2025 Archives

Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 24, 2025

The Coup That Finally Worked: How Mike Johnson Succeeded Where the Insurrection Failed

House Speaker Mike Johnson, presumably on the orders of Donald Trump, has unconstitutionally shut down the House of Representatives for over a month. The result is that Trump can now do pretty much whatever he wants without restraint. He’s effectively King of America, at least for the moment. No limits, no constraints, no oversight. It’s the coup that finally worked. If there is any one principle the Founders of this nation agreed on, it was that the first and primary function of Congress is to prevent a president from seizing king-like powers. It’s repeated over and over throughout their writings and carved into the Constitution itself.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 23, 2025

Trump’s Elite Pedophile Protection Program: Who are they Protecting?

Amy Wallace says the FBI and DOJ have the list. Twenty abusers. Zero accountability. How long will we tolerate this cover-up? When Emmett Till's mother lifted the veil from her son's mutilated body in 1955, she forced America to face itself. She knew that if the nation could see what had been done to her child, it could no longer pretend innocence. That open casket was a moral explosion: it turned private grief into a public reckoning. The same courage is needed now. Amy Wallace, the co-writer of Virginia Giuffre's memoir Nobody's Girl, has said she knows the names of the men who raped and trafficked children with Jeffrey Epstein. She says the FBI — and, presumably, its director Kash Patel — knows the names of those men.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 22, 2025

Trump: Is He the Thief in the Ballroom?

Trump is now trying to extract a quarter-billion dollars from the American treasury — our tax dollars — to compensate himself for the troubles he faced when Merrick Garland belatedly tried to hold him to account for criminally stealing classified documents, trying to overthrow the 2020 election, and his explicit, public outreach to Putin to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails and make them public that helped him win the 2016 election. The decision about whether to give him the $230 million will largely fall to Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice she heads, assuming no Republicans in Congress dare challenge him. The obscenity of his former private attorney — who looked the other way for eight years in Florida when she was Attorney General there and Trump and Epstein were up to their dirty deeds — ratifying this demand is astonishing.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 21, 2025

Will Trump’s Fear Factory be his Greatest Weapon or His Ultimate Undoing?

He's learning what every would-be king learns: fear works only until people remember who they are… Trump and his people, with all their strut and swagger, want you to think he's the most powerful man in America and will continue in power indefinitely. Don't believe it. The reason he's rushing so hard and fast to spread his secret, masked police across American cities while mobilizing the military against civilians is precisely because he's so extraordinarily weak.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 20, 2025

When the Chant Fades, Who Builds the Future?

The movements of the 1960s built lasting institutions. Today's movements need more than moral clarity: they need leadership and coordination... The No Kings Day protests last weekend were breathtaking. Seven million or more Americans filled streets across the country explicitly condemning the way Trump has been running our country. They carried handmade signs, sang freedom songs, and for one afternoon reminded the nation that resistance still burns hot. But here's the hard truth: that energy, that passion, that righteousness means very little if it doesn't translate into structure and leadership. Movements that fail to coalesce around leaders and build institutions typically die in the glare of their own moral light or fail to produce results.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 19, 2025

FA Hayek vs. the Birth of Democratic Socialism: "The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and How to Restore Its Greatness"

Friedrich August von Hayek studied at the knee of Mises during what Mises called his “private seminars” in the offices of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce on that city’s Ringstrasse (Grand Boulevard) between 1920 and 1934. Out of this developed both a lifelong friendship, the formation of the Mont Pelerin Society, and the new economic religion of neoliberalism. By 1940, the year Mises emigrated to the US, Hayek had also fled the Nazis, although he’d moved to London (he became a British citizen in 1938) which was then being regularly bombed by Hitler’s Luftwaffe. As the bombing campaign, the Blitz, became more aggressive that year Hayek began to seriously worry about the possibility a bomb could kill his children. This was a turning point for his family and he thought that America, daily becoming more egalitarian and leading the world out of the Republican Great Depression with FDR’s New Deal, would offer them the best opportunities.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 18, 2025

Saturday Report in Cuteness 10/18/25...

Dear friend, I’m on the road this week doing a round of book signings, meeting folks, and talking about how we can keep working together for a fairer and more compassionate America. Today I’m speaking at a No Kings event and fundraiser for our Los Angeles affiliate KPFK. Because of that, there won’t be a Saturday Report this week, but I didn’t want to leave you without a smile. So, here’s a little love and lightness from home. Our two kittens, Jagger and Toshi, have been doing their part to keep things joyful. Jagger’s the light silver one, and Toshi’s darker and spotted, a little living artwork in motion.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 17, 2025

When Loyalty Becomes Law: Is Our Military Already in on a Coup?

The Pentagon's purge of its own legal advisers reveals how obedience is replacing principle, and why that's the hallmark of authoritarian capture… Is the U.S. military already in the early stages of a Trump-led coup against our Constitution? Inside the Pentagon, loyalty is being elevated above law as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth quietly removes senior military lawyers, the very officials meant to uphold legality and restraint, and replaces them with loyalists.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 16, 2025

Is This What the Next Generation of GOP Leaders Sounds Like? Don’t Look Away...

The leaked messages show what happens when cruelty becomes political culture… Just this week, Politico exposed private Telegram chats among Young Republican leaders where they didn't just flirt with Nazi-style extremism, they reveled in it. In thousands of leaked messages from across the nation, rising GOP stars praised Adolf Hitler, joked about sending political rivals into gas chambers, and mocked the very idea of human dignity.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 15, 2025

Are the Streets of Chicago Showing Us the Future of American Democracy?

When federal agents turn weapons on citizens, it's not just a local scandal — it's a national reckoning. Yesterday, here in Chicago, where I am today, America caught a glimpse of its possible future, and it was terrifying. Federal agents, dressed like soldiers and armed with the weapons of war, rammed a civilian vehicle on 105th Street, using a maneuver outlawed by Chicago police, and then fired tear gas into a crowd of bystanders and local officers. The air filled with smoke and screams as parents fled with babies in their arms, teenagers were slammed to the pavement, and a young girl was struck in the head by a gas canister. One boy was detained for hours, denied his rights, his family left in the dark. This was not a foreign regime or some distant "law-and-order" fantasy. It was an American city, in broad daylight, and it looked more like a militarized crackdown in a third-world dictatorship than traditional American law enforcement. The question we have to ask is simple and chilling: Is this America that we are becoming, one where democracy dies behind clouds of tear gas?