Hartmann Report

Trump's Smithsonian purge follows the same roadmap used by Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and every strongman who came before… Share “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” — George Orwell, 1984 It seemed so trivial. Trump ordered the Interior Department to post signs along the walkways leading up to several of the museums that make up the Smithsonian system in Washington, DC warning people that they’d find “inaccurate information” therein. It was based on a bizarre “report” written by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council and released without fanfare on the 4th of July.

The uniforms have changed. The technology has evolved. But the mission remains the same: protect power through fear and intimidation… “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.” —President Woodrow Wilson, who screened the Klan recruiting film “Birth of a Nation” in the White House Trump and the GOP are desperate to hang onto the oligarchy they’ve created, particularly in the face of the upcoming elections. Increasingly — as oligarchies usually do when they decide it’s acceptable to use violence to hang onto power — they’re turning to hate, fear, and terror as their tools. To this end, Trump and his lickspittles are reinventing the old Confederate slave patrols in modern form. Most recently, ICE has begun violently force-feeding and catheterizing people in ICE concentration camps when they protest conditions or the absence of due process by going on hunger strikes.

The policies under attack today once defined mainstream American leadership from Teddy Roosevelt to FDR and LBJ. Trump’s most recent desperate attempt to change the subject from his involvement with Epstein, Iran, Netanyahu, and the billions he and his grifter sons are making with their skeezy schemes is to call progressive Democrats “communists.” He’s even gone so far as to suggest that some should be stripped of their citizenship and deported or thrown into one of his ICE concentration camps. Meanwhile, open conflict is erupting within the Democratic Party around populist issues. So-called “moderate” Democrats are defending their dependence on corporate and AIPAC money to win elections and arguing for maintaining the status quo that Citizens United has established by legalizing political bribery.

From FEMA relief to clean energy funding, government resources are becoming political weapons, creating the kind of regional resentment that has shattered nations before… Trump is now officially allocating federal resources based on whether people voted for or against him: any other president in recent history would’ve been impeached for this. One of the most visible differences between authoritarian and democratic governance is how the government treats parts of the country based on their politics.

Davis’s fraudulent headnote of 1886 was just the beginning. Over the next 140 years, corporate lawyers would build an empire of constitutional rights on that foundation of fraud. The progression reached its logical conclusion in 2010, when five corrupt Republican Supreme Court justices—several openly on the take from rightwing billionaires and massive corporations—handed morbidly rich oligarchs the power to buy American democracy outright. Citizens United wasn’t just about campaign finance rules or the legalization of bribing Supreme Court justices (although it encompassed both): it was the culmination of a 140-year theft. The oligarchs finally had functionally unlimited constitutional weapons to complete what the southern plantation fascists built prior to the Civil War and the railroad barons started in 1886: the destruction of the American Dream and its replacement with an all-American form of oligarchic feudalism.

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.