Hartmann Report

From Caesar's denarius to Trump's meme coin, the message is always the same: "I am the state and you damn well better both fear me and pay me tribute!" On Tuesday the Office of Government Ethics released Donald Trump’s annual financial disclosure, and the astonishingly corrupt number that jumps off its 927 pages — a length his team laughingly insists proves his “commitment to transparency” — is $1.4 billion. That’s what he personally reported earning from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures in the single year of 2025 when he was president for roughly 11 months, dwarfing everything he took in from real estate, hotels, and golf courses combined. The largest slice, roughly $635 million, were royalties on the $TRUMP meme coin, a “collectible” digital token — basically, a little JPG-style image he sold to the rubes — whose entire “collectible” value rests on one thing, which is his name and face stamped onto what he’s hustling as internet money. This is one of the oldest cons in the long history of men who decided that the state and its treasury were, first and foremost, there for themselves to loot.

An afternoon in East Berlin became the lens through which today's America suddenly makes terrifying sense... In the winter of 1986 while living in West Germany I visited East Berlin with my oldest daughter, who was still a teenager, and on the far side of Checkpoint Charlie we were picked up by a young man named Torsten who ran a gypsy cab. Before we’d gone more than a block he had the two of us rehearsing a story, that we were his long-lost cousins over from the West, so we’d all say the same thing if the Volkspolizei or Stasi stopped the car. He couldn’t have been much past twenty, and he was kind to two strangers all afternoon (and grateful for the 20 Deutschmarks I gave him), but under all of it he was afraid the entire day, because in the country he lived in a man could be hauled in for the crime of driving people around and not being able to account for himself. That fear, the quiet hum of it running beneath an ordinary afternoon, is exactly what a “papers, please” society feels like from the inside.

Critics argue the decision resurrects the patronage politics the Pendleton Civil Service Act was designed to end… The six unscrupulous Republicans on the Supreme Court — over the loud objections of the three true constitutionalists on the Court — are aggressively dragging America back not just to the 1950s but, as of yesterday, to the 1830s. Arguably the most depraved president in American history, Andrew Jackson (aka “The Indian Killer” a title he gave himself), Trump’s favorite, whose picture he hung in the Oval Office, invented what came to be called the “Spoils System.” If you wanted a job in the federal government, or a favorable ruling from one of the then-few federal agencies, all you had to do was give a big enough gift to President Jackson, or pledge your loyalty to him instead of the Constitution and the people, and your wish would be granted. Prior presidents, particularly among the Founding generation, were generally strongly opposed to such a corrupt system.

Hundreds died in this week's heat wave. But the real killer is a political & economic system that rewards predators, turns citizens into prey, & leaves governments protecting power instead of people… Hundreds of people died yesterday across Europe from the heat; they’re a symptom of a larger problem that governments around the world have failed to address — that goes far beyond simply global warming — and that the Trump regime is making far worse. Its foundation is one of the most troubling aspects of human nature called predation: while most people just want to live their lives, raise their kids, and have a comfortable old age, some small percentage of those among us have simply become, for lack of a better word, predators.

If J.C. Bancroft Davis was the triggerman, then Justice -Stephen Johnson Field was the mastermind behind the corporate theft of constitutional rights. He’d spent three decades on the Supreme Court, building the intellectual infrastructure that would transform corporations into constitutional persons. We must understand Justice Field to clearly see how democracy was hijacked by the oligarchs of that era. But more than just that, understanding Field also reveals the ideology behind the hijacking. This wasn’t just a case of corruption or greed, although there was plenty of both. This was, instead, a vision of America fundamentally opposed to the Founders’ and Framers’ vision of America and explicitly at odds with the possibility of creating a thriving middle class.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — There’s no longer any mystery about whose side the Supreme Court is on; the only mystery is why it bothers pretending otherwise. — Somebody finally proposed making California’s 250 billionaires chip in, and you should hear them scream. — Senate Democrats noticed that traditional Medicare is the only insurance in America with no limit on what it can cost you, and decided to do something about it. — A federal judge just told Trump’s Justice Department to stop hiding the files on the woman who says Trump sexually assaulted her when she was 13. — Trump’s mentor Vlad may be plotting a poke at NATO, and he’s picked the perfect moment, because the man in the Oval Office treats the alliance like a protection racket he resents paying into. — While Trump was busy feuding with Giorgia Meloni over a photo op, the woman actually positioned to end Meloni’s career was quietly building her case. — The hellscape currently broiling Europe is not weather, it’s a receipt for fifty years of lies from the fossil fuel industry. — Geeky Science Alert! The $300 ring you bought to fix your sleep may be the thing keeping you awake.

Congress passed the laws. Previous presidents signed them. The Supreme Court has now declared they can be ignored whenever this particular president chooses (but not Biden)... Something happened inside the Supreme Court chamber on Thursday that almost never happens: Justice Sonia Sotomayor was so disgusted by what the six radical, on-the-take Republican appointees had just done that she read her dissent aloud from the bench, and Justice Samuel Alito, who’d written the majority opinion, snapped back at her in real time, a breach of the Court’s normally stage-managed decorum that left veteran reporters in the room visibly startled in slack-jawed amazement. On the surface they were fighting about asylum seekers. But Sotomayor understood, as Alito surely did, that the real question wasn’t who gets to cross the border: it was whether the laws Congress writes still mean anything once a neofascist, imperial president (like Alito and his peers want) decides he’d rather not follow them because he’s above the law.

Why Americans are embracing policies they were taught to fear, while rejecting a stupid, oligarchic economic model that's failed us all (except the oligarchs)... On Tuesday night, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party got a message it would prefer to pretend it didn’t hear. In New York, Mamdani-backed progressives swept the congressional primaries, ousting two sitting Democratic congressmen and taking an open seat in a single evening. Former city comptroller Brad Lander beat Rep. Dan Goldman by more than thirty points. A 32-year-old democratic socialist named Darializa Avila Chevalier knocked off five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and state Assembly member Claire Valdez won the seat Nydia Velázquez is vacating. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (a recipient of dark money and AIPAC money) campaigned hard against all three and watched all three win anyway. As Bernie Sanders put it afterward, the message is pretty clear: Americans are sick to death of a rigged economy and of billionaires buying their elections.

The pattern is becoming impossible to miss: the hidden report, the voter-roll purges, the gerrymanders, and Postal Service changes targeting mail ballots in Democratic states.. Somewhere inside the White House right now there’s a federal intelligence report sitting in a drawer, and Trump’s lickspittles who put it there are betting you won’t see it before you vote in November. It’s an assessment of the security of America’s voting machines, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Reuters revealed last week that White House officials have spent months refusing to authorize its release even as the 2026 midterms come barreling toward us. The findings are almost comic in their irony, but they could also become the weapon that brings down our democracy this November. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first the backstory.

The Pentagon investigation is finished. Congress still hasn’t seen it. The families of Minab deserve answers—and so do we... On the morning of February 28th, the first day of Donald Trump’s war on Iran, the children of the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in the southern Iranian town of Minab were at their desks a little after ten o’clock when the missiles arrived. The name of the school means “The Good Tree.” By the time the dust settled, as many as 175 people were dead, most of them girls between the ages of seven and twelve. Iran’s confirmed count came to around 155, and the list its state broadcaster released documents dozens of dead little boys, dozens of dead little girls, more than two dozen dead teachers, several dead parents, a dead school bus driver, and a dead pharmacy technician from the clinic next door. The teachers had started phoning families the instant the attacks began, begging them to come collect their children. There wasn’t enough time. Some parents reached the school only in time to claw through the rubble looking for their daughters, and according to first responders and a Reuters stringer the building was hit a second time, a so-called “double tap” (which is a war crime), with the survivors and the rescuers caught in that second blast and blown to pieces.