Thom Hartmann

Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan, declared Thursday morning, seems to have broken the brains of Republicans and the chattering class.

Donald Trump’s pathetic bleats notwithstanding, people voting for progressive Democrats and “democratic socialists” aren’t voting for communism or even socialism; they’re trying to get America to the same sort of economy and form of government that works for everybody — a system somewhat like the one a majority of us had before Reaganism, and that most other developed countries enjoy right now. That includes:

— A healthcare system that covers every American as a right of citizenship, where injury or illness won’t break a family. A half-million of our families lost everything to bankruptcy last year just because somebody got sick; that literally does not happen in any other developed country on Earth, just America. And wanting to free us all of that fear isn’t “communism.”

— An education system that really works for young people, instead of barely maintaining 70-year-old schoolhouses and slapping the Ten Commandments on the wall as if “Thou shalt have no other gods before me … for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” is going to incentivize students (it won’t).

— A college system like in every other developed democracy in the world where everybody, if they’re capable of handling the work, can get an education and graduate into the working world without debt. And an end to the existing ~$2 trillion in student debt, a crime visited on the generations coming up today by a handful of rich bankers and their Republican buddies.

— A political system where a foreign government, massive corporation, or a greedy billionaire can’t simply buy elections, legislators, and judges. Where citizens can easily vote without having to jump through a million hoops designed to drive down the participation of low-income people and women. Where people can trust that the government and its spokespeople are telling the truth under all circumstances.

— An environment where we can breathe the air and drink the water, the food is safe, and our collective actions have reduced the methane and CO2 that are driving climate change.

— An immigration system that reflects America’s embrace of diversity as “the great melting pot,” a phrase that was popular in the mid-20th century and is now derisively called “DEI.” No more masked secret police, no more concentration camps that lock up children and brutalize people who’ve never committed a crime (immigration violations are civil, not criminal). No more violations of the 4th and 5th Amendments, no more killing Americans for protesting, and no more arrests based on the color of a person’s skin.

— A tax system where the morbidly rich pay their fair share, instead of throwing that burden on working class people and the upper middle class — who often are now seeing their combined federal, state, and local tax rates run over 50% — while billionaires pay a fraction of 4% and absolutely nothing on literally trillions in unrealized wealth gains.

— Respect for international law, particularly the laws against violently attacking countries like Iran, Venezuela, or individuals in boats in the Caribbean who haven’t attacked us first. Defense of those countries who are under attack by Trump’s owner, Vladimir Putin, and his buddy President Xi. And respect for the human rights of Palestinians and acknowledgement of the criminal, genocidal slaughter they’ve faced under international war criminal Netanyahu.

— An economy where at least two-thirds of all American families can have what they had in 1981: the ability to buy a home, a car, take an annual vacation, put their kids through school, and have enough for a comfortable retirement. Instead, as Robert Reich points out:

“Household electricity costs are up 18%, ground beef prices are up 22%, gas prices are up 40%, ACA out-of-pocket premiums are up 58%, [and] inflation is at a three-year high.”

Americans aren’t really asking for that much: Canada has it all. England has it all. France has it all. Germany has it all. Spain has it all. As do dozens of other countries, all the way down to little Costa Rica.

This isn’t rocket science. People simply want a government that will help them and their children achieve their highest potential, an economy that’s not rigged by and for the morbidly rich, and a job that pays enough to sustain a middle-class lifestyle.

The problem we face today is that a large cohort of our billionaire and CEO class are suffering from the mental illness commonly known as hoarding syndrome, a subset of obsessive-compulsive disorder. There’s never enough for them, no matter how much they have, so they don’t care how many people must die or live in poverty for them to maintain their (tax-deductible) islands, palaces, bunkers, yachts, and private jets.

It’s like that popular meme you find these days all over the Internet:

“If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes.”

Those billionaires and CEOs, following the 1971 advice of notorious tobacco lawyer and sociopath Lewis Powell, built out a massive think tank and media infrastructure to transform America from a middle-class nation into a full-blown oligarchy, where every decision made by the Supreme Court, Congress, and most state legislatures would take care of their wants and desires before those of anybody else.

Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court in 1972 and, in 1978, he authored the Bellotti decision, saying that corporations are “persons” and money is the “free speech.” That let Reagan float into the presidency two years later on a tsunami of oil industry money (along with the treasonous deal he cut with Iran’s Mullah’s to hold the American hostages until after the election), remove Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House, and kill his plans for solarizing America.

Billionaires began immediately spiffing and sucking up to the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, who returned the favor in 2010 by doubling down on Bellotti with Citizens United. Now fortunes are spent on every election cycle, including tens of millions from groups representing the interests of foreign countries.

A few hundred billionaire families, representing considerably less than one ten-thousandth of 1 percent of the American population, supplied roughly one-sixth of all the money spent on the 2024 federal elections and, in the presidential race, put down 44.5% of all the money spent by outside groups, virtually all of it for fellow billionaire Trump.

As Jimmy Carter told me almost a decade ago, America is no longer a democracy:

“Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery...”

This is what Americans are voting against this year in massive numbers, and no amount of name-calling and red-scare tactics by on-the-take Republicans and corporate Democrats, or hand-wringing by TV pundits and podcasters, is going to stop it.

Voters want fighters, and El-Sayed is a fighter. As are so many others in the Progressive Caucus and among the Zoomers, Millennials, and Gen X’ers now coming up into politics.

Americans know they’ve been screwed over the past 45 years since the GOP’s Reagan Revolution stopped seriously taxing the morbidly rich, killed off our unions, and sent our jobs overseas. And they’re rapidly waking up to exactly who it is who screwed them.

As my dear old friend Dick Gregory told me one brutally hot afternoon in Kampala as the two of us were touring Africa together in 1981 and discussing progressive change and US foreign policy:

“When you’ve got something really good, you don’t have to have to force it on people. They will steal it!”

American voters are in the process of stealing back their democracy and their middle class. Call it what you want, but it won’t be stopped.

It seemed so trivial. Trump ordered the Interior Department to post signs along the walkways leading up to several of the museums that make up the Smithsonian system in Washington, D.C., warning people that they’d find “inaccurate information” therein. It was based on a bizarre “report” written by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council and released without fanfare on the 4th of July.

The council itself was packed by Trump with leftovers from right-wing think tanks and activist groups like American Compass, Heritage, the Manhattan Institute, and Stephen Miller’s America First Policy Institute.

It claims that the American Museum of American History has displays that cover the fights for women’s and civil rights and to end slavery, along with the positive role immigrants, women, and queer people have played in our country, which it finds deplorable and un-American. It wrote that Smithsonian leadership and museum curators:

"Have directed the museum’s mission away from historical education and scholarship of a shared national inheritance to be celebrated, and toward extreme political activism, rooted in Marxism, to divide, dispirit and discourage Americans. … [And have] denigrated and displaced whites, males, Christians and Americans” while focusing on “race in areas where it has little to no historical relevance.”

Wild, over-the-top nonsense complaints that our museums are accurately portraying American history notwithstanding, this is far more sinister and dire than it seems.

Pretty much every dictator in history, both ancient and modern, has rewritten his nation’s history because, as Orwell noted, those who control the past can use it to reprogram the future.

Dictators and wannabe dictators rewrite the past to legitimize their rule, typically portraying themselves as representing the inevitable culmination of history, as the nation’s savior (“I, alone, can fix it!”), and as the rightful heir to a mythical glorious tradition like Trump is doing by trying to reinvent America as an exclusively white Christian nation.

In the process, they typically erase their rivals (Trump has replaced Biden’s picture in the White House with a photo of an autopen), reframe negatively their political opponents (ditto), and use the threat of erasure from history as a weapon against their own allies to keep them bowing and scraping (ditto).

Dictatorial regimes frequently use rewritten history to justify wars of aggression, suppress minorities, and gut civil liberties. Modern American examples include how Sam Alito cited a 17th-century witch-hanging British judge to justify ripping the right to abortion away from women, or how Trump has reinvented (with extensive lies) Obama’s peace deal with Iran to justify his and Netanyahu’s illegal war.

They rewrite history to bind themselves to the country’s majority group with simplified stories of the nation’s “glorious” past, claiming members of that group must rally around them to maintain national unity, strength, and a shared destiny. Diversity, in this context, is seen as a weakness as it doesn’t support this kind of dictatorial framing, which is why Trump called Kamala Harris “a DEI hire” on the campaign trail and has essentially criminalized the phrase.

Rewriting history is also a powerful way to shift the Overton Window to the right, causing the previously unthinkable to become “common sense.” When the history of protest, democratic movements, and civil rights efforts are reframed as chaos or crises in the nation’s history, young people are less likely to engage in them. When citizens fail to learn about successful alternatives to authoritarian rule, it can make democracy or pluralism seem unnatural or even impossible, particularly to young people.

— When Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BCE, he rewrote Egyptian history to make himself the son of the god Amun, the seniormost of the gods and arguably the one we acknowledge to this day when we end a prayer by invoking his name.
— Joseph Stalin removed purged officials from photographs, rewrote textbooks, and reshaped official government accounts of the Russian Revolution and WWI to magnify his own role.
— Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime taught a racialized version of German history that portrayed Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and other racial and political minority groups as enemies and Germany as the victim of a “stabbed in the back” betrayal after World War I.
— Mao Zedong oversaw repeated revisions of Chinese history, especially after the Cultural Revolution, with history textbooks and official records regularly being edited or radically changed to meet his political needs. To this day, for example, they’ve elided the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
— Even small-timers like Saddam Hussein do this; he linked himself to ancient Mesopotamian rulers and promoted a personality cult through museums, monuments, giant banners with his face on them hanging from federal buildings, and school curricula.

The simple reality is that in democracies it’s historians, journalists, courts, archives, universities, and scholars who write history and can challenge official narratives. Debate is expected, and interpretations can change as new evidence comes to light.

In dictatorships, on the other hand, the state typically monopolizes education, media, and archives, suppresses competing interpretations of history, and punishes those who publicly contradict the official version.

All of which is why it’s so important that we don’t treat the efforts by Trump and his neofascist lickspittles to rewrite America’s history into a sanitized white male supremacist mold as if it’s just some sort of aberration or sick joke.

This is serious stuff, and serious people within this administration are dedicated to destroying our and — particularly — our children’s understanding of the truly revolutionary and progressive history of this nation.

They’re trying to induce a national amnesia, stretching back through the history of the Klan, the Civil War, and even the American Revolution.

We must push back against them boldly and loudly, and when they’re gone we’re going to have a huge job cleaning up the fascist mess they’re making.

Trump, his billionaire buddies, and his Republican lickspittles appear to be setting up a possible massive fraud with regard to this fall’s election. It could signal the end of American democracy.

We democracy-loving Americans have fought oligarchy three times on these shores, roughly every 80 years. Each time, we defeated the morbidly rich and established or re-established popular democracy and a government that put working-class people ahead of the oligarchs.

This time, the oligarchs are behaving like they believe they can win, and the measures our billionaire oligarch-in-chief is taking right now should put every American on alert, if not provoke immediate impeachment.

First, some background.

While the Founders like Jefferson and Washington had large plantations and exploited the labor of enslaved people, they weren’t the truly rich, the oligarchs, of their era. Both those men, in fact, died in bankruptcy or its near-equivalent. The richest man to sign the Declaration of Independence was John Hancock, whose “fortune” was only worth about a million dollars in today’s money; like every other Founder, he left no fortune or family dynasty.

But there were real oligarchs in America in the 1770s, universally aligned with the British king, and they hated the idea of democracy and independence.

In The Rise of American Civilization, historian Charles Beard’s most famous work, he notes that on the banks of the Hudson River:

“From mansions that were castles, the Johnsons ruled in the Upper Mohawk Valley with a sway that was half feudal and half barbaric, relying on numerous kinsmen, armed Negro slaves, trained bands of Gaelic retainers, and savage allies from the dread Iroquois to maintain their sovereignty over forest and plain.”

It was the wealthiest families of the colonies who most strongly opposed both the Revolutionary War and the Constitution, because both endangered the stability of their fortunes, which were grounded in trade or relationships with England. Thousands of these families fought for and with the British, and fled the colonies after the Revolutionary War, both to England and Canada.

In the 1780s, we defeated oligarchy and established a fledgling, albeit imperfect, democracy, the world’s first at that scale.

Eighty years later, the plantation oligarchs of the Old South had amassed such fortunes that only a few hundred families essentially controlled the economy and politics of that entire region.

By the early 1850s, they’d outlawed democracy, rigging elections, imprisoning or killing pro-democracy newspaper writers and publishers, and turning their slave patrols against even white men who dared challenge their power.

In 1861, after declaring their independence from the United States, they turned their guns on the rest of America in an effort to finally end democracy on this continent. Abraham Lincoln defeated them and reestablished (a still-imperfect) democracy in America.

Eighty years after the end of the Civil War, oligarchs had once again seized control of the American economy and government during the part of the Gilded Age known as the Roaring 20s.

President Grover Cleveland had pointed to its early stages, warning Americans:

“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

The oligarchs’ excesses, though, crashed the economy, leading to the Republican Great Depression and the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. He challenged his era’s oligarchs head-on, saying, “They hate me, and I welcome their hatred.”

With his New Deal and his 90% top income tax rate, he broke them, and both reestablished our democracy as well as building the first middle class in world history that was more than half of a nation’s population.

So here we are now, 81 years after the end of World War II, and the oligarchs have once again seized control of our economy and our government. As President Jimmy Carter told me 10 years ago on my radio program:

“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery… So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”

And now we learn that the billionaire oligarch in the White House has gutted every one of the federal agencies designed to protect this fall’s election, as if embracing the mentality of the old Confederate oligarchs who’d essentially outlawed voting by anybody who may have opposed them.

Since taking office, Trump has:

— Frozen and defunded the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) election security division,
— Cut off the threat-sharing network serving 1,300 state and local election officials,
— Disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force,
— Gutted the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center,
— Shuttered the State Department’s counter-disinformation office,
— Reduced the Justice Department’s voting rights section from 30 lawyers to 3,
— Fired the head of the NSA Cyber Command who caught indications of Russian meddling,
— Left the Federal Election Commission (FEC) without a quorum,
— And this month fired every remaining commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) just four months before the midterms.

Something big is up, and they’re not even bothering to be subtle about it.

This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergy Lavrov in the Philippines; Trump’s been having hour-plus-long phone conversations with Putin on average every two weeks since his inauguration; and FBI director Ka$h Patel is planning a trip to Russia a month before the election.

Russia, of course, intervened massively in the 2016 election, Trump’s “Russia, Russia, Russia” attempts at minimizing their role notwithstanding.

The Mueller Report identified 10 specific instances of Trump criminally trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Michael Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

Robert Mueller’s two-volume report found that Russia had attacked the 2016 election in what he called a “sweeping and systematic fashion,” through the Internet Research Agency’s social media operation and the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation's hacking of Democratic emails, and that the Trump campaign “expected to benefit from the stolen material.”

The second volume laid out roughly 10 episodes of criminal obstruction of justice committed by Trump, and Mueller only declined to prosecute Trump because Justice Department policy barred indicting a sitting president, writing that while the report doesn’t conclude the president committed a crime, it also doesn’t exonerate him.

Along the way, his team criminally charged 34 individuals and three Russian companies, including 26 Russian nationals and six former Trump advisers, and won eight convictions or guilty pleas from Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, Alex van der Zwaan, and Richard Pinedo, with five of them sentenced to prison. Trump later pardoned five of those eight.

The problem Trump and his morbidly rich oligarch buddies are facing is that oligarchy — including the oligarchy they’ve reestablished here, where the needs of average Americans are gutted as the top 1% are taking deep dives into their money bins — is always a transitional form of government.

Throughout centuries of modern history, oligarchy has rarely lasted more than a single generation. When people realize that the oligarchs have taken over their government and are bleeding average working people dry, they push back hard.

Which forces the oligarchs and the government they control to choose one of two options: give in and revert back to democracy, keeping some or much of their riches but allowing a middle class to re-emerge, or come down hard on the people with an iron fist and crush the opposition.

In Hungary this year, that oligarchy chose the former path, as did the oligarchs in America in 1933. In Russia, Putin chose the latter path, as did Egypt’s el-Sisi and Turkey’s Erdoğan (among others).

In apparent preparation, Trump is building a massive masked secret police force worthy of the Shah’s SAVAK, he’s building detention centers as fast as humanly possible, he’s identified people who “oppose” “traditional American views” as “domestic terrorists” along with anybody he labels “Antifa." He is now openly calling Democrats communists and has suggested some should be deported or imprisoned.

Yesterday, Republicans (with the help of 13 turncoat Democrats: Reps. Kathy Castor, Henry Cuellar, Don Davis, Jared Golden, Vicente Gonzalez, Josh Gottheimer, Marcy Kaptur, Susie Lee, Jared Moskowitz, Chris Pappas, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Darren Soto, and Derek Tran) passed legislation out of the House that would make it wildly more difficult for millions of low-income Americans and married women who’ve changed their names to vote.

Reporter and statistician Greg Palast has documented — using nothing but official government figures — that the 2024 Republican voter suppression efforts prevented around 4 million American citizens from either voting or having their votes counted; had that GOP effort been unsuccessful, Kamala Harris would today be president and Democrats would control the House and probably the Senate.

This time, it appears, they’re trying to disenfranchise millions more and, given the flaccidity of Democratic leadership’s response, it appears they’ll pull much of it off. Those same Dem leaders, after all, allowed all that suppression to happen in 2024 — over loud objections by people like Stacy Abrams who were documenting it in real time — with nary a peep in the press.

Imagine how Republicans would have reacted if the documentary evidence actually showed Democrats had stolen a national election from them!

Which leaves it to us. The only way out of this will be for us to show up this fall in massive numbers, to refuse to be intimidated or frightened away from the polls, and to support folks like Marc Elias who are fighting voter suppression every step of the way.

Pass it along. This may be America’s last chance to preserve the democracy we’ve shed so much blood and treasure to gain and keep these past two-and-a-half centuries.

We have a lot of metaphors for it; the camel’s nose under the tent, the foot in the door, where there’s smoke there’s fire, and the handwriting on the wall, among others. Every police state in history started this way. As the White House declared last week in a press release:

“Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

First, they built the infrastructure based on what the public widely perceived as a real public safety and economic problem.

People had been pouring into the United States for centuries, looking for economic opportunity and a new life. Some were criminals, and Trump and the GOP highlighted their presence as the reason why it was so imperative to “build the wall” to seal the border and then begin aggressive mass deportations.

The majority of Americans (81% of Republicans and 49% of Democrats) rated border security as “important” in 2016, so Trump began by building his wall and expanding the detention centers that pre-existed from Reagan’s 1981 opening of them to detain Black Haitian refugees. (The detention firm CoreCivic got its first immigration detention contract in 1981, and another, GEO Group, was founded in 1984.)

The story Trump campaigned on and used as an excuse to massively expand arrests and detentions was the widely popular notion that they were hunting down and imprisoning “the worst of the worst.” Even many Hispanics voted for him thinking he would clean up their neighborhoods of criminals.

Trump rarely referenced immigrants without including words like “rapists” and “murderers”: he kicked off his 2016 campaign with such a speech after coming down the escalator at Trump Tower.

Then came the first policy turn that showed the lie and exposed what may have been their plan all along. Instead of arresting immigrants who’d committed crimes (or were even accused of having committed crimes), they went after Jose the gardener and Maria the maid.

Quickly, with encouragement by Supreme Court Justice Brett “Beer Bong” Kavanaugh, the system turned into a mass arrest and deportation program for people with brown and black skin rather than genuine “bad guys.”

This was the first point where Democrats began to publicly back away from the policy as white supremacist Republicans and racist independents embraced it more vigorously.

Then came the second policy turn, taking Trump, Vance, and Miller the next step toward their ultimate goal of turning America into a modern police state. In March 2025, during Trump’s second term, ICE agents began to mask up to conceal their identities and started using explicit and deadly violence against not only people of color suspected of being undocumented immigrants but also against anyone demonstrating against Trump and his ICE.

In the 16 months since, ICE officers have shot at least 30 people, killing at least eight that we know about and, as of last month, at least another 50 people have died in ICE custody. There have been no meaningful investigations of any of them and no prosecutions of ICE officers whatsoever for these “routine” actions.

And routine is exactly what they’ve become.

Which brings us to the next step, their third turn in the road: arresting and imprisoning legal immigrants for their words rather than their actions.

The Guardian reported this week that Salah Sarsour, the president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque, a green-card-holding business-owning legal permanent resident of the United States for over 30 years with six U.S. citizen children and nine citizen grandchildren, was arrested by ICE and held in a brutal detention center for 80 days where he lost 30 pounds and was denied monitoring for his diabetes:

“On 30 March, he was on his way to see his elderly mother when he was surrounded, he said, by at least 10 unmarked vehicles and armed agents in civilian clothing and whisked away, first to a detention center near Chicago and later miles away at a facility in Indiana. …

“When Sarsour, who has no criminal record in the US, was first detained, he thought the agents had mistaken him for someone else. When they tried to get him to sign paperwork agreeing to being deported, he refused.

“‘I was very confused,’ he said. Only as his ordeal protracted into days did he realize he had been targeted for his activism. ‘That really shocked me, to be honest,’ he said.”

Sarsour was only released because U.S. district judge James Patrick Hanlon concluded he’d been held because of his outspoken support of Palestinian rights and not because of any crime he’d committed, immigration status or otherwise. He had another court proceeding Wednesday in Chicago — he's waiting to find out if he will be fully freed or re-imprisoned.

But now Trump’s concentration camps have officially been used to hold people whose views the administration dislikes.

Trump’s September 25th National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” identified as potential “domestic terrorist” threats those Americans who espouse:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

It was used last month to indict 15 protesters in Minneapolis. And now Secretary of State Marco Rubio has essentially declared that it’s a loaded gun pointed at anybody who opposes Trump or is even a progressive member of the Democratic Party. The excuse/weapon they’re apparently planning to use is Cuba.

For Rubio, it’s a two-fer. He wants to run for president and thinks taking Cuba will get him there…but he needs an excuse. And that excuse will also provide Trump, Vance, Miller, et al with a fine opportunity to start rounding up American progressives.

Labeling Cuba as “The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” Rubio issued a 140-page document which claims that that poverty-stricken island nation:

“…has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.”

He claimed, to an audience including representatives from 66 countries and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon:

“The Cubans devoted themselves to recruiting, cultivating and mobilizing a global coalition of activists, intellectuals, and political groups around this cause, building a sprawling revolutionary network that shaped a disproportionate share of America’s most famous and influential extremist movements, from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground through to Antifa.

“Today, that network continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.”

The document names American citizens, just as the new White House website is now naming individual American reporters, who are essentially accused of being communist/“leftist” collaborators.

They include my colleagues David Pakman and Amy Goodman, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, influencer Hasan Piker, and nineteen others, including two other members of Congress.

The 20 organizations named include the Amazon Labor Union, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America, the National Lawyer’s Guild, and “Antifa.”

So now the architecture is in place. ICE has billions to expand their concentration camps, they’ve spread their secret police across every corner of America, they’re tied into Flock cameras and Palantir’s databases on pretty much every American citizen, and they’ve demonstrated they’re invulnerable to local law enforcement and can abuse or even kill people who resist them at will.

And now the Trump regime, like Putin and Hitler before them (among dozens of others), have identified “the enemy within” who must be purged and separated from society.

It might be good time to reach out to our elected officials and demand action. The phone number for Congress is 202-224-3121 but don’t forget your local officials, too, as it appears they’ll soon be dealing with ICE or ICE-affiliated federal goons coming for the “domestic terrorists” who defy “traditional American views.”

Last week, Donald Trump essentially told us exactly what he will do this November. When reports start coming in that the Democrats are winning, he will send in the troops.

He’ll point back to last week's national address and tell the nation:

“I told you so. I warned you. They rigged the election for the Democrats and now I have to stop it.”

He’ll mobilize ICE and the National Guard’s “Rapid Reaction Force” that he’s assembled over the past six months to seize ballot boxes and crush the inevitable “insurrection” — protests in the streets against his seizing ballot boxes — by “left-wing communist radical domestic terrorists.”

He’ll declare a state of emergency, invoke his NSPM-7, and blame it on a foreign country and/or “Antifa.” He’ll declare protesting a crime, and tear gas will fill our streets.

This is easy for me to imagine: I was there in 1967 when Lyndon Johnson did nearly the same thing, although for an entirely different purpose, and I’ve worked in several countries where this very scenario had already played out.

And those same white supremacists Trump has already pardoned can also easily imagine how it should play out when he calls them out to attack protesters; they’ve been terrorizing minority communities for centuries and are very good at it.

This includes his tens of thousands of well-armed loyalist cult members who’re salivating at the idea of splitting that $1.776 billion they believe they’ll get when he seizes absolute control of the country.

As Senator Amy Klobuchar said on MSNOW:

“This is a man desperate to hold onto his power and he will do anything to keep that power.”

Would he actually be so audacious as to try that? Could he actually pull it off?

He could, he will, because he’s already tried it once.

The difference is that six years ago — the last time he tried to overturn an election he lost — his Attorney General, FBI Director, Director of National Intelligence, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, DHS Secretary, and Chief of the National Guard would all have refused such an order, so he called on thousands of violent thugs to attack the Capitol, stop the election certification, and murder the vice president.

This time, in a classically Putin-esque move, he’s replaced all of those people with lickspittles like Blanche and true believer fanatics like Miller and Homan who’ll do exactly what he tells them to.

Many of them sat in the room with him, in the front row in front of the teleprompter, watching and nodding along with his lies. They know that if Democrats win and the election is certified this fall many of them, too, will end up on the wrong end of civil and criminal investigations.

Trump has recently declared, officially, that Democrats are traitors, communists, potential terrorists, and should be deported. The only thing he hasn’t demanded is for Democrats to be arrested for our politics, and that may well come in just a few months.

After all, he can’t afford to allow the House or Senate to fall into Democratic hands, because then he’ll be investigated with the power of law and subpoena for the many crimes he is currently committing.

He wouldn’t survive that politically, and he believes the Senate this time will actually convict him: they know that once he’s convicted and has thus lost his power, there’s no way he can regain it and he’ll no longer represent a threat to their political careers.

This is all why he’ll say or do anything to hang onto his power, because he knows if he loses that power his entire house of cards collapses.

He and his children go to prison or are forced into exile. His wife gets to reinvent her life the way she wants. What’s left of his properties gets sold off at auction like his casinos were the last time he went bankrupt.

This is what he’s imagining at 2 o’clock in the morning when he’s rage-tweeting. He’s also remembering the terrifying hours he spent sitting in a courthouse charged with 34 felonies for which he could go to prison.

It’s easy for him to imagine, because it’s exactly what he constantly tries to do to people he thinks have slighted him, from Jim Comey to Letitia James to Adam Schiff and dozens of others: he tries to break them financially while threatening them with long and brutal imprisonment.

He’s done this repeatedly, and his most recent threat to break or jail somebody was issued just last week.

But none of what he’s planning works without a lot of ordinary people saying, “Yes,” and that’s also where we may have a say.

That’s the thing about these operations that gets lost when we talk about them as if they’re just the work of one man, America’s Hitler, to quote JD Vance. It’s never one man who pulls the whole thing off, although it does take a lying psychopath with charisma and some leadership skills to get the process rolling.

Ultimately, though, it can’t work without the National Guard captain who decides the order is lawful enough, the county clerk who hands over the machines because a federal agent showed her a piece of paper, the local cop who puts on the riot gear because his sergeant did, and the poll worker who turns his ballots over to masked ICE agents because it feels safer.

My friends who were there in Germany in 1933 told me, as does history, that that country didn’t fall to a majority; the Nazis never got a legitimate victory at the ballot box.

That nation fell, as others have throughout history, because tens of thousands of people in unremarkable jobs did the small thing that was asked of them in the moment it was asked, and told themselves it was only temporary, and it must be okay because somebody higher up must know something I don’t.

Every one of those people made that decision cold, under pressure, with a stranger in a uniform standing in front of them and about four seconds to think.

Which is why the useful work right now isn’t reactive, and it isn’t something we do in November. It’s finding out, before November, what the people around us are going to do.

— Go meet your county election officials; they’re mostly your neighbors, and in a lot of counties they’re the ones who’ll be standing between a federal agent sent by Trump and a ballot box with nobody backing them up.

— Ask your sheriff, on the record, at a public meeting, whether he takes orders from Washington or from the county.

— Ask your state legislators what the plan is if the National Guard shows up, because most of them probably haven’t thought about it and they damn well should. Ask your governor and state attorney general.

— Find out which lawyers in your town do election work and whether they’re organized. Get to know the people on your block well enough that you can call them at midnight, if necessary.

— Get to know your local elected officials and, in the few months ahead, show up at your local Democratic Party meeting.

People who’ve already decided what they’ll do, and who know that the folks around them decided the same thing, behave completely differently when the moment arrives than people who are trying to figure it out on the spot.

That’s not optimism. It’s just how it’s always worked, in Selma and Kiev and Manila and everywhere else people have looked at an illegal order or an out-of-control authority figure and said, “No.”

What matters most in the next four months is going to happen at the local level, in county commission meetings and election offices that nobody’s watching.

Go be somebody who’s watching.

Tonight at nine o’clock Eastern, Donald Trump will look into a television camera and tell America he’s rescuing democracy. He teased the address to reporters this week, promising “really big news” about “free and fair elections” and adding that “it doesn’t get bigger.”

For once, he and I agree. It doesn’t get bigger.

An administration official told Reuters that the speech will center on newly declassified intelligence about the 2020 election and what the White House calls voting machine vulnerabilities open to foreign hackers; multiple election experts quoted in that same reporting warn he’s laying the groundwork to contest Republican losses this November.

To understand what we’ll actually be watching Thursday night, we have to go back to 1973, to a Manhattan night spot called Le Club, where a 27-year-old Donald Trump, freshly sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to Black families, met the most feared lawyer in New York. It’s a story I tell in detail in The Last American President.

Roy Cohn had made his reputation as Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel, wrecking careers with accusations he never had to prove. His advice to young Trump, as Cohn’s own cousin later recalled it, was blunt: “You might be guilty; it doesn’t matter.” Don’t settle. Don’t apologize. Attack the accuser.

So instead of quietly signing the consent decree his father’s regular lawyers recommended, Trump called a press conference and countersued the federal government for $100 million. A judge tossed the countersuit, the Trumps eventually signed roughly the deal they’d been offered at the start, and Cohn declared total victory anyway.

He understood something that’s become the operating system of Donald Trump’s entire life: the court of public opinion matters more than any court of law, and a lie defended with absolute commitment will usually beat a truth defended halfheartedly.

Over their 13 years together, Cohn drilled three rules into his student: Attack, never defend. Deny everything, admit nothing. Claim victory no matter what actually happened.

When Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation in 2017, Trump reportedly demanded of his aides, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” He was mourning a fixer who’d been dead for three decades.

It took him eight more years, but he’s finally found his Roy Cohn. He’s found several of them, in fact, and he’s installed them at the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

That’s the machinery humming behind today’s speech. The acting Director of National Intelligence is now Bill Pulte, a nepo-baby real estate guy with no intelligence experience who referred Trump’s political enemies for criminal prosecution based on mortgage records he pulled from government databases, and who Democrats say was installed precisely to help Republicans rig the midterms.

A White House task force has been combing through thousands of pages of classified documents, timed to land in the middle of an election season. Federal agents have already raided the Fulton County elections office and carted off 700 boxes of 2020 ballots, something I covered here at the Hartmann Report earlier this year.

Steve Bannon has promised ICE agents at the polls come November, and Trump’s new Postmaster General has confirmed the Postal Service won’t deliver mail-in ballots from states that refuse to hand over sensitive voter data to the federal government. And Jay Clayton, Trump’s pick for permanent DNI, faced his Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, one day before the speech, having already auditioned for the job by echoing Trump’s phony claims about “election integrity” on CNBC.

Standing in front of Mount Rushmore on the third of July, Trump told the crowd that if Senate Republicans kill the filibuster and pass his SAVE America Act, with its proof-of-citizenship, driver’s license-must-match-birth certificate (that kicks off millions of married women), and photo ID requirements, then Republicans “will not lose an election for 100 years.”

He tried holding a bipartisan housing affordability bill hostage to force the Senate’s hand, and now GOP leadership is trying to attach SAVE to the national security spending bill this week. Even Dan Abrams, hardly a flamethrower, opened his radio show this Monday by saying it’s time to admit the president of the United States is “trying to cheat” in the midterm elections.

One detail gives the whole con away: Tulsi Gabbard, before she resigned as DNI last month, commissioned a forensic analysis of voting machines seized in Puerto Rico. That analysis, Reuters reports, found security flaws but no evidence of hacking — none — and Gabbard’s own follow-up report recommending fixes has been sitting unreleased at the White House for months.

They went looking for proof of fraud, found none (but perhaps a way to hack machines in the future), buried the report that could have helped states harden their systems before November, and are now preparing a primetime address built on the fumes of the very investigation that came up empty.

Roy Cohn would be proud. Claim victory no matter what the facts say. When you’re in the wrong and on the defensive, lie and attack.

I lived in East Germany’s shadow for a year in the 1980s, working for an international relief organization in a small village a few miles from the border, and in 1986 I passed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin. Most Americans probably don’t remember or even know that the DDR held elections; regular ones, with polling places and ballots and officially reported turnout levels that were typically north of 98 percent.

What they didn’t have was any possibility of a surprise. The regime had hollowed out every institution that could have made the outcome uncertain, so the election became theater, a ritual performed to legitimize a result already decided.

Putin ran East Germany’s KGB at the time, and he’s now Trump’s mentor. Authoritarians rarely abolish elections. They keep the shell and kill what’s inside it, and it appears that Trump is following the path Putin blazed at multiple levels.

So will it work here? There’s no secret button that flips vote totals: more than 98 percent of American ballots are cast in jurisdictions with paper records, and when Trump signed an executive order that would have forced the decertification of voting machines, a federal judge permanently blocked it based on the Constitution handing the running of elections to the states.

The weapon Trump and his corrupt GOP will use is chaos, not hacking: seizures of ballots and equipment, decertification fights, litigation that delays counts past deadlines, ICE vans parked outside polling places in Democratic neighborhoods, and a pre-built national narrative, launched tomorrow night, that gives every Republican candidate permission to refuse to concede when they lose.

David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights attorney, thinks the document dumps will fall flat with most Americans, and the primary results this spring suggest voters aren’t buying what Trump’s selling.

But Roy Cohn’s method never needed a majority to believe the lie. It only needed enough confusion, enough delay, and enough intimidation to change who shows up and what gets counted. It’s worked for Donald Trump for 50 years.

Remember, though, how it ended for the teacher. Roy Cohn died in 1986, disbarred just weeks earlier for dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation, abandoned by nearly everyone he’d ever helped, including Trump, who dumped him when he got sick.

The con, in other words, always works right up until the moment it doesn’t.

Whether tonight marks the beginning of the biggest con in American history or the beginning of its collapse depends less on what Trump says than on what tens of millions of us do between now and the first Tuesday this coming November.

Congress is voting this week on whether to bolt the SAVE Act onto the national security spending bill, so call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and representative where you stand, and don’t forget to mention Todd Blanche to your senators.

Check your voter registration right now at vote.org, because purges are already underway in Red states, and track what your own legislature is doing to protect or restrict your ballot at openstates.org.

Democracy has survived con men before, but only because ordinary Americans refused to become the mark. As Jefferson told us, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty…”

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill — which gave the top 1% fully $118 billion this year in tax cuts — turns a year old this week and Republicans in Congress actually celebrated the largest cuts to food assistance and Medicaid in American history.

They told us it was about fraud, about lazy people gaming the system, about restoring the dignity of work. Exactly a year later, we can now see what it was really about in a line of cars outside a food bank in Phoenix.

That’s where ProPublica found Ana Alvarez on a recent morning, a single mother of five who works at a restaurant and lost her family’s SNAP benefits last September. She reapplied in December and the government still hasn’t processed her application.

She calls the agency every week and gets told to keep waiting, so she clips coupons, her kids don’t go to the zoo anymore, and as the summer heat bears down, she’s doing grim arithmetic on rent, the car payment, and the electric bill that keeps the air conditioning running. She’s one reason Arizona has lost more than half of its SNAP recipients in a single year.

In Michigan, a widow named Sarah works two food service jobs to raise her 9-year-old daughter on $219 a month in food assistance, help she’s needed since her husband died suddenly six years ago. Last Christmas one of her employers wrote a single number wrong on her renewal paperwork, one missing zero, and the state cut her off.

And in Atlanta, Human Rights Watch documented a 36-year-old supermarket cashier who was working and meeting every requirement until she gave birth in late 2025, at which point Georgia shut off both her Medicaid and her food stamps, claiming she’d failed to report the job she was standing at every day. She’s spent the months since trying to get her coverage back while the medical bills pile up. In the party of family values, apparently, having a baby is now a firing offense.

None of these women are cheats or freeloaders. They’re workers, mothers, widows: exactly the people these cynical Republicans swear they’re protecting. But the numbers tell the story: more than 4 million Americans have been pushed off SNAP since the bill passed, the steepest drop since Clinton’s 1996 welfare cuts, and in just the 13 states that publish the data, roughly 808,000 children have lost food assistance.

The Congressional Budget Office projects millions more will lose Medicaid as the work requirement paperwork machine grinds through the states, even though more than nine in 10 of the people targeted are already working, in school, caring for family, or disabled.

The cruelty built into the bill isn’t a side effect: it’s the whole reason for the “enhanced” paperwork requirements. Every mother who gives up in frustration, every widow tripped up by a typo, every application left to rot in a backlog is a line item of savings that can translate into a larger tax cut for Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg while the poorest households actually see their taxes go up.

That’s the morality of today’s GOP laid bare. They looked at Ana Alvarez’s five kids and Sarah’s daughter and that new mother in Atlanta, and they decided the billionaires needed the money more.

Every day, it seems, we see or hear about another way in which Trump and his lickspittles in Congress and the various federal agencies are tearing down our country, weakening our defenses, pitting Americans against each other, looting our government, and making life harder for everybody except the morbidly rich.

The question nobody seems to have an answer to is, “Why?”

— Is it that, as Craig Unger seems to suggest, that Trump’s been a Russian agent for decades and is setting us up to lose to the newly-forming Axis of Russia and China?
— Is it that he spent so many years burning with rage and embarrassment at not being accepted by New York high society that he’s just come to hate America?
— Could it be that American-values-hating foreign powers that have poured literally billions of dollars into the Trump family are paying him to tear us apart so they’ll never again have to endure the humiliation of having their human, civil, and women’s rights records called out by a future administration?
— Is it possible it’s all just to pay for tax cuts for billionaires?
— Or are his, Vance’s, and Musk’s white supremacist, Christian nationalist, libertarian, and/or neo-Nazi ideologies so intense that they’re willing to essentially burn the country down just to expel immigrants, deny benefits to people of color, elevate the rich, crush unions, and re-subordinate women?

These are serious questions for which I can’t find credible answers that explain the entire spectrum of their behavior. Why would Trump and the GOP:

— Condemn 12 million Americans to sickness and early death by gutting Medicaid (and the biggest cuts don’t even kick in until right after this fall’s election)?
— Destroy American soft power by killing USAID, thus condemning millions to death?
— Fire so many workers at the Social Security Administration that just getting through to sign up or get help has turned into a multi-day slog?
— Gut the State Department at a time diplomacy is most needed for world peace?
— End food assistance (SNAP) for millions when one-in-five American children experience hunger?
— Refuse to enforce laws and rules that allow workers to form unions in their workplaces?
— Propose forcing all new Medicare recipients onto Medicare “Advantage” corporate scam plans?
— Refuse military aid to Ukraine for over a year to give Russia time to finish off their genocidal job?
— Stop the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from going after fraudsters and banks when they rip people off?
— Eliminate a major NOAA program designed to warn communities about the dangers of flooding and other extreme weather crises?
— Politicize the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Election Commission?
— End net neutrality so none of us are safe online?
— Shut down anti-cyber-warfare operations in the federal government?
— Defund university research that leads to innovation and saves lives?
— Cut unemployment insurance benefits across Red states?
— Terminate support for people with student loans and gut scholarship programs?
— Slash Affordable Care Act outreach budgets and allow junk insurance plans?
— Reverse over 100 environmental rules, including those on clean air, clean water, and chemical safety?
— Weaken Dodd-Frank, including gutting oversight of “too big to fail” banks and stress tests for mid-size financial institutions?
— Dial back OSHA workplace safety standards and inspections?
— Cut taxes to rich people while raising them via tariffs on working class folks?
— Change the Federal Trade Commission to allow more monopolistic, rip-off corporate behavior?
— Make it harder to vote and harass Blue states by demanding their voter information?
— Work to prosecute women who have miscarriages or abortions?
— Make it harder to qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI)?
— End auto emission standards and increase our reliance on fossil fuels?
— Pack the courts with judges the American Bar Association says are “unqualified”?
— Destroy our faith in our elections and set up election workers for harassment?
— Fire the Inspectors General (who find waste, fraud, and abuse) across multiple federal agencies?
— Weaken whistleblower protections?
— Put the military on the streets of our cities in violation of Posse Comitatus?
— Use state power to punish political opponents and those who’ve investigated Trump’s crimes, alleged Russian collusion, and corruption?
— Create a network of concentration camps across America?
— Allow a shadow cabinet of billionaires and theocrats via Project 2025?
— Attack judges and prosecutors, leading to violence and threats of violence?
— Foment violence (like on January 6th) as a political strategy?
— Destroy our asylum and refugee systems?
— Pardon insurrectionists, rapists, cybercriminals, and other wealthy criminals?
— Defund the IRS so they can no longer audit the morbidly rich, leading to the loss of hundreds of billions in federal revenues?
— Ban books and censor libraries?
— Criminalize trans and queer people?
— Roll back gun safety measures?
— Defund the arts, humanities, and public media?
— Gut vaccine and other programs that keep Americans healthy?
— Nakedly politicize the military?
— Expand federal surveillance powers while kneecapping oversight?
— Criminalize free speech, particularly on college campuses?
— Attempt to revoke birthright citizenship?
— Attack press freedom and bar the Associated Press from the White House?
— Sabotage the US Postal Service?
— Undermine the census?
— Scale back civil and women’s rights enforcement?
— Normalize autocratic language like “vermin,” “scum,” and calling immigrants “animals”?
— Expel millions of brown-skinned immigrants who’ve already gone through the legal process to get work permits and are on a path toward citizenship?
— Create international fiscal chaos with an on-again, off-again TACO tariff policy?
— Cancel the suicide hotline for queer kids?
— Gut our national parks and sell off our federal lands to wealthy friends of the administration?
— Create a vast, secret, unaccountable police force with masked officers whose identity is concealed?
— Allow the president to accept hundreds of millions in obvious bribes from foreign powers in violation of the Constitution?
— Work so hard to conceal the crimes of a notorious sexual predator?

And this, of course, is just a partial list of the ways Trump and the GOP have weakened our nation, reduced our standing and prestige in the world, corrupted our government, and immiserated working-class families.

Many of the theories about why Trump and the GOP would enthusiastically do so much damage to our people, our military, and our democracy contradict others.

For example, why would billionaires want tax cuts at the expense of damaging the economy that made them rich? Why would we promote a muscular military policy like bombing Iran while simultaneously destroying morale within the ranks of our military and kneecapping our intelligence agencies?

“Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is,” sang Bob Dylan back in the 19

In the winter of 1986 while living in West Germany I visited East Berlin with my oldest daughter, who was still a teenager, and on the far side of Checkpoint Charlie we were picked up by a young man named Torsten who ran a gypsy cab. Before we’d gone more than a block he had the two of us rehearsing a story, that we were his long-lost cousins over from the West, so we’d all say the same thing if the Volkspolizei or Stasi stopped the car.

He couldn’t have been much past 20, and he was kind to two strangers all afternoon (and grateful for the 20 Deutschmarks I gave him), but under all of it he was afraid the entire day, because in the country he lived in a man could be hauled in for the crime of driving people around and not being able to account for himself.

That fear, the quiet hum of it running beneath an ordinary afternoon, is exactly what a “papers, please” society feels like from the inside.

I’ve been thinking about Torsten all week, because the reporting now says that immigration checkpoints are being set up within the United States, and that more than 213 million of us Americans live inside a hundred-mile band running inward from every land border and coastline where federal agents can now stop your car and demand proof of your immigration status. No international crossing required.

That zone, first drawn by a federal regulation back in 1953, swallows 10 entire states and cities like New York and Los Angeles, and the libertarians at the Cato Institute, who are nobody’s idea of open-borders radicals, call it the “Constitution-free zone” and have gone to the trouble of mapping the checkpoints one by one.

It’s “Constitution-free” because ICE has decided that the Fourth Amendment, which reads, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…” is just a suggestion, rather than one of the foundational guarantees of American liberty; just an obstacle standing between the Trump administration and the police state it’s steadily but relentlessly building.

In Washington, D.C., for example, a construction worker got waved over by the Park Police for a minor traffic matter, and within a minute ICE agents had surrounded his truck, asking where everyone was from and whether they were in the country illegally. Two of his passengers were taken away, and nobody would tell him where.

ICE is also now paying state and local police to help, and the money is staggering. One estimate says the total could hit two billion dollars this year alone. In Florida, police departments pocketed nearly forty million dollars for vehicles and gear. In the Florida Keys, agents threw up a checkpoint on the only highway in and out, a tourist route, and made more than three hundred arrests.

They’re stationed at courthouses, bus stations, train terminals, and airports too, snaring domestic travelers who never came near a border. The ACLU’s Naureen Shah put it plainly. “We’ve never seen this financial incentive scheme exist.”

When the Supreme Court first blessed these interior checkpoints in the 1976 Martinez-Fuerte decision, it authorized a brief stop and a question or two about citizenship, nothing more, no searches, no fishing expeditions. What Cato and others have documented in the years since is a steady drift into prolonged detentions, questioning about anything and everything, and drug dogs brought out with no particular reason.

And this past September five neofascist Republicans on the Supreme Court (led, in this case, by “Pillsbury Doughboy Brett Kavanaugh”) went further, clearing agents in the Los Angeles area to treat the color of your skin, your Spanish or accented English, the kind of work you do, or even the corner where you wait for it as reasons enough to stop you. They now call them “Kavanaugh Stops.”

One of the citizens swept up before that ruling was a young brown-skinned man born in East L.A. who kept shouting that he’d been born right here as agents pinned his arm behind his back. And if you try to flee one of these checkpoints by car at speed, a federal statute makes that its own felony punishable by up to five years.

Earlier this week, masked, armed, anonymous ICE thugs snatched and handcuffed a nun off the street in Texas and threw her into a “detention” cell; she was a nurse dressed in a full habit, but her skin was brown, an apparent violation of the new Trump doctrine of Make America White Again.

If this seems to you like something out of the old world, you’re right, but we didn’t need to import it from the Nazis or the Soviets. We built our own version early and often, and Trump and his Republican lickspittles on the Court and in Congress seem determined to reinvent it here in the 21st century.

Prior to the Civil War, enslaved people in this country couldn’t travel a country road without a written pass, and, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, the slave patrols that were ubiquitous across the Old South would stop any Black person and demand to see it.

After emancipation, the Black Codes and the vagrancy laws did the same work under new rationalizations. And in 1892, racists in Congress passed the Geary Act, which ordered every Chinese resident in America to carry a photographic “certificate of residence” at all times or face arrest, hard labor, and deportation.

It was the first time this country made illegal presence a federal crime, and Chinese immigrants understood exactly what it was, calling the papers “dog tags” because a Chinese laborer now carried his number in his pocket the way a licensed dog carried his on a collar, and any white man who felt like it could stop him and demand to see it.

It was “Papers, please,” made in America from the start of our republic, aimed at whoever white men decided didn’t belong.

Then there’s what I saw for myself living overseas. For part of our years in Germany, my family lived right on the East/West German line, in the little town of Höchheim, where I worked for the international relief organization Salem.

A few hundred feet from our house stood two enormous fences, both built on Eastern soil, with a raked strip of sand between them so the guards could read a single footprint, and watchtowers rose some thirty feet with men and machine guns inside. When we walked near the road, they’d swing the guns toward us.

Now and then someone trying to cross got shot dead in that sand. The border towns we could see on the far side were lit up all night so no one could slip out in the dark, and in the spring, when the thaw shifted the ground, we’d be woken by the muffled thump of land mines going off on their own.

Years later we took a train through East Germany and the police came down the aisle with machine guns and dogs, demanding to see everyone’s papers, and when my eight-year-old son lifted a camera to take a picture they threatened him until he put it down.

That same instinct built the apartheid pass laws of South Africa, where every Black adult had to carry a passbook they bitterly nicknamed the dompas, the “stupid pass,” and where in 1960 police shot sixty-nine people dead, most of them in the back, outside a police station in Sharpeville for the crime of showing up without one.

The Soviets ran their whole country on internal passports that told you where you were allowed to live and work, just like they erected statues to Joseph Stalin everywhere you went.

Every one of these systems existed for a single purpose: to monitor, intimidate, and control the movement and behaviors of people the state had decided it couldn’t trust to be compliant. And Trump, Miller, et al apparently believe they should be the model for the new America they’re trying to build with the help of rightwing media oligarchs, toadies hanging banners with his face on them across federal buildings, National Guard patrols in our cities, and compliant Republicans on the Court and in Congress.

Which is why today the Trump regime no longer even needs a man in a uniform to stop you and ask who you are and what you’re up to. Last spring, researchers pulled apart the official White House app for Trump’s MAGA loyalists and found it capable of tracking a user’s precise location every few minutes, shipped with a privacy disclosure that falsely told Apple it collected nothing, while routing most of its traffic to private third-party servers to get around the Fourth Amendment.

When a security firm actually ran the app on real phones they didn’t catch it broadcasting locations, so the code could do the tracking even if no one saw it happen: the Trump regime built a tool capable of following you everywhere you go and then lied to the app store about what it collected.

As I wrote in The Hidden History of Big Brother in America, the surveillance state rarely arrives announcing itself. And the irony in this one is that the app wasn’t initially aimed at immigrants or dissidents but at the administration’s own supporters, the people who downloaded it to feel close to Trump with regular rants and updates straight from the Oval Office.

Somewhere along the way we even turned “papers, please” into a video game, a Cold War diorama you boot up for the pleasant shiver of it, and now REAL ID has quietly added a document check to the airport line you already dreaded.

The old checkpoint needed a guard to ask to see your papers: the new one just scans your face and instantly identifies you, a feature that’s now also available to police watching people drive or walk along the streets in most big American cities.

ICE is now using it to monitor protestors. As The Washington Post documented earlier this year:

“Federal immigration officers fanning out across Minnesota and other parts of the country are newly equipped with an array of state-of-the-art surveillance technologies, thanks to a bill passed last summer that transformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the country’s most highly funded law enforcement agency.

“ICE has wasted no time spending its war chest, buying new tools ranging from biometric trackers to mobile phone location databases, spyware and drones, while loosening restrictions on how it uses some of these technologies.

“These new surveillance powers come at a time when ICE is also pushing the bounds of its traditional role of immigration enforcement. In recent months, ICE leaders, backed by top Trump administration officials, have asserted the authority to use all available tools to monitor and investigate anti-ICE protester networks, including U.S. citizens.”

The freedom to move through our own country without stopping to account for ourselves, without proving to a masked, armed, anonymous officer answering to Trump that we have permission to be on the street, is one of the most ancient things — from the days of the Roman republic to 1980s East Germany to today — that separates a free people from a police state.

Torsten understood that in 1986, which is why he was scared even while he was being decent to two strangers who could have gotten him arrested.

We’ve come here in America from the slave pass to the Chinese dog tag to biometric surveillance, facial recognition, automatic license plate readers, cellphone location tracking, and immigration checkpoints miles from any border. The through-line never changes, only the tools and the intentions of the government that uses them.

So don’t let this one slide past as somebody else’s problem just because you were born here and can carry the right documents. Call your representatives through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them to rein in interior checkpoints and roving patrols and to restore the Fourth Amendment inside that so-called “hundred-mile zone.”

There’s also increasing resistance to Trump’s police state instincts and programs among the more progressive members of Congress and candidates for office: support them any way you can.

Learn your rights before you’re standing at a checkpoint rather than after, and if you see a neighbor stopped, film it and bear witness. Support the groups suing to hold the line, from the ACLU to the immigrant-defense networks and civil liberties groups in your own town.

And if this piece helped you see the shape of the thing more clearly, share it, forward it, and send people to hartmannreport.com, because the whole goal of Trump’s “papers, please” state and the assassinations of Renee Good and Alex Pretti is that everyone learns to keep quiet, and the surest way to refuse it is to keep talking to each other out loud.

The “partisan split” of Americans showed up in a big way at Fourth of July celebrations and backyard barbecues last week, but the media, while noting or even complaining about it, rarely mentions exactly why it’s happening.

A few weeks ago, Louise and I were having coffee with an old friend who’s known us since the early days of the radio show, and somewhere between the second cup and the muffins she said something that’s been rattling around in my head ever since. Her sister, a three-time Trump voter, had finally called — after months of silence — and demanded to know why our friend had stopped returning her calls.

“It’s just politics,” the sister said. “Why are you taking this so personally?” Our friend, who is queer and married, listened for about 30 seconds and then said, very quietly, “Because you voted for the people who want me to disappear, and you knew that when you did it.”

Then she hung up. She told us she felt awful about it for about an hour, and then she felt nothing at all, and the nothing was almost worse than the guilt would’ve been.

I’ve heard variations on that story dozens of times in the past year, and apparently so have a lot of other people, because a piece making the rounds on Daily Kos a few weeks ago by the writer Vyan put words to something that’s been building in millions of American households since January of 2016.

The piece is bracing and worth reading in full, but the core observation is one that the right-wing media ecosystem genuinely can’t process: their voters are suddenly discovering that their daughters and sons and nieces and old college roommates no longer want to come to July 4th, Thanksgiving, and other holidays.

They’re treating this as some inexplicable “progressive cruelty,” as if the rest of us simply woke up one morning and decided to be petty.

Greg Gutfeld did a whole monologue on it on Fox “News.” The framing, of course, is that you’re the unreasonable one for refusing to “look past” a single political choice your father or your uncle made:

“Can’t you just love them anyway? Why are you being so hateful?”

Here’s the thing they can’t quite bring themselves to say out loud, because saying it out loud would require admitting what they actually did: they didn’t vote for lower egg prices, although that’s the cover story most of them have settled on by now.

They voted for a man who descended an escalator in 2015 and called brown-skinned Mexicans rapists, who described non-white immigrants as “vermin” who were “poisoning the blood of our country,” language historians of fascism noted at the time was lifted almost verbatim from Mein Kampf.

They voted for him again in 2024 knowing exactly who he was, knowing what he’d promised to do, knowing that Stephen Miller had spent two years describing on podcast after podcast a deportation operation that would, in Miller’s own words, require building “very large staging facilities” and deploying the military against the civilian population.

They knew.

The Heritage Foundation published a 900-page blueprint to, in my words, “Make America White Again.” Miller did the interviews. JD Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler” before he became his running mate, and then ran with him anyway, and the voters knew that, too.

So what they got is exactly the hate and racism they voted for, and now, 17 months into the second Trump administration, more than 675,000 people have been deported, the ICE detention population has swelled to over 68,000 — a 70 percent increase over where it stood at the end of the Biden years — and people are dying inside those facilities at a rate this country has never seen before.

The Kaiser Family Foundation tracked 46 deaths in ICE custody between January 2025 and March 2026, with annual deaths roughly tripling from the 11 recorded in 2024 to 33 in 2025, and 2026 already on pace to exceed even that.

The ACLU now estimates someone is dying in immigration detention roughly every six days, and a CNN investigation a few weeks ago found that at least a dozen of those deaths were directly attributable to medical neglect, understaffing, and the cascading failures that happen when for-profit concentration camp operations double the detained population without doubling the doctors.

Three of the six deaths in a single recent month were suicides. The administration’s response has been to point out that the death rate, expressed as a percentage of the swollen detained population, comes to 0.009 percent, which is the sort of statistic you cite when you’ve already decided the people doing the dying aren’t quite people.

And Miller isn’t slowing down. He’s spoken openly about a vision of removing as many as 100 million people from the United States, a number that mathematically can’t just describe the undocumented, because there aren’t 100 million undocumented people in this country and there never have been.

That number describes naturalized citizens, mixed-status families, the U.S.-born children of immigrants, and anyone whose skin is dark enough that their presence Miller and his ideological allies consider an affront to what they keep calling “Heritage Americans,” aka “white people.”

Since the law changed in 1965 and we ended racial immigration quotas, the majority of immigrants to America have not been white, but white people (from South Africa, for G-d’s sake) are all the Trump administration now encourages to come into the US.

Too many Black and brown people have already arrived from “s---hole countries,” they say, and it’s time for them to leave. Stephen Miller’s white supremacist project to ethnically re-engineer the country runs faster every week.

If you’re a white person who voted for this administration and you’re now telling your gay nephew or your Korean-American daughter-in-law or your Mexican-American grandkids that you don’t see what the big deal is, you’re asking them to make peace with the fact that the people running the country have, on the record, in their own voices, described a future in which they don’t exist here.

The economic case the administration likes to make is that all of this cruelty is somehow “necessary” because immigrants are “draining the country.” But that, in particular, is simply an establishing lie.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022 alone, and that in 40 states they pay a higher effective state and local tax rate than the top one percent of households living alongside them. Every million undocumented people deported represents about $8.9 billion in lost annual tax revenue, money that funds the schools and hospitals and roads in the very communities now cheering ICE on.

And the criminal rationale, the one that animates every Fox “News” chyron about “foreign rapists,” collapses just as fast: ICE’s own fiscal year 2025 enforcement data shows 127 sexual offense arrests in a country where the FBI logged roughly 127,000 reported rapes by US citizens, and the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network estimates closer to 443,000 actual incidents of sexual violence every year.

Meanwhile, Trump has issued an executive order labeling Americans dissenting from his racist, fascist, so-called “Christian” policies as domestic terrorists, and they’ve begun investigating, prosecuting, and imprisoning people for being anti-fascist, or “antifa” when the organization doesn’t even exist.

We’re dismantling due process, abandoning habeas corpus and the Fourth Amendment, and building concentration camps against a population that accounts for less than a tenth of one percent of the sexual violence in this country. The numbers don’t support the policy, though, because the economics were never the point, other than the number of Black and brown people arriving on our shores since 1965.

This is why people are walking away from their relatives and didn’t show up for July 4th picnics, and why the people walking away aren’t, in fact, “being petty.”

When someone you love votes for a candidate who has promised, in plain English, to do something cruel and unconstitutional and historically catastrophic, and then he does exactly that, and they still defend him, the relationship isn’t being broken by your refusal to overlook it.

The relationship was broken when they cast the vote. You’re just the one acknowledging the damage.

Gutfeld and his colleagues want to frame all of this as “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” as a kind of emotional incontinence on the left. But there’s a much older word for refusing to extend warmth and intimacy to people who’ve signed off on the persecution of your neighbors and those who stand for democracy against authoritarianism, and it’s not derangement.

It’s conscience.

The Germans who quietly stopped inviting their Nazi-sympathizing brothers-in-law to dinner in 1934 weren’t being dramatic. They were doing the only honest thing left to do, and most of them, looking back from the rubble in 1946, wished they’d done it sooner and louder.

We’re not in 1934 yet. The midterms are five months away. The country still has somewhat functioning courts (other than SCOTUS), a free press that’s bruised but breathing, and the kind of organized opposition that can flip a House and possibly even Senate majority if enough of us show up.

Look up the local organizations doing rapid-response work for detained families through groups like the Detention Watch Network.

And when the MAGA friend or relative in your life asks why you’ve gone quiet, you don’t owe them a fight and you don’t owe them an apology. You owe them, if you choose to give it at all, the truth: that you saw what they helped build, and you’ve decided you’d rather associate with someone else.

The rest of this year is going to demand more of us than ever before. Pretending otherwise is no longer an option.

Hundreds of people died last month across Europe from the heat; they’re a symptom of a larger problem that governments around the world have failed to address — that goes far beyond simply global warming — and that the Trump regime is making far worse.

Its foundation is one of the most troubling aspects of human nature called predation: while most people just want to live their lives, raise their kids, and have a comfortable old age, some small percentage of those among us have simply become, for lack of a better word, predators.

In nature, there are natural predators and natural prey; foxes and rabbits are the classic example.

Rabbits, like most prey animals, have wired into them by evolution a response called “tonic immobility”; we used to think that when a rabbit or mouse was seized by a fox or eagle and went limp that they were playing dead (“thanatosis”) but, in fact, we now know their body is suddenly flooded with hormones, chemicals, and nervous reactions that essentially put them into a coma to either/both fool the predator or avoid experiencing the pain of being torn to pieces.

Predator animals — including humans — also have this instinct/mechanism; we see it when people “faint from fright” or are paralyzed by PTSD. But it’s far less frequently activated in predatory animals, particularly social animals like apes and humans, largely because we invent social systems to discourage predation.

Among modern humans, according to psychology, predation against other humans is a form of psychopathy, twisting the predator instinct our species once used to hunt food, instead, against others of our own kind, whether it be via physical/sexual violence or via theft and fraud.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote to his dear old friend and advisor Edward Carrington on January 16, 1787:

“If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves.

“It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”

To prevent this psychopathic predation within our societies is why we created governments. I’m reminded of the years Louise and I spent living in Europe where the landscape is dotted with castles and walled cities built not to defend against wolves and bears but against other humans.

It’s been this way for millennia; the castles and walled cities of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East were designed to keep out invading human predators, be they the Huns, Vikings, Ottomans, or Crusaders.

Modern cities, as technology improved, developed the equivalent of walls to keep the predators out; airborne missile defense systems and the like.

But the problem we Americans now face — one that citizens of modern nations have faced in various parts of the world for centuries — is that our government, seized and then run by psychopathic predators, has become predatory itself rather than protective.

For example, JD Vance, who once wrote proudly about how when his father left the family and his mother was stealing drugs from the nursing home where she worked he and his sister existed on food stamps (SNAP benefits), is now “actively working to strip American children who were just like him of their SNAP benefits…”

And now our federal government is hand-delivering notices that “You may have violated federal law” to people who’ve criticized ICE murdering American citizens in Minneapolis.

That is what is happening today in America, with the Trump family, Republican politicians, massive monopolistic corporations, and the Epstein/Oligarch class extracting billions from us at the same time they threaten us when we protest. The top headline of a recent online edition of The New York Times, for example, was:

“Trump Cut a Billion-Dollar Mining Deal. His Sons Stand to Profit.”

Predation has also become the new American business model as well; everything, it seems, is a hustle designed to prey on us.

We pay a fee for our car to open remotely or have navigation; to use a word processing or other necessary program; or must surrender all of our private information simply to have a laptop operating system function properly, even though we paid thousands for the hardware.

But as much of a problem as corporate predation has become (largely through the GOP’s Reaganism, neoliberalism, and Clinton’s Third Way deregulation), the biggest danger is government predation, because — unlike Microsoft or Apple or a car company, which can each just hustle a few bucks from us every month — government has the power to take all of our money, end our freedom and lock us up, and even — as Alex Pretti’s and Renee Good’s families learned — kill us with impunity.

This is where America stands today. The Trump regime, and those states controlled by Republicans more generally (which are almost universally the poorest, with the highest rates of illiteracy, poverty, STDs, unwanted pregnancies, murder, rape, and other violent crimes), have turned predatory.

They are using the weapons of theft and violence (which our government holds legally) against us citizens when we protest their modern forms of predation: their corruption, ICE violence, encouragement of predatory corporate behavior, and general rigging of the system to the benefit of the Epstein/billionaire class and the politicians it owns.

Now we find that even people protesting against ICE and other Trump regime abuses are being arrested and sentenced to decades in prison, people posting about these outrages are being visited by DHS to intimidate them, and the Trump regime promises to rig the upcoming elections.

It’s a problem as ancient as our government itself. As Jefferson also wrote in that same letter to former Continental Congress member Edward Carrington:

“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.”

This is why the acquisition/control of our news and social media sites by morbidly rich Epstein/billionaire class predators — whose first loyalty is to their peers rather than democracy — is so dangerous to both our republic, the poor, and what’s left of our middle class.

It’s why Trump taking hundreds of millions from the fossil fuel and other industries and then either ignoring their lies and their poisoning our planet or their theft from us via banking and insurance predation is so destructive of both faith in government and life itself.

It’s why the 50-year-long project funded by American oligarchs to pack our courts (particularly the Supreme Court) with toadies and ideologues, to build rightwing media empires, and to seize control of our universities and public schools has done such violence to our society, be it in school massacres, women dying because doctors are afraid to provide lifesaving reproductive care, or working families watching their children inherit a nation with fewer rights, fewer opportunities, and a planet pushed ever closer to ecological collapse.

So, what do we do?

I agree — as have generations of Americans — with Jefferson’s comment 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.”

We must, in other words, do everything we can to stop, block, and even prosecute the predators among us who’ve seized outsized control of both our government and our economy.

— To take on the fossil fuel industry and the Republicans who continue to both defend and subsidize it and its executives, who should be investigated for their decades of lies about global warming that are, today, literally killing thousands around the planet every day.

— To rebuild the New Deal and Great Society programs that neoliberals in both parties have been tearing apart for 45 years.

— To replace the predators in the insurance and banking industries with a Medicare For All style national healthcare program and free or affordable higher education like my parents’ generation enjoyed.

Public opinion polling and recent elections show that Americans are waking up; our work — our obligation as both citizens and decent human beings — is to assist and speed along that process by speaking out.

We must demand better of our elected representatives: work to strip our electoral system of the dark and billionaire money five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court authorized in Citizens United; strengthen the right to unionize while raising the minimum wage; rebuild a green electrified America; end the cap on Social Security taxes; and assist the growing progressive movement within the Democratic Party.

Tag, we’re it!

Somewhere inside the White House right now, there’s a federal intelligence report sitting in a drawer, and Trump’s lickspittles who put it there are betting you won’t see it before you vote in November.

It’s an assessment of the security of America’s voting machines, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Reuters revealed last month that White House officials have spent months refusing to authorize its release, even as the 2026 midterms come barreling toward us.

The findings are almost comic in their irony, but they could also become the weapon that brings down our democracy this November. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first the backstory.

Tulsi Gabbard launched this whole investigation to dig up proof of Donald Trump’s endlessly repeated lie that voting machines stole the 2020 election from him. What her people reportedly found instead was that some states are running outdated equipment that ought to be patched, and that there’s no evidence anywhere that a single vote was flipped or manipulated.

So the one document that could actually help election officials harden their systems before Election Day has been buried, precisely because it tells the opposite of the story the president wanted told.

And consider who now controls that report. Gabbard stepped down this spring, and now Trump has installed Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, a man who runs the federal housing agency and chairs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has no intelligence background whatsoever, and didn’t even hold a security clearance until days before he walked in the door.

He reportedly showed up early, asking for a list of every employee so he could decide whom to fire, floated cutting hundreds of intelligence jobs (a Putin dream for decades), and wondered aloud whether he could carry the President’s Daily Brief home with him.

Trump has been remarkably candid about why Pulte is there, telling reporters that his new spy chief may “find out some things about the rigged elections.”

David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who works with election officials in both parties, warned that Pulte appears handpicked precisely because he embraces the same 2020 lies Gabbard chased for 18 months and could never prove.

Elections lawyer Marc Elias put it more bluntly, calling the appointment a straightforward attempt to seize control of our elections, and Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, called Pulte a “national security threat”.

So, the person who’ll decide whether that voting-machine report ever sees daylight, and what gets done with the weaknesses it describes, is now the president’s hand-picked election man, a guy who at Housing was willing to violate the standards of his office and common decency to dig into Letitia James’ and Adam Schiff’s mortgage records just to make Trump happy that he could then punish them with lawfare.

That by itself would be a scandal in any other administration: a regime that talks about election integrity from sunup to sundown is sitting on the very report that could improve it. But the worry that’s been keeping voting-rights lawyers awake runs in a direction most Americans haven’t yet let themselves imagine.

Back in February, the Guardian’s George Chidi walked through how this could unfold.

After the FBI raided Fulton County’s election office and hauled off 2020 materials, Trump went on Dan Bongino’s podcast and announced that Republicans should “nationalize the voting” and “take over” elections in 15 places.

That same week, we learned Gabbard had quietly trucked voting machines out of Puerto Rico to hunt for vulnerabilities. Set those moves next to each other, as the Campaign Legal Center’s Bruce Spiva did, and the pattern becomes shockingly clear.

“This is not a coincidence,” he said.

Trump’s March executive order declared a national emergency over supposed foreign interference in our elections, invoking a 2018 order called EO 13848 and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Miles Taylor, who helped draft 13848 when he was at Homeland Security and is a regular guest on my radio/TV program, told the Guardian they wrote it “to create a mechanism for sanctions, not to empower the director of national intelligence to fiddle with elections.”

But that law lets a president block the use of “property” like voting machines and tabulators that he claims are tainted while an investigation grinds on, and he never has to prove a thing. He can, in other words, selectively seize the machine that registered your vote this November and refuse to release it until long after people are sworn into office.

Disinformation researcher Joohn Choe validated that concern, pointing out that this fall the federal government could start seizing machines across the country, classify the supposed evidence, and then tell judges it can’t reveal what it’s looking for or how long it’ll take because national security forbids it.

“States would not be able to certify what they would not be able to access,” Choe said.

Picture what that would do to a close election. If federal agents declared a swath of digital voting machines (from heavily Democratic parts of swing states or in critical elections) off-limits in the last week of October, you’d get a cascade of emergency court hearings, county election directors scrambling to print and hand-count ballots they never planned for, early voting collapsing in the targeted places, and the results of a handful of razor-thin House races hanging unresolved for weeks.

Trump wouldn’t need to flip a single vote to steal a chamber of Congress; he’d only need to make the counting impossible in the right districts at the right moment, then let the chaos and the lawsuits do the rest.

That’s the scenario Eric Levitz mapped out in a chillingly plausible Vox analysis that’s been circulating among election experts. The old fear was that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act and send the military to grab ballots on election night: this version the experts now consider more likely is quieter and far harder to fight.

As Derek Clinger of the University of Wisconsin’s State Democracy Research Initiative put it, Fulton County points toward a seizure of ballots “conducted with the appearance of a legal process,” which is both more probable and tougher to challenge while the clock is running.

Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center told Vox that anyone still doubting this administration is laying the groundwork to interfere in our elections should now have those doubts erased.

And this is where that buried report comes back into the picture. A federal document, stamped with intelligence-community authority and describing machine “vulnerabilities,” is exactly the kind of prop a White House could pull out of the drawer in late October and wave in front of the cameras as the official-sounding justification for declaring machines compromised and votes thus not counted.

No source has yet reported that’s the plan, but that’s sure my read of where these pieces point. And with Trump, it isn’t hard to imagine how a report written to chase a lie, then held in reserve, could end up serving as the excuse for the very seizure the experts are warning about.

The Founders saw this coming, which is why they deliberately handed the running of elections to the states rather than to a national executive who might tip the scales. The federal judge who permanently blocked Trump’s March order last fall said exactly that, but Trump and his toadies appear hell-bent on ignoring this court as they have so many others over the past 18 months.

And every strongman of the last century who set out to capture a democracy began by capturing the machinery that decides who won, almost always under the banner of an emergency and an investigation.

When Louise and I lived in Germany in the early 1980s, I spent evenings with older Germans who’d been young in the 1930s, and the thing that haunted me wasn’t the violence they described. It was how ordinary each step felt while it was happening, how every move was cloaked in legal language and official reassurance, right up until the morning they understood the ballot no longer meant anything.

It’s all starting to come into focus: the report in the drawer, Pulte parked atop the intelligence community, the Postal Service rewriting its rules to choke off mail-in ballots in the very states that lean Democratic, the demands for voter rolls, and the gerrymanders.

And all of it springs from the one hard fact that the American people have spent the better part of a half-century rejecting what the GOP is selling:

Without his treasonous deal with Iran to hold the hostages, Reagan never would have become president; without his brother purging 10,000 Black people from the rolls weeks before the 2000 election, George W. Bush would have lost to Al Gore; without Russia and Facebook skewing the messaging toward Trump in 2016, Hillary would have become president.

Fifty years of representing $40 trillion in trickle-down tax cuts put on the national debt and then shoveled into billionaires’ money bins while everyone else’s wages flatlined, 50 years of culture-war crusades against queer, Black, and Hispanic people designed to keep working folks fighting each other instead of looking up at who’s picking their pockets: the voters have finally had enough of all of it.

They want their damn middle class back, the one we had before Reagan killed the unions, stopped enforcing anti-monopoly laws, gutted higher education, told us government was the problem, and the morbidly rich among us started pulling away from the rest on the foundations of their tax cuts.

A party with something real to offer ordinary Americans wouldn’t need to seize the machines and gut the mail to hold onto power: the rigging is their confession that they’ve already lost the argument.

The special elections held so far this cycle have mostly gone against Trump, and his earlier schemes to rig the maps and purge the rolls have run into one legal wall after another, which is probably what’s driving these extreme measures.

Even Chuck Schumer says Democrats already have teams of senators and lawyers war-gaming every angle of attack, with people in place “to make sure they count the votes fairly.” The courts and the states still hold the line, but a line only holds when the people behind it are paying attention.

So pay attention, and then act. Call your members of Congress through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and demand that the ODNI report be released now, while there’s still time to patch the systems it describes, instead of being saved as a weapon for October to set aside our votes.

Check your own registration and find your polling place at vote.org, keep an eye on your state’s election rules through openstates.org, and program the Election Protection hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE, into your phone before the fall so you’ll have it the moment something looks wrong at your precinct.

Like the early 2000s in Russia and Hungary, this is the season when democracies are either defended or quietly lost, and the defending falls to ordinary people like us who refuse to look away.

If this piece helped you understand what’s at stake, share it with the friends and family who still think the midterms will simply happen the way midterms always have, and forward it to someone who can volunteer as a poll worker or an election observer this November.

The more of us who see the drawer they’re hiding this report in, the harder it becomes for anyone to use it against us. Support independent journalism, subscribe and share the Hartmann Report, and let’s make sure every vote in 2026 is cast, counted, and honored.

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

This weekend, the right-wing Italian daily Libero, a major conservative newspaper that shares a fair amount of Donald Trump’s politics, ran a one-word verdict on the President of the United States across its front page. The Italian word is coglione. The polite translation is “idiot.” The translation that George Conway and half of social media reached for, and the one the paper plainly intended, is a good deal blunter than that and more dictionary accurate: “a--hole.”

What set the newspaper off wasn’t the war, or the self-dealing, or the cruelty toward immigrants: it was Trump’s lie about a photograph. He pathetically told an Italian network that Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had “begged” him repeatedly for a picture at the G7 in Évian, that she’d wanted it so badly he “felt sorry for her” and went along.

Meloni, who until a week ago was Trump’s closest ally in Europe (and the only one who came to his inauguration), called the story “completely fabricated” and said neither she nor Italy ever begs. Her foreign minister cancelled his trip to Washington in protest.

And a conservative Italian newspaper looked at the most powerful man on Earth inventing a petty, humiliating story about a friendly head of state for no reason anyone could name but his own wretched, needy, emotionally-stunted ego and decided that therefore there was exactly one accurate word for him.

A newspaper in Milan, run by people who’d probably vote for him if they had the chance, will say in a banner headline what our own press, knowing far more about this man than they do, still treats as unspeakable.

So let’s do what our major papers won’t, and lay the record out in plain English:

— A jury in Manhattan found Trump liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll, and the federal judge who presided, Lewis Kaplan, wrote in his own ruling that what the jury concluded Trump did amounts to “rape as ordinary people understand the word,” even if it didn’t fit New York’s narrow penal statute.

— We have him on tape, in his own voice, bragging that his fame lets him grab women. And continuously trash-talking female reporters.

— We have the Eric Trump Foundation, set up to raise money for children dying of cancer at St. Jude, quietly paying hundreds of thousands of those donated dollars to his father’s golf courses and steering more than half a million to other groups tied to Trump interests, while donors believed every dollar was going to sick kids.

— We have a “university” that wasn’t a university, shut down after he paid twenty-five million dollars to settle fraud claims from the students it fleeced.

— We have a memecoin he launched days before his inauguration that enriched his family and a handful of insiders by hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, even as the small-dollar believers who bought in on the strength of his name watched the thing collapse by more than ninety percent.

— And we have a shooting war against Iran that began in February, with American bombs and a dead Iranian Supreme Leader, that Congress never voted on and that the Brennan Center for Justice called flatly unconstitutional.

Every one of those facts has been reported, sourced, litigated, and confirmed, and they’re really just the tip of the corruption and criminality iceberg which also includes 34 felony convictions and the apparent sale of pardons. And yet pick up the average front page on any given morning and you’ll find the man at the center of all of it described as “controversial,” or “polarizing,” or “unconventional.”

You’ll read that he “made claims” or “stoked tensions” or “broke with norms.”

Press critic Margaret Sullivan and journalist Aaron Rupar gave this habit a name a couple of years back: they call it “sanewashing,” the steady translation of genuinely deranged, asinine conduct into the calm, gray vocabulary of normal politics, and the Columbia Journalism Review has documented how reporters keep reaching for euphemism precisely when the moment calls for the plain word.

Why do they do it?

— Part of it is the old religion of objectivity, the conviction that a serious reporter never uses a sharp word about a politician no matter what that politician does, as though neutrality between an arsonist and a fire department were the height of professionalism.

— Part of it is fear. Like Putin in his early days, Trump sues, and the corporations that own our biggest networks and newspapers would rather write him a check than fight him in court even when they’d likely win, and every settlement teaches the next editor to soften the next headline. Scholars who study democratic collapse have watched this dynamic up close, and they’ll tell you that newsrooms grow reluctant to use the accurate word for a man precisely as the accurate word becomes most necessary.

— And part of it tracks back a half-century to RNC Chairman Rich Bond telling Republicans to scream “liberal bias” every time a newspaper or reporter told a true story that reflected poorly on Republicans. “Work the refs” was his instruction.

I lived in Germany for a stretch in the 1980s, and one of the things I noticed reading the papers there was how brutally unafraid European journalists were to call a powerful person a fool or a liar to his face, in print, right there in the headline. It wasn’t recklessness. It was memory.

Germans of that generation knew exactly what happens when a press decides that the polite thing, the cautious thing, the access-preserving thing — as had happened there in the 1930s — is to keep describing a dangerous man in reasonable language, until the day comes when it’s too late to describe him any other way.

But today in America, a handful of giant corporations and right-wing billionaires have come to own most of what Americans read and watch, and that concentration now quietly shapes the boundaries of what those outlets will say about the powerful people they both report on and often fear.

The Italians still have a mainstream press scrappy enough, and independent enough, to call a spade a spade. We used to.

The Founders didn’t protect the press in the First Amendment so it could practice stenography. They gave it that protection so it would tell the country the truth, bluntly, when the powerful would rather it didn’t, and so it would be the thing that warned us before the danger arrived rather than after.

A free press that won’t name what’s in front of its own eyes isn’t being fair. It’s failing at the one job the Constitution set aside for it.

So here’s where you come in, because the press won’t fix itself and the politicians won’t fix it for us. Cancel the subscription to any outlet that keeps calling a documented fraud “unconventional,” and put that money toward independent journalism that uses real words.

Make sure you’re registered and ready at vote.org, and look up exactly who represents you at the state level at openstates.org, because the people who’ll decide whether your vote even counts in 2026 are sitting in your statehouse right now.

And if this piece said something you think more people need to hear in plain language, then do the thing the Italian editors did. Don’t soften it. Share it, forward it, post it, and send folks to hartmannreport.com so we can keep telling the truth here without a billionaire owner deciding which words I’m allowed to use.

The morbidly rich and GOP are counting on our politeness. Let’s disappoint these, as the Italians would say, “assholes.”

Donald Trump is already telling us he’s going to try to steal the 2026 election, and the fact that he’s saying it now, months in advance, is the whole tell.

Back in February, he stood up and declared that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” floated taking over the vote in 15 states his party doesn’t control, and returned to the lie he’s been pushing for a decade, that mail-in ballots are crawling with fraud.

They aren’t. Americans have voted by mail for more than a century and a half, and the Brennan Center has shown over and over that you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit mail-ballot fraud.

The fraud claim was never an argument: it’s an excuse for voter suppression, its own form of election fraud. When you convince tens of millions of people that the only way your side can possibly lose is if the other side cheats, you’ve prepared them to swallow whatever you “have to do to protect the vote,” and to reject the result as illegitimate if you lose anyway. That’s the groundwork, and they’re laying it right now in the open.

The measures themselves are extraordinary. This spring, Trump signed an executive order trying to seize federal control over how states run their elections, and when the courts blocked most of it, his administration found a back door through, of all places, the Post Office.

The Postal Service has proposed a rule that would let it refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that won’t first hand over its complete list of mail voters to the federal government, a rule the NAACP says is built to disenfranchise voters and that 23 Democratic-led states are now suing to stop.

Steve Bannon went on his podcast and promised that “we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” and when reporters asked the White House to rule it out, the press secretary wouldn’t. More than forty-eight million Americans voted by mail in 2024.

These men want the power to decide whose ballot gets carried to the mailbox and who feels safe enough to show up in person.

If you’re wondering why they’re working this hard to keep you from voting, the answer slipped out of Todd Blanche’s mouth this spring.

Standing on a stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Dallas, the man who’d been Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer and who now runs the Justice Department as acting Attorney General told the crowd, “[E]verybody’s afraid that the next administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted.”

He meant it as a rallying cry. What he actually delivered was a confession: you don’t spend your evenings bracing for an indictment unless some quiet part of you already knows what you’ve done.

A reckoning is coming for the people breaking the law for this president, and they can feel it.

And now the White House is even discussing completely blowing up the Constitution and the right of habeas corpus, which dates back to the year 1215 when the British elite forced King John to sign the Magna Carta on the plain at Runnymede. As the New York Times reported:

“Suspending habeas corpus was one of two radical ideas [Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen] Miller had been pushing that alarmed [White House Staff Secretary Will] Scharf. The other was invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to enforce the law on American streets as protests grew against deportation sweeps.”

Todd Blanche, in particular, has every reason to be worried: he knows who Trump really is, and what he’s capable of.

He’s the lawyer who defended Trump in the New York hush-money trial that ended in 34 felony convictions, and in the federal cases over January 6th and the classified documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago.

He’s also the guy who’s now hiding three million Epstein documents and cut the cushy, puppy-filled deal with Ghislaine Maxwell for keeping her mouth shut.

Now he presides over a Justice Department that he and Trump have remade into a personal instrument of vengeance, complete with a Hitler-like 60-foot banner of Trump’s leering face on its façade, and the president has just nominated him to hold the office permanently.

So when Blanche says out loud that he’s afraid, he isn’t being paranoid. He’s being a good lawyer, reading the room, and the room he’s reading is called “history.”

It reminds me of two lawyers I learned about when we lived in Germany, because the men doing Trump’s legal dirty work today are walking a road that better-dressed men walked 90 years ago, and, as a result, we know exactly where it leads.

The first is Hans Frank, who started out as Adolf Hitler’s personal attorney, defending Hitler and his Nazi thugs in court all through the 1920s the way Blanche once stood behind Trump at the defense table.

When Hitler took power, Frank was rewarded. He became the Reich’s chief jurist, president of the Academy for German Law, and eventually Governor-General of occupied Poland, where he presided over ghettos, mass plunder, and slaughter on a scale that’s still hard to grasp.

Frank was the respectable face of the regime, the man who insisted there was a legal theory for everything. At the Nuremberg trials he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and on October 16, 1946, the respectable lawyer was hanged.

The second man is Roland Freisler, and if Frank shows you what happens to the enabler, Freisler shows you what happens to the judge who decides — like Blanche has argued and John Roberts went along with — that the law is simply whatever Dear Leader wants it to be.

Freisler ran the Volksgerichtshof, the People’s Court, a tribunal stood up outside Germany’s constitutional structure for the express purpose of producing the verdicts the regime demanded. He handed down thousands of death sentences in three years.

He screamed at defendants from the bench, ordered their microphones cut, condemned the young students of the White Rose resistance to the guillotine for the crime of printing leaflets, and sent the officers of the July 20th plot to be hanged within hours of their show trials.

Freisler never faced a Nuremberg of his own, but only because an American bomb fell on his courthouse in February 1945 while he was reportedly clutching a defendant’s case file. The defendant lived; the judge did not. There’s a grim justice in the fact that the one man who most weaponized the law against his fellow citizens was killed holding the very file he was using to destroy one of them.

I stood in the small plaza at the University of Munich back in 1988, the Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, named for Hans and Sophie Scholl, where the two of them were caught scattering their leaflets from the gallery before Freisler sent them to die. They were the Renee Good and Alex Pretti of their time.

The university has since pressed bronze replicas of those scattered leaflets right into the pavement, so that today you walk over them and have to stop.

You think, standing there, about how ordinary the machinery of all this was. It wasn’t run by monsters in uniform alone. It was run by men like Todd Blanche and John Roberts, men with law degrees, men who told themselves they were just interpreting the statutes, just following the orders, just serving the head of state.

And every honest accounting that came afterward, from Nuremberg onward, rejected that excuse and established the principle that a directive from above does not protect the man who carries it out.

That principle is precisely what must be keeping Todd Blanche awake, because we’re already watching the American version, as Mark Twain once said, rhyme.

When Trump wanted his enemies prosecuted, the career professionals balked, so the administration installed Lindsey Halligan, another former Trump personal lawyer with no prosecutorial experience whatsoever, as a U.S. attorney, and she promptly indicted James Comey and Letitia James.

In contrast with Germany in 1933, a federal judge threw both cases out, ruled her appointment unlawful, and other judges in the district were so disgusted that one of them now puts an asterisk beside her name on every court filing.

Thankfully, at least so far, these are not the actions of a legal system that’s fully surrendered (although Aileen Cannon may soon have a word). They’re the actions of one that’s still fighting back, and that fight is the whole ballgame.

But it gets worse, because that same executive order about mail-in voting also directs the Department of Homeland Security to build its own state-by-state lists of who’s eligible to vote, exactly the kind of national database you’d assemble if your real plan was to pressure states into purging their rolls.

If that sounds like paranoia, it’s only because we’ve already forgotten that we lived through it. In 2000, Jeb Bush’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, who also happened to be co-chair of his brother George’s Florida campaign, hired a private firm to scrub the voter rolls using a list of supposed felons that included eight thousand names shipped in from Texas.

The matching was deliberately loose, flagging anyone whose last name was an 80 percent match to a felon’s, and the Brennan Center later found that at least 12,000 eligible voters were wrongly purged, 22 times George W. Bush’s 537-vote margin. Black Floridians were 11 percent of the electorate and 41 percent of the people thrown off the rolls.

Bush took the presidency by that sliver, and the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount that would have caught the theft was shut down by a Supreme Court whose deciding majority included a justice his own father had put on the bench, Clarence Thomas, whose wife was at that very moment collecting résumés for a Bush administration, and Antonin Scalia, whose sons worked for firms representing Bush, neither of whom saw any reason to step aside.

That’s the voter merge-and-purge playbook, and they’re dusting it off on a national scale for this November with new, borrowed-from-Putin tweaks. Or at least they’re trying their hardest to.

When the Reichstag finally voted itself out of existence in March 1933, uniformed storm troopers lined the walls of the chamber so the legislators would understand the price of voting no.

That’s the tradition these men are drawing from, and we’d be fools not to be clear-eyed and ready for just about anything between now and November. After all, we all watched what Trump and his lickspittles did on January 6th, 2021, killing four police officers as they tried to “hang Mike Pence.”

But here’s the difference between Germany in 1933 and America in 2026 and, as Wendy Lawrence argues in a brilliant recent essay, it comes down to timing.

The Germans got their decisive vote after the seizure of power, when a newly seated Reichstag rubber-stamped the Enabling Act and handed Hitler everything. We get ours before. Which is why they’re so frantically trying to suppress the vote.

The November midterms will arrive while the courts are still ruling against this administration, while subpoenas can still be issued, while the power of the purse still belongs to whoever controls the House.

A Democratic majority doesn’t need to convict anyone to change everything. It can deny the appropriations that fund the deployments and the detention machine, it can compel sworn testimony and drag the concealed directives into daylight, and it can restore a Justice Department willing to enforce laws like Section 242, the Reconstruction-era statute that makes it a felony for any official to strip any citizen of their constitutional rights.

The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling shields the president’s official acts, but it shields no one beneath him. The agents, the contractors, the lawyers who signed the unlawful papers, all of them remain fully exposed, and a future attorney general can act on that.

Trump understands this perfectly, which is why he told House Republicans that they have to win the midterms because otherwise “they’ll find a reason to impeach me.” It’s why his people muse about ICE at the polls and write rules to choke off the mail. It’s why Stephen Miller is reportedly pushing to suspend habeas corpus. It’s why Trump promised to “pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval [Office].”

These lawyers and judges aren’t afraid of impeachment as an abstraction: they’re afraid of the reckoning that oversight makes possible, the same reckoning Hans Frank met at the end of a rope and Roland Freisler escaped only by dying.

The coming reckoning — unless they can stop it this fall — isn’t vengeance. It’s the rule of law standing back up after being knocked down, and in this country that recovery still runs through a ballot box which the members of the Reichstag of 1933 no longer had.

So, make sure you’re registered, and make sure everyone you know is too, at vote.org, and if you vote by mail, request your ballot early this fall and send it back early so no postal rule can run out the clock on you.

Save the nonpartisan Election Protection hotline in your phone, 866-OUR-VOTE, and call it the moment anyone tries to intimidate you at a polling place, because no badge and no uniform has the right to stand between you and your vote.

Call your representatives through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and remind them that funding lawless deployments, gutting oversight, suspending habeas corpus, and letting the Post Office police our ballots are against the Constitution.

Keep an eye on your own statehouse at openstates.org, where this fight is being waged district by district.

And if this piece helped you see the stakes clearly, please share it and support independent journalism here at the Hartmann Report, because the people counting on you to look away are counting just as hard on you to stay home, and the single most dangerous thing you can do to them is to show up.

A Cable TV host did an extended rant a few days ago about how many cases Trump has lost in court, arguing that “these guys are really bad at what they do” or words to that effect. I beg to differ: they know exactly what they’re doing, and getting convictions to imprison protesters isn’t (yet — they haven’t yet finished building out their network of concentration camps) their real goal.

Stop thinking of it as law enforcement and start thinking about it as punishment and intimidation. That’s their real goal, at least for the moment.

The indictment, the predawn FBI raid, the mugshot, the bail hearing, the ankle monitor, the year of massive, retirement-fund-draining legal bills and sleepless nights, and the GoFundMe that a protestor, politician, schoolteacher, or a local trustee has to set up just to defend herself against the most powerful government on Earth: those are the punishments that Trump and his lickspittles are so gleeful about inflicting on those of us they decide to target.

Former Trump DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor, noting last week that he’s heard more indictments of Trump “enemies” are coming soon, summarized it this way:

“The Soviet-ization of American life is farther along than most people realize.”

The eventual dismissal in court or quiet non-indictment by a grand jury is just paperwork stapled to the end of a campaign of brutal intimidation that already did exactly what it was built to do.

A prosecutor who only brings cases he expects to win is enforcing the law. But, in Trump’s case, corrupt prosecutors who keep bringing cases that grand juries reject, that judges ridicule, that they themselves abandon the moment real scrutiny shows up, aren’t trying to win at all. They’re trying to make examples of people, to destroy them financially, and to intimidate anybody else who may think of speaking out.

Because making examples of people who criticize those in power is Rule One in the Dictator’s Playbook.

This isn’t even a new or modern idea here in America.

Back in 1798, President John Adams and his rightwing Federalists pushed through the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to publish anything false, scandalous, or malicious about the president. The most dramatic target was a sitting liberal congressman from Vermont named Matthew Lyon, who went to jail for writing that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp.”

Adams had his federal prosecutors go after more than two dozen people, most of them opposition newspaper editors, for the “crime” of criticizing him. It was such a naked abuse of power that horrified Americans swept Adams out of office in the election of 1800 and handed the presidency to Thomas Jefferson, who pardoned every last one of them and expired most of the law.

The Framers had just finished writing into the First Amendment the right of the people “peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances,” and Adams turned right around and tried to make exactly that a felony.

Everything Trump’s DOJ is doing right now is a sequel to that story, with an even more fascist edge to it.

For example, you can see the whole brutal scam running in a case just outside Chicago. Six immigration-rights allies, including a former congressional candidate, an Oak Park village trustee, and a Democratic ward committeeperson, got hit with a felony conspiracy charge for allegedly surrounding an ICE agent’s SUV at a protest outside the Broadview detention facility.

They were painted as a “violent mob” in the media, each faced up to seven years in prison, and they spent the better part of a year raising money and living with all of that hanging over their heads. It was a living hell, the sort of thing that disrupts lives, loses jobs, and even can stress marriages to the point of breaking, which is exactly what Trump’s malicious legal goons intended.

Then — in a move I suspect they hadn’t anticipated — a curious federal judge pried loose the original grand jury transcripts, and the whole thing came apart in dramatic fashion.

The transcripts show the grand jury had actually refused to indict, returning a rare “no bill,” and that when one juror said out loud that the case was a “crock of s–t,” the lead prosecutor simply dismissed him and sent him home.

It took the ethics-free lawyers still willing to work for Trump and Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche three separate tries before prosecutors finally squeezed out the indictment they wanted, and the judge later said she’d never before seen the kind of misconduct she saw in those pages.

To avoid a public humiliation, days before the trial was set to begin, the U.S. Attorney dropped everything with prejudice, meaning it can never be refiled; one of the defendants broke down in tears and cried out loud in the courtroom when she finally heard it was over.

If Broadview was a fluke, you could chalk it up to one rogue prosecutor having a bad year. But it wasn’t a fluke. It’s the template.

Out in Los Angeles, a former Marine and longtime community activist named Alejandro Orellana got indicted on felony conspiracy and civil-disorder charges, facing up to 10 years, for the crime of handing out protective face shields to people demonstrating against ICE.

The FBI raided his home and ripped it apart; the U.S. Attorney went on social media to brand him part of a “shadowy network funding riots.” Six weeks later, prosecutors quietly moved to dismiss the case. By then, the Los Angeles Times had documented dozens of protest-related arrests that had collapsed or been quietly downgraded, none of them walked back with anything like the fanfare of the original perp walks.

In each case, people were hit with tens of thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of dollars in legal bills, had their lives and homes turned upside down, and were doxxed in ways that, for many, brought death threats and harassment from Trump’s most violent and fervent cultists.

This Russia-like racket runs all the way up to Capitol Hill.

When six Democratic members of Congress, including Senator Elissa Slotkin from my home state of Michigan and combat hero Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, recorded a ninety-second video reminding service members that they have a legal duty to refuse unlawful orders, Trump called it seditious behavior “punishable by DEATH” and demanded they be arrested and put on trial.

His DOJ actually carried it to a grand jury, which flatly refused to indict anyone. The same thing kept happening to other marquee targets: the cases against James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were thrown out, and a second grand jury refused to charge James even on a do-over, something her lawyer called unprecedented, because it nearly is.

Nonetheless, all of their lives were disrupted, all of them had to raise a small fortune to cover their legal costs, and their reputations were sullied. That was Trump’s real goal.

And it’s not just individuals.

When DOJ leadership went after the Southern Poverty Law Center, whistleblowers inside the department told Congress that senior officials ordered prosecutors to fast-track a “legally deficient” indictment even though they couldn’t point to a single victim or any actual deception, and that the standing instruction was to “go big” and “go loud” against protesters and critics like the SPLC.

That’s why career lawyers — literally thousands — have been resigning from federal positions in waves rather than sign their names to this kind of fascistic, bullying, punitive crap.

The cruelty of the thing is the point: the people running these legal grifts know they’ll lose most of these cases, but they don’t care, because winning in court was never the goal. The goal is to hurt the protestors and intimidate into silence anyone else who may be watching.

It’s the next teacher who thinks about marching in a protest, the next county trustee who thinks about signing an open letter, the next reporter who thinks about publishing a leaked memo and decides it just isn’t worth a year of her life and a hundred thousand dollars in legal fees to find out whether she’d eventually be vindicated.

Joe McCarthy understood this in the 1950s, when he and Roy Cohn (also Trump’s attorney and pre-Putin mentor) barely convicted anybody of anything yet gleefully destroyed thousands of lives. The subpoenas, the televised hearings, and the blacklist did all the work, and careers and lives were turned upside-down on accusations alone.

Watchdog groups like Protect Democracy are now keeping running tallies of these retaliatory cases precisely because the pattern has become too consistent to pass off as a string of honest mistakes, like they keep trying to pretend they are.

So let’s name it plainly: when prosecutors keep bringing cases that grand juries don’t want, that judges openly mock, and that they themselves abandon the instant a real court starts asking real questions, they aren’t fumbling.

They’re trying to bleed and then delete the right to peaceably assemble and petition for a redress of grievances, the right to free speech, the right to hold an anti-Trump or anti-fascist opinion right out of the Constitution, one frightened citizen at a time.

The sentence gets served long before any jury votes, and the verdict they’re actually chasing is our silence.

Don’t hand it to them. Call your senators and your representative through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and demand real and serious oversight of a Justice Department that’s being run as a McCarthy-like revenge and intimidation operation, and insist that the people dragged through these sham prosecutions be protected and made whole.

Back the organizations defending them, from Protect Democracy to the ACLU, and stand behind the local prosecutors and judges who’re refusing to go along.

Make sure everyone you know is registered at vote.org and find out who’s actually on your ballot at openstates.org, because the surest way to end a weaponized Justice Department is to elect the people who will dismantle it.

The Framers gave us the right to petition our own government precisely so that we’d never have to be afraid of it, and the only way to keep that right alive is to use it loudly enough that they’re forced to remember why it exists.

And if this piece helped you see the pattern more clearly, please share it, forward it, and pass it along, because their whole corrupt, evil strategy depends on people feeling alone and outgunned: the simple act of making sure your neighbors understand what’s happening is its own quiet form of resistance.

You can support this work and find more of it at hartmannreport.com, and every time you share it you make the next person a little less afraid to stand up. And that’s how we rescue our democracy.

I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capital city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year.

The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious Democrat, and I was a long-haired anti-war hippie member of MSU's Students for a Democratic Society.

I did the news there for years, and nobody ever told me how to spin it or what to insert or delete. I knew that I couldn’t bias it to reflect my own opinions: the news — accurate, factual, honest information — was sacred.

It was also the cost of our broadcast license, and we all knew it. The widely misunderstood Fairness Doctrine’s main demand was that radio and TV stations “program in the public interest,” and that was widely understood to mean straightforward, reliable, faithful-to-reality news at the top and bottom of every hour on radio and an hour-long news block in prime time on TV.

We did this — and embraced the Fairness Doctrine — because we knew it was part of the price of freedom, of democracy in our republic. When Thomas Jefferson said he’d rather live in a country with newspapers and no government than in one with a government but no newspapers, he wasn’t knocking government; he’d help create ours and was its president for 8 years. He was talking about the vital importance of an honest and free press.

Part of that honesty came from the competition; there were multiple stations in Lansing and most had an in-house news operation like ours, and the ones that didn’t ran the CBS or AP radio newscast twice an hour. Honesty and clarity were essential to getting and maintaining an audience, as well as hanging onto our license.

Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and now Trump and his oligarch enablers are trying to bury the entire concept of honest, straightforward news.

Over the past year and a half, we’ve watched Brendan Carr, Trump’s hitman at the FCC, go to CPAC conferences and brag about how he’s going to assault stations that say things he and Trump dislike. He’s trying to intimidate ABC affiliates into muzzling Jimmy Kimmel — again. And he succeeded in taking down Stephen Colbert.

And a Trump-adjacent billionaire nepo-baby has acquired CBS and is systematically stripping it of its journalistic integrity, starting with the evening news and now gutting the nation’s number-one news magazine show, 60 Minutes.

Storied journalist and 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley isn’t taking it lying down, even though it’s a virtual certainty that he has the standard non-disparagement clause that most media operations now require for talent, which forbids them to ever speak ill of their former employer should they leave for any reason. He’ll probably get sued for it, but he’s a man committed to the truth.

Trump, Ellison, Weiss, the billionaire owners of Sinclair, the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News,” the 1,000+ billionaire-owned radio stations across the country, the billionaire-subsidized podcasters, and billionaire-owned social media sites like Facebook and X that have apparently been algorithmically slanted toward Trump’s neofascist movement are all following an ancient script.

Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, and Franco all seized control of the news in their countries in their first year in power. It took both Putin and Orbán two or so years, because they wrote a new script for the takeover: sue the news outlets and reporters into bankruptcy for “defamation” or “slander,” then have friendly oligarchs take over the outlets.

Orbán even came to CPAC in Dallas to tell Republicans that they should do the same thing as he had done by turning America’s media over to right-wing billionaires. He also told the American CPAC conference in Budapest four years ago, during the Biden administration, that they should do the same in America when Republicans next seized control of the US government:

“Have your own media,” he said. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”

He added:

“Of course, the GOP has its media allies, but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcast day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.”

Thus, this is now the Putin/Orbán/Trump formula:

— Manufacture a crisis.
— Declare an “emergency.”
— Seize powers the Constitution doesn’t grant.
— Bypass Congress.
— Bully or ignore the courts.
— Use masked, secret police and the military against your own residents.
— Send people to foreign concentration camps.
— Build concentration camps within the United States.
— Prosecute lawyers and judges.
— Assert control over universities.
— Merge corporate and state interests.
— Cow the media into silence about your corruption and crimes.
— Then call it all “law and order.”

Trump is 18 months into his project and he’s already taken down the Voice of America, defunded PBS and NPR, seen the Washington Post and LA Times acquired by sycophantic billionaires, and turned CBS over to a nepo-baby billionaire who’s going after CNN next. As Jefferson pointed out, this is how democracies are fatally corrupted, which is apparently Trump’s and his billionaire enablers’ goal.

Combine that with a capture of the police and prosecutorial agencies of the government so, like in Putin’s Russia, they can harass and prosecute anybody who dares speak up against their destruction of our way of life, and you have the classic formula for turning a democratic republic into an oligarchic dictatorship.

The classic symbol of authoritarian governance dating back to ancient Rome and Caligula — violence as entertainment — will come to the White House as musclebound men will beat each other bloody and senseless for spectacle and the amusement of our 80-year-old “president” on our nation’s birthday.

Masked thugs snatching people off the street without warrants and putting them into concentration camps in violation of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments also plays well for the fascist Klan-remnant Republican base, so long as the people they beat, pepper spray, or murder are either dark-skinned or “liberal agitators.”

We’re now way down the road to the complete destruction of America, all in less than two years, as I wrote and warned of in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy in 2020.

The courts are packed with Trump toadies, thousands of lawyers have been purged from government, the FBI is now weaponized against Americans, Blacks and women are being pushed out of senior military commands by an openly white supremacist Defense Secretary, our history is being whitewashed in national parks, museums, and every federal property, and Trump’s face hangs, 60 feet tall, on multiple federal buildings.

And now they’re coming for the news. If it falls, recovering our republic will be possible — the examples are Hungary with Peter Magyar and Volodymyr Zelenskyy being elected in Ukraine — but very, very difficult. It will take years and cost a fortune both in work, cash, and probably blood, as it did in those two countries.

But we can gain courage from our heroes of this moment. Scott Pelley is unintimidated, telling us bluntly that the new owner and management of CBS tried to force him to lie to us on the air and spin stories so they could please wannabe-Emperor Trump. When they tried to lie their way out of the PR mess Pelley created for them, he immediately called out their falsehoods.

This crisis isn’t limited to CBS: the same nepo-baby billionaire who’s taken over that network also, according to Bernie Sanders, now owns, controls, or soon will control:

“TikTok, Warner Bros., Paramount, DC Studios, The Discovery Channel, CNN, CBS, HBO, BET, Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, Nickelodeon, MTV, Cartoon Network, Food Network, Travel Channel, Investigation Discovery, Animal Planet, Comedy Central, Showtime, TBS, TLC, HGTV, and more.”

Oligarchy and monopoly are two sides of the same anti-democratic fascist coin. They’re always tied together.

As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.

To register our discontent with those outlets. To boycott them. To demand that our politicians start breaking up the monopolies that Reagan legalized when in 1983 he ordered the SEC, FCC, and FTC to stop enforcing the antitrust laws that went all the way back to the 1890s (leading to three decades of “merger mania”).

Monopolies are destructive, but media monopolies are pure Putin-style poison.

We all must become truth-tellers, regardless of whether our platforms are, like mine, on radio, TV, and Substack, or if the place we can make our mark and speak our voice is on social media, the local newspaper’s letters to the editor, financial or volunteer support for a fighting progressive politician, or the town square with a protest sign.

We are all Scott Pelley.