Hartmann Report

If Republicans are winning by rigging elections, can Democrats really afford to stay 'ethical' and still win? Democrats are at least 17 years late to the party and damn well better catch up soon if they want to win the House (or Senate) in next year's election. The history — and lack of Democratic response — is shocking. While a state must go to court to take away your gun, five Republicans on the US Supreme Court have refused to enforce the "right to vote" provisions of the National Voting Registration Act of 1993 so states don't even have to notify you when they steal take away your vote. And, wow, are Republicans committed to taking away your vote!

As the Nation teeters on the edge of authoritarianism, what will it take to defend democracy and constitutional order? There's no sugarcoating the truth: As fascism's grip tightens under Trump and the GOP, America's government no longer operates as a constitutional republic. The ostensible oaths to "support and defend the Constitution" are hollow, a ghost script read aloud while the regime marches America toward authoritarian collapse in the mode of Russia and Hungary. Every federal institution now performs in synchronous mimicry of Dear Orange Leader's unraveling psyche: false justifications, lop-sided pretenses of accountability, cosplay theater designed more for emotional spectacle than legal legitimacy, accelerating escalation at every turn. Nothing — literally nothing organized or passed by Republicans in the last 44 years — was built to uplift average Americans. It's all been engineered for power consolidation, GOP single-party rule, the wealth of the morbidly rich, and narrative control.

If somebody had set your house on fire, killing your child and pets, and then your city demanded that you give that somebody hundreds of dollars a year for the next decade, how would you feel? Families across America have lost their homes, family members, and livelihoods to wildfires, floods, extreme heat and cold, mile-wide tornadoes, bomb cyclones, heat domes, hurricanes, and drought caused by today’s climate emergency, but nonetheless they have to pay taxes subsidizing the fossil fuel industry that helped cause this global crisis.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — So, let me get this straight: Because of Trump’s tariffs, Americans will pay 18.3% more for food and products while manufacturing is not returning (we’ve lost over 100,000 manufacturing jobs since Trump became president again), and the top 100 big business CEOs and stockholders are raking in an extra $1.2 trillion in personal income because of the new Trump tax cuts while Trump destroys unions for government workers. Does this sound fair? — James Carville tells Democrats to ‘save democracy’ by adding states and packing the Supreme Court. — Texas Republicans are resorting to threats and intimidation in their effort to rig the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential election with their extreme gerrymander. — The Epstein Files: Will Joe Rogan speak truth to power or become Trump’s fixer in chief? — Trump calls for new US census that excludes undocumented immigrants. — Get ready for more expensive gas, more pollution, worse severe weather, and bigger profits and paychecks for the fossil fuel billionaires who own the GOP. — Crazy Alert! All bow to the #2 king? — Video of the Day: The Trump administration is bragging that they’ve put a guy who, on January 6th encouraged rioters to “kill” police officers, into a well-paid senior position.

The battlefield is no longer overseas. It's your city. Your rights. Your voice. And the military is no longer standing guard: it's standing in the way… After a couple of wannabe carjackers punched out Big Balls in DC, Trump used it as an excuse to threaten to take over the city and bring in the National Guard to police it, in a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. This despite the fact that crime in Washington DC is at a 30-year low and the city already has the largest police force, per capita, of any municipality in America. None of that matters; Trump wants to turn America into a police state, just like every other dictator in the world does when they get ahold of a democracy. They steal from the people, enrich their cronies, break laws with impunity, and then use police agencies to terrorize the general populace, judges, and legislators into docility and submission when they object. In fact, they told us this was their goal. They showed us. They planned it in writing. A leaked memo from inside the Department of Homeland Security reveals what many of us feared but hoped we were wrong about: that the military is no longer a last resort in American governance. It's now a first tool. A central player. A political weapon, just like in Russia.

With the Epstein truth collapsing, is America's favorite interviewer about to become Trump's top enabler? Joe Rogan built an empire on being the guy who asked the questions nobody else would. That's why millions of Americans — especially younger men — trust him more than they trust the nation's media, Congress, or the Supreme Court. They believe he sees through the spin. He talks to conspiracy theorists and scientists alike, grills politicians, mocks the media, and makes it all feel like truth-telling. But now, Rogan is at a crossroads. The question isn't whether Joe Rogan will change the country. The question is whether power is changing Joe Rogan.

History is filled with politicians who believed they were untouchable. But the pattern always cracks. Always. The lie gets too big. The system bends just far enough. The coverup fails… There's a tape. Not a metaphor, not a rumor, not some fuzzy third-hand whisper passed from burner phone to basement podcast. A real audio recording. Two full days of Ghislaine Maxwell, the trafficker-in-chief of Jeffrey Epstein's underage empire, speaking directly to Deputy Attorney General and Trump former criminal lawyer Todd Blanche. The Justice Department has it. Transcribed, digitized, real. Senior officials have confirmed it exists. And they're sitting on it. Why? The answer, as always, is simple: because the truth is radioactive and most suspect that there's no way she told the truth. And this time, it may not be the crime that blows the doors off. It'll be the coverup.

We Watched Others Fall: Now the Edge Is Beneath Our Feet Putin and Orbán showed us the edge. Trump’s ready to push us over… We watched it happen in Russia. We watched it happen in Hungary. Democracies, once imperfect but alive, were hollowed out from within by strongmen who declared emergencies, rewrote the rules, and convinced enough people that fear was freedom and corruption was strength. We told ourselves it couldn’t happen here. That our guardrails were stronger. That our Constitution was invincible. But now, we stand where they once stood: at the jagged edge of the authoritarian cliff. The wind has picked up, the ground beneath us trembles, and the man leading us forward isn’t walking, he’s charging. Not because he wants to save America, but because he wants to rule it as an absolute autocrat.

Why 51 Texas lawmakers fled the State to stop a power grab, and what it means for us all… The Republican motto — since Nixon sabotaged LBJ's Vietnam peace negotiations and Reagan blew up Carter's deal to get the Iranian hostages back — has been: "If you can't win, cheat." As Republicans rush to redistrict/gerrymander Texas, if enough Dems leave town there won't be a quorum so the redistricting can't happen. Which is why Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was threatening to could lock up Democratic lawmakers to prevent them from leaving the state. Governor Abbott thought he had a pretty slick plan; have Texas: Republicans refuse to consider legislation funding aid to the people stricken by the recent disastrous, climate-change-fueled floods until after the state had been more severely gerrymandered. Because of massive FEMA cuts, those people are pretty desperate. Calling his bluff yesterday, Democrats fled the state to Illinois, where Governor JB Pritzker offered sanctuary to the 51 Texas legislators in need of it.

As predictably as the sun rises, every Sunday a commentator or politician on one of the Sunday political talk shows says — without being challenged —that the Republican Party understands and supports business better than Democrats. The weekend as I’m writing this chapter, it was CNN’s turn. All my life, the media has told us that the GOP is the “party of business.” It may have once been true under Eisenhower when I was a very young child, but today it’s a lie — and has been so in a huge way since the neoliberal Reagan Revolution. Republicans kill economies; Democrats rescue and build them.