefferson’s more agrarian, both saw a future for our nation, in their own ways, that we today call the American Dream.

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — The Trump administration has now openly threatened to imprison American election officials who won’t let it “help” run this fall’s elections. — Turns out that when you spend 45 years transferring the nation’s wealth to the top, the people at the bottom eventually notice. — And here’s the punchline the consultant class is going to spend all weekend trying not to say out loud: “democratic socialist” now polls better than “MAGA.” — Fox “News” covered Trump’s election-fraud address the way a cat covers what’s in the litter box. — Texas has decided that five million public school children will study the Bible whether their families are Christian or not, and Jewish leaders are pointing out — politely, which is more than the state deserves — that this always ends badly. — Senate Republicans just voted to let an AI algorithm with a financial stake in saying “no” decide whether your mother gets her knee fixed. — Congress is about to make you permanently jet-lagged, and the science says don’t. — Geeky Science Alert! The stick shift is dying, and it’s taking something with it that we’re going to miss more than we know.

The question is no longer whether Trump will contest defeat this fall. It's whether America's institutions—and its citizens—are prepared to stop him when he does… Last night, Donald Trump essentially told us exactly what he will do this November. When reports start coming in that the Democrats are winning this fall, he will send in the troops. He’ll point back to last night’s speech and tell the nation: “I told you so. I warned you. They rigged the election for the Democrats and now I have to stop it.” He’ll mobilize ICE and the National Guard’s “Rapid Reaction Force” that he’s assembled over the past six months to seize ballot boxes and crush the inevitable “insurrection” — protests in the streets against his seizing ballot boxes — by “left-wing communist radical domestic terrorists.” He’ll declare a state of emergency, invoke his NSPM-7, and blame it on a foreign country and/or “Antifa.” He’ll declare protesting a crime, and tear gas will fill our streets.

Control information. Intimidate opponents. Capture institutions. Rewrite reality. And the final box may be closer than Americans think... Tonight at 9 p.m., Donald Trump will commandeer prime-time television for what he’s billing as a speech about “free and fair elections,” promising “really big news” and reportedly planning to unveil what his people describe as “newly declassified intelligence” about “foreign (Chinese Communist Party) interference” in the 2020 election. Two days ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson stood at a podium and told America why the Pentagon needs an extra $350 billion: “We’re fighting communism on our own shores.” He followed that up on social media with, “THE BARBARIANS ARE INSIDE THE GATE!” The communists and barbarians, in case you’re wondering, are you and your neighbors, and the proof is how we voted in Democratic primaries this spring. Just the idea of returning to the McCarthy era of redbaiting like Johnson is doing here is obscene.