Hartmann Report

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.

Democracy has survived con men before, but only because ordinary Americans refused to become the mark… Tomorrow night at nine o’clock Eastern, Donald Trump will look into a television camera and tell America he’s rescuing democracy. He teased the address to reporters this week, promising “really big news” about “free and fair elections” and adding that “it doesn’t get bigger.” For once, he and I agree. It doesn’t get bigger. An administration official told Reuters that the speech will center on newly declassified intelligence about the 2020 election and what the White House calls voting machine vulnerabilities open to foreign hackers; multiple election experts quoted in that same reporting warn he’s laying the groundwork to contest Republican losses this November.

One year after Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill," millions have lost food assistance and healthcare while billionaires pocket massive tax cuts. The bigger question is: why? Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill — which gave the top 1% fully $118 billion this year in tax cuts — turns a year old this week and Republicans in Congress actually celebrated the largest cuts to food assistance and Medicaid in American history. They told us it was about fraud, about lazy people gaming the system, about restoring the dignity of work. Exactly a year later we can now see what it was really about in a line of cars outside a food bank in Phoenix.

The permanent fence around Lafayette Square isn't just about security. It's the latest warning that oligarchy is preparing to defend itself from democracy… Friday afternoon the Trump administration released a formal proposal to ring Lafayette Square with a permanent fence up to ten feet tall and to install gates across Pennsylvania Avenue at 15th and 17th Streets, all of it designed so officials can seal off America’s most famous protest ground within minutes. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton had already introduced legislation to stop Trump, warning that we shouldn’t leave “citizens peering at their democracy from behind permanent fences.”

Every American schoolchild learns about the Boston Tea Party, and most also learn it was about “taxation without representation.” That’s true, but hugely incomplete. The Boston Tea Party was, in reality, fundamentally a rebellion against raw corporate power. The tea being dumped belonged to the British East India Company, then the world’s largest corporate monopoly. The tyranny being resisted was a new form of corporate tyranny corruptly backed by Company stockholder King George III’s government force. The Founders of this nation, then, fought a revolution every bit as much against a corporation as against the British military. Understanding this history explains why they would’ve been horrified by the idea of corporate constitutional rights.

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — The Trump DOJ has decided that monopolies are people too, and they deserve a break — Donald Trump promised to cut your electric bill in half. Instead he’s spending your tax dollars to guarantee it goes up — In the middle of the worst housing-affordability crisis in a generation, Trump refused to sign the biggest housing bill in a generation, all to throw a childish tantrum. — With one more purge, Trump moved to seize the machinery that referees American elections. — ICE thugs went looking for one man in Houston, found someone who sorta resembled him, and killed him instead. — Vladimir Putin assumed Siberia was too far away to feel his war. Ukraine just corrected him. — While the administration burns coal and blesses monopolies, an entire species is quietly starving to death off our coast.

History shows that police states aren't declared: they're assembled piece by piece, until one day ordinary people realize the freedoms they once took for granted have quietly disappeared… Tuesday morning in Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo did what he’d done nearly every morning for 35 years. He woke at 5 a.m., kissed his wife goodbye, loaded his van, and drove off to pick up his construction crew in Magnolia Park, the neighborhood that’s anchored Houston’s Mexican American community for a century. He’d raised three sons in that city; they became a teacher and two engineers. He had no criminal record, and he was partway through the legal process of getting a work permit, biometrics and fingerprints already done. By 7 a.m. he was lying face down on Canal Street with a bullet in his abdomen, crying out for help in Spanish while a federal agent knelt over him talking on the phone. He died at Ben Taub Hospital, the same hospital where two of his sons were born. The Harris County medical examiner has ruled the manner of his death a “homicide.”

They don't agree on politics. They do agree that the American Dream is slipping away, and that could change everything… Democratic primary elections, in particular, are showing us America is both in the midst of a deep crisis and is on the verge of what could be transformational, positive, life-altering political and economic change comparable to FDR’s New Deal. It became obvious, really, in the first minute of New Year’s Day this year, when two things happened at once vividly showing us all the contrast and the crises around where America stands right now. In a long-abandoned subway station deep under lower Manhattan, progressive Democrat Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of New York City, largely on the simple promise that New York could once again become “a city we can afford.” And at that very same midnight — because Republicans refused to extend them — the enhanced Obamacare subsidies expired for more than twenty million Americans, jacking their health insurance prices overnight into stratospheric amounts that are now pushing families to skip pills, skip meals, and skip the doctor entirely.

Trump's latest Red Scare recycles one of America's oldest political tricks: invent an internal enemy to distract voters from the policies reshaping the country… So, now Trump says we’re communists, you and me, after having earlier called us “potential domestic terrorists.”