Hartmann Report

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Trump chuckles as he admits Putin is helping Iran kill American troops. — The lie heard around the world: Trump told our allies Iran was surrendering, but Iran didn't get the memo. — The war comes home, as they always do. An Israeli strike in Lebanon killed two of Ghazli's (the attacker of of the Michigan synagogue) brothers and two of his brother's children. The FBI — what's left of it after Ka$h Patel fired the team responsible for tracking Iranian terror operations in the US — is also investigating the two separate attacks that happened this week. — Don't let Stephen Miller turn America into a surveillance state. — Is this what the Republican Party's future looks like? — Democrats are winning. Everywhere. And nobody's talking about it. — Did AI kill 175 children in an Iranian school?

The slogan that promised efficiency was really a blueprint to dismantle public government and hand its power—and money—to the billionaire class… The bombs are falling on Iran this week, Kash Patel has fired the FBI experts on Iranian sleeper cells in America, and people are speculating that Trump's trying to provoke an Iranian attack on the US to justify blowing up November's elections. Somewhere in the wreckage of what used to be America's functioning national security apparatus, the ghost of Ronald Reagan is grinning. I've been doing my progressive program on SiriusXM, Free Speech TV, and radio stations nationwide for over two decades, and every time a Republican runs for office promising to "run government like a business" — Reagan's favorite meme — I tell my listeners exactly what's coming next: — Tax cuts for the morbidly rich, — Gutted regulations that had been designed to protect average people, — Privatized (profitized) public services that will make billions for corporations and eat our tax dollars, — incompetent management of government agencies and our economy, — And, soon, a slow-motion disaster that the rest of us end up paying for.

If the road to Tehran required the sons and daughters of the billionaire & political class to march beside everyone else's kids, would we still be there? The drumbeats for expanding our (and Israel's) war with Iran are loud. Cable news panels talk about strategy. Politicians talk about deterrence. Pentagon briefings talk about targets and timelines. But there's one thing missing from almost every conversation in Washington. Risk.

From campaigning to destroy NATO to selling out Ukraine to letting Russia help kill American soldiers in the Gulf region, Trump's goal appears to be, to "Make America Russia"… Eight of our American service members are dead and over 140 wounded because Iran's military has suddenly gotten really good at targeting our soldiers, Airmen, and Marines. News reports say they've been able to hit us with such precision because Russia is using their extraordinary spy satellite, spy plane, and advanced radar capabilities to help Iran's military. The Washington Post, which first reported on this, quoted a Russian military expert as saying that Iran is now "making very precise hits on early-warning radars or over-the-horizon radars," seeming to validate the concern.

It's the deliberate, systematic destruction of your ability to know what's real... We got more lies this morning from the Pentagon press briefing. They're now up to 17 different rationalizations for the attack on Iran, none of which makes sense. To paraphrase Rod Serling, consider what happened in Minab, Iran. A Tomahawk cruise missile, an American weapon, a weapon that Iran doesn't own and can't fire, struck a girls' elementary school. One hundred and seventy-five people are dead, most of them little girls who showed up that morning to learn to read. And Donald Trump stood in front of cameras and said Iran did it. He lied. About dead children. Without blinking. And his crew backed him up, even knowing it was a lie.

Bombed boats, dead fishermen, starving children, and broken families reveal the human cost of power without empathy… Across Iran and the Caribbean, Trump and his lickspittles delight in killing as if people were expendable scenery, not human beings with loved ones and families. Meanwhile, they ignore the death and destruction their fellow psychopath, Putin, rains down on Ukraine every night. India and America invite Iran to send an UNARMED ship to the Indian Ocean to participate in military exercises, and Trump and Whiskey Pete decided it would be fun to blow it out of the water, leaving over 100 sailors miles from shore, desperate for a rescue. Instead of saving them, as international law requires, we simply left them to drown. Whiskey Pete called it "quiet death." In fact, there was a lot of screaming and sobbing, although the bombers couldn't hear it from 20,000 feet any more than Hegseth could in his drunken haze.

Donald Trump didn’t emerge from a vacuum. He’s the product of systems—­corrupt, corroded, and increasingly anti-democratic, yes, but systems nonetheless—­that made his rise not just possible but inevitable. If we only focus on removing Trump without addressing the deep corruption of Citizens United and other events and systems that produced him, we’re simply setting the stage for the next authoritarian, who may be smarter, more disciplined, and ultimately more dangerous. As a result, the deep question that our media almost never mentions is this: can democracy survive when it’s for sale?

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Will Iran surrender or will this war burn the world down? and, "Some people will die": That's your president speaking of Americans' lives. — Trump tells CNN Cuba is soon going to fall: "I'm going to put Marco over there." — DOJ releases the interview with the woman who alleges Trump raped her as a minor. — ICE has killed another person in one of their concentration camps, the ninth so far this year. — Russia Sharing Intelligence with Iran to Target US Forces? — Good News Alert! Kristi Noem got fired. Cricket the Dog was unavailable for comment.

A quick note to my MAGA acquaintance... Dear MAGA voter, I'm not writing this to mock you. I'm writing because you were lied to. And it wasn't by the people you were told to hate, but by the man you trusted the most. You were pissed off when you voted in 2024. Honestly, rightfully angry. Your town lost its factory. Your kids can't afford the house they've been dreaming of for years. The politicians in Washington kept promising you things and delivering nothing; in fact, Republicans even took away your Medicaid and food stamps as well as your kids' school lunches. You wanted someone who'd finally blow the whole damn thing up and put regular people first. So did I and millions of other Americans. The difference is who we trusted to do it. Let's talk about what actually happened.

As Iran's leaders gathered to debate a U.S.-brokered nuclear deal, American and Israeli intelligence already knew their location. Was this diplomacy, or something darker? Jared Kushner grew up sleeping in Benjamin Netanyahu's bed. That isn't a metaphor or hyperbole. Netanyahu, during his visits to New York over the decades, was close enough to the Kushner family that, as The New York Times reported, he slept in Jared's childhood bedroom. Jared Kushner didn't grow up watching Netanyahu on the news the way the rest of us did. He grew up knowing the man as something close to a family institution. And that man, who has said publicly that he has "yearned" to destroy Iran's military and political leadership "for 40 years," is the same man whose government may have been coordinating directly with Jared Kushner in the days before the most consequential American military action since the invasion of Iraq or the Vietnam War. We need to ask the question that official Washington is too timid, too compromised, or too captured by the moment's war fever to ask: "Was Jared Kushner sitting across from Iranian negotiators in good faith? Or was he trying to get the Iranian leadership to meet together so Netanyahu could kill them all in one single decapitating strike?"