2025 Archives

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 22, 2025

When the Tyrant Slips: Why America Should Fear a President Who’s Losing the Plot — and the Polls

Dictators don’t go quietly. They orchestrate fear, silence dissent, and distract with spectacle. Trump’s moves in 2025 suggest he’s not planning to lose power — no matter the cost. Trump is starting to lose big, from courtrooms, to the press increasingly calling him out, to millions of Americans showing up in the streets every few weeks. As anybody who’s ever lived or worked in an autocratic state (I have) can tell you, a strongman or wannabe dictator is most dangerous when he’s on his back foot. Trump’s tariffs have put America on the verge of a serious inflationary recession, the Supreme Court and multiple lower courts have repeatedly ruled against him, his public approval polling is in the crapper, and even conservative publications and former Republican politicians (free from the strictures of an upcoming primary) are openly calling him out (including in Murdoch publications). The first lesson they teach in dictator school is that “there must be an enemy within.” Trump embraced this from the first day of his campaign for president when he attacked “Mexican rapists and murderers” he said were “invading” America.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 21, 2025

The Biggest Political Con of the Last Century Unmasked

Why the destruction of public institutions, the middle class, and government itself may not be a mistake — but the mission… Neal deGrasse Tyson makes a very relevant point this week: "If a foreign adversary snuck into our Federal budget and cut science research and education the way we're cutting it ourselves — strategically undermining America's long-term health, wealth, and security — we would likely consider it an act of war." Trump's administration just said you can't get the Covid vaccine unless you're over 65 or sick, setting up America for more death and disease.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 20, 2025

The Final Checkmate: Republicans Move to Destroy the Balance of Powers

In a legal sleight of hand, Republicans want to strip judges of their power to enforce rulings — because holding Trump in contempt might actually work… With almost no mention by our mainstream corporate press, Republicans in the House of Representatives are proposing to end all checks on the power of Donald Trump, effectively ending the American experiment of a democratic republic. It's shockingly anti-American. Since the only branch of government standing against Trump right now is the courts, Republicans believe they've found a way to end that resistance. Here's the backstory. The grand invention of our Founders, cribbed from the Iroquois Confederacy and following an outline Montesquieu suggested (based on his reading about Native Americans), was a three-branches-of-government system where each branch would act as a check on the power of the other two.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 19, 2025

The Great American Betrayal: How We Lost Our Moral Compass

When greed replaces justice, and cruelty becomes policy, democracy dies not in darkness—but in plain sight, cheered on by those in power… At its deepest level, government is a moral force grounded in a moral view of the world. It may not comport with morality as most of us view it; the Saudi oppression of women, the Russian violence against the queer community, and the Iranian brutal suppression of that nation's democracy movement are all examples of things most Americans consider immoral. But each is grounded in a particular moral worldview that those governments and their leaders have adopted.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 18, 2025

The Right To Work For Less: The Hidden History of the American Dream

In 1935, Congress passed, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed, the National Labor Relations Act, often referred to as the Wagner Act, legalizing labor unions in the United States for the first time. It was referred to as “the most radical piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress.”[lvii] New York’s Democratic Senator Robert Wagner was the new law’s main author, and his legislative aide, Simon H. Rifkind, told Theodore J. St. Antoine in 1986 that there were several reasons for the law. First, there was considerable labor unrest across the nation; it had been particularly bloody over the preceding fifty or so years since the labor movement first emerged in a big way in the 1880s. Employers would hire private security companies or pay off local politicians and police to harass, beat, and often even kill workers to prevent unionization. One of the most infamous examples was the Ludlow Massacre in 1914.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 17, 2025

Saturday Report 5/17/25 — Trump ordered 15K workers to snitch and not a one did...

The Best of the Rest of the News. — "Huge scandal": Internal documents catch Trump administration in massive Social Security lie. — How Trump's "Emergency" Powers Could Become Permanent. — Trump orders the FBI to lay off white collar crime in favor of hunting immigrants...Plus, apparently they're now harassing American journalists. — Georgia is forcing a brain-dead woman to complete her pregnancy and making her family foot the bill. — Trump ordered 15K workers to snitch & not a one did. — Geeky Science: Does 7000 steps keeps cancer away? — Crazy Alert! Why is the DHS looking at producing a reality show where immigrants compete for citizenship? — Here's your moment of Zen which provoked an angry rant from Donald Trump yesterday (Bruce Springsteen)

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 16, 2025

Gutting the Weather Watchers: When Tyrants Rewrite the Forecast

This is no accident. It's a coordinated attack on science, safety, and the truth—just in time for hurricane season… This disaster has me so angry I can barely type straight. Elon Musk and his phony "Department of Government Efficiency" — which isn't even a real government department, by the way — are systematically destroying the agencies that keep Americans alive when Mother Nature comes calling. And for what? Some twisted ideological experiment that's going to cost lives. The National Weather Service is falling apart right before hurricane season. They have 155 empty positions that should be filled with forecasters working around the clock to track storms and save lives.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 15, 2025

Red State Hell: The GOP Plan to Keep You Desperate, Sick, and Too Damn Tired to Fight Back

Republicans in the House of Representatives voted out of committee early yesterday morning legislation that would strip as many as 14 million Americans of their Medicaid-based healthcare, including millions of seniors in nursing homes and children living in poverty. Ironically, Red states will be hit harder by this than Blue states, as they’re generally less capable of making up the loss of federal funds (Medicaid is administered at the state level with block grants from the feds). Which provokes some serious head-scratching among the pundit class; why would Republicans kneecap their own people? Do they really think they can get away with it, just to fund tax breaks for Elon, Mark, Jeff, and Donald? And, for that matter, why is it that Red states are so vulnerable to this GOP perfidy?

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 14, 2025

Are We Still a Nation That Takes Care of Its Own—Or Just a Playground for Billionaires?

As Republicans slash Medicaid to fund tax breaks for the morbidly rich, America must decide: Do we honor our social contract or abandon it to greed? Here we are again, my friend, watching the age-old story play out before our eyes. The Republicans are preparing to hand out trillions in tax cuts to their billionaire benefactors, and how do they plan to pay for this latest giveaway to the oligarchy? By ripping healthcare away from 13.7 million Americans, including millions of our most vulnerable seniors who depend on Medicaid for their very survival. But this isn't just about healthcare policy. This is about the fundamental question that's defined America since the New Deal: Are we a society that believes in the common good, or are we returning to the brutal Social Darwinism of the Gilded Age?

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 13, 2025

America’s Long Coup: How the GOP Rigged, Lied, and Stole Its Way Into the White House for Over 50 Years

The numbers are in. The evidence is overwhelming. And the silence is deadly. It’s time Democrats started calling this what it is: a decades-long criminal conspiracy to seize power by any means… Trump is an illegitimate president, but he’s not the first. The last Republican who was elected president without fraud or naked treason was Dwight D. Eisenhower. And it’s damn well past time that Democrats started telling the story. But let’s start with Trump, and then go to Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.