2026 Archives

Posted at Hartmann Report on Feb. 4, 2026

Over 70,000 People Detained in 225 Concentration Camps, With Plans to Double Them: Why Isn't This a National Emergency?

ICE's nationwide detention system continues to expand under plans that would double its size while shielding it from meaningful accountability… As people testified before Congress yesterday about the brutality and violence they'd suffered at the hands of ICE, that massive paramilitary organization was shopping for giant warehouse-style facilities they can retrofit into what they euphemistically call "detention centers." Cable news people call them "prison camps" or "Trump prison camps," but look in any dictionary: prisons are where people convicted of crimes are held. As Merriam-Webster notes, a prison is: "[A]n institution for confinement of persons convicted of serious crimes." Jails are where people accused of crimes but still waiting for their day in court are held, as Merriam-Webster notes: "[S]uch a place under the jurisdiction of a local government for the confinement of persons awaiting trial or those convicted of minor crimes." But what do you call a place where people who've committed no criminal offense (immigration violations are civil, not criminal, infractions)? The fine dictionary people at Merriam-Webster note the proper term is "concentration camp":

Posted at Hartmann Report on Feb. 3, 2026

Is Trump Rebuilding the Confederacy, Starting With the Slave Patrols?

A warning from history about oligarchy, terror policing, and the death of democracy… ICE thugs dragged a Minnesota woman out of her car and assaulted her, stopping only when local police showed up, leaving her with cuts and bruises from being dragged on the ground. Her "crime" was following and tracking Trump's violent, racist, masked federal modern-day Klan goons. Joe Scarborough expressed the shock and outrage of most Americans, when he said: "This is so out of control, and it looks like a paramilitary force from the third world! And so [the] police chief – not Antifa, Republicans, not Antifa, liars on the right – she calls the police to ask for help in America from paramilitary-type officers. It's disgusting!" What Scarborough and most Americans probably don't know — particularly since Reagan gutted Civics education — is that this is nothing new for America.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Feb. 2, 2026

The Manchurian Billionaire: How Trump’s Rise Mirrors Every Classic Intelligence Takeover

Debt, ego, sexual compromise, and fear: why Trump's behavior makes sense only when you realize he's been in Putin's pocket for years… The British newspaper Daily Mail is out with a deeply researched investigative report, the result of a long collaboration between columnists Glen Owen and Dan Hodges, along with Mark Hookham (Assistant Editor Investigations), and Daisy Graham-Brown (Investigative Reporter). It's shocking in its detail and its implication that Putin has basically owned Trump for years, even before he ran for president in 2016. They note of last week's partial (about 50%) Epstein document release: "The files include 1,056 documents naming Russian President Vladimir Putin and 9,629 referring to Moscow. Epstein even seems to have secured audiences with Putin after his 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution." Essentially, they're arguing that Epstein was running an operation on behalf of the KGB/Putin that lured wealthy and powerful men to Epstein's New York and Palm Beach mansions and his island where they were surreptitiously filmed having sex with underage girls.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Feb. 1, 2026

Chapter 11: The Climate Collapse Presidency: The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink

"Climate change is the single greatest threat to a sustainable future but, at the same time, addressing the climate challenge presents a golden opportunity to promote prosperity, security and a brighter future for all." —Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary-General, Remarks at Climate Leaders’ Summit, April 11, 2024 The greatest existential threat humanity faces isn’t hiding in a military bunker or a terrorist cell. It’s in plain sight: the accelerating collapse of our only home’s life-support systems. Trump’s first term was environmental arson. He gutted the EPA, installed fossil fuel executives in key positions, shredded over one hundred environmental protections, and abandoned the Paris Climate Agreement. Scientists were silenced. Research was suppressed. The words “climate change” vanished from government websites as if deleting terms could delete reality.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jan. 31, 2026

Saturday Report 1/31/26 — Trump's New Grift: A $10 Billion Demand for “Reputational Harm” After his Income Tax Avoidance Was Exposed

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Is this how a free press dies in America, with Don Lemon in handcuffs? — New Trump act may lead to the takeover of elections. — Trump's New Grift: A $10 Billion Demand for "Reputational Harm" After his Income Tax Avoidance Was Exposed. — Trump building 'white supremacist army' inside government that will outlast him. — Is Minneapolis now a "papers please" city for non-whites? — Mark Carney stood up for democracy, and Trump is pissed. — DOJ busted for removing Epstein files accusing Trump of child rape.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jan. 30, 2026

When Democracy Learns to Speak the Language of War, Children Become Collateral Damage

How war language is being used to collapse the distance between immigration enforcement, political retaliation, and the criminalization of dissent… "The curse of empathy is to see yourself in every death, and to see the child hidden in the body of every corpse." —John D. MacDonald A five year old child — Liam Conejo Ramos — was taken from his home and sent hundreds of miles away to a detention facility for-profit concentration camp in Texas. He was never accused of a crime, didn't cross our southern border alone, and is so young he barely understands what's happening to him; odds are he has no understanding of why he's being treated with such brutality. Nobody told little Liam about Tom Homan and Stephen Miller being so eager to punish brown-skinned immigrants, delighting in their pain, rationalizing it as a "deterrent" to "illegal immigration" that's "poisoning the blood" of white America, as Donald Trump himself pointed out on the election trail.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jan. 29, 2026

When Future Historians Write About the Fall of American Economic Power, Will Trump Be the Turning Point?

Under Trump, tax giveaways to the wealthy and soaring debt replaced economic stability and sacrificing the nation's future for short-term political gain… America's economic system has never been fair or perfect, but for more than a century it rested on basic guardrails that kept instability in check and allowed us to fight for progress and win. Those guardrails are now being stripped away by policies that favor wealth and power over accountability and long-term stability. For over a hundred years, the United States has been the cornerstone of international economic stability. The independence of our central bank (the "Fed") has been a part of it, as has the strength of the dollar, which comes about in large part because the rest of the world relies on our currency as the default for international trade. And now Trump and the GOP are threatening it all.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jan. 28, 2026

The Most Dangerous Moment Is When Authoritarians Seem to Compromise

Trump's recalibration follows the same step-back, step-forward playbook used by Orbán, Putin, and every modern strongman… Over on Threads last night, sierracascadia posted: "CNN BREAKING: Kristin Holmes reports Stephen Miller is saying 'there may have been a breach of protocol' and Noem is blabbering about how she was in touch with Trump and Miller for her talking points. Miller is saying that he got his information CBP trying to shove it down to Bovino! This fucking clown show guys. They are all going down." Meanwhile, Democrats are celebrating the replacement of Nazi-cosplayer Greg Bovino and eager puppy-killer and adulterer Kristi Noem with Tom Homan, who merely takes $50,000 bribes in burger bags and is therefore presumably more reasonable. Blue collar versus white collar, and all that. But, wait a minute. Slow down. It's way too premature to toast the dawn of a new era.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jan. 27, 2026

Once Again, Under the Shadow of Authoritarian Power, Americans Must Decide What Kind of Nation We Will Become

Will we stand with the generations who expanded freedom through resistance and sacrifice or surrender self-government to fear, force, and authoritarian power? There is something deeply unsettling about Lincoln's famous phrase "four score," meaning eighty years. It's roughly the length of a human life, but is also the interval at which the United States repeatedly collides with crisis and is forced to decide, again and again, what kind of nation we will be. Historian Neil Howe explores this pattern in his book The Fourth Turning Is Here, arguing that every eighty years America reaches a sort of breaking point that ultimately hits on major issues like democracy or autocracy and oligarchy. What typically triggers those moments, historians will tell you, is when inequality has grown extreme, political power has hardened into the hands of a few, and democratic norms have been eroded or even openly attacked. The country then is forced to choose: either expand freedom and rights, or slip toward authoritarian rule.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jan. 26, 2026

Is the Most Powerful Message in America Now "Obey or Die"?

What the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti reveal about who really controls this country and how... Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, Greg Bovino, and even whiskey Pete Hegseth are all out there trying to tell us that Alex Pretti was a domestic terrorist who came to a protest with the intention to "massacre" ICE agents. But that's not their real message. Back in 1980, I went into Uganda during the Civil War against Idi Amin to take over a refugee camp up in the Karamoja region. When I was leaving the country, going through the Entebbe airport (which had only intermittent electricity and considerable damage from the war), I was confronted by three armed men, two of them Tanzanian soldiers (who'd just successfully occupied the country as Amin fled to Saudi Arabia) and one a local Ugandan policeman. One of the soldiers had an AK-47 over his shoulder and he grabbed the clip and rotated the gun down so the barrel was pointed right at my nose from a distance of about 6 inches. "I could kill you right here, right now," he said with a smile, "and nobody will ever know. Nobody will ever punish me. Now, give us half of your money." His message was essentially the same message that the Trump regime is trying to communicate to all of us today