Thom Hartmann

Thomas Carl Hartmann is an American radio personality, author, businessman, and progressive political commentator.

Trump betrayed MAGA — and it wasn't an accident

Dear MAGA voter,

I’m not writing this to mock you. I’m writing because you were lied to. And it wasn’t by the people you were told to hate, but by the man you trusted the most.

You were pissed off when you voted in 2024. Honestly, rightfully angry. Your town lost its factory. Your kids can’t afford the house they’ve been dreaming of for years. The politicians in Washington kept promising you things and delivering nothing. In fact, Republicans even took away your Medicaid and food stamps as well as your kids’ school lunches. You wanted someone who’d finally blow the whole damn thing up and put regular people first.

So did I and millions of other Americans. The difference is who we trusted to do it. Let’s talk about what actually happened.

You were told Donald Trump would “drain the swamp” of corruption in Washington, D.C. Instead, as former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene can tell you, Trump has built the most corrupt, billionaire-stuffed cabinet (13 of them!) in American history. Epstein buddy Howard Lutnick. Billionaire hustler Scott Bessent. Hedge fund managers and Wall Street insiders as far as the eye can see.

And then he handed the core agencies of the federal government — with no vote, no vetting, no accountability to anyone — over to Elon Musk, the single richest human being on the planet. Not a populist or a Washington outsider: the most powerful oligarch alive, whose wealth came from Barack Obama bailing out Tesla and who now gets tens of billions in annual government contracts.

Musk’s teenage hackers stole your Social Security information and destroyed America’s soft power by gutting USAID: as Bill Gates said, “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.”

This is your swamp now, one that’s already literally killed at least a million children around the world while handing our nation’s soft power over to Vladimir Putin.

Trump also said there would be no more “stupid wars.” Yet he’s spending $1 billion a day and has already destroyed six American lives over his attack on Iran and still can’t explain to us why he did it or what actual threat that country represented to America. It appears he just did it because Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Jared Kushner all encouraged him to.

And now the Washington Post is reporting that Putin is giving the Iranians “targeting information” so they can kill American troops, just like when Putin put a bounty on US soldiers in Afghanistan and that was fine with Trump during his first term. Is that the kind of war you want? Somehow I doubt it.

You were also promised lower drug prices. Remember that? Trump made it a centerpiece of his campaign pitch. He looked straight into the camera and said he’d take on Big Pharma. But the pharmaceutical industry is making more money than ever before, and now the same Republican Congress that cheers Trump’s every move has cut a trillion dollars out of Medicaid (the cuts come later this year).

That’s the national healthcare program that covers roughly one in five Americans, the majority of them in rural, working-class communities that voted for the same Republicans who gutted it on Trump’s orders. Your neighbors. Your family members. People who believed in him. Cuts made simply to pay for a trillion dollars of Trump’s $5 trillion tax break for himself, Mark Zuckerberg, Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and the other billionaires who put him into office.

And then there’s the tariffs, which he told you China would pay. But China isn’t paying: you are. Tariffs are taxes collected at the border and paid by American importers, that are then passed on to American consumers like you and me.

The people most exposed to rising prices on clothes, appliances, groceries, and cars are working-class families who spend a higher share of their income on the necessities of life. That’s you. The billionaires in his cabinet can absorb and even profit from Trump’s inflation; you can’t.

And while all this is happening, the national debt keeps exploding. It ballooned by $7 trillion during his first term. His second-term tax proposals are deficit-financed giveaways that only benefit corporations and the ultra-wealthy.

Trump talks about “no taxes on tips” and “no taxes on Social Security” but those cuts are very, very limited and expire in a few years; the tax breaks on billionaires are deep and last forever. Your grandchildren will spend their lives paying off Trump’s tax cuts for people who summer in the Hamptons. This isn’t fiscal conservatism: it’s looting dressed up in a red hat.

Remember the wall? Mexico was going to pay for it. Mexico didn’t pay for a single inch of it. And remember when Musk publicly defended keeping H-1B visas, the program Trump uses to import European workers for his shabby golf motels and that let corporations import cheaper foreign labor and hold down American wages? That caused a genuine civil war inside MAGA world for about a week, before the Murdoch/Ellison Epstein-class billionaire media moguls changed the subject. Trump sided with the billionaires; being one himself, he always sides with the billionaires.

Don’t forget Social Security and Medicare. He swore — repeatedly, explicitly — that he’d never cut them. Watch what the fine print says, particularly since he fired more than 7,000 Social Security workers to make it really hard on people who are trying to sign up. That’s about encouraging people to move to the Medicare Advantage scam plans that are so profitable to his insurance industry donors.

Watch what DOGE is circling. Watch the budget proposals coming out of his own party’s Congress. The cuts aren’t coming for the people at Mar-a-Lago: they’re coming for you.

And perhaps the cruelest irony of all: the communities hit hardest by Trump’s policies are the communities that supported him most. Farmers crushed by retaliatory tariffs from trading partners. Rural hospitals dependent on federal funding now facing existential pressure. FEMA cuts hurting people in bright red southern states. The economic pain is landing heaviest on the people who believed in him the most.

None of this is an accident. This is what happens when you elect a pathological liar who talks like a populist but governs for the donor class. Your anger was real. His betrayal is real.

I’m not asking you to become a Democrat. I’m not asking you to agree with me about anything except this: a man who fills his cabinet with hedge fund managers, hands power to the world’s richest oligarch, lets Big Pharma walk, starts a war to distract us from news he raped 13-year-old girls, and watches your grocery bill climb while calling it “victory” is not on your side.

He never was.

The swampy system you were furious at? It’s still there. It just has a new Dear Leader.

You deserve better than this. Heck, we all deserve better than this.

Join us…

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Did Trump's son-in-law use diplomacy to lure Iranian leaders into a death trap?

Jared Kushner grew up sleeping in Benjamin Netanyahu’s bed.

That isn’t a metaphor or hyperbole. Netanyahu, during his visits to New York over the decades, was close enough to the Kushner family that, as the New York Times reported, he slept in Jared’s childhood bedroom. Jared Kushner didn’t grow up watching Netanyahu on the news the way the rest of us did. He grew up knowing the man as something close to a family institution.

And that man, who has said publicly that he has “yearned” to destroy Iran’s military and political leadership “for 40 years,” is the same man whose government may have been coordinating directly with Kushner in the days before the most consequential American military action since the invasion of Iraq or the Vietnam War.

We need to ask the question that official Washington is too timid, too compromised, or too captured by the moment’s war fever to ask: “Was Jared Kushner sitting across from Iranian negotiators in good faith? Or was he trying to get the Iranian leadership to meet together so Netanyahu could kill them all in one single decapitating strike?”

Here’s what we know. The third round of nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran wrapped up in Geneva on Feb. 26th and 27th. The Omani foreign minister, who’d been mediating the talks for months, told CBS News on the eve of the bombing that a deal was “within our reach” and that Iran had fully given in to American demands and agreed it would never produce nuclear material for a bomb, or an ICBM capable of striking the United States.

A fourth round had already been scheduled for Vienna the following week to work through the technical details following final discussions in Tehran. The Iranian foreign minister told reporters his team was ready to stay and keep talking for as long as it took.

And then, less than 48 hours after those talks in Switzerland concluded, the bombs began to fall.

On the morning of Feb. 28th, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council was gathered together in their offices for meetings. That body, the one that manages Iran’s nuclear dossier and makes the regime’s most consequential decisions, is exactly where you would expect the Iranian leadership to be sitting after a round of talks with America that their own foreign minister was calling “historic.”

They were almost certainly deliberating whether to accept or reject Kushner's American proposal. And according to the Wall Street Journal, American and Israeli intelligence had verified that senior Iranian leaders would be gathered at three locations that could be struck simultaneously. How they knew that is, as the Journal carefully noted, still unknown.

In other words, Iran’s entire decision-making apparatus was assembled in one place most likely because they were in the middle of an active negotiation with Jared Kushner. The talks had created a predictable, intelligenceable window.

Diplomats who were part of the earlier rounds of talks now tell reporters that the Iranian side has come to believe they’d been misled, and that Tehran now views the Witkoff-Kushner negotiations as, in their words, “a ruse designed to keep Iran from expecting and preparing for the surprise strikes.”

That’s not the assessment of Iranian state media spinning a narrative after a military defeat; it’s the conclusion of people who were in the room, speaking to American journalists, on the record.

Now layer on top of that what we know about who Witkoff was meeting with in the days before they sat down with the Iranians. He flew to Israel and was briefed directly by Netanyahu and senior Israeli defense officials and then, with Kushner, flew to Oman and Geneva and sat across the table from the Iranian negotiators.

The man who briefed Kushner’s partner (Witkoff) before those talks — Netanyahu — is the same man who said on the night the bombs fell that “this coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” He wasn’t even remotely subdued or reluctant about the possibility of the Middle East going up in flames, perhaps even igniting World War III. He was, instead, triumphant that he finally got an American president to do something he’d been unsuccessfully pushing for decades.

We also know that the Trump regime’s explanations for why the attacks happened when they did have collapsed into open contradiction. Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially told reporters the US struck because Israel was going to attack anyway and Iran would have retaliated against American forces. Trump then went on television and flipped the scenario upside-down, saying he might’ve “forced Israel’s hand.”

The two most senior officials in the administration told two diametrically opposite stories within 48 hours of each other, and neither story explains why the diplomacy that the Omani mediator called substantively successful — that essentially got America everything we said we wanted — was abandoned without the final round.

None of this proves that Kushner was running a deliberate double-cross operation designed to concentrate Iranian leadership in a killable location. What it does prove, though, is that the question is entirely legitimate and demands an answer under oath.

This is not the first time in American history that such a question has had to be asked, or that it damaged America’s reputation on the world stage. In October of 1972, Henry Kissinger stood before the cameras and told the world that “peace is at hand” in Vietnam. The Paris negotiations, he assured everyone, were on the verge of ending the war.

But it was a lie: two months later, Nixon ordered Operation Linebacker II, the most intensive bombing campaign of the entire war, dropping more tonnage on North Vietnam in twelve days than had been dropped in all of 1969 and 1970 combined.

The Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973 on terms that serious historians have long argued were not meaningfully different from what had been on the table long before the bombing. Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize for those negotiations. His North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, however, refused to accept his share of the prize, saying that peace had not actually been achieved and the Vietnamese had been deceived because the negotiations were a sham. And he was right: the war dragged on for two more years and was ended by Jerry Ford with the fall of Saigon.

The question that has haunted the world since those 1973 negotiations is the same question hanging over Kushner’s Geneva talks today: were the talks ever meant to succeed on their own terms, or were they simply a setup to destroy the Iranian leadership even if they gave us everything we wanted?

There’s also the Ronald Reagan precedent. His campaign was credibly accused of running a back-channel to Iran to delay the release of American hostages held in Tehran so that Jimmy Carter couldn’t get a pre-election boost from securing their freedom. It took decades for anything close to a full picture to emerge, but now we know that the Reagan campaign successfully committed that treason just to get him into the White House in 1980.

We don’t have decades this time. A war is under way and Americans are already dying. The leadership of a modern, developed country of ninety million people has been decapitated. And every foreign ministry on Earth is watching and drawing conclusions about whether they’ll ever again trust American diplomacy.

If the Iranians were right that they were “negotiated” into a kill box, no government facing an existential American ultimatum will ever be able to assume our good faith again.

The damage this administration is doing to American credibility isn’t abstract or temporary: when a country uses the negotiating table as a targeting opportunity, it poisons the well for every administration that comes after it.

North Korea is watching. Iran’s neighbors are watching. China is watching. The next time an American president sends an envoy somewhere with a genuine offer of peace, why would anyone believe it? Le Duc Tho knew the answer to that question when Kissinger betrayed his Vietnamese negotiating partners in 1973. The world is apparently relearning it now.

Congress has the constitutional power and the institutional obligation to call Kushner and Witkoff before investigative committees and ask them directly: What did you know about Israeli targeting plans during the Geneva talks? When did you know it? What were you instructed to accomplish or delay? Did you communicate with Netanyahu’s government during the negotiations themselves?

The man at the center of this diplomacy grew up treating Benjamin Netanyahu like a member of the family. That’s not a reason to assume guilt, but it sure as hell is a reason to demand answers, loudly, now, before the war makes the asking impossible.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Trump bombed Iran and left America vulnerable to retaliation. That's no accident

History doesn’t repeat, as Mark Twain allegedly said, but it sure does seem to rhyme. And right now, the rhyme between the first year of the George W. Bush presidency and the first year of Donald Trump’s second term is staring us in the face and it’s getting scary.

After “Poppy” George H.W. Bush finished his 1991 “little war” against Iraq, he left American troops stationed at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Those soldiers on what Osama bin Laden considered sacred Muslim soil — the home to Mecca — became his primary grievance against America.

He said so publicly, raving at the New York Times and anyone else who’d listen. American men were drinking alcohol and looking at pornography and thus defiling Saudi holy land, he said, and American women were showing their bare arms and driving cars in a country where such things are absolutely forbidden. When Bin Laden declared war on us, he meant it as part of a religious and moral crusade.

That war came home on September 11, 2001, and it arrived at a miraculously convenient moment for an otherwise hapless George W. Bush. The new president had taken office under a cloud of illegitimacy after five Republicans on the Supreme Court, two of them appointed by his own father, stopped the Florida recount — that would have handed the election to Al Gore — and thus gave Bush the presidency.

Millions of Americans believed the 2000 election had been stolen, between Jeb Bush purging 90,000 Black voters from the Florida rolls just before the election, and the five Republicans on the Court handing Bush the Oval Office. His approval ratings were mediocre at best, he had no mandate, and he struggled to find any sort of an agenda beyond more tax cuts for billionaires that could excite the public.

Then the towers fell, and overnight Bush became the most popular president in the history of modern polling: his approval rating hit 90 percent. The man who’d been floundering became, overnight, a “wartime president,” which was exactly what he’d wanted all along.

Back in 1999, Bush told his ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz that if he ever got the presidency, what he really needed was a war:

“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander in chief ... My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it.”

Bin Laden’s 9/11 attack on the US gave Bush his “chance to invade,” his war capital. He spent it to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks, and to drive an even larger tax cut for billionaires than originally anticipated.

Exposed by the Downing Street Memos, his administration had fabricated intelligence, ginned up fake connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and lied about weapons of mass destruction. Hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of his lies, but Bush got his “successful presidency.”

Now look at Trump.

His poll numbers right now are worse than Bush’s were in the summer of 2001; worse in many regards than any president in polling history. His approval ratings on literally every topic — from immigration to ICE to taxes to inflation to healthcare, etc., etc. — are underwater and sinking.

Further, there are allegations that the FBI is sitting on evidence related to claims Trump raped at least one and possibly two 13-year-old girls. His family is openly monetizing the presidency, with his nepo sons and son-in-law cutting real estate deals and cryptocurrency schemes with the governments of Saudi Arabia and the UAE while Trump pushes — against the advice of our intelligence agencies — to send advanced AI chips to those same countries.

The corruption is so brazen it barely qualifies as corruption anymore. Trump and his lickspittles have pulled off what was previously unimaginable: the reinvention of government as a machine to generate profit for the ruling family — much like Saddam Hussein had done in Iraq and Vladimir Putin has done in Russia — all right out in plain sight.

Meanwhile, Trump’s ICE agents are terrorizing communities across the country, beating and intimidating American citizens, deporting legal residents without due process, and violating the Fourth and Fifth Amendments so routinely that constitutional scholars have stopped being shocked and started being terrified. Reports of ICE-related deaths of American citizens like Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis are piling up as the Trump regime refuses to cooperate in state-level murder investigations.

On top of all these crises, the electoral landscape for November is looking catastrophic for Republicans. Trump and the GOP are staring down a potential wipeout in the 2026 midterms, which is why red-state legislatures are gerrymandering with abandon, why Trump is floating proposals to nationalize elections, ban mail-in voting, and station ICE agents outside polling places in minority neighborhoods.

These are not the actions of a confident political party that believes it’s doing what’s best for average Americans. They are, instead, the actions of people who know they’re on the verge of losing power and facing accountability, and are therefore willing to destroy our very democracy to hold onto power.

So, Trump desperately needed something to change the subject. And right on cue, he launched an unprovoked military attack on Iran, apparently at the urging of Benjamin Netanyahu, who has his own desperate need to remain in power to keep himself out of prison for his own bribery and corruption scandals.

The bombing of Iran gave Trump a few days of wall-to-wall war coverage, pushing every other scandal (including Epstein) below the fold. It was a classic wag-the-dog maneuver, but so far it’s worked well enough to dominate the news cycle.

But here is where the rhyme with 2001 turns frighteningly dark.

Kash Patel, Trump’s FBI director, has fired or reassigned almost the entire FBI team responsible for tracking Iranian threats inside the United States. The specialists who spent years building intelligence networks to monitor Iranian-linked operatives on American soil have been purged from the agency, fired unceremoniously.

At the same time, Trump has let funding for the Department of Homeland Security lapse, leaving critical counterterrorism functions in limbo as Republicans in Congress refuse — at his insistence — to act. He’s systematically dismantled the very apparatus that exists to prevent a terrorist attack on the continental US or our assets around the world.

Ask yourself why. Why would a president who just bombed Iran simultaneously gut the very intelligence infrastructure built by previous administrations to detect and prevent Iranian retaliation? Why would you poke a hornet’s nest and then fire the guy with the EpiPen?

Unless you wanted to get stung.

The logic is almost too ugly to contemplate, but it tracks perfectly with recent history. Bush needed 9/11 and got it, and it saved his presidency. Trump needs something equally dramatic to reset his collapsing political fortunes.

A spectacular Iranian-sponsored attack on American soil, or even a major domestic attack by a radicalized actor inspired by the chaos Trump himself has created, would instantly transform him into a Bush-like “wartime president.”

It would push the bribery, the rapes, the constitutional violations, the ICE killings, and the election rigging off the front page overnight. It would give him emergency powers he has already shown he’s more than willing to abuse. It would give Republicans a reason to “rally around the flag” and postpone the reckoning that November 2026 currently promises.

This is not some wacky conspiracy theory: it’s simply pattern recognition. When a president provokes a hostile nation, then fires the people whose job it is to protect us from that nation’s retaliation, the conclusion is either staggering incompetence or something far more sinister.

We can’t afford to wait and find out which one it is.

Call your senators and your representative today. Call them tomorrow. Call them every day until they act. Demand that Trump’s attack on Iran stop before it spirals into a full-scale war nobody voted for.

Demand that the FBI immediately reinstate its Iranian threat-monitoring teams. Demand that DHS be fully funded and its counter-terrorism mission restored, with ICE being forced to start obeying the law and the Constitution.

And demand that Congress exercise its constitutional authority over war and peace before Trump drags us deeper into a conflict designed to serve no one’s interests but his own and Bibi Netanyahu’s. The phone number for the Capitol switchboard is (202) 224-3121.

Use it. Our safety, our democracy, and our future depend on it.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

This horrifying right-wing demand sent a chilling message to us all

It probably shouldn’t surprise us. After all, intolerance and hate have always been the fuel that drives and sustains right-wing movements around the world and throughout history.

Now the hosts of one of the largest-circulation “conservative” podcasts in the country are calling for a Muslim commentator to be stripped of his citizenship and deported from America.

His sin? He called for the next president to take down the Hitler-style massive banners on the Justice and Labor Department buildings that feature Donald Trump’s face, and the new one on the Education Department with Charlie Kirk’s face. And, of course, he’s a brown-skinned Muslim. As Raw Story is reporting:

“Yeah, he’s just a repulsive creature,” said one of the guys filling in for the late hard-right crusader. “We gave him citizenship for some stupid reason, and he rewards us by dumping on an American icon and an American hero. Yeah, you know what? I’ll give my primary support to whoever says, we’re going to try to find a way to strip this person’s citizenship and send him back to some dump.”

“Yeah, we should, actually, we should,” his buddy agreed. “He’s a foreigner that, to Blake’s point, for some reason, in our stupid immigration system, he was allowed in. Then he’s allowed to come in here and smear the memory of Charlie Kirk, the legacy of Charlie Kirk.”

“And listen, those are the freedoms that have been bestowed upon him by a superior country and culture than his own,” he added. “And yeah, whatever, he’s British or whatever his, you know. But he’s a Muslim.”

“And so, yeah, we have a superior culture than Mehdi Hasan’s, and yet he’s come in here, and he’s been bestowed with the same freedoms that American citizens have long enjoyed.”

Mehdi Hasan is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and he’d absolutely destroy these two snowflakes in a debate. Which is why, of course, they’re not debating him but simply trash-talking him.

This neofascist call to use the power of government to punish a person for their speech is about as un-American as it gets. And it’s also right in line with the reactionary conservative impulse that goes back more than two centuries.

In the Adams/Jefferson election contest of 1800, as Dan Sisson and I point out in our book The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction and What This Means Today, partisan newspapers were absolutely relentless in their personal attacks against Thomas Jefferson.

John Adams fared better because, during the previous two years of his presidency, our second president had shut down around 30 anti-Federalist/anti-Adams newspapers and thrown their publishers, editors, and writers in prison for speaking ill of him. One died in jail, another fled the country, and others were financially destroyed. Adams even jailed the town drunk in Newark, New Jersey, for a comment he made to the bartender, making Luther Baldwin one of the most famous alcoholics in American history.

Then-Vice President Jefferson responded to a friend who asked, during Adams’ initial crackdown, how he felt about it all and he responded with a pithy expression of what has been, for most of America’s history, the true American credo:

“I am persuaded myself that the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves. The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty.

“The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people.
“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

When I was 16 years old, I published a little anti-war newspaper called The Jurist that a friend of mine and I distributed in our high school. My father — a fervent Republican activist — printed it on his mimeo machine, even though he totally disagreed with pretty much everything I wrote about the Vietnam War. In one issue I went too far, attacking the school’s principal for “suppressing our free speech”; he kicked me out of school.

It turned out well for me as I’d been on an advanced-track since Sputnik went up when I was in second grade, so I transitioned straight to community college that year, and my Republican father defended me all the way. As he would have defended anybody whose opinions differed from his.

Barry Goldwater would have agreed with my father (we went door-to-door for him in 1964 when I was 13), as would have most Republicans of that era. William F. Buckley welcomed lefties on his Firing Line show that Dad and I watched together every weekend.

But don’t try to tell today’s Republicans about pluralistic democracy or the importance of dissent in a free society. There’s nothing conservative about these right-wingers who embrace hate, violence, and the use of government force to shut up those with whom they disagree; that’s pure neofascist reactionaryism.

They and their Epstein-class billionaire backers will apparently be much happier if Trump can succeed in flipping America into a Putin-style autocracy and use the force of government to crush all the remaining anti-Trump voices.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Trump just committed a naked crime — and the horrific reason is all too clear

Operation Epstein Fury — with a bonus to help Bibi get re-elected so he doesn’t have to face charges for his criminal behavior — is rolling on as Donald Trump ignores the constitutional requirement that only Congress can declare war.

He’s also violating the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that dictates the president, if he reacts to an actual attack on America like Pearl Harbor, must notify Congress within 48 hours and have authorization within 60 days. In this case there was no actual or even imminent attack against America.

To further confuse things, Trump is throwing the Iranian protesters under the bus by saying that he’s willing to talk with the Iranian regime now that Ayatollah Khamenei is dead, much like he crapped on pro-democracy voters and protestors in Venezuela when he kept that repressive regime intact after illegally removing Nicolás Maduro and promising democracy.

This conflict is also now spreading. Khamenei was to many Shia Muslims around the world something akin to what the Pope is to Catholics (there’s no equivalent among the Sunni Muslims). Imagine the Catholic world’s fury if a country had assassinated Pope Leo XIV: we’re now seeing Shia protests and outrage from Bangladesh to Pakistan to Lebanon.

And here at home, Trump is musing about using Iranian interference in our 2020 election as an excuse to issue an emergency executive order to seize control of the upcoming November midterm election.

Which is particularly ironic, given that the well-documented Iranian intervention that year was designed to help get Trump reelected (after all, he’d just torn up the JCPOA nuclear deal) and avoid a Biden administration from coming into power.

Four Americans are dead and five in critical condition because of Iranian retaliatory strikes, as are civilians in several other US-aligned countries in the region. Along with around 200 young people in Iran after we bombed a girl’s school and a gymnasium.

And it’s early days. As Winston Churchill famously said in 1936 about war:

“Once the signal is given, no one can predict how far events will go.”

America’s Founders and the Framers of our Constitution not only would have agreed with Churchill, but saw a president seizing war powers from Congress as an existential threat to the republic. On April 20, 1795, James Madison, who had just helped shepherd through the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and would become President of the United States in the following decade, wrote:

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.”

Reflecting on the ability of a president to use war as an excuse to become a virtual dictator, Madison continued his letter:

“In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive [President] is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war...and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both.

“No nation,” our fourth President and the Father of the Constitution concluded, “could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Since Madison’s warning, “continual warfare” has been used both in fiction and in the real world. In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, the way a seemingly democratic president kept his nation in a continual state of repression was by having a continuous war.

The lesson wasn’t lost on Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, who both extended the Vietnam war so it coincidentally ran over election cycles, knowing that a wartime president’s party is more likely to be reelected and has more power than a president in peacetime.

And, as George W. Bush told his biographer in 1999:

“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as commander in chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Every Republican president since Reagan has had his own “little war.” Now it’s Trump’s turn, after all the times over the years he warned that if Barak Obama was ever in trouble he’d start a war with Iran to distract us:

“In order to get elected, @BarackObama will start a war with Iran.” (2011)

“Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective…” (2011)

“@BarackObama will attack Iran in the not too distant future because it will help him win the election.” (2012)

“Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin — watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate.” (2012)

“Remember what I said about @BarackObama attacking Iran before the election…” (2012)

“I predict that President Obama will at some point attack Iran in order to save face!” (2013)

Given that Baron, Don Jr, and Eric Trump all apparently suffer from hereditary bone spurs and no Trump has ever served as a “loser” or “sucker” in our military (and his grandfather came to America as a German draft-dodger), it’s unlikely this war will mean anything other than profit-making opportunities for the Trump children.

But it compounds his constant ignoring of constitutional limits on presidential power ranging from gutting federal agencies without authorization to having ICE routinely ignore court orders, flagrantly violate the Fourth Amendment, and daily lie to the American people.

Nobody invested in peace or democracy is mourning the death of the Iranian dictator or the possible unraveling of its theocracy. But must we do it in a way that breaks both US and international law?

Trump apparently thinks so; not only will it distract from the news reports that he allegedly raped at least one and maybe more 13-year-olds — allegations he denies — and his naked corruption and bribe-taking but it also carves another “screwed Congress” notch in his belt.

There was no attack on America, as required by the War Powers Resolution. There wasn’t even a serious possibility of an attack on America.

Madison and the Founders of his generation had it right: this is a naked crime by Trump and Hegseth against our Constitution and our laws and requires a strong congressional response such as impeachment.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

This terrifying Trump plot to steal elections is already underway

Recently, Steve Bannon told an audience:

“And I will tell you right now, as God is my witness, if we lose the midterms … some in this room are going to prison — myself included.”

Now, it looks like Donald Trump and the people around him are seriously considering declaring an emergency to let them seize control of this November’s elections, according to reporting in the Washington Post:

“Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.”

Trump and the lickspittles and criminals he’s surrounded himself with are in a panic. If Democrats take the House and/or Senate in this November’s elections, they’ll have the power of subpoena so the regime’s crimes and corruption will be laid out for everybody to see. Some could even go to prison, including Trump himself.

He’s been basically screaming, “Do something!!!” at Republicans for the past year. It started publicly with his demanding that Texas and then other red states further gerrymander their elections to reduce the number of Democrats in the House.

In red states they’re purging voters in Blue cities from the rolls like there’s no tomorrow, and the GOP is trying to recruit “election observers” to challenge signatures on mail-in ballots on an industrial level. As reporter Greg Palast pointed out, this is how Trump took the White House in 2024; if it hadn’t been for over 4 million (mostly Black) fully qualified US citizens being purged or having their ballots rejected after technical challenges, Kamala Harris would be our president today.

But given how badly Trump’s doing in the polls today, even all these efforts don’t look like they’ll be enough to keep the House and Senate in Republican hands.

So now Trump toadies like Jerome Corsi (the creator of the Birther movement and the Swift Boat slurs, who’s been a guest on my program multiple times) have an idea: just imitate what Putin, Orbán, Hitler, and other dictators have done to hang onto power when they get unpopular: declare an emergency and use it to rig the election.

Yesterday, the Post detailed how MAGA-aligned activists are now openly discussing manufacturing or exaggerating a national emergency to justify Trump’s agents in the federal government to interfere in this November’s elections.

These aren’t fringe anonymous trolls on some obscure message board; they’re people operating in proximity to the president of the United States. Corsi arguably destroyed John Kerry’s chances in 2004 and lit the Birther fuse that catapulted Trump into political fame.

And they’re floating the idea that if normal democratic processes don’t produce the “right” outcome, they could help create a fake crisis to seize control of the election nationally.

If you’ve studied history — and you know I have — that’s the moment when the hair on the back of your neck should stand up.

Because this isn’t new, creative, or even uniquely American: it’s straight out of the authoritarian playbook.

In 1933, Germany’s parliament building, the Reichstag, went up in flames at the hands of a mentally ill Dutch communist who was probably maneuvered into the act by the Nazis. Adolf Hitler declared it “proof” of an existential communist threat. Civil liberties were suspended overnight. Gone in the blink of an eye were freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble as Hitler’s goons began to round up his political opponents and throw them into his new concentration camp at Dachau.

Elections were technically still held, but under conditions so distorted they no longer qualified as free or fair in any meaningful sense, and the so-called “temporary” emergency became Hitler’s legal bridge to a permanent dictatorship.

Similarly, in Turkey in 2016, elements of the military tried to pull off a coup against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan while he was out of town. Erdoğan declared a national state of emergency and then kept it in place permanently. Tens of thousands of protesters were arrested. Judges and teachers were purged from their jobs, and media outlets were closed down for being “fake news.”

While emergency rule was in effect, Turkey held an election that transformed its parliamentary democracy into a hyper-presidential system tailored to give virtually all federal power to Erdoğan himself. It was the end of democracy in Turkey.

Vladimir Putin’s rise offers another variation. In 1999, a series of apartment bombings killed hundreds of Russians and the Kremlin blamed Chechen terrorists. The attacks propelled Putin, then a relatively unknown prime minister, into the presidency on a wave of fear and fury.

Putin then declared a state of emergency that expanded his police powers, gave him tighter media control, and let him seize control of the elections process. In the years since then, elections in Russia have become ritual rather than reality. The ballots are printed every few years, and the votes are counted, but the outcome is never in doubt.

Viktor Orbán in Hungary shows yet another model. He declared a “state of crisis” over migration by Syrian refugees in 2015 and kept renewing it long after migration levels collapsed. During the COVID pandemic, he got the parliament to give him the authority to rule by decree on an indefinite basis; it’s still in effect.

As a result, elections still happen (there’s one coming up), but the media landscape was completely taken over by Orbán-friendly billionaires (see: CBS, WaPo, LA Times, Fox “News,” Sinclair, Wall St. Journal, NY Post, and 1,500 rightwing radio stations). Orbán didn’t need to cancel Hungary’s elections; he simply reshaped the legal and political environment in which they happened.

There’s a common thread in all of this. The crisis wannabe dictators inevitably declare — real, exaggerated, or cynically manipulated — become the justification for seizing extraordinary powers. Those powers narrow dissent, intimidate opponents, and functionally rig the elections.

That’s why this shocking new reporting in the Washington Post is so alarming. When political actors like Corsi begin talking openly about declaring an emergency to override or interfere with elections, they’re not blowing smoke: they’re testing a classic dictator’s narrative.

They’re trying to figure out — and will learn from the national reaction to this Post reporting — whether they can persuade the public that normal election processes are too dangerous to trust. After all, in each of the cases I listed above, the machinery of democracy was used to hollow out democracy itself.

And they may not even have to manufacture an emergency: if Trump can sufficiently provoke Iran, they may activate their proxy network around the world and in the United States, and we could be facing a genuine crisis on the order of 9/11. This is one of the few ways to make sense of today’s massive military buildup in the Middle East.

The danger here isn’t just a fabricated catastrophe or a retaliatory strike by Iran, although those are pretty damn severe. It’s the normalization of the idea that if the electorate appears likely to choose “wrongly,” an emergency can justify changing the rules of democracy.

History shows us, over and over again, that when a nation loses its democracy to an aspiring autocrat, the language and strategy used is always the same. “The nation is under threat.” “The moment is an emergency.” “Normal rules must be suspended — just temporarily — to save the country.”

And in every case, “temporary” turned out to be the most dangerous word of all.

We’re now at that moment where influential figures are publicly contemplating that path, and the lesson from history isn’t subtle. The real emergency, in a constitutional republic, begins when leaders like Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan and Trump — and their toadies like Corsi, Bondi, Noem, and Gabbard — decide that elections themselves are the problem.

Multiple observers have noted that this plan is grossly unconstitutional. But so were Trump’s tariffs (which also used IEEPA emergency authority as their rationale), and the Supreme Court let him run with them for almost a year before stopping him.

Similarly, ICE goons kicking in people’s front doors and smashing their car windows to drag them off without a judicial warrant is a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, but Trump’s agents continued to do it every day. Something being against the law or the Constitution has never stopped our convicted felon/rapist/insurrectionist president in the past.

This plot will only be stopped if it’s widely reported and an outraged public rises up in opposition. Call (202-224-3121) your elected representatives — Democratic and Republican — and let them know you’re onto this plot and won’t tolerate it. And that if they have any fidelity left to the Constitution and American values, they won’t either.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Trump's reliance on this old lie shows his entire project is bankrupt

Donald Trump didn’t merely criticize his political opponents this week, both at the State of the Union and from his office the following morning. He went on a racist rant that would have embarrassed a talk radio shock jock (if it didn’t get them fired), much less a head of state.

After Representatives Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) shouted “shame” and “liar” during his State of the Union and walked out in protest, Trump took to social media to sneer that they had “the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people” and were “LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick” who “look like they should be institutionalized.”

He labeled them “Low IQ” — his favorite slur for women, Black, and Hispanic people — and suggested they be sent back “from where they came.” He lumped in Robert De Niro as “Trump Deranged,” “demented,” and possibly “criminal” for criticizing him.

This is the president of the United States talking.

This may have been normal politics in the old Confederacy — which Trump is trying to revive with his base namings and statues and purging Black history from museums and monuments — but it shouldn’t be normal today.

This is an elderly man — whose father was busted in a Klan rally and who himself was busted in the 1970s for refusing to rent to Black people — now occupying the Oval Office and responding to dissent with language that sounds like it was scraped from the darkest, most disgusting corners of the internet.

When Trump tells elected racial-minority members of Congress to “go back where they came from” — US citizens who’ve sworn an oath to defend the Constitution — and trash-talks well-known and respected public figures like De Niro this way, he’s using the oldest dictator’s trick in the book: he’s trying to dehumanize them.

And when he says they should be sent overseas “as fast as possible,” he’s invoking one of the ugliest refrains in American history, the taunt racists have hurled at people of color for generations to tell them they don’t really belong in our nation.

Ilhan Omar came to this country as a refugee and went through the arduous and lengthy process to become a US citizen. Rashida Tlaib was born in Detroit. Yet Trump’s first racist instinct when confronted by two outspoken women of color is to question their right to be here at all.

That’s not an accident; it’s an ancient political strategy rooted in dividing people and turning them against each other. He wants his followers to hate them, and then to act on that hate, making them fearful and putting their lives at risk.

He knows his followers tried to kill Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and actually killed a state legislator in Minnesota and her husband, a federal judge’s son, and others. He knows that by painting Tlaib, Omar, and De Niro as alien, unhinged, and dangerous, he can activate that part of his base that regularly acts on grievance and fear with violence.

This is Blackshirt and Brownshirt politics for the 21st century. It’s pure, unadulterated hate, and should be beneath any elected official. But, of course, this is Donald Trump, for whom there’s no floor beneath which he and his Republican lickspittles can’t sink.

He called his long, boring, rambling, lie-filled State of the Union speech an “important and beautiful event” and accused them of ruining it with their protests. But democracy isn’t a pageant like his old Miss Teen USA contests (that are accused of feeding the Epstein machine). It’s not a royal court where subjects must sit quietly while the monarch speaks (or walks into their dressing rooms while they’re naked).

Members of Congress are not props: they’re co-equal representatives of We the People. If they believe a president or anybody else is lying or has harmed their constituents (and Trump’s ICE goons murdered two of Omar’s constituents in cold blood), they have every right to say so, to do it loudly, and to suffer the consequences like removal or censure if they come.

The Founders and Framers of the Constitution didn’t design a system to protect a president’s feelings. They designed one to protect liberty.

Trump’s attack on De Niro follows the same playbook. De Niro criticized his fascist-like behavior and Trump responded by calling him “sick and demented” with an “extremely Low IQ,” hinting that some of what he said was “seriously CRIMINAL.”

“Criminal.” For speech. In America! That word should chill to the bone anyone who cares about the First Amendment and our most basic freedoms. When Trump toys with the idea that criticism of him could be prosecuted, he’s not joking any more than Putin did in the months before he started arresting protestors. He’s testing the boundaries of what his followers in Congress and what’s left of our system of justice will accept.

And then, almost as an afterthought, Trump boasted that “America is now Bigger, Better, Richer, and Stronger than ever before.”

“Richer” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Yes, the top sliver of this country is now, as a result of 45 years of Republican tax cuts, staggeringly wealthy. Billionaires saw their fortunes explode with the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts. Corporate profits have soared because of Republican deregulation and the destruction of our union movement.

But for working families staring down sky-high rents, unaffordable health care, crushing student loans, stagnant wages, and grocery bills that don’t match their paychecks, Republicans bragging about unprecedented riches among their Epstein-billionaire donor class rings hollow.

We’re living through an affordability crisis caused by Republican policies. More than half of Americans are one emergency away from financial ruin. Young people wonder if they’ll ever own a home. Parents juggle two or three jobs and still fall behind. If this is what Trump’s “richer than ever” looks like, it’s a prosperity reserved for a gilded few while the rest of us tread water.

Any president with a moral compass would acknowledge that reality. He’d understand that leadership requires more than chest thumping and name calling. The office carries a responsibility to elevate the national conversation, not drag it into the gutter. It requires the maturity to accept that in a diverse republic, people will disagree, sometimes loudly, sometimes angrily, and that’s a sign of a healthy democracy.

That diversity is not a flaw in the American experiment: it’s its genius. A democracy that includes Somali refugees turned lawmakers, Palestinian American women from Detroit, Hollywood actors, rural conservatives, urban progressives, people of every color and creed, is a democracy that reflects the real America. And, apparently, the America that Republicans once embraced but today the GOP now hates.

A clash of perspectives and approaches is how we fine-tune our ideas and correct mistakes. It’s how we prevent a concentration of power from calcifying into naked tyranny.

When Trump calls dissenters “lunatics” and tells them to “go back where they came from,” he’s attacking that very foundational American principle. He’s signaling that only certain voices — specifically those of wealthy white Christian men — are legitimate. That they’re only “real” Americans who count.

History teaches us where that road leads, and it doesn’t end in strength. It ends in repression, decay, and the ultimate destruction of the republic itself, which is most likely why Putin probably encourages Trump in this sort of thing during their regular phone conversations.

The bigger picture here is about more than one bizarre, racist, hateful rant among many. It’s about the playbook that authoritarians across the world have used for generations to fracture democracies from within.

When people are anxious about their jobs, their bills, and their futures, an aspiring strongman doesn’t calm those fears with honest solutions; he redirects them. He points at the “other” and says, “There’s your problem!” The immigrant. The Muslim woman in Congress. The Black lawmaker. The outspoken actor.

He tells us to be afraid of each other so we won’t question how Reagan Revolution Republican policies of the past 45 years are crushing working people.

Trump’s words matter because they’re not just insults. They’re signals. When a president calls political opponents “lunatics,” suggests they should be “institutionalized,” or tells American citizens to “go back where they came from,” he’s normalizing hate and exclusion, the “othering” of his opponents.

That poison seeps into public life and erodes the traditional American shared understanding that no matter how fierce our disagreements, we’re all equal citizens under the law. Democracy can’t survive if we start treating dissent as treason and diversity as a threat, which is exactly why Trump is doing this. Like his mentor Vladimir Putin, whose picture he just hung in the White House along with Washington and Jackson, he hates democracy, and has said as much over and over again.

America is strongest when it refuses that dictator’s trap, when it expands the circle of American belonging instead of narrowing it.

The real danger to our country isn’t Omar’s loud protest or De Niro’s sharp criticism. It’s America being stuck with a leader who lives and breathes hate, fear, and division, who wants us to see our neighbors as our enemies, and a party that’s so terrified of him that they back everything he does and says, no matter how grotesque.

That sort of fear-stoking and poisonous hatred doesn’t make America bigger or better. It makes us smaller, angrier, and — as Trump and Putin want — easier to divide and thus control.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

This Trump grift has rotted through our government. It must bring a reckoning soon

On Tuesday night in the State of the Union, we watched the most corrupt president (and presidency) in the history of America lie his way through a fascist-friendly speech. He didn’t mention how rich he’s made himself and his kids off the presidency, as he tried to paint in a good light what is, frankly, the most dishonorable, unprincipled, and criminal regime in the history of the free world.

Rumors have been flying for years — ever since Rudy Giuliani apparently confessed during Trump’s first term he and Trump were selling pardons for $2 million each and splitting the money — that Trump is at it again, taking what look like bribes for everything from pardons to business deals to regulatory and tariff relief. And the evidence is piling up in ways that are unmistakable.

For example, Judd Legum’s Popular Info news site is reporting that the parent company of crypto.com has made a series of “donations” to Trump’s main SuperPAC, MAGA Inc., amounting to $35 million.

That SuperPAC has already paid tens of millions for Trump’s legal fees, apparently including personal defense lawyers and business deal lawyers, and can hang onto that money to support Trump’s lavish lifestyle once he leaves office.

Shortly after the last donation, as Legum reports:

“25 days later, on February 17, the Trump administration’s Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), intervened on Crypto.com’s behalf in high-stakes lawsuit in federal court.”

But that’s just the tip of this particular iceberg. Crypto.com also runs prediction markets, the slick new way to get around laws regulating gambling, and recently cut a deal with Trump’s media company (which owns and runs his Truth Social site that’s so badly Nazi-infested and whose majority stockholder is Trump himself) to offer prediction market products through Truth Social or the company that owns it.

Then there’s the report from The New York Times that lays out how the United Arab Emirates (UAE) desperately wanted to buy super-high-tech chips from the US to kick-start their move from being a petrostate into becoming the Silicon Valley of the Middle East. The only problem was that they have a military cooperation agreement with China, and the US was concerned that they’d funnel some of the chips to that country.

So, the UAE “invested” $500 million in Trump’s new crypto scheme. As the Times laid out:

“An investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates purchased nearly half of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company last year, making the family business partners with the U.A.E. even as President Trump negotiated foreign policy matters with the Middle Eastern nation …

“At the same time that the crypto deal came together, the Emirati government secured an agreement with the Trump administration for the export of hundreds of thousands of advanced chips to power A.I. technology.”

Similarly, after Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner backed the Saudi‑UAE blockade of Qatar and defended the crown prince after the Khashoggi killing, the Saudi’s gave Kushner $2 billion to fund his investment firm. No droids in that car!

Not to mention the millions that the Saudi’s gave Trump’s tacky golf motels to put on their LIV Golf Tournaments. Or the millions he makes by forcing the Secret Service to pay to follow him to his golf courses and Mar-a-Lago, along with a regular army of foreign governments and corporations seeking favors, as CREW just exposed.

Or when Ivanka Trump was the “senior White House advisor” as she and her father were managing a trade and tech confrontation with China and that government “gave” her at least 34 Chinese trademarks worth millions.

Immediately thereafter, Trump suddenly reversed course to “save” Chinese telecom giant ZTE and later moved to ease pressure on Huawei via temporary licenses, despite U.S. national‑security warnings. She and her husband reportedly made as much as $640 million during their time exploiting the White House in Trump’s first term.

Trump’s boys are opening Trump-branded hotel/golf deals all over the world in countries that have had contentious relationships with the United States, mostly because of authoritarianism and corruption, with hundreds of millions to billions of dollars flowing into the Trump family’s money bin.

They include: India, Indonesia, Oman, Vietnam, Romania, Bali (Indonesia), Maldives, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Or all other the corrupt “deals” making Trump’s two oldest sons mindbogglingly rich that Liz Dye documents.

And, of course, it works both ways. When Pam Bondi was Florida Attorney General, her office opened an investigation on behalf of Floridians who’d been ripped off by Trump’s scam Trump University. Trump had his fake charity — which was later closed down for fraud — write her campaign an illegal $25,000 check and suddenly the investigation vanished.

And then there’s Trump’s pardon pipeline.

Consider Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of Binance. Zhao pleaded guilty to violating U.S. anti-money-laundering laws, agreed to massive financial penalties, but was thrown into prison nonetheless. Not long after, Trump granted him clemency as Binance worked out a $2 billion stablecoin deal anchored in a Trump entity.

Or take Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road operator serving a life sentence. Ulbricht ran what was allegedly the world’s largest hub for trading in illegal guns, narcotics, and human trafficking. Nonetheless, Trump gave him a pardon, stunning the legal world.

Other recipients have included well-connected political allies and donors, such as former Las Vegas council member Michele Fiore — convicted of wire fraud — whose sentence was vacated despite a jury verdict, and extremist figures like Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys pardoned after participating in the January 6 insurrection.

Even British billionaire Joe Lewis was pardoned for insider-trading convictions, again showing how Trump’s clemency has disproportionately flowed to the wealthy and well-connected.

None of this should surprise Americans; a jury of his peers found Trump’s little personal corporation guilty of felony tax fraud and fined it over a half-billion dollars (which apparently has yet to be paid). And he was personally convicted of 34 felonies involving falsification of business documents in a successful effort to rig the 2016 election by preventing the public from learning of his relationship with Stormy Daniels.

Since his inauguration just 14 months ago, Trump’s personal wealth has increased by an estimated $4 billion. Not bad for a guy who could have been headed to prison if he hadn’t gotten elected president. After all, both Brazil and South Korea just gave their former presidents long prison terms for trying to pull off what Trump tried to do on Jan. 6, 2021.

This is the most corrupt administration in the history of America, with Trump following Vladimir Putin’s formula for becoming wildly rich step-by-step. And somehow Fox “News” and the rightwing echo chamber never seem to report on any of it…

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Trump's State of the Union will contain this poisonous lie — don't fall for it

Tonight is the State of the Union speech. If it follows the routine of previous GOP presidencies, Trump will use our national debt as an excuse to call for more tax breaks for billionaires along with drastic cuts to social spending, just like Reagan, Bush, and Bush did.

“The national debt is the United States’ next great war,” Jodey Arrington, the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, thundered this month about our $38 trillion national debt and $1 trillion annual interest payments on that debt.

If we’re going to use his war analogy to describe this very real crisis, the first shots were fired in 1981, when Republicans’ so-called supply-side tax cuts began a 45-year upward transfer of over $50 trillion in wealth that made billionaires fabulously rich while it hollowed out our nation’s Treasury. They stole $38 trillion from our government, and another $12 trillion (at least) from working class families via wage freezes and the destruction of unions.

Ever since 1981 — when our national debt was less than a trillion dollars — Republicans have eagerly slashed taxes for their Epstein-class billionaire donors, ballooned deficits, and then cynically blamed teachers, seniors, and working families for the red ink.

Now they warn of catastrophe, but the real catastrophe is the annual payment — now officially a trillion dollars a year in interest — for GOP policies that funneled public wealth upward while starving the middle class.

For 45 years we were told by Reagan, Bush, Bush, Trump, and their billionaire backers and think tanks that cutting taxes on the morbidly rich and giant corporations would unleash prosperity. Instead, those tax cuts have collectively drained at least $38 trillion out of the federal treasury.

Thirty-eight trillion dollars. That number is so large it barely fits in the human imagination, so let’s translate it:

Thirty-eight trillion dollars is roughly what it would cost to fund a Medicare-for-All-style universal health care system for a decade. In other words, we could have guaranteed health care as a right in America for ten years — every doctor’s visit, every prescription medication, every surgery and ER visit — and still had money left over. And because it would eliminate the need for Medicare and Medicaid, we could run it for a lot longer than just a decade.
It’s more than 20 times the entire federal student loan debt that our young people are groaning under. We could have made college free and wiped out every penny of student debt in this country over and over again, freeing tens of millions of Americans to buy homes, start businesses, and raise families instead of mailing checks to banks for decades.
It’s enough money to build tens of millions of affordable homes. Even at $300,000 per unit — a generous estimate — $38 trillion could pay for well over one hundred million homes. That wouldn’t just reduce housing costs; it would fundamentally reset the housing market and break the back of the affordability crisis that’s crushing the middle class.
It’s enough to make universal pre-K permanent for generations. And, at the same time, it could have made community college tuition-free nationwide, rebuilt every crumbling bridge, modernized the entire electric grid, gotten us off fossil fuels while it hardened our infrastructure against climate disasters, and still left trillions in the bank for health care and education.

Instead, we used that money to lower income and estate taxes on the very wealthiest Americans, and then Republicans turned around and pointed to the resulting debt as proof that we “can’t afford” child care, education, a green economy, health care, or housing.

We also just officially hit a trillion dollars a year just in interest payments on the national debt. That’s money that doesn’t educate a child, doesn’t insure a family, and doesn’t build a single home. It’s simply a transfer to bondholders, the majority of whom are already-wealthy investors and financial institutions.

And what could the $1 trillion a year we’re now paying as interest on the national debt buy instead?

It could permanently expand Affordable Care Act subsidies and dramatically reduce premiums for millions of working families, and still leave hundreds of billions for other priorities.
It could fund universal pre-K across America several times over.
Two years of those interest payments would be enough to eliminate essentially the entire federal student loan portfolio.
One trillion dollars a year could finance housing construction at a scale not seen since the World War II mobilization, ending both homelessness and skyrocketing rents.

And here’s the cruelest irony: this Republican national debt and its associated interest burden exists solely because of those tax cuts.

The GOP’s “Two Santas” strategy — cut taxes when a Republican is in the White House, then scream about deficits when a Democrat takes over — has produced exactly what its author, Jude Wanniski, wanted it to produce. Gut the middle class while elevating the Epstein-billionaire class into the stratosphere, making them richer than any pharaoh or king in world history.

Contrary to Republican lies demanding we gut social programs to pay down the national debt, we don’t have a “spending problem” in American government: we have a looting problem.

We were told the tax cuts would pay for themselves but, of course, they didn’t because they were never intended to. That was just the GOP’s dishonest sales pitch on behalf of their wealthy owners. Instead, those tax cuts for the rich paid for stock buybacks, wealth concentration, and the rise of a billionaire class that now uses its fortune to buy media, politicians, and Supreme Court judges who ask, “How high?” when billionaires yell, “Jump!”

Thirty-eight trillion dollars isn’t just an accounting number. It’s the health care people didn’t get, the homes that weren’t built, the student debt that shackled a generation, the schools that went underfunded, and the infrastructure that collapsed.

And the trillion dollars a year we now spend on interest is the bill for Reagan’s, Bush’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s 45-year “supply side” experiment.

Americans are just now beginning to realize that none of this was ever really about balanced budgets or “fiscal responsibility.” Instead, it was always about power. About spending like drunken sailors to “make the good times roll” during four GOP presidencies, and squealing like stuck pigs when Clinton, Obama, and Biden — who all tried to cut spending and balance the budget, per Wanniski’s plan — were in office.

Deficits were the weapon. Tax cuts were the bait. And the national debt — and thus the middle class — became the hostage. And the result is exactly what you’d expect if you’d designed a system to starve government of revenue while shoveling unimaginable levels of wealth at the top.

Under this 45-year-long GOP punishment of America’s working people, public schools struggled, health care bankrupted families, housing costs exploded, and college became a lifelong mortgage. Meanwhile, the Epstein-billionaire class grew so large and so politically powerful that it now writes and rewrites tax policy, regulatory policy, media ownership, and even the rules of democracy itself.

Supply-side economics — a massive and intentional fraud — was sold as a growth strategy but in reality it was always designed as a wealth transfer strategy that offered Republican presidents the ability to spend like crazy to create the illusion of good economic times. The middle class and the poor paid for it, the debt reflects it, and the trillion dollars a year in today’s interest payments proves it.

This is not some natural economic cycle: it’s the predictable outcome of deliberate Republican policy choices stretching back four decades.

And the question now, as we prepare to hear Trump’s assessment of the state of our union, is simple: do we continue underwriting a system designed to funnel public wealth upward, or do we return to 1933-1980 90%-74% income tax rates on the rich and once again tax the wealthy and corporations so we can pay down our debt and invest some of that money in the working class people who actually created America’s prosperity?

Because that $38 trillion didn’t “disappear”: it was transferred from our treasury straight into the money bins of people like Epstein, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Musk.

And what we’re living with today is the bill.

The national debt isn’t the cause of our problems: it’s the receipt. It’s the paper trail of the largest upward transfer of wealth in 250 years of American history. And until we name that and tell the truth of how four Republican presidents got us here, we’ll keep paying for it.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

America's most precious word is now a lie

Tennessee Republican State Rep. Monty Fritts, who’s eyeing running for Governor, has proposed legislation that would put women in that state who’ve had abortions in the electric chair. Republican policy has already killed hundreds of pregnant women: those who live in a red state with an abortion ban (almost all of them) are more than twice as likely to die during pregnancy or immediately after childbirth than women who live in states that allow abortion.

The founding principle of America is freedom, a word that’s been a touchstone for the GOP since the days of Ronald Reagan. Thomas Jefferson identified what his generation meant when using that word when he wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Today, however, all three of these rights that secure freedom’s predicates — “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — are under assault by Trump and his Republican lickspittles.

So much for “Life”: Masked, armed ICE thugs have murdered two American citizens and multiple immigrants on the streets of our country in the first few weeks of this year, and women are dying in red states for lack of healthcare as Republican lawmakers substitute their obsession with controlling female bodies for the judgement of physicians.

An estimated 50,000 Americans — men, women, children — die every year in this country for lack of health care (and another 500,000 families are wiped out in bankruptcy) because Republicans refuse to even consider a national health care system like every other developed country in the world has.

Or “Liberty”: Trump’s secret police are compiling lists of people who’ve protested against them, are routinely smashing in front doors and car windows and imprisoning people without the warrants the Fourth Amendment requires, and are now even demanding — again, without judicial warrants — that all of the big social media companies turn over details on anybody who’s criticized ICE online. All of the companies, it appears, are complying out of fear that Trump will retaliate against them.

Or “the pursuit of Happiness”: Two entire generations are crippled with student debt since the Reagan Revolution ended free or cheap college in America; only about a tenth of Americans have the protection of a union since the GOP declared war on organized labor in 1981; and while you and I are paying income tax rates approaching 50 percent in some states, billionaires and giant corporations pay virtually nothing.

Our freedom to know what’s happening in the world and within our government is under attack by an administration that echoes Stalin’s “enemy of the people” and Hitler’s “Lugenpresse” (“lying press” or “fake news”) language as it sues and arrests journalists like Don Lemon for doing their jobs. Funding for NPR/PBS was ended, at the same time Trump surrendered the foreign information wars to Russia by killing off the Voice of America.

Our freedom to live without being poisoned is under attack by Trump’s regime gutting clean air and water protections while Bob Kennedy cheerleads Trump’s expanding production of cancer-causing herbicides like glyphosate.

Our freedom to vote is under direct assault by Republicans who want to purge from the voting rolls women who changed their names when they got married, as well as literally hundreds of smaller attacks on our right to vote across the Red states.

Our freedom to live without fear of our homes being destroyed by extreme weather is gone, as Trump and his GOP toadies gut our protections from greenhouse gasses, kill off Biden’s green energy programs, and bring back expensive coal to produce electricity.

Our freedom to be represented by people the majority of Americans want in office is similarly crippled: as reporter Greg Palast points out, if the 4+ million citizens who were either purged from the rolls or whose votes were challenged and thus not counted in the 2024 election had been able to cast their ballots, we’d have Kamala Harris as president and a Democratic-controlled House and perhaps even Senate.

Our freedom to live in a world at peace has been kneecapped by Republican administrations that lied us into war with Iraq and Afghanistan, now threaten war with Iran, and keep increasing military spending while pleading poverty when it comes to the needs of working people and their communities.

Our freedom to live in a nation free of corruption has been destroyed by the most corrupt administration in the history of America. Tom Homan taking a $50,000 bribe. Pam Bondi taking a $25,000 bribe. Kristi Noem and her boyfriend (both married to other people) flying around at taxpayer expense in a lavish “flying bordello” 737 with two plush bedrooms. Trump’s and Witkoff’s kids making billions off corrupt deals while “representing America” overseas.

Our freedom to a stable economy free of manipulation by the morbidly rich is gone, as the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts have run up a $38 trillion national debt. We’re paying more now in interest on the national debt — over a trillion dollars a year — than it would cost to solve much of the problems of homelessness, student debt, and healthcare in this country. All so over $50 trillion could be transferred from the middle class to the Epstein billionaire class over the past 40+ years.

Our children’s freedom to a safe, secure childhood has been shattered by decades of Republican obeisance to their donors in the weapons industry; kids are regularly thrown into a state of terror by active shooter drills in their schools and the knowledge that in America — and only in American — the bullets could start flying anytime, anywhere.

Our right to religious freedom — and freedom from religion as well — is under daily assault by wealthy Christian nationalist fanatics and hypocrites like “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth forcing extremist Christianity on our troops and states forcing the Ten Commandments on their own schoolchildren. (A list of commandments that have all been violated by our current president.)

Even our businesspeople are losing their freedoms: Trump is now threatening publicly traded Netflix with “consequences” unless they remove former Obama administration official Susan Rice from their board. He’s extorting millions in “donations” and “gifts” from corporate CEOs while making billions for himself and his corrupt family. And small businesses across the nation are being crushed by monopolies that 45 years of Reaganism have allowed to flourish.

When American oligarchs and their rightwing media shills rant about “freedom,” they mean freedom from taxes and regulation so they can get richer and poison the world for profit while they systematically crush workers. They’re calling for an end to personal and corporate responsibility, but only for themselves.

Freedom isn’t a slogan (although Republicans have abused it as one for decades): it’s found in the lived experience of average people.

When Americans can no longer feel safe in our bodies and homes, secure in our votes, stable in our economy, and confident in our education and healthcare, then Jefferson’s “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” have become aspirational again rather than actual.

Which appears to be exactly how the neofascists who’ve taken over the GOP want it.

Pass it on…

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Trump's fervent obsession lifts the veil on a grim reality

Stephen Colbert joked that Donald Trump wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about him on television because “all Trump does is watch TV.” It was a punchline, but it also revealed something darker: when political power becomes obsessed with controlling the screen, the most effective way to silence dissent isn’t through raids or arrests. It’s through ownership.

In today’s America, the battle over free speech isn’t happening in courtrooms, it’s happening in quiet White House dinners with greedy billionaires. And it’s following an old script.

When Viktor Orbán — the Hungarian strongman who Marco Rubio visited this past weekend to tell him how much Trump loves him and supports him — wanted to crush opposition media in his country he didn’t need police, courts, regulatory agencies, or even threats. He didn’t even need the Hungarian mafia to break the knees of Budapest media owners or threaten reporters.

Orbán simply invited a few morbidly rich Hungarian oligarchs over for dinner and told them that if they’d buy out the big media outlets and spin the news in his favor, he’d make sure their government contracts and business opportunities in other non-media areas would more than compensate them for their hassle and expenses.

Orbán let Republicans in on the strategy in May 2022, when he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest and told the American Republican crowd:

“Have your own media. It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left.”

It’s a pretty straightforward business proposition that we see Trump embracing right now: “Give me good media coverage and I’ll make you additional billions; use your media to crap on me and I’ll have the FCC harass you and my billionaire friends buy you out.”

And, sure enough, check how it’s working out for the non-media companies (rockets, AI, data, web services, etc.) owned by media moguls Elon Musk (Twitter/X), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook), Larry Ellison (Paramount/CBS/TikTok), and Jeff Bezos (Washington Post) that now get hundreds of billions of dollars every year in contracts from the federal government. No doubt it’s just a coincidence that their media outlets have all become cheerleaders for Trump.

Putin did the same thing in Russia, and the media in most other autocratic nations is similarly all or mostly owned by regime-friendly oligarchs on similar terms.

This model, pioneered in Germany in the 1930s, is now used to keep in power strongman regimes in the Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey, India, Brazil, the Philippines, Colombia, Tunisia, Turkey, Peru, and Ghana, among dozens of others. It’s rapidly spreading across the world.

It’s produced headlines like these:

And now, here in the United States:

To be fair, Republicans didn’t just suddenly adopt this strategy when Orbán suggested it to them. They’ve been doing it since the days of Ronald Reagan; it just went on steroids with Trump.

We used to have laws and rules to prevent this sort of thing. But in 1985, Reagan greased the skids for Rupert Murdoch to become a citizen so he could buy US media outlets. In 1987 Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine, and in 1988 Rush Limbaugh debuted on 56 major radio stations.

In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act, overturning laws dating back to the 1920s that prevented any one oligarch or company from owning multiple newspapers or radio or TV stations, leading to an explosive consolidation that today gives us 1,500 oligarch-owned rightwing radio stations and hundreds of rightwing oligarch-owned TV stations across the nation.

Republican screams of a “liberal media” dating back to the 1980s notwithstanding, there isn’t a place in America where you can’t get a large daily dose of pro-fascist, pro-Trump media. Drive from the East Coast to the West Coast, from the Canadian border to the edge of Mexico, and you’ll never be without a rightwing radio companion telling you how wonderful Trump, Vance, Putin, et al are.

As Colbert joked this week:

“Let’s just call this what it is: Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV because all Trump does is watch TV.”

And now, Matt Stoller is reporting that the Ellisons — who now own CBS — have a “secret plan” to acquire CNN as well, a goal that Trump has explicitly and publicly gushed about. As the network itself reported, Trump said, “It’s imperative that CNN be sold” and David Ellison recently “offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN.”

But the Putin/Orbán/Trump strategy to end all media independence in America may be facing headwinds if Democrats can take control of the House, Senate, or both this fall.

Axios and Raw Story report that:

“DC insiders and partners Matthew Miller and Tucker Eskew have issued warnings that Democrats will aggressively pursue corruption allegations against the president and Trump administration officials.”

Miller and Eskew added:

“The subpoenas are coming. The only question is whether companies will be ready.”

State attorneys general also have real power over media concentration. In 2015 a coalition of state AGs joined federal regulators in challenging Comcast’s proposed takeover of Time Warner Cable, and Comcast abandoned the merger rather than face trial.

In 2018 several state attorneys general urged regulators to block Sinclair Broadcast Group’s acquisition of Tribune Media, after which the FCC moved to reject the deal and it collapsed. And in 2019, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Virginia attorneys general sued to limit Nexstar’s purchase of Tribune stations, forcing major divestitures before the merger could proceed. History shows that when states intervene, consolidation often fails or is dramatically reduced.

Citizen activism has also repeatedly changed the behavior of partisan media without any hint of government involvement or censorship. For example, after the 2012 Limbaugh Sandra Fluke controversy, dozens of national advertisers left his program and many never returned.

And following Trump’s January 6 attack on our Capitol, advertiser boycotts and viewer pressure led companies to suspend advertising on certain Fox News opinion programs, and several cable carriers reconsidered their carriage agreements. Organized brand-safety campaigns have also pushed social media platforms to demonetize rightwing and fascist extremist content.

In each case the speech itself remained “legal,” but because of public outrage the economic incentives changed, showing how average citizens in a market-based democracy can reshape media behavior by influencing the revenue that sustains it.

If ever there was a time ripe for revisiting the laws and rules that gave us the relatively unbiased media landscape — that vigorously supported American democracy — between the 1930s and the 1980s, it’s now. And the same is true of the immediate need for citizen activism, like we saw in awake of Trump’s attempt to use pressure on media owners to silence Jimmy Kimmel.

Hopefully, Democratic politicians and citizen activists are paying attention, because the crisis — and the opportunity — has never been more urgent.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Dramatic developments show Trump's presidency on the verge of collapse

We’ve only had one genuinely failed presidency in the modern era: Richard Nixon’s. I believe we’re on the verge of the second, and for very similar reasons. If it plays out the way I expect, the consequences could be world-changing, and will certainly alter how our politics work for decades to come.

The tipping point began in a big way when Attorney General Pam Bondi went before Congress to defend Donald Trump. When asked how many of Epstein’s co-conspirators she’d indicted, she refused to answer and instead completely lost it, going off on a bizarre rant that included:

“Donald Trump signed that law to release all of those documents. He is the most transparent president in the nation’s history. None of them asked Merrick Garland over the last four years one word about Jeffrey Epstein.

“Donald Trump — The Dow — the Dow right now is over 50,000. The S&P at almost 7,000 and the Nasdaq smashing records. Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming. That’s what we should be talking about.”

Nobody was buying it any more than when Trump said on Wednesday of this week, “I’ve been totally exonerated. I did nothing.”

Instead, both became punch lines for comedians and have Republicans hiding to avoid being interviewed.

And on Thursday we saw the bookend of this Watergate-like tipping point, when the former Prince Andrew was arrested by the British police. They didn’t even give the royal family an advance notice, didn’t invite him to come and be questioned, but instead just showed up and took him away, then tore apart his residences looking for evidence.

Consider the analogy.

The Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down began in June 1972, but Nixon didn’t resigned until August 1974. It crossed over his re-election in November 1972, and was barely a factor, just like Epstein was only a footnote to Trump’s election in 2024. For over two years, most Americans thought Watergate was overblown.

Early reporting in the mainstream media largely dismissed the initial furor of Democrats over their headquarters’ offices being broken into as partisan huffing and puffing, because almost nobody thought Nixon himself had anything to do with the crime.

Conservative media at the time ridiculed Democrats’ concerns as political opportunism, calling the event — as Nixon himself said — “A third-rate burglary.” The legal system was largely disinterested, beyond holding the burglars themselves to account for a crime where it wasn’t clear that anything was even taken from the offices.

And the Nixon administration — and his Department of Justice and its leader, Attorney General John Mitchell — ridiculed both politicians and media folks who expressed concern that Watergate represented an actual threat to our constitutional system of government.

What changed when the tapes were finally released (analogous to the release of 3 million documents by the DOJ and Bondi’s evasive testimony) was that Americans finally realized that the president was, in fact, “a crook” and that the institutions of the federal government — particularly the DOJ — had been covering up for him.

We’re damn close to that moment now.

The recent DOJ release included reference to a report that a 13-15-year old girl reported to the FBI that Trump beat her up when she bit his penis as he forced her to perform oral sex.

This week, reporter Roger Sollenberger found that she was interviewed at least four times by the FBI and those more in-depth interviews (case number 3501.045) had mysteriously gone entirely missing from the documents released by Patel and Bondi.

The story made a headline on the conservative news site Drudge Report, among others; this mirrors the period immediately before Nixon resigned when rightwing sites and elected Republicans stopped publicly defending him.

Nixon fell when institutional America and the GOP stopped speaking out in his defense. It wasn’t just the break-in or the hush money he paid the burglars that broke the dam; it was when the elite consensus turned on him.

Late in the evening on Aug. 7th, 1974, three Republican leaders — Barry Goldwater, Hugh Scott, and John Rhodes — walked over to the White House and told President Nixon that the evidence against him had accumulated beyond spin, loyalty, and even partisan defense. The center of gravity had shifted, and two days later he was gone.

I’m not suggesting Trump is losing his presidency this week or next; after all, Watergate took over two years and Nixon didn’t have Fox “News” or 1,500 rightwing radio stations or Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk churning social media on his behalf. Trump has a much more powerful firewall than Nixon ever dreamed of. It may sustain him for months or even another year.

And, as president, he has a lot of tools at his disposal to keep changing the subject, which is where these revelations about Trump could become “world changing” if he comes sufficiently desperate.

A war with Iran appears to be his latest gambit. During Watergate, Nixon’s aides developed what they called a “modified limited hangout,” a strategy not of disproving the scandal but of suffocating it in the media by overwhelming the public with competing announcements, threats, events, and crises.

Nonetheless, while Americans will tolerate misconduct, abuse of office to escape accountability is an entirely different animal. And allegations of child rape are a much bigger deal than breaking into the DNC; Nixon didn’t even participate, he just gave the orders and supervised the cover-up. Trump, on the other hand, appears to be right in the middle of Epstein’s operation, perhaps even including his teen modeling agency and Miss Teen USA pageant.

It’s a cliché that “the coverup is worse than the crime,” but they keep doing it.

And now it’s metastasizing beyond Epstein.

Bondi and Patel insist the Epstein investigation is closed. Kristi Noem and Kash Patel refuse to give Minnesota police evidence in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. ICE defies over 4,400 court orders and refuses members of Congress or the press entrance to its brutal concentration camps. Trump goes after the FBI agents who uncovered Putin’s efforts to make him president in 2016. He and his family make $4 billion off his presidency in less than a year. Trump sucks up to Putin.

Trump’s level of criminality and corruption exceeds Nixon’s by orders of magnitude.

The coverups were why Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell went to prison, as did his Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, his Assistant for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman, his Special Counsel Charles Colson, and his White House Counsel John Dean (who’s since been a frequent guest on my radio/TV program).

That has to be waking Pam Bondi and others around Trump up at night. And it should be giving pause to every elected Republican facing the November midterms.

Every Watergate moment looks impossible right up until the hour it becomes inevitable. And when that hour arrives, it never feels sudden to those who carefully read history; only to the people who insisted, until the very end, that it could never happen here.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

This Trump assault shows how the end of democracy begins

Donald Trump‘s Crusade against Kilmar Abrego Garcia is “on life support” as it may finally be dismissed this week or next by District Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Tennessee. But will that be the end of this father’s and husband’s ordeal?

This week, I told you about the historic pattern associated with countries moving from democracy to tyranny. First, they start breaking the law and ignoring the Constitution in small ways, and the more they get away with it — and buy off or threaten politicians who may otherwise stop it — the more they do it. We’ve been watching Trump do this almost from the first day of his second term in office.

Then I laid out the mechanism behind that, the way men like Trump who want to become dictators co-opt the law by threatening law firms and the media, ignoring judges, and legally, verbally, or physically attacking the press, politicians, and regular citizens who speak out. Trump has done all of these things already, too, just like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán did when they were deconstructing the democracies in Russia and Hungary.

Today we look at how a country finally, fully crosses from being a self-correcting democracy into a rigid tyranny like those two countries, and how average people like us can identify that moment in time to do something about it before it is utterly too late.

Over the past few months, you may have noticed a rather strange rhythm in the news. A judge orders a man like Kilmar Abrego Garcia released and the Trump regime simply finds another way to hold or punish him. Another court blocks a deportation, and administration officials announce they’ll try again using a different legal strategy.

The result is that, as of last week, courts around the country have ruled more than 4,000 times that Trump’s ICE detentions were unlawful, and yet the detentions continue — more than 70,000 people so far, including families and children — while larger facilities are being built every day to hold still more people.

Nothing going on here in America resembles the movies we all watched as kids. Nobody announces the end of the Constitution and the rise of a new dictator or regime. The courts still appear to otherwise function, lawyers still argue their cases, and judges still write opinions explaining why the regime has overstepped its authority. Sometimes, like with the judge who just ordered Trump’s lickspittles to restore the history of George Washington’s slave-holding, their opinions are even blunt and scathing.

On paper the system appears intact, but in practice something subtler has been happening with greater and greater frequency, particularly since last summer: the rulings by the judges and the outcomes that seem to contradict them slowly drift apart. The legal system, in other words, is beginning to crack and fail under the strain of their constant “unitary executive” attacks that use the Project 2025 arguments that Trump is above the law.

This is how the end of democracy begins.

Most of us were taught a reassuring civics lesson when we were young. We were told that when our government acts illegally, we can simply go to court and the court would fix the situation. The lawsuit may take time, but once the judge decides, the matter is settled.

That belief is the quiet foundation beneath every other freedom enjoyed by the citizens of any functioning democracy. We rely on it when we speak, when we vote, and when we criticize or ridicule those in power. We assume that somewhere in the background, operating quietly but irresistibly, there exists a constitutional place where the arguments end and the court’s decisions hold those in power to account, restoring balance and maintaining our democracy.

But that’s a damn fragile assumption that hasn’t been tested in our lifetimes because we haven’t had a lawless president before, so we can easily fail to recognize it.

However, the men who wrote the Constitution — who’d actually lived under a very real tyranny — understood the fragility of that assumption through their own personal experience. They’d lived under a corrupt government that repeatedly insisted it was acting lawfully while colonists instead experienced exploitation, abuse, and brutality.

In the 1770s, history books tell us, British officials could always produce a justification for their actions. Doors were kicked in under broad and often specious warrants or no warrant at all, people were sent to prison in rigged trials, and the local judges who didn’t work for the King but stood for the rule of law were brushed aside because the King and his men said so.

Even though the British authorities always claimed a legal excuse for what they were doing, people still felt pushed around and powerless. The problem wasn’t that there were no laws, but that the regime could keep doing whatever it wanted while everyone argued about whether it was actually allowed. Just like Trump and his toadies are doing as you read these words.

Alexander Hamilton addressed this directly in Federalist 78 when he explained the peculiar weakness of courts in any republic. The judiciary, he wrote, “has no influence over either the sword or the purse… It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.” [emphasis Hamilton’s] Courts don’t command armies or control money; they issue their decisions and depend on the rest of government — and the approval of the public — to carry them out.

That arrangement only works so long as everyone agrees that a court’s judgment ends the matter. The moment officials discover they can treat a loss in court as a temporary inconvenience rather than a binding stop sign, the character of the entire system changes from democracy to something else altogether.

Nothing dramatic needs to occur for this transition to begin. Elections continue to happen, politicians and pundits offer complaints and justifications, and the legal briefs pile up in the courthouse files. But the practical effect of a ruling weakens, because the losing side — in this case, the Trump regime — simply continues under a new rationale so the argument starts all over again, while they keep doing what they were doing before they were challenged.

We see this with ICE routinely violating the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, as I detailed yesterday. With Trump defying the law and withholding monies appropriated by Congress. With Whiskey Pete Hegseth murdering people on the open seas day after day in defiance of both American and international law. With “Blankie” Kristi Noem refusing to hand evidence in the Good and Pretti murders over to local authorities, and “Have You Looked At The Dow?!?” Pam Bondi refusing to hand evidence of Trump-aligned billionaires’ participation in Epstein’s gruesome crimes over to Congress.

And it usually begins with the emerging dictatorship going after the weakest groups among the population.

Hitler’s first victims — in his first weeks in office — were trans people, the same group Republicans whipped up hate against to seize office last year. Putin went after “outsider” Chechens, who weren’t ethnically, linguistically, or culturally Russian. Orbán campaigned and won election on a slogan of “build the wall” along Hungary’s southern border to keep out brown-skinned Syrian refugees (and he then built the wall when in office).

History tells us that tyranny invariably begins with attacks on those easiest to ignore, the marginal, the disliked, the politically powerless, like the “Mexican murderers and rapists” Trump turned into electoral gold in 2016. Most citizens simply shrug when they hear about it, because they don’t imagine themselves ending up in the same position.

But once emboldened with their early successes, within short order tyrants and their toadies always move on from the weakest to arresting and punishing those who might restrain them through legal or public pressure: lawyers, entertainers, reporters, pundits, students, professors, universities, nonprofits, media outlets, and eventually opposition politicians.

Over time, a dictatorial regime’s habit forms: act first, deal with the consequences later. Kill a few people in the streets. Jail a couple of judges and politicians. Prosecute a smattering of reporters. Defund democratic institutions like NPR, VOA, and USAID. Gut the social safety net to throw the working class into crisis so they’re otherwise occupied.

And through it all, keep ignoring the court orders and relentlessly move forward in the project of deconstructing the democracy that was carefully built and nurtured for centuries before.

Losing in court or even at the ballot box becomes mere delay instead of defeat, until eventually the public grows accustomed to seeing courts disagree with the government while the government just plows ahead anyway.

When that happens, the line between democracy and tyranny has first, quietly, been crossed. If not stopped right away, it’s all downhill from there.

Before that line is hit, elections actually change the direction of public policy because politicians and bureaucrats are committed to listening to public opinion, following the law, and obeying the courts.

After that line’s been crossed, elections merely alter political theater, as the machinery of tyranny continues grinding forward. The forms of democracy remain, but their corrective power fades, not because judges stopped ruling, but because rulings stopped controlling events.

Just ask any modern Russian or Hungarian. Or read the history of Europe in the early 20th century.

As a German professor told reporter Milton Mayer in the early 1950s of his experience living through the rise of Hitler:

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.

“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.

“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

None of this means a democratic country suddenly flips into tyranny on some particular, identifiable day, whether proclaimed or not. It means that freedom depends on whether citizens, officials, and institutions stand up to the wannabe tyrant and demand that legal decisions have real-world consequences.

In other words, public opinion is the last wall a tyrant must shatter. It’s where, when it prevails, tyranny is finally stopped. And that is you and me.

The founders’ ultimate safeguard of our democracy was neither heroism nor violence (Second Amendment nuts notwithstanding), but the shared expectation that the law binds the leader even when he protests. When that expectation falls apart, when the judiciary’s orders are routinely ignored, Hamilton’s warning becomes more than a theory and the nation’s democracy only survives if the public loudly demands its judgments be honored.

Understanding this tells us what we must do now and next.

We must pay attention when courts order the government to change course, and raise hell when the Trump regime ignores those orders.
We must regularly call our elected officials and demand that they require legal rulings be followed, particularly if they’re Republicans and such a position may be politically costly to them.
We must support local and national leaders who defend our court’s decisions instead of treating them as optional obstacles.
And we must participate in the civic pressure between elections that keeps the constitutional machinery honest, because voting alone can’t overcome a regime that’s learned it can disregard the referee whenever it wants.

A free republic doesn’t depend on its leaders never overreaching; it depends on overreaches producing immediate and painful consequences. The danger moment arrives quietly, however, when a nation gets comfortable with the idea that the leader and his sycophants can keep breaking the law even after courts and public opinion told them they must stop.

Hamilton warned us the courts possess judgment but neither sword nor purse, and Jefferson told us our government exists solely by “the consent of the governed.”

Whether those judgments still govern events in America has always been up to us.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

The wannabe fascists have a plan. They'll win if we don't fight back

This fight isn’t really about immigration. It’s about whether the Constitution still restrains government power at all.

When elected officials call it a “nonstarter” to require federal agents to get a judicial warrant before kicking in doors, to give people bail or a trial before they face long-term prison, and to allow protests, they’re not debating border policy, they’re testing whether the Bill of Rights is still binding or has become merely decorative.

The Bill of Rights was written to put friction between the state’s power to use force and the people it governs. To restrain government.

If that friction can be removed so government can attack any one disfavored group, then constitutional rights stop being universal guarantees and turn into conditional privileges. And once that shift happens, history — and Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem — show us that the groups of people who’re unprotected never stays small for long.

This week’s news which highlights this crisis is that Republicans have shut down the Department of Homeland Security because they say Democrats’ call for ICE to follow the law and the Constitution is “a nonstarter.”

Seriously. Here’s the first sentence of the Democrats’ demand that Republicans say is so unreasonable:

“DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant.”

Right now, ICE is kicking in doors and smashing windows of cars in order to attack and arrest both citizens and non-citizens alike. They do it because they say they can. And to arrest, detain, and imprison people they claim they can issue their own phony, made-up “administrative warrants” and don’t need a judge or court to see any evidence or say a word.

This is complete bulls---, and it’s genuinely astonishing that Republicans are backing them up. The Fourth Amendment isn’t complicated. Here it is, in it’s entirety (notice it does NOT say “citizens” but says “people”):

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

That’s it. Every word. And it applies to any “person” who happens to be in the United States. Nonetheless, ignoring 250 years of American law and history, DHS General Counsel James Percival said:

“[I]llegal aliens aren’t entitled to the same Fourth Amendment protections as U.S. citizens.”

His argument is that kicking in the front doors of the homes of people where undocumented immigrants may be staying, or smashing the windows of their cars, is not “unreasonable.”

This is a classic example of how law can get twisted into gibberish by a criminal regime like we are currently suffering under. And it doesn’t even include the right to a trial by jury, the right practice journalism, or the right to protest, all guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Yesterday I told you about something the people who started this country learned from bitter experience and their deep reading of history: a wannabe fascist government (like Donald Trump is trying to turn ours into) doesn’t have to openly break the law to destroy liberty.

It just has to have enough sycophants in positions of power to ignore the law so it no longer restrains the government’s awesome power.

To modern Americans that may sound like an abstraction, but it’s critical. Government is the only institution that has widespread cultural approval to use violence, to imprison or even kill us, and to tear our lives apart in search of alleged criminal activity.

The whole point of a democracy is to restrain that power and prevent it from ever becoming so concentrated in a small number of hands that it can be abused for the benefit of one group over another.

Our movies and old newsreels of the Nazi era seem to tell us that we’ll recognize tyranny when there are tanks in the streets, newspapers are shut down, elections are canceled, and we see public executions of protestors.

But that’s not how tyranny usually works in its middle stages, like the one we’re in now.

At our founding, for example, the British Empire never announced, “Colonists have no rights” the way ICE’s lawyer is now proclaiming that immigrants aren’t protected by the Fourth Amendment. In fact, Parliament repeatedly insisted the opposite. Americans were British subjects, protected by British law, and the king’s officials repeated that constantly.

And yet, nonetheless, British agents kicked in doors without meaningful warrants. People were faced with almost daily violence. British agents monitored, followed, and often beat or arrested people who protested. Newspapers were shut down and writers arrested. And the courts couldn’t meaningfully restrain officers acting in the name of the Crown because their authority was both granted and limited by a single man, the King.

Everything existed inside a legal framework, and the British repeatedly insisted that it was the colonists, not their own agents and troops, who were “breaking the law.”

That’s what finally snapped the colonist’s patience. It wasn’t a single outrage like the Tea Act or the Boston Massacre — although those highlighted the oppression they experienced — but their final realization that every complaint they filed was answered with a legalistic explanation of why the abuse was justified.

Read the Declaration of Independence — which I quoted yesterday — closely and you’ll see a pattern emerge. Jefferson doesn’t just list harms. He listed systemic, undemocratic structural and jurisdictional moves: judges who were dependent on the ruler, military power that was put above civil authority, the denial of power to local courts, tax laws that only benefited the rich, and people transported for trial elsewhere.

The issue wasn’t cruelty or British abuse of power, although both were terrible. It was that the very structure of authority, the system, had been arranged so law was constantly being rewritten on the fly, tweaked to confront defiance, and abused to enhance and justify government power over people’s lives instead of limiting it.

That distinction, after the Revolutionary War, shaped the Constitution that came next.

We tend to treat the Bill of Rights as a moral document, a statement of national values, but the people who wrote it were being much more practical than philosophical. They were building a machine they believed would make tyranny as a governing method impossible.

They assumed — again, based on their own experience and their reading of history —that every government would always want to expand its own power because every government throughout history always had.

That’s why they wrote our Constitution the way they did: to establish a structure, a system, that’s bigger than any politician (including the president).

If the government wants to arrest or imprison someone, it must first charge them with a specific crime.
If it charges them, it must present valid evidence to an independent judge or jury.
If it presents evidence, the accused can confront it and has a mandatory right of defense counsel.
Before force like arrest, home invasion, or imprisonment is used, the courts must review and can even prevent it.

Those protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights and the overall three-branch structure of our government weren’t there out of kindness or to enhance public morality. They were put into the highest law of our land to produce serious friction — a proverbial “throwing sand into the gears” of our system — that would slow down any politician’s or party’s rush to destroy democracy.

They understood that when politicians and bureaucrats have to explain themselves in public, when they must justify their actions, they’re less likely to abuse people the way the King of England had done during their era.

Perhaps even more important, the Founders and Framers of our Constitution also knew from history that when any group seizes enough power to rise above the law, the republic itself is on its last legs.

Once a segment of society (like the Epstein-billionaire-class or ICE) reached that point — whether because of government employment or vast riches — they knew that the system would be distorted and democracy could die, even if the black-letter text of the law remained intact.

When that happens — as we’re seeing today with Trump having ignored more than 4,400 court orders — court’s rulings become technically binding but the government feels free to ignore them.

The British abuse of the colonists in 1773 is an ancient echo of what we see in Minneapolis today where the FBI just this week officially refused to turn over evidence in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti to the local authorities who, under the law, have jurisdiction over murder.

Under this Trump regime federal government officials now refuse to comply with the Constitution, the law, with court orders, and with even normal American expectations for human decency. They shop around for friendly judges, laugh at court orders, and daily ignore the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments.

This is exactly why early Americans were obsessed that the due process provisions in the Bill of Rights must apply to everyone, not just citizens, not just allies, not just the respectable. The moment any government starts to decide who receives full legal protection and who the law can either abuse or elevate, it has quietly shifted into that second operating mode the King of England was asserting in 1773. What our nation’s founders called “tyranny.”

History shows what happens once the law restrains some and elevates others above itself: the category of both the abused and the exempt expands. Both always expand, because power, once exercised, becomes precedent. What began as an exception becomes “normal.”

The Founders knew republics — when corrupted by rich, unscrupulous men — drift into this new mode. Like in modern-day Russia and Hungary, elections continue, laws remain on the books, courts keep ruling and yet the poor, the workers, the dissenters, the protesters get crushed while the rich and well-connected — the Epstein billionaire class — rise above any accountability whatsoever.

Which raises the harder question we, as Americans suffering under this regime, must confront right now:

If our government can commit violence, violate the Constitution, lie to the public on a daily basis, repeatedly lose in court, and yet continue acting however they want because the structure now allows it, is there some specific point or line where we’ve officially moved from democracy to tyranny?

It turns out, history tells us that such a line exists. Political philosophers have argued about it for centuries, but the people who wrote our Constitution were quite certain they knew roughly where it lay.

History also tells us there is a line, a point where a democracy stops being a democracy. The people who wrote our Constitution believed that line is crossed when those in power can ignore the law and face no consequences.

It’s passed when rights can be denied to some, when court orders can be brushed aside, and when the government can use force without meaningful oversight. And when that happens, our republic itself is in danger.

Tomorrow I’ll walk through that threshold and explain what it means for us today, because whether we’ve crossed it or not determines whether normal political remedies like elections and legal processes can still function — or ever again function — the way most Americans still assume they do.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Trump's favorite form of oppression is as old as America — but much more dangerous now

At 3:07 in the morning the pounding started.

Not a knock or a doorbell: it was the kind of impact meant to wake the neighbors and erase any doubt that resistance would be pointless.

Within seconds armed men were inside the house, shouting orders, refusing questions. No explanation, no warrant presented, no charges read. Just urgency, intimidation, and removal.

The people taken that night would eventually learn something chilling: under the legal theory being used, what happened to them wasn’t considered a violation of their rights at all.

It was 1773 in Boston.

That idea is not new to America. In fact, it’s exactly the governing method that pushed the colonies into revolution.

The men who wrote the Declaration of Independence weren’t reacting to isolated abuses. They were reacting to a system, one designed to make resistance legally impossible while violence remained technically lawful.

Every clause they listed, every amendment that followed in the Bill of Rights, was aimed at preventing that same mechanism from ever taking hold here again.

To see why, look at what Thomas Jefferson wrote, in The Declaration of Independence:

“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world:
“He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. …
“He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws...
“He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
“He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
“For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
“For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
“For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
“For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: …
“For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: …
“A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” [emphasis added]

It’s also why the Framers of the Constitution added the Bill of Rights, the first ten Amendments to our Constitution, which include:

“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. …
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
“No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…
“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed…; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.” [emphasis added]

Individually, each of the following modern incidents can be argued about. People debate the details, the legality, the motives.

But our nation’s Founders feared something else entirely: not separate abuses, but a governing structure where each action reinforces the next until law itself stops restraining power.

That’s the pattern our Founders were trying to outlaw. And it’s the pattern that explains why courts keep ruling against these actions by the Trump regime, yet they continue anyway.

Consider where we are today.

Trump’s masked, “absolutely immune” fascist goons are kicking in doors and smashing car windows and violently seizing people without judicial warrants in open violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the highest law of the land.
They’re building massive databases of people they consider “domestic terrorists,” surveilling protestors and, most recently, demanding that social media sites turn over to them the identities of people who post anti-Trump and anti-ICE messages.
They’re visiting the homes of people who’ve attended protests to intimidate them.
Their Epstein-class-billionaire fascist allies are tweaking social media algorithms to amplify pro-Trump, pro-ICE messages and shadow-banning those opposing them. Other Epstein-class-billionaire fascist allies are buying up major news sites and spinning the news and opinion they publish to normalize all this.
At the same time, Trump, the 13 Epstein-class-billionaires in his cabinet, and the 150+ Epstein-class-billionaires who supported his ascent to power are grifting billions out of our economy while gutting healthcare, education, housing assistance, green energy, and any other programs that might support a middle class and a clean environment.

Most Americans are reluctant to say that America is now a fascist country, hoping that the next election will bring Democrats into power and constrain Trump and his lickspittles.

The senior-most leaders of Canada and Europe, however, think we’ve passed the point of no return. And they’re acting on that belief.

As Dean Blundell notes:

“Ottawa plans to increase military spending to 5 percent of GDP over the next decade. That would mark the largest sustained defence build-up since the Second World War. Not 2 percent. Not incremental NATO compliance. Five percent … This is not a procurement tweak. This is Canada reverse-engineering decades of structural reliance on the American military industrial complex.”

Similar sentiments and actions were echoed at the Munich Security Conference this past week.

The final report from the Conference says of America:

“More than 80 years after construction began, the US-led post-1945 international order is now under destruction…” Trump and Vance are “demolition men,” and even when compared to Putin are “the most powerful of those who take the axe to existing rules and institutions.”
Trump’s policies “will pave the way for a world that privileges the rich and powerful, not the wider mass of people who have placed their hopes in disruptive change.”

Outside of optimistic Democrats in the United States, it seems nobody in the world — and particularly Canada and Europe — thinks the United States will back away from becoming a violent police state. They believe the alliance between Trump, Epstein-class-billionaires, and Putin has won and America has permanently changed.

After all, as Reuters reported last week:

“Hundreds of judges around the country have ruled more than 4,400 times since October that President Donald Trump’s administration is detaining immigrants unlawfully, a Reuters review of court records found.
“The decisions amount to a sweeping legal rebuke of Trump’s immigration crackdown. Yet the administration has continued jailing people indefinitely even after courts ruled the policy was illegal.”

The biggest growth industry in America right now is building concentration camps to hold people who have never faced a judge or jury — in open violation of our Constitution and the Bill or Rights — and never been charged with or convicted of any criminal statute.

Europeans, who’ve seen this movie before, don’t believe for a second that within a year or two those camps will be limited to brown-skinned immigrants. They expect that people like you and me will soon be in them as well.

After all, Trump right now is trying to put eight members of Congress, a state judge, the form FBI and CIA directors, New York’s Attorney General, his own former National Security Advisor, his Federal Reserve Chairman, a Fed Governor, New Jersey’s former governor, Jack Smith, Miles Taylor, Christopher Krebs, and reporter Don Lemon in prison.

Thomas Massey and Marjorie Taylor Greene, both former allies of Trump who’ve called him out, have recently tweeted that they are not suicidal, just like opposition leaders in Russia used to do in the early days. Even Republicans are realizing that Trump’s role model is Vladimir Putin.

As alarmed democracy advocates around the world point out, the list of people Trump wants in prison or dead seems to grow daily: he’s actually trying, right now — in a very real way that our media seems to be largely ignoring — to put each one of those people into an actual prison. Just like Hitler did, Mussolini did, Pinochet did, Putin did, Erdoğon did, Xi did, etc., etc.

Meanwhile, as Republicans are trying to pass a law that would prevent at least 20 million people, mostly married women and low-income Americans, from voting this November and in 2028, the nation’s top law enforcement official, Kristi Noem, just this weekend told a group of reporters that Republicans are doing it because:

“When it gets to election day, we’ve been proactive to make sure we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country.”

Most Americans still assume elections alone will decide whether this stops, but our allies abroad — who’ve seen this movie before in their own countries in their grandparents’ lifetimes — appear far less certain. They’re acting as if the United States has entered a phase nations rarely reverse once fully established.

Our best hope now is that America’s Founders anticipated this very possibility.

They understood that a government could learn to operate in a way where individual actions seem debatable but the overall direction becomes irreversible. That’s why they embedded one final safeguard, not in the ballot box, but in a structural limit on power itself.

Almost nobody talks about it anymore.

Tomorrow I’ll walk through that safeguard and why, once a government crosses a particular threshold, winning elections no longer automatically restores the system that existed before.

Because if we’re already past that line, like the Prime Minister of Canada and the leaders of Europe were saying out loud last week in Munich, the question Americans are arguing about right now is not the one that will actually determine what happens next.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.