The same day that poll came out, on Wednesday, CBS News published photos that American service members smuggled out of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia showing extensive — massive — damage to barracks, facilities, and even U.S. aircraft, all done by Iranian drones and missiles. The Pentagon’s own Inspector General just reported that there has been $3.7 billion in equipment and building losses and around 60 aircraft destroyed or severely damaged.
This follows Trump, last week, lying through his teeth, saying that the Iranians had inflicted “no damage” on U.S. facilities and troops, 18 of whom are now dead with hundreds more hospitalized.
Trump calls that small potatoes and refused to visit the wounded troops when he was at Walter Reed a few weeks ago. One soldier, his identity concealed, told CBS News, “We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”
Not only is Trump regularly — arguably, daily — lying to America and the world about what’s happening in the Middle East (and dozens of other things), but that polling shows that most Americans have figured it out. Which raises a vital question for our country at this pivotal moment:
What happens to a country when it loses trust in its government and leaders, and what can be done to restore that trust?
I’ve seen the consequences of this sort of loss of trust up-close and personal in the years I traveled the world on behalf of a German international relief organization, and the lessons I learned are both important and grim.
In the 1990s I made several trips to Bogotá, Colombia on Salem’s behalf, as I wrote about in The Prophet’s Way; I remember the immigration officer at the airport stamping my passport, saying “Mister Tourist, be careful.” At dinner that first night, after being warned not to take taxis or trust the police, a German woman who’d lived there for 15 years flinched every time the doorbell rang.
Her husband’s office manager, an ordinary middle-class guy, had been forced to watch helplessly at gunpoint as 15 armed men broke into his house looking for their 16-year-old daughter; when they discovered she wasn’t there, they took his wife, a friend of my dinner companion.
Every night for a month they called the husband and made his wife cry into the phone as he systematically drained every credit card, bank account, and retirement account he had. She was only released when he’d finally mortgaged his condo and given them the last of his money and credit. She was a shell of a person afterward, barely able to speak, and the family was desperately trying to borrow enough money from friends to leave the country and go back home to Germany.
The nun who ran the church where we were staying (locked into cells with steel doors and cement walls) warned us against going to a restaurant after dark and wrote down the phone number of the only trustworthy cab company in the city. Off-duty cops and soldiers had organized “hunt clubs” to shoot street children for sport.
One morning, as Horst Von Heyer and I drove past a billboard advertising a gated community of upscale homes with smiling guards carrying AK-47s, we passed a teenage boy sprawled on the sidewalk in a spreading pool of blood, a uniformed man standing over him with a gun still in his hand. Nobody in the car said a word; it was just too ordinary.
This is just one small example from my own experience of what happens when people no longer trust their own government. Into that vacuum of trust rush two types of people.
The first are the predators, who correctly figure that it’s now open season. We’re seeing that right now as corporate America fleeces us, banks rip us off, health insurance companies deny us care to fatten profits, and oil companies and their wholly-owned GOP shills lie to our faces about climate change.
The second are the strongman politicians, who promise that only violence and an iron fist can “restore law and order.” I saw that in Kaliningrad, Russia in the 1990s when four Russian cops pulled our car over for speeding and then let us go when we gave them a case of high-end chocolates. It was a town where the mob-run kiosks around Lenin Square were “the safest parts of town” (and vodka was cheaper than bottled water).
Six years later, Russians — by then exhausted by the crime and grifting oligarchs — handed the country over to a KGB colonel who promised to make the trains run on time. There hasn’t been a free election in that country since.
Recently, El Salvador ran that same script. A corrupt, on-the-take government of grifters and hustlers so ripped off the country and gutted the middle class that Salvadorans voted in Nayib Bukele, a guy who describes himself as “Central America’s coolest dictator.” He proceeded to arrest and lock up about two percent of the entire country, cutting crime but also ending democracy altogether.
That’s the warning for us. When trust is gone, wild stuff happens to countries and I’ve seen it in person from Peru to the Philippines to Uganda to South Sudan and Darfur and elsewhere. And now I’m seeing it here as the predators and fascists are running amok in America.
Trust is the single most vital component of all human relationships. With it, you can create miracles; without it, it’s hard to do anything productive.
Just ask any marriage counselor; to recover trust after a betrayal can take years and requires both full disclosure, real contrition (or at least explanation), and a genuine change in behavior.
And that’s exactly what Americans are struggling with right now. In a republic like ours, trustworthiness necessarily begins at the top, and Donald Trump is an utterly un-trustworthy man.
He cheated on every one of his wives. He convinced his followers to give him a combined $3.81 billion for his $TRUMP and $MELANIA digital coins before their value fell 97 percent and he pocketed the difference. He’s made another $1.4 billion from crypto just in the first year of his second presidency.
And then there are the jailings and murders being carried out in Trump’s name and under his direction.
In January, his masked thugs murdered Renee Good (a mother of three) and Alex Pretti (an ICU nurse at the VA), both American citizens, on the streets of Minneapolis. For six months, the administration refused to hand the evidence of the murders over to state prosecutors and physically blocked state investigators.
As of today, nobody has been charged with these crimes. That’s the Bogotá sidewalk, the uniformed men with high-powered rifles who know nobody will ever hold them to account for their killing sprees.
This is a pattern that’s been more than 50 years in the making.
— Nixon committed treason, blowing up the Vietnam peace talks to win the 1968 election, and then repeatedly both broke the law and took bribes while in office. Ford pardoned him, telling us our “long national nightmare” was over, when he was simply setting up its next phase.
— Reagan cut a deal with the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the 1980 election to screw Jimmy Carter and, when a special prosecutor began a serious investigation of that treason, George H.W. Bush’s Attorney General, Bill Barr, advised him to pardon the six Iran-Contra defendants on Christmas Eve of 1992, just months before he left office. Bill Clinton chose to ignore it all and “look to the future.”
And when George W. Bush’s brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, purged around 100,000 Black Floridian citizens from the voter rolls in the months before the 2000 election so his sibling could “win” the state by 537 votes and their father’s appointee to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, cast the deciding vote to stop the recount that would have revealed the crime, Al Gore just let it slide.
Which brings us to the Democrats. It’s long past time when they have to say, in one loud voice, “No more! We are finally going to hold these criminals to account!”
Most recently, Trump committed a whole bunch of crimes both during his first term as president and, particularly, when he lost the 2020 election and demanded that Georgia’s Secretary of State “find” another >11,000 votes and sent a mob to the Capitol to murder the vice president and speaker of the House.
Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, waited 15 long, painful months before appointing Jack Smith and getting serious about holding this serial criminal to account; it was too little, too late.
Every one of those decisions, from Ford through Clinton to Gore and Garland, was made by decent people who told themselves that they were protecting our nation’s institutions by letting a little Republican crime slide by.
Unfortunately, that’s not the way this works.
Instead, what they told the next Republican criminal (or, in Trump’s case, himself) was that they, too, should go ahead and crime because if they get caught, they’ll get off with a slap on the hand or maybe, at worst, lose their office.
Every one of these Republican presidents, in other words, showed the next that the price of crimes against our democracy was negligible.
That’s how we got from Nixon hiding his bribes in the Oval Office to Reagan committing treason with the Iranians to the Bush brothers rigging Florida in 2000 to Trump selling meme coins from the White House and implicitly encouraging his agents to shoot citizens in the street.
Other democracies have gone down this road and figured out how to recover from a political party becoming so corrupt it sanctions theft from, and even the open murder of, its own citizens.
— In Argentina, they put the ruling junta on trial in a civilian courtroom in 1985, just two years after the dictatorship ended and during a time when the generals still almost certainly could have re-taken the government.
— South Korea impeached, removed from office, and sentenced President Yoon Suk Yeol to life in prison just 15 months after he tried to declare a state of emergency and martial law to avoid the consequences of his party’s electoral losses — the same crimes Trump is openly contemplating now.
— Brazil arrested and convicted former President Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a January 6th style coup and sentenced him to 27 years in prison; they also convicted his generals alongside him.
None of these countries collapsed; to the contrary, the democratic fabric of each was strengthened by holding their former political criminals to account. All are still democracies, and it looks like the same process will soon play out in Hungary.
Even South Africa’s “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” — which people think of as a “gentle alternative” to criminal prosecution — wasn’t designed to be gentle. People who failed to make full, public confessions of their crimes were supposed to be imprisoned; the cautionary tale is that none were, which is a good part of why many South Africans will tell you the wounds are still open. The government broke trust even as it was trying to restore it.
Increasingly, Americans get this. There have to be consequences for:
— betraying America, Ukraine, and democracy on behalf of Putin,
— looting our treasury and handing no-bid contracts to friends and business associates,
— traveling the world on our dime while picking up billions from dictators on the pretense of negotiating peace,
— killing unarmed civilians in the Caribbean and children in Iran,
— poisoning our air in exchange for campaign contributions,
— trying to overthrow our government and fix the 2026 election,
— sending armed masked thugs into our streets to intimidate and kill us while organizing them into the country’s largest domestic spying operation,
— handing trillions in tax breaks, all borrowed from the rest of us, to billionaire donors who are now trying to buy this 2026 election,
— and all the other crimes that you’re welcome to list in the comments to this article.
If Democrats want to earn the votes of that 89 percent of Americans who’ve lost faith in their government, they must — every one of them who wants our vote — publicly promise to prosecute these people.
No more Garland pauses, no more Ford pardons, no more Clinton, Gore, and Obama looking the other way. Not for Trump, Miller, Noem, Hegseth, the ICE agents, the crypto bagmen, the Abu Dhabi royals, or the pardon-buyers who’re cashing in on Trump’s corruption every day.
On Day One, the subpoenas must begin: Legislation mandating an independent counsel with a real budget and open trials in open court the way Argentina, Brazil, and South Korea did it. Impeachment of every corrupt Cabinet billionaire and associated lickspittle, from Trump on down. Revealing the complicity of Congressional Republicans.
Democrats don’t get to run on “restoring trust” and then govern like an abused spouse who keeps offering “just one more chance.” We’ve had four Republican presidents openly break the law or even commit treason just for political power; it must come to an end.
So, be sure you’re ready to vote and make sure your friends are, too.
And please share this piece and support hartmannreport.com, because the only reason I can still say these things out loud is that people like you help keep the lights on.
A Trojan horse threatens to turn America into a puppet nation — and it's inside the gates
As a veteran, the oath I took to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, did not come with an expiration date. National security is not solely the responsibility of the military or even law enforcement. It begins with ensuring a government of, by, and for the people cannot be bought by the ultra-wealthy or left vulnerable to foreign influence.
A nation whose elected officials are propped up by foreign countries and shadow entities is not a sovereign nation, but a puppet. It is time to cut the strings.
As we mark Constitution Day this Sept. 17, I ask my fellow veterans to put that oath into practice through active civic participation. Take action to stand up for a country that is not run by the highest bidder.
Our nation’s Founders anticipated this exact vulnerability. George Washington called foreign influence “one of the most baneful foes of republican government,” while Thomas Jefferson warned that preserving liberty required constant vigilance against corruption and outside interference.
Unchecked dark money and foreign-backed interests are pouring into our elections, bending public policy toward priorities that do not serve the American public. Veterans, working families, and everyday citizens are being drowned out by massive financial influence from masked donors we cannot match.
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Here in Maryland, State Board of Elections filings reflect the same reality we see nationwide: Out-of-state funding and deep-pocketed donors dominate campaign finance, sidelining Marylanders. But this is not just a Maryland problem, and it is not one that we can solve alone. We need a national response.
According to an Ipsos Poll, Americans across the political spectrum agree that campaign spending is not speech that should be unregulated. Voters overwhelmingly agree that citizens and their elected representatives should be the ones setting the limits, without the Supreme Court sweeping away those protections. In 1976, in Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court determined that spending unlimited money on political campaigns is protected as free speech. In 2010, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission extended that “right” to corporations.
If money in politics is free speech, then most everyday Americans have no voice at all. Billionaires and corporate entities can spend sums in a single cycle that the vast majority of us will never see in a lifetime.
Americans of all political persuasions are uniting behind a clear objective: passing a constitutional amendment that restores the power to regulate election money to Congress and the states. The movement is real, and the moment has arrived.
The For Our Freedom Amendment, championed by American Promise, achieves exactly that by authorizing state and federal oversight of “contributions and spending in campaigns, elections, or ballot measures.” It has been introduced in Congress and needs active support to reach the floor for a vote.
Why is an amendment necessary? There are only two ways to overturn the Supreme Court: Wait for the court to reverse its own precedent, which is not happening here, or use the mechanism we learned about in high school civics, a constitutional amendment. The ultimate check and balance.
This Constitution Day cannot pass without notice. Having pledged our lives to defend this Republic, veterans hold both the standing and the moral obligation to demand a higher standard. We did not serve this country only to watch foreign wealth and billionaire mega-donors choose our leaders for us.
Fellow veterans, we no longer wear the uniform, but our duty is not finished. Our time standing in formations may be over, but our oath to the Constitution never expires. While we served, many of us were unable to be engaged in politics. That time has passed; we are home, and we are still serving, and we cannot do this alone.
Maryland Matters is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: info@marylandmatters.org.