Thom Hartmann

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

The staggeringly lucrative secret behind Trump's war lust

There are several clear winners from Trump’s attack on Iran:

— Russia, who can again fund its violence against Ukraine with new oil revenue and now claims its unprovoked attack on that nation is consistent with this new Trump Doctrine;
— Saudi Arabia, which has long hated Iran and lobbied since at least 2008 for the US to attack that country;
— the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which has similarly pushed America to attack Iran since at least 2010;
— the American defense weapons industry, which is making additional billions;
— Don Jr. and Eric, who have taken a big position in a drone-manufacturing business, getting them in on the Pentagon gravy train;
— Donald Trump himself, who’s succeeded in largely pushing Epstein off the front page;
— and Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s called for American strikes against Iran since 1992 and will stay out of prison as long as the war continues.

The losers include:
— The credibility of the United States and the rule of international law;
— the families of 13 dead and 140 injured American soldiers and airmen,
— the families of at least 160 dead Iranian little girls and thousands of other dead civilians in a dozen countries,
— American taxpayers who’re paying for the bombs;
— and future prospects for world peace.

But the biggest winner may be Jared Kushner, who apparently pushed Trump to initiate the war while he’s trying to solicit $5 billion from the same Arab states that have been begging American administrations for decades to attack Iran.

Back on March 5th, I speculated here on Hartmann Report that Kushner and Witkoff had been negotiating with Iran in bad faith, possibly to get the Iranian leadership to meet together in one place so Netanyahu (who used to sleep in Kushner’s bedroom) could kill them all with a missile strike.

Three years earlier, I laid out the backstory of how Kushner allegedly helped MBS take over the Saudi kingdom and was richly rewarded with $2 billion to fund his new investment venture.

Now, The New York Times is reporting that Kushner is back at the Arab trough, trying to pick up an additional $5 billion for his company from the same states that have been begging America to attack Iran for decades.

This represents a massive and apparently corrupt conflict of interest, as Congressman Jamie Raskin and Senator Ron Wyden pointed out when they called for an investigation into Kushner acting as an unregistered foreign agent in violation of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA. They wrote:

“This revelation is deeply disturbing, as Mr. Kushner appears to be influencing U.S. foreign policy by acting as a political consultant to the Saudi government while also accepting their money. … Mr. Kushner’s proximity to President Trump and the potential for political interference warrants the appointment of a Special Counsel.”

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, in a brilliant imitation of Vladimir Putin, is threatening news organizations for their reporting on the War. He seems upset about news stories that Trump may have ignored warnings from his top generals that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz if we attacked them; those reports appear to be well-sourced.

And it appears it was Kushner who was one of the main cheerleaders for this war, risks to world oil supplies and the possibility of the conflict igniting WWIII be damned.

Trump himself said that Kushner had advised him that Iran was preparing to strike America, something that’s patently impossible; they don’t have any missiles capable of reaching the United States and had just offered to sign a new deal promising never to develop any. Nonetheless, Trump — in an eerie echo of Bush’s lies about Iranian WMD — told America:

“Within a week, [Iran was] going to attack us, 100 percent. They were ready. They had all these missiles, far more than anyone thought, and they were going to attack us.”

Did I mention that Kushner is asking the Saudis and Emiratis for another $5 billion? As Popular Information reported:

“Kushner’s largest investor is the Saudi Arabian government, which provided Kushner with $2 billion in funding in 2021. Each year, Saudi Arabia pays Kushner 1.25% of its investment, $25 million, as a ‘management fee.’ Meaning he has received in excess of $100 million from the Saudi government over the last few years.

“Notably, ‘Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made multiple private phone calls to Trump’ in February, advocating a U.S. attack,’ according to reporting in the Washington Post. Trump’s comments reveal that Kushner used his role in Geneva to push Trump toward the outcome favored by his biggest client. Affinity Partners also received more than $200 million from the UAE. According to CNN, behind the scenes, the UAE was also lobbying Trump to strike Iran.”

Never before in American history have US negotiators had massive personal financial stakes in the outcome of their own negotiations. It’s a clear violation of the Constitution’s and US law’s ban on foreign emoluments, and possibly numerous anti-bribery laws.

With Congress paralyzed by terrified, spineless Republicans refusing to even look into the possibility that billionaire Trump, billionaire Kushner, billionaire Witkoff, and billionaires in the Middle East have thrown America into war just to enrich themselves, the burden has fallen on the American press.

Which has produced the predictable squeals from Carr and the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News” propaganda channel, and from Whiskey Pete Hegseth, giggling about how things are going to change when David Ellison takes over CNN.

Threats notwithstanding, our elected officials need to step up now to defend both the First Amendment, the Emoluments Clause, and the lives of our men and women in uniform.

Even lacking subpoena power, Democratic leadership should convene shadow hearings to investigate this possible double-dealing that’s already killed Americans and threatens to plunge the entire world into flames.

At the very least, they should spend a few weeks holding public, on‑the‑record hearings into whether this Iran war is being steered from Riyadh, Jerusalem, and Kushner’s investment firm instead of the Pentagon.

With their Benghazi spectacle that followed the death of four Americans, Republicans taught us that when our officers and enlisted people die abroad, Congress has a duty to drag every decision‑maker before the cameras; Democrats should apply that same standard now, and ask under oath whether Trump, Kushner, and their billionaire partners are profiting from a war they helped ignite.

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

The single move that will bring Trump's plans crashing down

The drumbeats for expanding our (and Israel’s) war with Iran are loud.

Cable news panels talk about strategy. Politicians talk about deterrence. Pentagon briefings talk about targets and timelines. But there’s one thing missing from almost every conversation in Washington.

Risk.

Not the geopolitical kind. Not the think-tank kind. Real risk. The kind that lands in your living room in the form of a letter from the government telling your family that your child is being sent to war.

For most of modern America’s leaders — and certainly for generations of the Trump family — that risk simply doesn’t exist.

We live in a country where fewer than one percent of the population serves in the military. The burden of fighting America’s wars has been placed on a narrow slice of our people. They’re mostly working class, many come from rural communities, and many join because it’s one of the few stable ways to get healthcare, education benefits, and a future.

Meanwhile the people who debate whether we should be bombing Iran are almost never sending their own kids.

That didn’t used to be the case.

During World War II nearly every American family had someone in uniform. War was a shared national sacrifice, and politicians understood that every decision they made could cost the life of one of theirs or their neighbor’s son or daughter.

I remember well how Vietnam brought that reality home in a different way. I hated it, protested against it, got kicked out of school for those protests, and still curse LBJ and Nixon for their lies that killed nearly 60,000 of my fellow citizens. But that, in retrospect, is exactly how it should be. That protest/debate was a good thing for our nation, every bit as good as the war was wrong and bad.

The draft lottery meant that millions of young Americans suddenly had skin in the game of war. College campuses erupted in protest not because students were uniquely radical but because they knew they might soon be the ones crawling through rice paddies under machine gun fire in a war that the country had, by then, fully realized was based on lies.

The draft was what forced our country, our families from coast-to-coast, to confront the human cost of war. And eventually it forced our government to end that war.

In 1973 Richard Nixon and Congress ended the draft and created today’s all-volunteer military. The argument sounded reasonable at the time, particularly after the upheaval of Vietnam. A professional military would be more skilled and more motivated, they said. It would be more competent, even more lethal.

But then something else happened because the draft ended: war became easier for politicians to throw our military into, because the dissenting voices in the ranks had vanished.

When only a tiny slice of Americans are at risk for fighting, bleeding, and dying, the political price of launching a war drops dramatically. Congress members can vote for military action without worrying that their own children or those of their constituents will pay the price. Television pundits can cheer for bombing campaigns without imagining their own kids in uniform.

The result has been nearly nonstop war for half a century, from Ronald Reagan’s attack on Grenada straight through to today.

Afghanistan lasted 20 years. Iraq dragged on for nearly two decades. The United States has been involved in military operations across the Middle East and Africa that most Americans can barely locate on a map.

Now we’re staring at the possibility that Trump’s attacks against Iran could metastasize into World War III.

The stakes here are much higher than George W. Bush’s wars that he told his biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, were fought to get him a second term in the White House. Iran isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan: it’s a nation of nearly 90 million people with a large military, deep regional alliances, and the ability to disrupt global energy markets overnight. It’s twice the size of Iraq or Texas.

And a war there could ignite the entire Middle East, which could easily spread to Europe (and already has, in a minor way, with Iran’s attacks on Cyprus and their missiles sent at Turkey). As we deplete our munitions, it might also encourage China to try to take Taiwan.

Yet the discussion among Republicans in Washington sounds strangely casual. Analysts debate air strikes on TV and guess about retaliation scenarios the way sports commentators pontificate about playoff strategies. Pete Hegseth struts and preens for the camera like a tough guy.

All because it’s easy to talk that way when you know your family won’t be fighting.

Now, imagine a different system.

Imagine that the United States had a national draft that applied equally to everyone. Rich kids and poor kids. Red states and blue states. The children of senators, CEOs, and television hosts alongside the children of factory workers and teachers.

This is how it works today in Norway (includes women), Sweden (includes women), Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Greece, Israel (includes women), South Korea, Singapore, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, and Sweden young people can opt to serve in the nonprofit sector (like hospitals or environmental work) instead of the military.

The draft provides a right of passage into adulthood for young people, something found in the history of every society. Those who serve for a year could be rewarded with free college or trade school. They’d get out of their local bubble, see the world, meet and work side-by-side with people who don’t look or speak or pray like them.

These are all good outcomes of national service.

And it’s successful: other than Israel, which has its own unique problems, you’re not hearing much bellicose war rhetoric from any of those nations’ leaders.

If we had that here, do you think Republicans would still talk so casually about war with Iran? Would Congress rush to authorize military force if their own sons and daughters might be called up next month?

History suggests the answer is no.

Countries with universal service become more cautious about war because the entire society feels the consequences. Parents ask harder questions, students organize, and communities demand clear, explicit, detailed answers about why a conflict is necessary and exactly what victory would look like.

Shared sacrifice, in other words, produces democratic accountability. And right now America doesn’t have that.

Instead, we’ve created a system where war is something that happens to somebody else, that roughly one percent who volunteer. It’s fought by someone else’s kids. It’s endured by someone else’s family.

That’s not how a democracy is supposed to work.

The Founders of our republic deeply distrusted standing armies, so much so that they wrote into the Constitution that the army must be funded every two years or it will cease to exist. It’s right there in Article I, forcing our country to reevaluate our military and its use every time Congress reconvenes:

“The Congress shall have Power…To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;”

They believed that America should only go to war when the public truly understood the stakes and Congress had engaged in a vigorous, public debate about it. That’s why declaring war was not among the powers the Constitution gives the president.

“The Congress shall have Power…to declare War…”

When there was a national consensus, and only then, would we go to war. Citizen soldiers were supposed to ensure that war remained a last resort rather than a convenient tool of foreign policy. This BS like Republicans today are doing as they hold briefings for Congress behind closed doors would have horrified them.

And ignoring that concern is how Trump got us here: the all-volunteer military quietly erased that safeguard.

Don’t take me wrong: the men and women who volunteer to serve our nation deserve enormous respect. They’ve carried the weight of America’s wars with courage and sacrifice.

The problem isn’t them: it’s the rest of us. When the risks of war are concentrated in a small segment of society, the rest of the nation stops paying attention. Politicians face less pressure, military interventions multiply, and wealthy defense contractors prosper.

The human cost of war, in other words, gets hidden.

But a fair national draft would change that overnight.

It wouldn’t make America more warlike: history shows it would do the opposite. If every family knew their children could be sent to fight, Americans would demand diplomacy first, second, and third.

Wars would still happen when they truly had to, but they wouldn’t happen so casually. A president who just orders the troops to start shooting at a country like Iran would be held to account by every family in the country.

As the war with Iran grows hotter, we should be asking a simple question that almost nobody in Washington wants to hear:

“If the road to war with Tehran required the sons and daughters of the billionaire and political class to march beside everyone else’s kids, would we still be there?”

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

A dizzying web points to who owns Trump and the depth of his treason

Eight of our American service members are dead and more than 140 wounded because Iran’s military has suddenly gotten really good at targeting our soldiers, airmen, and marines. News reports say they’ve been able to hit us with such precision because Russia is using their extraordinary spy satellite, spy plane, and advanced radar capabilities to help Iran’s military.

The Washington Post, which first reported on this, quoted a Russian military expert as saying that Iran is now “making very precise hits on early-warning radars or over-the-horizon radars,” seeming to validate the concern. The article added:

“Iran possesses only a handful of military-grade satellites, and no satellite constellation of its own, which would make imagery provided by Russia’s much more advanced space capabilities highly valuable — particularly as the Kremlin has honed its own targeting after years of war in Ukraine…”

When asked about the reports, Donald Trump — who’d just returned from the soldiers’ bodies’ dignified transfer — basically downplayed Russian efforts to hurt Americans, just like he did when he learned in 2020 that Putin was paying Afghan insurgents a bounty to kill our soldiers. He pointed out that the US had been sharing intelligence with Ukraine during the Biden administration, so apparently, according to him, Russia is justified in helping Iran kill American service members:

“They’d say we do it against them. Wouldn’t they say that we do it against them?”

His fellow real estate billionaire, Steve Witkoff (whose sons are making billions with Trump’s sons in the Middle East and who has been regularly traveling to Moscow for private meetings with Vladimir Putin) similarly shrugged off the report, telling CNBC:

“I can tell you that yesterday, on the call with [President Trump], the Russians said they have not been sharing. That’s what they said. So, we can take them at their word, but they did say that.” Witkoff later added, “Let’s hope that they’re not sharing.”

Putin himself, though, was nowhere near as circumspect, saying:

“On my part, I want to confirm our unwavering support of Tehran and our solidarity with our Iranian friends. Russia has been and will remain the Islamic Republic’s reliable partner.”

As if to confirm that Trump is Putin’s toady, just last week, in the wake of Iran shutting the Strait of Hormuz and cutting oil supplies to Asia and the Subcontinent, our president signed a waiver to our Russia sanctions so Putin can now sell unlimited amounts of Russian oil directly to India.

Every time Putin says “Jump,” Trump asks, “How high?”

Which raises the question: “Why? Why does Trump always give Putin whatever he wants and why is he so terrified of speaking out against him?”

Is it possible that Trump is actively working for Putin? What if Putin somehow owns him? Or is blackmailing him? And has been running him as an Russian asset since at least 2017?

That sort of treason would be more important than Russian agents Robert Hanssen (life without parole), Aldrich Ames (life without parole), or Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (death penalty).

And let’s not forget that right after Trump won re-election in November 2024, Russian state TV published explicit nudie pictures of Melania Trump and their anchors were laughing about it and at Trump. Was this Putin’s first assertion this cycle that he still owns Donald?

Jack Smith’s case in Florida was limited to Trump stealing sensitive documents and sharing them on two publicly known occasions (and didn’t even reference other known acts like Kid Rock’s allegation that Trump showed him Top Secret maps in the White House: this was apparently a regular thing for Trump).

That said, you can bet your bottom dollar that the FBI and other agencies worked as hard as they could to contain the damage done by Trump’s leaving documents that could cause “grave damage” to America in public places where spies could simply waltz in and take cell-phone pictures of them by attending a wedding or paying $200,000 for essentially unlimited access Club membership.

But what if it goes beyond that? What if Putin has owned him for years?

From Russian oligarchs laundering money through Trump’s operations — real estate is the most common device used worldwide for money laundering — to keeping him alive in his most difficult times, like those multiple bankruptcies in the 1990s when he almost lost everything?

Or perhaps blackmailing him?

What if Putin got him the presidency, and he knows that if America found out for sure, it would destroy him? Or has Jeffrey Epstein’s videos of Trump with underage girls? Or his own pictures, taken when Trump was in Moscow for one of his beauty pageants?

Which begs the question: exactly how much damage might Trump have already done to our nation, and what does he have planned for the next three years of this second term?

And is he getting ongoing day-to-day instructions from Putin, which explains why he’s so reluctant to discuss their conversations, as Rachel Maddow recently documented?

In 2019 the Washington Post revealed that throughout his last presidency, Trump was having regular secret phone conversations with Putin (more than 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.

Throughout the campaign, Manafort let Russian intelligence know where Trump needed help, and when, and it appears Russia jumped in to social media to provide the needed help.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison and ended any investigations. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia.

As the New York Times noted in 2020:

“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. [Konstantin] Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”

There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and bringing documents to Mar-a-Lago was just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported in 2022 that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin, who has agents in those countries, told him to?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he thinks he can makes money off them. Or he’s scared.

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” the Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

When Robert Mueller’s FBI team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump himself trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Manafort, asking FBI Director James Comey to “go easy” on Gen. 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.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.

And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.

Sen. Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was freaked out because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:

“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally given a man working for the FBI to Putin — a man whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:

“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As the Washington Post noted in an article titled, “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on Aug. 2, the Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, the New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.

“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”

And now, to complicate matters, it appears Elon Musk took with him access to the payroll records of all of our nation’s spies and other foreign intelligence agents. The Elon Musk who, the Wall Street Journal reports, has also reportedly been having his own secret conversations with Putin.

If it turns out the Trump has been acting as an agent for Russia, how long might this have been going on?

Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977, as documented by the German newspaper Bild when the StB’s files were declassified, because Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey.

Czechoslovakia at that time was part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union, and Ivana and her family had been raised as good communists. Now that a Czech citizen was married into a wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started tracking Trump virtually from his engagement.

As 2016 and 2018 investigations by the Guardian found:

“Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a ‘conspiratorial’ informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.”

An investigative reporting breakthrough by Craig Unger for his book American Kompromat led Unger to Uri Shvets, a former KGB spy who’d been posted to Washington, D.C. for years as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS.

Shvets told the story — from his own knowledge — of how Trump and Ivana visited Moscow in 1987 and were essentially recruited or seduced by the KGB, a trip corroborated by Luke Harding in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.

Their trip was coordinated by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that was a front for the KGB, and the Trumps’ handlers regaled Donald and Ivana with Soviet talking points, presumably about things like the horrors of NATO.

The KGB’s psychological profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not much of a deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he should run for president in the US.

Much to the astonishment and jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

He then purchased a large ad in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe on Sept. 1, 1987 that questioned America’s ongoing support of Japan and NATO, both thorns in the side of the USSR and their Chinese allies.

Trump’s ad laid it on the line:

“Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? ... The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

As the Guardian reported in 2021:

“The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful ‘active measure’ executed by a new KGB asset.

“’It was unprecedented,’ [Shvets said.] … It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.’”

Meanwhile, Putin was making friends with powerful influence over American foreign policy.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who flipped his nation into a strongman neofascist state following an unsuccessful attempted coup in 2016 (he imprisoned and tortured numerous journalists and political opponents), has been deepening his relationship with Putin ever since that US election year.

In 2017, Erdoğan apparently gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off Gen. Michael Flynn even as Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor, who also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House.

Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about one of those conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn was also an unregistered agent of a foreign government while working in the White House: he had taken about a half-million dollars from Erdoğan.

Around the time he was leaving office, Trump pardoned Flynn, essentially burying the entire story.

From campaigning to destroy NATO to selling out Ukraine to letting Russia help kill American soldiers in the Gulf region, Trump’s goal appears to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.”

The big question is, “Why?”

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

Trump may be trying to provoke an attack on American soil

We got more lies on Tuesday morning from the Pentagon press briefing. They’re now up to 17 different rationalizations for the attack on Iran, none of which makes sense.

To paraphrase Rod Serling, consider what happened in Minab, Iran.

A Tomahawk cruise missile, an American weapon, a weapon that Iran doesn’t own and can’t fire, struck a girls’ elementary school. One hundred and seventy-five people are dead, most of them little girls who showed up that morning to learn to read.

And Donald Trump stood in front of cameras and said Iran did it. He lied. About dead children. Without blinking. And his crew backed him up, even knowing it was a lie.

And now the corporate media will spend two days on this and then move on to whatever shiny object the White House throws next. That isn’t an aberration: it’s the GOP’s entire strategy. This is who they are and have been since Reagan pioneered the scam: a PR machine front for an iron-fisted oligarchy.

I’ve been studying authoritarian movements for 40 years, including in my book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. I’ve written about how Hitler rose to power, how Mussolini consolidated his grip on Italy, how the Confederates took over the American South, how strongmen from Budapest to Brasília have used the same playbook again and again.

And the first page of that fascist and neofascist playbook is always the same: “Destroy the concept of shared truth.”

Not any particular truth. Not “this lie” or “that lie.” The concept of truth itself. Make people so exhausted, so confused, so beaten down by the constant barrage of contradictions, lies, and naked bulls--- that they give up trying to figure out what’s real. Make cynicism feel like wisdom and encourage your “influencers” to make it cool. Make “nobody knows anything” feel like a reasonable way to understand what’s happening.

Because once you’ve done that, once you’ve convinced enough people that truth is just whatever you say no matter how outrageous or transparently false it is, you can do pretty much anything.

You can bomb a school full of little girls and blame the victims.
You can try to rig an election and, when you lose, call it stolen from you.
You can watch a million Americans die and say the virus is just going to disappear.
You can claim that tax cuts for billionaires will help average working-class people.
You can say that increasing poisons in the air and on our crops will Make America Healthy Again.
You can argue that destroying unions will increase working people’s standard of living.
You can claim that taking people’s healthcare away “encourages individual initiative” and “independence.”

Trump didn’t invent this. But my G-d, has he ever perfected it.

Trump also didn’t build this lie machine all by himself. Most of it was built for him, over a period of 50 years, with billions of dollars, by morbidly rich people who never appear on television and never have to answer for any of it.

In 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that became the blueprint for the takeover of America by the richest men in the country. Powell told the business community that they were losing America, that universities, the press, and the courts were all turning against “free enterprise,” and that if corporations didn’t fight back systematically and aggressively, capitalism itself was at risk.

What followed was one of the most consequential 50-year projects in American political history, every bit as nation-changing and dangerous as the Confederate movement of the 1840s.

Think tanks were funded to produce “alternative” academic research that would always reach the “right” conclusions.
Conservative media was built from the ground up, from 1,500 AM talk radio stations to Fox “News” to the rightwing takeover of social media, all to create an information ecosystem where Republican voters would never have to encounter an uncomfortable fact.
Public schools and Civics classes were defunded and attacked, because an educated citizenry asks too many questions.
Local newspapers, the institutions that actually hold local power accountable, were starved out of existence.

Charles and David Koch alone spent hundreds of millions of dollars seeding distrust in climate science, in government, in the very idea that collective action could solve collective problems. And they were just the tip of a massive iceberg.

This wasn’t an accident; it was a strategy.

And that strategy had one ultimate goal: to create a population of Americans so skeptical of institutions, so distrustful of expertise, so certain that everyone is lying all the time, that they’d be willing to believe anything.

Donald Trump didn’t create those people. They were created for him by these cynical billionaires.

And that means that removing Trump from power won’t dismantle the machine. Unless it’s defeated along with Trump, it’ll just produce another Trump, a smarter one, one who doesn’t make his lies and corruption quite so obvious.

The numbers around this project are staggering. Thirty thousand naked lies or misleading statements Donald Trump made during his first term alone. The Washington Post counted them: over 30,000.

That’s a man who woke up every single morning with the intention of deceiving the American people. That isn’t occasional dishonesty or spin: it’s a psychopathy — pathological lying — deployed as a governing strategy.

And it worked for Trump, just like it worked for Mussolini, Hitler, Putin, and Orbán before him.

He told people that Barack Obama, a man who released his birth certificate, a man whose Hawaiian birth was verified by state officials, a man who graduated from Harvard Law, was secretly a Kenyan. Millions of people believed it then and millions still do to this day.
He told people three million illegal ballots were cast against him in 2016 and that he won in 2020. While repeated investigations by reporters, federal agencies, and even courts (including the Supreme Court) found no evidence, he keeps saying it anyway.
He told people Covid would disappear. “One day, like a miracle, it’ll just go away.” Over a half-million Americans are in the ground because of the lies Trump told during those early critical months when action could’ve saved lives.
And then he told us all the biggest lie of all, the lie that almost ended the American experiment with democracy. When he lost in 2020 — lost fairly, lost decisively, lost in a contest that his own Attorney General, his own Homeland Security officials, his own judges said was legitimate — Donald Trump told his followers the election had been stolen.

Sixty-plus lawsuits, thrown out by every court that heard them. Even his own people told him the fraud claims weren’t true.

Nonetheless, he lied about it anyway. Louder. On repeat. For months.

And on January 6th, 2021, his mob stormed the United States Capitol, our Capitol, the symbol of 250 years of democratic governance, because this twisted man had spent months pouring gasoline on their rage and then lit the match at a rally a few blocks away.

People died. Police officers were beaten and four of them died. Members of Congress hid under their desks. And Donald Trump giddily watched it on television and did nothing for hours.

That’s who’s running the United States of America right now.

His supporters will tell you, as they always tell you, “that was then.” Move on. Stop living in the past. But here’s the thing: he never stopped.

Back in power, he’s now claiming inflation was at record levels when he took office. It wasn’t.
He’s claiming gas prices have dropped below two dollars in some states. They haven’t.
He says climate change is a hoax. It’s not.
He’s reviving the zombie lie that undocumented immigrants vote in American elections, a claim that multiple rigorous studies (including by the Heritage Foundation) have demolished but Republicans keep reciting, because it serves the GOP’s purpose of making Americans distrust their own elections.
He’s pushing discredited claims linking vaccines to autism. He’s the President of the United States and he’s telling parents not to trust medicines that have saved millions of lives, based on a sham study that was retracted decades ago because the author fabricated the data.
He’s claiming America pays for nearly the entire NATO alliance. We don’t. We pay a significant share, but 29 other nations contribute. This isn’t a matter of interpretation; it’s arithmetic.

These aren’t gaffes or misstatements. They’re deliberate lies. Each one chips away at some aspect of American life and governance, at trust in elections, trust in science, trust in institutions, trust in the basic idea that we can all look at the same facts and reach the same conclusions.

That’s the goal of these billionaires who fund the GOP and put Trump into office. And their buddy, Vladimir Putin, whose bots so heavily populate our social media. It’s always been their goal. And it was their goal long before Donald Trump came down that escalator.

And then there are Trump’s toadies and lickspittles, the hangers-on. Let’s not let the enablers off the hook, because this machine doesn’t even remotely run on Trump alone.

Pete Hegseth, an alleged alcoholic wife-beater whose own mother called him “an abuser of women” who, she wrote, “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego,” was handed the most powerful military in human history despite having no meaningful qualifications for the job. He was confirmed by Republicans in the Senate in what future historians will call one of the greatest acts of institutional cowardice in American history.

This is the man who stood in front of cameras after Minab and said Iran was the only side targeting civilians. One hundred and sixty dead children. Footage of an American Tomahawk missile. And Pete Hegseth looked America in the eye and lied.

Hegseth, Vance, Noem, Bondi, Miller, Vought, et al, aren’t confused or mistaken. They absolutely know what they’re doing and what lies they’re telling. And they’re counting on enough of us being too tired, too overwhelmed, too beaten down by 50 years of relentless Republican dishonesty to push back.

Don’t be.

Democracy isn’t a building. It’s not a flag or even a Constitution, as important as that document is. Democracy is a shared agreement, an agreement that we’ll resolve our differences through votes and not violence, that we’ll be governed by facts and not whoever yells the loudest, that when we disagree about what happened we can at least look at the evidence together.

That agreement didn’t just happen into existence; it took over three centuries to build. It was, as I write in The Hidden History of American Democracy, built on the Enlightenment and Native American idea that reason matters, that evidence is meaningful, that human beings are capable of governing themselves when they’re told the truth and well-informed.

This 50-year project I’m describing has been a direct assault on that very idea of self-governance. Defund the schools. Kill the local press. Teach people that experts are “elitists,” science is opinion, and government is always the enemy. Then stand back and watch what happens to a democracy that’s been hollowed out from the inside.

Donald Trump is what happens. CBS is what happens. An unprovoked war against Iran is what happens.

Our nation’s Founders and the Framers of the Constitution understood this. They knew that a free press and an educated citizenry aren’t luxuries: they’re the load-bearing walls of the republic. Knock them out and the whole thing comes down.

We’ve been watching someone kick at them for 50 years. Trump is just the most recent, least sophisticated, and grossest wrecking ball they finally decided to throw at us.

And 160 children in Minab are dead, and the men responsible are pointing their fingers at the country they bombed and saying, “Iran did it.”

Trump is basically inviting Iranian partisans to attack America with the ferocity and style of 9/11, hoping it’ll provoke a “rally around the president” moment like Bush got and the Reichstag Fire did.

As fascism expert Timothy Snyder writes:

“A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provoke a terrorist attack inside the United States. This would provide Donald Trump with a pretext to try to cancel or ‘federalize’ the coming Congressional elections.”

This is what it looks like when a democracy is in genuine danger.

The rightwing lie machine was built to make you feel like nothing you do matters. Like it’s all just too big. Like you’re way too small. Like the liars always win, so, “Why bother?”

That’s both the first and the last lie they need you to believe.

Don’t.

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

Trump's 'macho' monsters just revealed what they really are

Across Iran and the Caribbean, Donald Trump and his lickspittles delight in killing as if people were expendable scenery, not human beings with loved ones and families. Meanwhile, they ignore the death and destruction their fellow psychopath, Vladimir Putin, rains down on Ukraine every night.

India and America invite Iran to send an UNARMED ship to the Indian Ocean to participate in military exercises, and Trump and Whiskey Pete decided it would be fun to blow it out of the water, leaving more than 100 sailors miles from shore, desperate for a rescue. Instead of saving them, as international law requires, we simply left them to drown.

Whiskey Pete called it “quiet death.” In fact, there was a lot of screaming and sobbing, although the bombers couldn’t hear it from 20,000 feet any more than Hegseth could in his drunken haze.

Just like they blew up a boat in the Caribbean and then, when two fishermen survived clinging to a piece of debris and were desperately waving for help, came back with an illegally unmarked plane and blew them into bits of blood and gristle. Another clear violation of international and American law.

And then they bombed a girl’s school in Iran, killing at least 160 children, and then lied about it while also humble-bragging that “people will die” in their war of choice. As Stephen “Nosferatu” Miller gleefully announced after the little girls were slaughtered:

“What you’re seeing right now … is a military under President Trump’s leadership that is not fighting politically correct. That isn’t fighting with its hands tied behind its back.”

And Hegseth bragged:

“No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically-correct wars.”

When he was asked about the six American soldiers who were killed because Putin is helping Iran target Americans in the region, his reply was disgusting:

“When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it. The press only wants to make the president look bad.”

These are the ghouls who were delighted — thrilled — when masked ICE thugs in Minneapolis shot Renee Good in the face and Alex Pretti in the back. They then went on TV, giddy, and smeared them to the world. And killed dozens of people so far this year in their concentration camps while delighting in tearing children from their parents.

Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025 who’s gleefully overseen the firing of hundreds of thousands of federal workers, shattering their lives and families while throwing the American government into crisis, apparently gets off on thinking of them crying themselves to sleep at night, worrying about getting thrown out on the street with their children because they can’t pay rent:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”

Yeah, trauma. It’s what today’s Republicans love, so long as it happens to other people. It’s their drug of choice.

Vought’s and Musk’s massive cuts to the federal workforce to pay for tax cuts for billionaires — in this case, laying off thousands from the National Weather Service — meant that families in Michigan had virtually no warning that tornadoes were bearing down on them this past weekend. Three people are now dead and a dozen more in the hospital clinging to life.

Of course they weren’t billionaires, so their lives don’t much matter, right? Like the millions who lost their health insurance when the Big Beautiful Bill redirected ACA subsidies and Medicaid revenue to tax cuts for the morbidly rich. Or the pregnant women across red states who are dying at more than twice the rate of women in blue states because of misogynistic GOP anti-abortion laws.

Trump, Hegseth, Vance, Miller, Leavitt, et al think this sort of thing makes them seem “macho” and “tough.” Nearly 90 percent of Republican voters agree with them.

What it really does is reveal them as psychopaths, the very human embodiment of evil. If they’d been born in a different time or place, they’d be Ted Bundys or Charles Mansons and their GOP followers would be “good Germans” watching with a smile and a salute as the boxcars roll by.

When those six U.S. service members were killed by Iranian retaliation, Trump refused to remove his $50 souvenir hat (available for sale on his website) or bow his head and shrugged, saying that “sadly, there will likely be more … That’s the way it is.”

Those soldiers are just suckers and losers, after all; they should have had the good sense of the Trump men to complain about bone spurs or simply flee the country to avoid the draft, like Grandpa Drumpf did when Germany kicked him out for refusing to serve.

“War Secretary” Hegseth — with his Crusader cross and Dius Vult slogan tattoos — brags that they’ve “only just begun” putting “narco‑terrorists at the bottom of the ocean,” with no interest in who is actually on board the boats they’re striking. After all, they’re not white people and they’re not rich.

This isn’t the language of leaders reluctantly using force as a last resort; it’s the rhetoric of psychopaths who see the rest of humanity as disposable, as dots in a video game, as objects whose death is entertainment, so long as their own luxury and power are secure.

Elon Musk throws a quarter-billion dollars into the 2024 election to put Trump in the White House and in turn is given an opportunity to kill over a million Black and brown children on the other side of the planet by gutting USAID. As Bill Gates noted, it was “the richest man in the world killing the poorest children.”

When a college Republican chat room devolved into a Nazi-loving, Black- and Hispanic-loathing festival of hate, conspiracy theories, and Hitler adoration last week it was just another Thursday. Like Musk giving the Nazi salute — twice — at a Trump rally.

My dad’s Republican Party — Eisenhower’s and Romney’s and McCain’s Republican Party — is long dead and gone, and in its place is a cult built on grievance, paranoia, white supremacy, and a love for authoritarian strongmen including Putin and Orbán.

They delight in death and destruction. They love the language of blood and gore. They’re monsters.

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

Trump betrayed MAGA — and it wasn't an accident

Dear MAGA voter,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He never was.

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

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

Join us…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now look at Trump.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unless you wanted to get stung.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This terrifying Trump plot to steal elections is already underway

Recently, Steve Bannon told an audience:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the president of the United States talking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shortly after the last donation, as Legum reports:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there’s Trump’s pardon pipeline.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America's most precious word is now a lie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pass it on…

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