Thom Hartmann

A new Economist/YouGov poll of registered voters that just came out this week found that the top two words that Americans across the board endorse to describe Donald Trump are “corrupt” (53%) and “dangerous” (51%). Not even half of registered Republican voters were willing to call him “honest.”

This is consistent with Gallup’s finding earlier this month that fully 89 percent of Americans now believe that corruption in our government is widespread, the highest number in the two decades the polling company has been asking, and a higher number than in any other advanced, industrialized democracy.

The same day that poll came out, on Wednesday, CBS News published photos that American service members smuggled out of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia showing extensive — massive — damage to barracks, facilities, and even U.S. aircraft, all done by Iranian drones and missiles. The Pentagon’s own Inspector General just reported that there has been $3.7 billion in equipment and building losses and around 60 aircraft destroyed or severely damaged.

This follows Trump, last week, lying through his teeth, saying that the Iranians had inflicted “no damage” on U.S. facilities and troops, 18 of whom are now dead with hundreds more hospitalized.

Trump calls that small potatoes and refused to visit the wounded troops when he was at Walter Reed a few weeks ago. One soldier, his identity concealed, told CBS News, “We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”

Not only is Trump regularly — arguably, daily — lying to America and the world about what’s happening in the Middle East (and dozens of other things), but that polling shows that most Americans have figured it out. Which raises a vital question for our country at this pivotal moment:

What happens to a country when it loses trust in its government and leaders, and what can be done to restore that trust?

I’ve seen the consequences of this sort of loss of trust up-close and personal in the years I traveled the world on behalf of a German international relief organization, and the lessons I learned are both important and grim.

In the 1990s I made several trips to Bogotá, Colombia on Salem’s behalf, as I wrote about in The Prophet’s Way; I remember the immigration officer at the airport stamping my passport, saying “Mister Tourist, be careful.” At dinner that first night, after being warned not to take taxis or trust the police, a German woman who’d lived there for 15 years flinched every time the doorbell rang.

Her husband’s office manager, an ordinary middle-class guy, had been forced to watch helplessly at gunpoint as 15 armed men broke into his house looking for their 16-year-old daughter; when they discovered she wasn’t there, they took his wife, a friend of my dinner companion.

Every night for a month they called the husband and made his wife cry into the phone as he systematically drained every credit card, bank account, and retirement account he had. She was only released when he’d finally mortgaged his condo and given them the last of his money and credit. She was a shell of a person afterward, barely able to speak, and the family was desperately trying to borrow enough money from friends to leave the country and go back home to Germany.

The nun who ran the church where we were staying (locked into cells with steel doors and cement walls) warned us against going to a restaurant after dark and wrote down the phone number of the only trustworthy cab company in the city. Off-duty cops and soldiers had organized “hunt clubs” to shoot street children for sport.

One morning, as Horst Von Heyer and I drove past a billboard advertising a gated community of upscale homes with smiling guards carrying AK-47s, we passed a teenage boy sprawled on the sidewalk in a spreading pool of blood, a uniformed man standing over him with a gun still in his hand. Nobody in the car said a word; it was just too ordinary.

This is just one small example from my own experience of what happens when people no longer trust their own government. Into that vacuum of trust rush two types of people.

The first are the predators, who correctly figure that it’s now open season. We’re seeing that right now as corporate America fleeces us, banks rip us off, health insurance companies deny us care to fatten profits, and oil companies and their wholly-owned GOP shills lie to our faces about climate change.

The second are the strongman politicians, who promise that only violence and an iron fist can “restore law and order.” I saw that in Kaliningrad, Russia in the 1990s when four Russian cops pulled our car over for speeding and then let us go when we gave them a case of high-end chocolates. It was a town where the mob-run kiosks around Lenin Square were “the safest parts of town” (and vodka was cheaper than bottled water).

Six years later, Russians — by then exhausted by the crime and grifting oligarchs — handed the country over to a KGB colonel who promised to make the trains run on time. There hasn’t been a free election in that country since.

Recently, El Salvador ran that same script. A corrupt, on-the-take government of grifters and hustlers so ripped off the country and gutted the middle class that Salvadorans voted in Nayib Bukele, a guy who describes himself as “Central America’s coolest dictator.” He proceeded to arrest and lock up about two percent of the entire country, cutting crime but also ending democracy altogether.

That’s the warning for us. When trust is gone, wild stuff happens to countries and I’ve seen it in person from Peru to the Philippines to Uganda to South Sudan and Darfur and elsewhere. And now I’m seeing it here as the predators and fascists are running amok in America.

Trust is the single most vital component of all human relationships. With it, you can create miracles; without it, it’s hard to do anything productive.

Just ask any marriage counselor; to recover trust after a betrayal can take years and requires both full disclosure, real contrition (or at least explanation), and a genuine change in behavior.

And that’s exactly what Americans are struggling with right now. In a republic like ours, trustworthiness necessarily begins at the top, and Donald Trump is an utterly un-trustworthy man.

He cheated on every one of his wives. He convinced his followers to give him a combined $3.81 billion for his $TRUMP and $MELANIA digital coins before their value fell 97 percent and he pocketed the difference. He’s made another $1.4 billion from crypto just in the first year of his second presidency.

And then there are the jailings and murders being carried out in Trump’s name and under his direction.

In January, his masked thugs murdered Renee Good (a mother of three) and Alex Pretti (an ICU nurse at the VA), both American citizens, on the streets of Minneapolis. For six months, the administration refused to hand the evidence of the murders over to state prosecutors and physically blocked state investigators.

As of today, nobody has been charged with these crimes. That’s the Bogotá sidewalk, the uniformed men with high-powered rifles who know nobody will ever hold them to account for their killing sprees.

This is a pattern that’s been more than 50 years in the making.

— Nixon committed treason, blowing up the Vietnam peace talks to win the 1968 election, and then repeatedly both broke the law and took bribes while in office. Ford pardoned him, telling us our “long national nightmare” was over, when he was simply setting up its next phase.

— Reagan cut a deal with the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the 1980 election to screw Jimmy Carter and, when a special prosecutor began a serious investigation of that treason, George H.W. Bush’s Attorney General, Bill Barr, advised him to pardon the six Iran-Contra defendants on Christmas Eve of 1992, just months before he left office. Bill Clinton chose to ignore it all and “look to the future.”

And when George W. Bush’s brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, purged around 100,000 Black Floridian citizens from the voter rolls in the months before the 2000 election so his sibling could “win” the state by 537 votes and their father’s appointee to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, cast the deciding vote to stop the recount that would have revealed the crime, Al Gore just let it slide.

Which brings us to the Democrats. It’s long past time when they have to say, in one loud voice, “No more! We are finally going to hold these criminals to account!”

Most recently, Trump committed a whole bunch of crimes both during his first term as president and, particularly, when he lost the 2020 election and demanded that Georgia’s Secretary of State “find” another >11,000 votes and sent a mob to the Capitol to murder the vice president and speaker of the House.

Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, waited 15 long, painful months before appointing Jack Smith and getting serious about holding this serial criminal to account; it was too little, too late.

Every one of those decisions, from Ford through Clinton to Gore and Garland, was made by decent people who told themselves that they were protecting our nation’s institutions by letting a little Republican crime slide by.

Unfortunately, that’s not the way this works.

Instead, what they told the next Republican criminal (or, in Trump’s case, himself) was that they, too, should go ahead and crime because if they get caught, they’ll get off with a slap on the hand or maybe, at worst, lose their office.

Every one of these Republican presidents, in other words, showed the next that the price of crimes against our democracy was negligible.

That’s how we got from Nixon hiding his bribes in the Oval Office to Reagan committing treason with the Iranians to the Bush brothers rigging Florida in 2000 to Trump selling meme coins from the White House and implicitly encouraging his agents to shoot citizens in the street.

Other democracies have gone down this road and figured out how to recover from a political party becoming so corrupt it sanctions theft from, and even the open murder of, its own citizens.

— In Argentina, they put the ruling junta on trial in a civilian courtroom in 1985, just two years after the dictatorship ended and during a time when the generals still almost certainly could have re-taken the government.

— South Korea impeached, removed from office, and sentenced President Yoon Suk Yeol to life in prison just 15 months after he tried to declare a state of emergency and martial law to avoid the consequences of his party’s electoral losses — the same crimes Trump is openly contemplating now.

— Brazil arrested and convicted former President Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a January 6th style coup and sentenced him to 27 years in prison; they also convicted his generals alongside him.

None of these countries collapsed; to the contrary, the democratic fabric of each was strengthened by holding their former political criminals to account. All are still democracies, and it looks like the same process will soon play out in Hungary.

Even South Africa’s “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” — which people think of as a “gentle alternative” to criminal prosecution — wasn’t designed to be gentle. People who failed to make full, public confessions of their crimes were supposed to be imprisoned; the cautionary tale is that none were, which is a good part of why many South Africans will tell you the wounds are still open. The government broke trust even as it was trying to restore it.

Increasingly, Americans get this. There have to be consequences for:
— betraying America, Ukraine, and democracy on behalf of Putin,
— looting our treasury and handing no-bid contracts to friends and business associates,
— traveling the world on our dime while picking up billions from dictators on the pretense of negotiating peace,
— killing unarmed civilians in the Caribbean and children in Iran,
— poisoning our air in exchange for campaign contributions,
— trying to overthrow our government and fix the 2026 election,
— sending armed masked thugs into our streets to intimidate and kill us while organizing them into the country’s largest domestic spying operation,
— handing trillions in tax breaks, all borrowed from the rest of us, to billionaire donors who are now trying to buy this 2026 election,
— and all the other crimes that you’re welcome to list in the comments to this article.

If Democrats want to earn the votes of that 89 percent of Americans who’ve lost faith in their government, they must — every one of them who wants our vote — publicly promise to prosecute these people.

No more Garland pauses, no more Ford pardons, no more Clinton, Gore, and Obama looking the other way. Not for Trump, Miller, Noem, Hegseth, the ICE agents, the crypto bagmen, the Abu Dhabi royals, or the pardon-buyers who’re cashing in on Trump’s corruption every day.

On Day One, the subpoenas must begin: Legislation mandating an independent counsel with a real budget and open trials in open court the way Argentina, Brazil, and South Korea did it. Impeachment of every corrupt Cabinet billionaire and associated lickspittle, from Trump on down. Revealing the complicity of Congressional Republicans.

Democrats don’t get to run on “restoring trust” and then govern like an abused spouse who keeps offering “just one more chance.” We’ve had four Republican presidents openly break the law or even commit treason just for political power; it must come to an end.

So, be sure you’re ready to vote and make sure your friends are, too.

And please share this piece and support hartmannreport.com, because the only reason I can still say these things out loud is that people like you help keep the lights on.

Trump has now repeatedly offered his voters $5,000 checks if Republicans hold onto the House and Senate this fall, calling it the “Trump dividend.” Last week, he told a rally that it’ll “happen 100 percent” if enough people turn out to vote GOP.

Since his own party controls both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, he could now get an appropriation passed for the ~$1.2 trillion this will add to the national debt; the fact that he’s not doing this is pretty much proof that what’s really going on here is a good old-fashioned vote-buying scheme dressed up with some fancy language to make it seem less like the crime it is.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that “if the Republicans win” is quite simply a way of telling millions of Americans that there’s five grand riding on how they vote.

And then there’s Trump telling a crowd in North Carolina that he's not going to send any more disaster aid via FEMA unless they elect a Republican senator. He claims it was a joke, like when he joked about tearing down the East Wing, or building a triumphal arch, or trying to end mail-in voting.

It's really just a variation on the $5,000 check: “Vote the way I want, and I'll make sure you get something; vote against me, and I’ll withhold benefits from you.”

Americans have seen this corrupt movie before, and the last time we saw it, we made it a crime.

During the 1938 midterm elections in the midst of the Republican Great Depression, about a quarter of all American families were surviving on paychecks from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a program Republicans decried as “communism.” Democrats, though, controlled both branches of Congress and the White House, and more than a few of the local Democratic politicians were willing to exploit that widespread dependence on the public dole.

Reporter Thomas Stokes documented how WPA workers were being leaned on for both votes and campaign contributions; the reporting earned him a Pulitzer. TIME magazine reported that Harry Hopkins, the guy heading up the WPA, was promising both jobs and promotions in exchange for votes, and a Texas Democratic senator investigated, finding similar reports out of Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.

The scandal ripped across the front pages from coast to coast, and people were rightly disgusted. Given that a quarter of the population was only able to survive because of WPA payments, the threat to pull them (or expand them) in exchange for votes and contributions seemed like extortion.

So the president’s own party decided to clean up its own act. New Mexico’s Democratic Senator Carl Hatch wrote a bill he titled “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities” that explicitly outlawed government officials from using the power of their offices to influence politics or elections. A Democratic House passed it 241 to 134 and FDR signed it into law on August 2, 1939. We call it the Hatch Act.

Section 3 of the 1939 Hatch Act contained a criminal statute that’s still on the books, only lightly amended, as Title 18, Section 600 of the U.S. Code. It doesn’t begin with “any federal employee.” It opens with “Whoever”:

“Whoever, directly or indirectly, promises any employment, position, compensation, contract, appointment, or other benefit, provided for or made possible in whole or in part by any Act of Congress … to any person as consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity or for the support of or opposition to any candidate or any political party in connection with any general or special election to any political office … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.” (emphasis added)

A companion law, Section 597, makes it a two-year felony to offer any sort of expenditure to influence anybody’s vote. Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner argues Trump crossed that line the moment he made that promise. And, he points out, “if the Republicans win, you win with us” is a clear, neat description of offering a reward for supporting a political party in a general election.

Fox “News” and Trump’s other lickspittles argue that in 1982 the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Hartlage, already said that politicians can make campaign promises involving money because, in that case, a Kentucky candidate had promised that, if elected, he’d cut his own salary.

But that guy was describing what he’d do to himself if he won the office he was seeking; there’s never before in American history been an offer of cash to voters with a trigger clause that says the money only comes if one party wins and the other loses.

That’s why Republican Thomas Massie said he’s insulted at Trump suggesting his and his constituents’ votes could be bought for a mere $5,000, why former GOP Congressman Bob Good called it a “vote-buying scheme,” and why the libertarians at Reason magazine used the word “brazen” to describe Trump’s latest corrupt scheme.

As I have mentioned before, 89 percent of Americans now believe that our government is experiencing “widespread corruption” because for over 50 years Democrats have let Republicans get away with their crimes, including Carter endorsing Ford’s pardon, Clinton’s “look to the future,” Gore’s concession, and Garland’s 15-month nap. Every one of those choices by Democrats told the next sleazy Republican that there was basically no price to be paid for corrupting our democracy.

This $5,000 vote-buying scheme and Trump’s FEMA threats are the perfect pivot points for Democrats to highlight how insanely corrupt the GOP has become since Nixon first started taking bribes and selling legislation.

And while Trump has the immunity that six on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court gave him, the people around him who are echoing and promoting these illegal schemes don’t.

Both Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Vice President JD Vance have been out hustling this $5,000 scheme on television, and Section 600 makes it a crime for anyone who makes such a campaign promise “directly or indirectly.”

And the federal statute of limitations is five years, which carries this particular offense out to September of 2031, when it’s reasonable to hope/assume Democrats will again control our federal government and its ability to prosecute crimes.

So, Democrats in Congress need to get ready with subpoenas and serious questions: Who drafted this crazy plan? Who at Treasury and Commerce worked on it, and was it during their government-paid work hours? Did the RNC coordinate any aspect of this? And what the hell is going on with FEMA?

Those are the questions the Hatch Act was written to let us ask.

There are also anti-vote-buying laws on the books in every one of the 50 states and DC, and each state has its own ability to launch investigations, empanel grand juries, and go after corrupt officials. Democratic state attorneys general could, at the very least, begin notifying corrupt Republicans to preserve their records and documents, putting everybody on notice that finally, after all these years of GOP corruption, clean and accountable government is on its way.

Democrats cleaned up their own vote-buying corruption in the late 1930s, and now it looks like they’re going to have to clean up this Republican scheme along the same lines. Let your elected officials know you want Hatch Act and FEMA investigations started on Day One of the new Congress in January.

And please share this piece and support hartmannreport.com; it’s readers like you who make it possible for me to keep saying these things out loud.

Last Friday, for the first time in American history, a brand new court in America deported Nazira Haji Zada, a 47-year-old lawful permanent resident living in Fort Worth, to Afghanistan. She was never charged with a crime, and wasn’t allowed to see the evidence against her (and neither were her lawyers). Attorney General Todd Blanche called the whole thing “a win for national security and the rule of law.”

This was possible because, in a moment of national hysteria following the Tim McVeigh bombing in Oklahoma City in the 1990s, Congress authorized the creation of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, something so counter to normal American concepts of the rule of law and fair play that no president before now had been willing to use it.

Until, of course, Trump.

When I was around 12, my dad gave me his tattered copy of a paperback of Franz Kafka’s short novel The Trial and told me he wanted to discuss it after I’d read it. The book gave me nightmares for weeks, which was clearly his goal.

He was a tool-and-die maker in Lansing, a WWII vet, and a man who’d volunteered in 1945 to go fight and even die to defeat fascism and defend the rule of law. He saw The Trial as the essence of why he’d joined the Army straight out of high school.

The Trial opens with a bank clerk named Josef K. being dragged out of his bed one morning by two officers who won’t tell him what he’s being charged with. They made clear that even they didn’t know what his crime was.

Over the following year, he’s pulled deeper and deeper into a dark court that’s never held in public or official buildings, whose judges he never sees, and whose files are “secret” and thus not available to him or his lawyer. Nobody ever sees or says what Joseph K. was accused of, and his attorneys advise him it’s best to stop asking because the fact that he was arrested in the first place will be considered by the court as all the proof they’ll need of his guilt.

The story ends when two men in frock coats drag him out to a quarry at night and carry out his execution as mandated by the secret court:

“Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the high court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread all his fingers.
“But the hands of one of the men closed around K.’s throat, while the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing eyes, K. could still see the two men close in front of his face, cheek pressed to cheek, watching the outcome. ‘Like a dog!’ he said…”

When Kafka wrote that in 1914, he was a Jew living in Prague inside a dying empire. He never lived to see Hitler or the Gestapo or Putin build the very thing he’d imagined, but my dad did, which is why he’d given me that book so I could understand what a police state would feel like from the inside. He told me repeatedly throughout my life that “only the rule of law” and the Constitution protected us from the tyranny he’d volunteered to fight as a teenager.

I got a glimpse into that world myself twenty-some years later, in the winter of 1986, when my teenage daughter and I crossed through Checkpoint Charlie and were picked up in East Berlin by a young gypsy cab driver named Torsten. Before we’d traveled even a full block, he had us rehearsing a cover story that we were his cousins from the West, in case the Volkspolizei or the Stasi pulled us over.

That’s because in East Germany — where the secret police was then largely run by a guy named Vladimir Putin — Torsten knew that anybody could be hauled into jail at any time for any reason and nobody would ever have to explain why.

What happened Friday here in America is the Trump administration’s version of the same thing:

— Under this bizarre law in these secret courts, 8 U.S.C. § 1534, the judge reviews the government’s classified evidence alone, in chambers, and neither the accused nor the public may learn what it is or where it came from beyond an unclassified summary.

— The Federal Rules of Evidence don’t apply.

— The government may use the fruits of FISA wiretaps and warrantless physical searches, and the accused is specifically denied the right to suppress evidence she claims was gathered illegally.

— You get a court-appointed “special attorney” with a security clearance who can look at the secret file on your behalf, but that lawyer is forbidden by law from telling you or other lawyers what’s in it, and if he does he faces 10 to 25 years in federal prison.

Kafka gave Josef K. a lawyer who couldn’t see the file with the charges against him. Now Trump mandates a lawyer who can see the file, but goes to prison if he talks about it to any other living being.

Zada’s public defenders put it plainly before she was chained and thrown onto the plane to Afghanistan:

“Dragging lawful permanent residents into court but refusing to show them or their attorneys the evidence that will be used against them is a plain violation of due process,” they said in a statement, adding that her consent to removal “should not be seen as an endorsement of this court’s legitimacy.”

This secret court is only the most recent brick in the fascist wall Trump, his tech bro billionaire supporters, and his fascist lickspittles are building around what used to be American law. Last year he sent 238 men to life sentences in a torture prison in El Salvador — most with no criminal record whatsoever — without even bothering with a hearing for them.

One of them — a gay makeup artist named Andry Hernández Romero who was snatched by masked, armed men at the asylum appointment the government had set up for him — was shipped off to his life sentence in a foreign hellhole on the strength of crowns tattooed above the words “mom” and “dad." He spent 125 days incommunicado before a prisoner swap got him out.

Shades of Joseph K. 109 years later.

ICE today is holding roughly 65,000 people in detention, most of them never convicted of even any minor crime (being in the country without papers is a civil infraction, not a crime) and never having seen a real judge or courtroom. Most will wait months for a hearing that may never come, a clear violation of their Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

In their frantic efforts to purge America of nonwhite people, Trump’s racist toadies have frozen our refugee program since he was sworn in, with more than 100,000 fully vetted people stranded abroad. We’ve only admitted 6,069 refugees, and all but three were lily-white South Africans.

These misogynist white supremacist fascists are also purging our government’s own institutions of women and people of color. Whiskey Pete Hegseth has fired or forced out at least 20 generals, admirals, and senior civilian leaders; when he removed the Army’s chief of staff in April, in the middle of a war, the Pentagon announced it in true Kafkaesque fashion without even bothering to give a reason.

White South African immigrant Elon Musk’s DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management drove out more than 300,000 federal workers in a single year, with Black women losing roughly a third of those jobs. (I can no longer link to this because the administration deleted their workforce demographic data in March, 2025.) Many were fired with Joseph K.-style form letters that cited nonspecific “performance” issues, often sent to people who’d gotten glowing reviews just weeks previously.

One National Institutes of Health analyst’s supervisor told her that management had been ordered to pick either misconduct or performance as the reason and so had simply randomly picked one. A federal judge correctly called the entire process a “sham,” and when ProPublica dug into what ICE has been up to, they found more than 170 US citizens who’d been dragged off and imprisoned, often for days with no access to either a phone or a lawyer, all in clear violation of the law and our Constitution.

Each of these examples of overreach and lawbreaking by Trump, ICE, and the DOJ are grounded in the same basic logic Kafka described: you are powerless before the all-knowing, all-seeing state. Instead of being judged, you’re processed through an impersonal, uncaring, brutal machine.

If you’re arrested it must be because you’re guilty, even if nobody knows for sure of what. And when you ask why this is happening to you, the answer is a variation on, “You don’t need to know and, besides, we won’t tell you in any case.”

My father’s generation understood something we’ve lost track of in the years of right-wing hysteria since McVeigh and 9/11.

Our Sixth Amendment guarantees that every accused person — citizen or not — must be told the nature and cause of the accusation they’re charged with, have a public trial, and be confronted with the witnesses against them. The Fourteenth Amendment requires and guarantees due process for everybody confronted by the government, citizen or not.

When a government stops honoring the rule of law, due process, and fundamental human rights, it ceases to be a legitimate republic and has demonstrably slid into the early stages of being reinvented as a full-blown fascist state.

Zada may well have been involved in potential terrorist activity, although none of us will ever know because of the secretive nature of this case. If she was guilty, it should have been established in public; we have plenty of ways to protect sources and methods, when necessary, that are consistent with our Constitution.

Torsten knew what a country that doesn’t respect the rule of law and civil rights felt like. So did my dad, which is why he asked me to read The Trial when I was 12. We’re not East Germany yet, but Trump’s clearly learned from his mentor/owner who used to run that country’s secret police, and this new terrorist court is now established as a legal precedent. Which means this is just beginning.

Call your senators and representative at the Capitol Switchboard, 202-224-3121, and tell them the Alien Terrorist Removal Court should be repealed and that not one more person, citizen or not, should be deported, detained, or fired by this government without being told why.

And if this piece was useful to you, please share it and support my daily work, because the only real answer to a government that won’t explain itself is a public that never stops demanding it does.

While Hakeem Jeffries revealed, as he trash-talked Medicare for All, that he doesn’t believe we’re in a full-blown populist moment in America, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and the neofascist tech bros and billionaires fully realize what’s going on — and are committed to making the most of it.

As are Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed and many more Democratic candidates this year.

At its core, populism is a way of understanding politics as a struggle between ordinary people and a powerful elite that has stopped serving them. It’s not inherently left- or right-wing; it’s really a way political scientists describe a moment when the majority of a population has lost faith in the existing system and is looking for alternatives.

Arguably, the greatest failure of government in the past century was the Republican Great Depression, kicked off by Herbert Hoover with GOP tax cuts and tariffs in 1929 and lasting largely through the end of World War II. It created a populist moment that brought to power a Bernie-like populist in America named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It also brought to power a Trump-like populist in Germany named Adolf Hitler.

Because populist moments or eras typically evolve out of desperation — a third of Americans and Germans were unemployed in the 1930s — they open the door to people who offer solutions that radically depart from the norm. Breaking the old model and replacing it with a new one, in fact, is the essence of that populist pitch, be it coming from the fascist or the democratic socialist side.

And make no mistake: America is now being pulled in both directions by powerful movements from both sides. A recent Pew poll found that while almost 90 percent of Americans trusted our government to “do the right thing” for them in the Eisenhower/Kennedy 1960s, today that number sits at a shocking 17 percent.

The ground for a major, wrenching transformation of America has been seeded and the neofascist movement — which figured it out first — has, for the moment, captured control of our federal government along with about half of our states. But there’s also massive progressive pushback and dissatisfaction that, if anything, is amplifying the widespread populist sentiment.

So, which side will prevail?

The creation story of this moment is found when Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian mullahs to hold onto their American hostages until after the election of 1980, thus destroying President Jimmy Carter’s chance at reelection. Reagan immediately began to execute a neofascist vision that had been presented to him by the billionaires who funded the Heritage Foundation with their 1981 “Mandate for Leadership,” that era’s version of Project 2025.

He destroyed the American union movement, slashed wages for working-class people, gutting the middle class, made it harder to retire on Social Security, made deep cuts to FDR’s social safety net, ended free college, killed Carter’s solar energy programs, gave trillions of tax dollars to billionaires while raising taxes on working people, slashed funding for our public schools, and repeatedly blamed the nation’s problems on Black people and “elites” in our universities.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton picked up Reagan’s neoliberal mantle and brought us “the end of the era of big government” and “the end of welfare as we know it” as Reagan’s draconian tax cuts — which no Democratic president since has seriously challenged — began the modern explosion of billionaires and monopolistic corporations.

President Barack Obama, although he campaigned on the populist-sounding slogan of “hope and change,” continued the neoliberal plan, turning our healthcare system over to a handful of massive insurance companies and their billionaire executives.

Forty-five years of neoliberalism, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, have taken us from two-thirds of us being in the middle class with a single paycheck in 1981 down to a mere 41 percent of us claiming that status and having to have two full-time jobs per family to do it today.

As the Republican Great Depression devastated average voters, so has this failed neoliberal experiment, bringing us to this second modern populist moment.

On the neofascist side, there’s a populist movement initially led by tech and fossil fuel billionaires that’s been joined by the more than 200 billionaire families and foundations who spent nearly one in five of all dollars used in the 2024 election.

They’re aided daily in their efforts by propaganda operations run by Vladimir Putin (internet trolls), Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, and Benjamin Netanyahu (AIPAC), all committed to spreading strongman ethnonationalist movements across the world at the expense of democracy. And, of course, Donald Trump and his seizure of our federal government and police agencies.

Their most compelling weapon is their control of most of our media, particularly the powerful social media sites Facebook and X. As Peter Thiel wrote in 2010, quoted in the opening of Gil Durand’s brilliant new book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy:

“The initial founding vision was that we were going to use technology to change the whole world and basically overturn the monetary system of the world… the basic idea was that we could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority… But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world—without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who were never going to agree with you—through technological means… technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”

On the side that still embraces democracy, the populist progressive movement has been led by Bernie Sanders for decades, although that mantle is increasingly being picked up across the Democratic Party as politicians recognized over the past decade this populist moment.

Multiple polls from 2016 showed that Bernie Sanders could’ve easily beaten Trump, if the Democratic Party machine and the big donors Bill Clinton brought along hadn’t sabotaged him. It was verified by Politifact. Populist voters were ready to elect a populist in that election, and the only one offered to them was Trump.

They rejected the neoliberalism of Reagan and the Clintons alike, and those who vote for Democrats are clearly now opting for a reinvention of America along the social democracy lines pioneered by the Scandinavian nations.

In his book I Paid Hitler, 1930s steel baron Fritz Thyssen confesses that he was entranced by populist Hitler’s promise to “resurrect” Germany from the depths of the Depression and its loss in World War I. He organized the first seed money that got Hitler into power in 1933 and brought along many of his fabulously rich peers.

Today’s heir to Hitler’s authoritarian populist mantle is Trump (although Vance and Rubio, among others, are waiting for the king to fail so they can step into the vacuum).

During that same time, the plutocrat and former New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt turned his back on his own class and embraced a Bernie-like populist message, claiming that he could put America back together by taxing the morbidly rich at 90% and using government to meet workers’ needs.

Today’s heirs to FDR’s progressive populist mantle could well be billionaire Illinois Governor JB Pritzker or Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (although there are numerous competitors).

On both sides, the message is similar:

“The elites and the government have failed us, feathered their own nests while ignoring us and ours, and they must be overthrown and replaced. We need radical change in the direction of our government and our culture.”

The only difference is that the Republicans are saying they’ll fix things by handing the reins of government to billionaires and the stability of society to armed, masked ICE agents while Democrats are saying we must reverse Reaganism, tax the rich, and use that money to restore our middle class with free healthcare, education, and housing supports.

We’ve been in this populist moment since the middle of the GW Bush administration, although it was a slow boil until the 2016 election. The first indication was Obama winning with a populist message, and the for-sure proof was Trump winning twice on purely populist messages. The Trump movement, however, figured out that this was where America was at, long before it occurred to Democrats (other than Bernie), and Biden’s efforts, although valiant, were too little and too late.

So, here we are at this populist moment, and our country faces a binary choice: fascism or democratic socialism.

Republicans are universally lined up on the fascist side, backing Trump and ICE while feeding at the trough of their billionaire donors. That unanimity gives them tremendous power; their only problem is that they’ve failed to deliver for the people — and voters know it.

But Democrats are split, between those corrupt neoliberals like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and John Fetterman who are deeply in the pockets of corporate and wealthy interests, and a new and growing generation of politicians who often describe themselves as democratic socialists or social democrats.

This schism, a remnant of the Clinton years, is weakening the Democratic Party’s populist appeal as many believe the Perez-style Democrats will prevent the AOC- or Pritzker-style Democrats from actually accomplishing the transition to a social democracy that America needs.

Some doubt that this is the most important election in our lifetime, noting that every cycle we hear that kind of rhetoric. But, given the stakes and the boiling populist energy arrayed on both sides, it’s hard to imagine this isn’t the most critical one since 1932 America and 1933 Germany.

Whenever I spoke with Gloria Steinem on my program over the years, I always got a sense of a person with incredible charisma, intellect, and a real grasp of what power was and how to use it. She was a force of nature.

When the announcement that she’d passed away at 92 hit the news last week, it perfectly juxtaposed against the story the major “conservative” site Townhall had published titled, “No, the World Would Not Be a Better Place If Women Ran It.” Their point was:

“Anyone who went through middle school, junior high or high school knows full well the kind of nasty behavior that females are capable of.”

Nobody planned that coincidence; there’s so much hate against women floating around in Republican circles these days that if it wasn’t that piece it’d be something else, but it highlights a worrying trend in American culture and politics, one with echoes of a troubling past.

Back in 1972 Louise and I got married, and when she went to get her first credit card in her own name I had to co-sign for her. Not because I was more creditworthy; she’d been supporting herself by working since she was 15. It was the bank’s requirement because she was a woman.

That year was a bit of a touchstone for the women’s movement.

It was the year Steinem’s Ms. magazine sold out its entire 300,000-copy run in eight days; the year that her first issue ran a “We Have Had Abortions” statement signed by 53 women including Steinem, Billie Jean King, and Susan Sontag, all confessing to what was then a crime; the year Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment and sent it to the states; and the year Title IX became law.

And even though our culture was racing ahead, my bank still demanded a man’s name on the signature line. It wasn’t until Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974 that a woman — of any age or income — no longer needed a husband, father, brother, uncle, or male friend to co-sign for credit, a mortgage, or pretty much anything else. And, more often than not, the credit history belonged to the man and didn’t mention the woman, so a divorce or a death could erase everything she’d built.

While this may sound both dystopian and like ancient history to today’s young people, it’s a world that many within the GOP are actively trying to recreate.

Pastor Joel Webbon, for example, has been preaching for years that women shouldn’t have a voice in American politics because, he says, a woman’s political voice properly comes from her husband, and if she isn’t married, from her father, brother, uncle or whichever man in her life “loves her most.” That’s the same list Louise’s bank used: husband, father, brother, uncle, family friend...

Webbon helped write “The Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel” alongside Oklahoma state Senator Dusty Deevers and former Trump administration official William Wolfe. His “Right Response Conference” has put Doug Wilson, Stephen Wolfe, Steve Deace, and Auron MacIntyre on stage. He’s endorsed candidates, and he sat for a 10-part interview series with notorious neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.

He’s part of the “TheoBros” network, which is connected to Republican officeholders mainly through Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s church membership and Vice President JD Vance socializing with people in it.

Whiskey Pete belongs to Doug Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), and last year our SecDef reposted a CNN segment in which Wilson and other CREC pastors proclaimed their belief that women shouldn’t vote. Instead, they argued, an entire household should have a single vote, and it should be exclusively cast by the man of the house.

In February of this year, Pete invited Wilson to preach at the Pentagon’s monthly worship service, itself a violation of the Constitution. He stood beside him on stage, and broadcast the entire event on the Defense Department’s internal TV network.

In the Pentagon, Hegseth has become obsessed with pushing women out of leadership roles and instituted mandatory testosterone screening in the name of “lethality.” And over at the Department of Health and Human Services, the former heroin- and sex-addicted lawyer with no medical training whatsoever that Trump put in charge seems equally obsessed with his own masculinity and testosterone levels.

These are the men Republicans think should be role models for the generation of boys and young men coming up today:

— Hegseth paid $50,000 in a confidential settlement to a woman who told Monterey police that he took her phone, blocked the door of a hotel room, and assaulted her as she kept saying, “No.”

—Kennedy kept a 398-page journal in 2001 with a ledger in the back listing 37 women by first name, each rated on a scale of one to ten according to how far things had gone. His wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, found it, and her family has always believed his promiscuity contributed to her death by suicide in 2012.

— Trump has been held liable in civil court for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and for defaming her about it. The Epstein files the Justice Department tried to keep buried include FBI interview summaries in which a woman alleged that Jeffrey Epstein introduced her to Trump when she was somewhere between 13 and 15, that he forced oral sex on her, and that he beat her when she bit his penis. He publicly cheated on all three of his wives, and bragged to Billy Bush that he could sexually assault any woman he wanted because, he said, “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”

— Then there’s Musk, who’s fathered at least 14 children with multiple women. While Hegseth, Trump, and Kennedy seem to think the sole role of women is to be arm candy and to provide pleasure in bed, Musk apparently thinks they’re most useful as toaster ovens for white babies.

These are the men writing the rules for our daughters and granddaughters.

And that year Louise and I got married seems to have been one of history’s hinge points. Lewis Powell wrote his infamous Memo in 1971 and Nixon put him on the Court to carry it out the following year. My old debating nemesis Phyllis Schlafly started her Eagle Forum to fight ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972.

The Heritage Foundation was founded the next year, in 1973, the same year the Supreme Court decided Roe, and it all laid the foundation for Rush Limbaugh to spend decades trash-talking “Feminazis.” Andrew Tate carries on his crusade, as does Trump’s former body man, John McEntee, who joked that when conservatives said they wanted mail-only voting “they meant male, spelled m-a-l-e.”

Many men and businesses think they benefit when women can’t have an economic life independent of them, can’t start a business, or take a risk, or even negotiate on their own behalf. Women’s liberation gave half the American workforce the power to walk away from a bad marriage or a bad job, and Republicans are resentful of it.

But the cost to both women and society for this resurgence of misogyny is huge. ProPublica found, looking at 7 years of Texas hospital data, that after that state banned abortion, sepsis rates jumped more than 50 percent and that maternal deaths have been climbing in Texas while falling in Blue states.

Texas’ Attorney General is right now pushing criminal charges and a $1.6 million bond against a Houston midwife, while in Missouri Republican legislators are pushing a state registry of expectant mothers they can then monitor to make sure they don’t get an abortion.

Elon Musk’s Grok AI has generated an estimated 23,000 sexualized images of children and a reported 1.8 million sexualized images of women in just 11 days, after which Musk posted that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero,” as his company put the feature behind a paywall, monetizing it.

Meanwhile, accused rapist Andrew Tate — whose $8,000-a-year War Room ran a PhD course on seducing, isolating, and pushing women into sex-cam work — has cultivated the president’s youngest son, with an associate telling the New York Times he’d given Barron dating advice as Tate became a big brother to him.

This is all incredibly damaging to young men, as well. These views of women and male dominance produce men who can’t ask for help, can’t be a real partner, and can’t ever truly get close to anyone, including their own families. And these incels blame their loneliness on the women, sometimes with murderous violence.

One of the great missions of Gloria Steinem’s life, as she told me more than once on my program, was the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced in 1928 and re-introduced in 1972, that says, simply:

“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

It’s impossible to measure how many discoveries and accomplishments for the human race we’ve already lost to the suppression of women’s agency and rights, but now is a great time to take the next step toward ending this horror.

The Equal Rights Amendment has been ratified by 38 states, the number the Constitution requires, but Republicans are still fighting it by claiming that it wasn’t ratified by all before 1982 and therefore isn’t valid. The Republicans on the Supreme Court refuse to examine the case.

Two weeks ago, the new Archivist of the United States told senators he’ll stick with his predecessor’s refusal to certify it, following a Justice Department opinion rather than the plain text of Article V of the Constitution, which doesn’t mention dates or times for constitutional amendments at all.

Congress can settle this and establish women’s rights by law with a simple resolution with a majority vote.

So, call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your representative and both senators you want them co-sponsoring the resolution affirming ERA ratification. Then check your registration at vote.org, because Republicans are again openly discussing repealing the Nineteenth Amendment that gave women the vote.

I signed for Louise in 1972 because the bank required it; nobody should have to do that ever again. We need to put women’s rights into the Constitution, where no right-wing politician can again challenge them.

If this article helped you see how the pieces fit, please share it and consider supporting the Hartmann Report so we can keep doing this work. None of this fixes itself and if we want a better future for our daughters and granddaughters, we can’t just stand idly by.

In one of the most obscene segments ever aired on Fox “News,” our billionaire Treasury Secretary this week said the inflation Americans are suffering is Ukraine’s fault because, in response to Putin’s criminal regime daily murdering Ukrainian civilians (a war crime), Zelenskyy has been blowing up Russia’s energy assets.

Stupidity? Hypocrisy? Owned by Putin? Or is something even more sinister at work here?

That same morning, the Financial Times revealed that, for the past three years, Russia has been helping Iran build a supersonic cruise missile capable of blowing our ships out of the water, and at an Iran/Russia/China summit with Iran’s president, Putin, and Xi in Bishek, Putin said he’ll continue to supply Iran with “the necessary goods” that can be used to kill Americans.

Europe’s policy chief told the world that Russia gave Iran the satellite intelligence they needed to target and kill and maim American troops while destroying billions worth of our military infrastructure in the region. A senior official confirmed to CBS that Moscow was doing this, with 13 killed and 380 wounded by Iran (official numbers) just in the first 40 days.

Still, Trump invited Russia’s finance minister to the G20 meeting that was supposed to focus on punishing countries that are aiding Iran.

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked about it all, he waved the question off as irrelevant, saying that Putin’s got his own set of problems.

Are you seeing the same pattern I am? Our Treasury Secretary scolded Ukraine for fighting back against naked, murderous Russian aggression, our Secretary of State shrugged his shoulders about Iran and Russia working together to kill our troops, and Trump issued a new threat against our closest neighbor and ally, Canada.

If Putin had sat Trump, Hegseth, Kennedy, Bessent, Rubio, and Stephen Miller down in a room and ordered them to hurt and weaken the US, exactly what would they have done differently?

Of course, it was Trump who gave the orders and created the environment for all this to help Putin and screw America. And his motivation may be even more disgusting than the simple treason that this Manchurian Candidate scenario seems to indicate.

Start with the war. Ignoring the Constitution’s requirement that only Congress can declare war, Trump has now bombed at least 8 countries, the most recent being Iran, where we’ve now burned through air defenses that we could have used to defend Europe (including Ukraine) from Russia or Taiwan from China.

Our Patriot interceptor inventory has collapsed from 2,330 before the war to somewhere between 759 and 827 today, a drop of at least 65 percent, and our military has expended nearly four-fifths of its THAAD inventory. It’s going to take years to rebuild those stocks, and in the meantime we’re badly weakened on the world stage.

While Russia knows that the Patriot is pretty much the only weapon capable of knocking down the ballistic missiles Russia’s been throwing at Kiev every night — and Trump has refused to provide any more new ones to Ukraine for over a year-and-a-half — Moscow has kicked their own missile production into high gear to exploit that shortage. Their ballistic missile strikes on Ukraine went from 61 in April to 198 in July, with an even more radical increase across August.

The war Trump chose to join against Iran in violation of our laws and Constitution, in other words, is directly helping Putin kill children in Ukraine and assists Iran in hitting our troops in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, a humiliated South Korean President Lee had to go on TV and admit to his country that he was incapable of stopping Trump from pulling THADD components and Patriot batteries out of South Korea at the same time North Korea’s brutal dictator, Russian/Chinese ally, and Trump’s “good friend” Kim Jong Un is adding to his nuclear weapon inventory and testing ballistic missiles capable of incinerating Los Angeles and San Francisco.

While all that’s happening, Whiskey Pete Hegseth is hollowing out the Pentagon from the inside in his crusade to get rid of women and Black or Hispanic officers. The Army’s top civilian leader, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, resigned this week after multiple disputes with Pete, who’d previously fired Army chief General Randy George.

The resulting disaster is that our Army has no Senate-confirmed civilian or uniformed leadership in the middle of a shooting war.

Morale has collapsed, just like Putin would want, as Pete has most recently blocked another six officers from promotion, forced polygraphs on his own subordinates, and installed white male MAGA-only officers in senior slots.

And when reporters at Stars and Stripes — published since 1861 and started by Abraham Lincoln — dared write about the hardships sailors were enduring aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, Pete fired the paper’s editor and publisher. So much for a free and honest press for our troops.

There’s also, in no particular order:

— Ordering new carriers back to steam catapults on a ship already under construction
— Making the future drone-carrier harder to build because now the ship won’t reach the fleet until 2034
— Bombing boats in the Caribbean in what legal scholars across the spectrum call criminal extrajudicial killings
— Our national debt hitting $40 trillion because of Reagan’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s tax cuts, on pace to break the World War II record by 2030
— Interest on that debt is already exceeding all defense spending, money that instead could have given us healthcare and free college for the past two generations
— Handing roughly a trillion dollars in tax cuts to the top one percent last year while cutting Medicaid by about the same amount
— Cutting SNAP so hard that more than a million poor American children lost their food benefits
— Refusing to raise the minimum wage or make it easier to unionize
— Cutting the CDC’s parasite surveillance staff from 11 people to three and stopping surveillance for cyclospora
— Driving inspections of foreign food facilities to historic lows
— Cutting the childhood vaccine schedule from seventeen diseases down to eleven while discouraging Americans from getting any vaccinations
— Refusing to enforce our antitrust laws
— Firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for publishing a jobs number he didn’t like, so now we’re getting happy-talk numbers that must be corrected 2 months later
— Attacking our closest allies and trading partners, Mexico and Canada, with punitive tariffs
— Withholding $1.7 billion from NIH and canceling 2,200 grants for medical research and cancer cures while Europe and Canada recruit our scientists
— Moving nearly 150 programs out of the Education Department to kill it and our kids’ chances at a better future
— Killing Voice of America and smiling about it as Russian and Chinese state media move to fill the vacuum
— Weaponizing the DOJ against Trump’s personal enemies
— Defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, and NPR because they told the truth
— Threatening the broadcast licenses of networks that offended Dear Leader
— Hollowing out our cybersecurity agency protecting our infrastructure and elections (CISA) so today states are freaking out that there’s no federal election security plan for the midterms
— Pausing enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, our main defense against foreign money bribing or otherwise corrupting American officials, including the president
— Handing our media to friendly oligarchs
— Deregulating the crypto underground that moved $104 billion to sanctioned entities in a single year, most of it Russian, Iranian, and North Korean
— Pardoning the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other cop-killers and then erasing their seditious conspiracy convictions entirely
— Sending masked, unmarked, armed federal agents into American neighborhoods
— Deploying armed National Guard troops into American cities over the objections of their governors, mayors, and citizens and in violation of posse comitatus
— Labeling “anti-capitalism” and “anti-Christianity” as terrorism indicators under NSPM-7
— Destroying faith in our elections
— Standing up an FBI and IRS joint effort to harass good-government and anti-corruption nonprofits
— Capping federal student borrowing in ways that hit aspiring teachers hardest.

In addition to hugely helping out Vladimir Putin, almost every thing on that list can be used in one way or another to put money (often government money) into somebody’s pocket.

At the same time, Trump’s appointee at the CFTC is suing states that try to regulate the futures betting markets, Uday’s … er, Don Jr’s … 1789 Capital venture fund led a billion-dollar funding round for Polymarket, valuing that betting outfir at $21 billion. Uday himself told Republican attorneys general to back off.

Both Uday and Qusay now have major stakes in both drone and other defense companies that benefit from our Pentagon tax dollars (that are never audited), and a rare-earth firm Uday invested in just got a $620 million Pentagon loan after the White House intervened to make it happen.

Whatever happened to my father’s GOP that fought fascists in WWII, hated repressive governments like in Russia and China, and preached fiscal moderation?

Between the Powell Memo, Jude Wanniski’s Two Santas strategy, five corrupt on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court, and Trump’s ass-kissing embrace of Putin, it’s pretty much entirely dead. Nothing left but suck-ups, bigots, and cynical opportunists who figure the best way to win an election is to shut down polling places in Texas.

We’re now watching a government run by people philosophically (and often financially) aligned with Putin and other tinpot dictators, who view our nation as a resource to be stripped for their own private gain.

So make sure everybody you know is registered and ready via vote.org, and double-check your registration if you live in a Red state. And then this November, turn out and vote these greedy bastards out of office while voting is still available to us.

And if this is the kind of reporting and analysis you want more of, please subscribe to the Hartmann Report and share this piece with the people in your life who need to hear it. Getting this kind of information in front of one more voter today matters more right now than almost anything else we can do.

What should we Americans do when it comes out that our Secretary of Defense has been committing crimes in plain sight and nobody in the administration seems concerned about it?

Back in 2008, New York Times reporter David Barstow revealed that the Pentagon under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, starting in the fall of 2002, had recruited dozens of retired military officers to go on TV as if they were independent military analysts.

They were paid to push the Bush administration’s propaganda about weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds, and other lies to build support for the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that the president and vice president had lied us into.

The hired guns got their talking points from the Pentagon, and internal documents called them “message force multipliers.” One participant later described it as “psyops on steroids.” Barstow disclosed how this was pure propaganda, noting:

“[M]embers of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated.”

Those unnecessary and illegal wars cost America the lives of about 7,000 troops and 7,600 contractors, led more than 30,000 service members and veterans of those conflicts to later commit suicide, 52,000+ wounded for life, and added roughly $5 trillion to our national debt with an estimated $2 trillion in veterans care and interest still to be paid.

Barstow won a Pulitzer Prize for his work and Congress — responding to widespread horror among the public that America would start targeting the civilian and voting population with propaganda the same way Hitler routinely did in the 1930s and Putin does daily in Russia — passed 10 U.S.C. 2241a, which says simply:

“Funds available to the Department of Defense may not be obligated or expended for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not otherwise specifically authorized by law.”

Ever since, every Pentagon appropriation has carried a similar restriction known as Section 8001, following a similar prohibition passed 74 years ago as the Federal Labor-Security Act of 1952, which says:

“No part of any appropriation . . . shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress.”

Propagandizing the American people has been a crime for more years than Hegseth has been alive: there shouldn’t be any doubt that our government using our tax dollars to target us with psyops is illegal. But don’t bother telling that to Whiskey Pete. He apparently doesn’t care.

This past Sunday, Dan Lamothe and Tara Copp revealed in The Washington Post (Pentagon Secretly Installs Military Influencers in Civilian Roles) that Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon has been quietly moving several conservative military veterans with large online followings into government roles, all while refusing to answer any questions about what they actually do.

What we do know is that most have been using their public personas to push stories favorable to Pete and Trump and to trash-talk opponents of this administration’s policies.

Just like another influencer, this one a deaf Utah housewife with nearly a million followers on social media and, until June, an accredited Pentagon reporter. Since July, though, she’s been a “special government employee” at the Department of Defense, something that she didn’t bother to disclose to her audience when she started the DSA Explorer, an interactive map of Americans she claims are associated with the antiwar Democratic Socialists of America.

The Pentagon refuses to explain what she does for it or which office she runs this McCarthy-esque operation out of; she claims it’s a private project.

It brings to mind Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky, who said in Congress in 1948, as he tried to “restate the existing prohibitions on domestic dissemination” of American-produced propaganda designed to hit Russia:

“By law, the USIA cannot engage in domestic propaganda. This distinguishes us, as a free society, from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity. … The American taxpayer certainly does not need or want his tax dollars used to support U.S. Government propaganda directed at him or her.”

If authorizing and paying for all of this with our tax dollars is a crime, it doesn’t seem to bother Whiskey Pete. Of course, he’s never been all that concerned with following the law.

It’s also a crime in both American and international law to murder survivors of a shipwreck, even if you caused it in a war, but that didn’t stop Pete from ordering a double-tap on one of the boats he was targeting in the Caribbean.

Law professors told TIME magazine that intentionally killing a shipwrecked person is a war crime, and that absent an actual armed conflict it’s simply criminal murder, punishable by life in prison. Congress asked for the video of the killing and the written orders but, 15 months later, neither Congress nor the American public have seen either one.

Or the killings of the unnamed and unidentified men piloting small boats who have never been charged with a crime or faced any sort of due process.

Or the Signal affair, where the Pentagon’s inspector general (before being demoted) concluded that Hegseth illegally transmitted the number and strike times of manned American aircraft over hostile territory through a commercial app on his personal phone hours before those aircraft flew.

Pete declined to be interviewed, never turned over the phone, and some of the messages had auto-deleted before anyone could capture them.

When the Bush administration secretly paid Armstrong Williams to push No Child Left Behind, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) ruled that Bush’s Education Department had violated Congress’ multiple prohibitions on government-funded propaganda directed at American citizens.

They also ruled that by spending money Congress hadn’t specifically authorized, the Bush administration had violated the Antideficiency Act, 31 U.S.C. 1350, a class E felony which carries two years in prison for the people who break it and goes back to 1905. (Bush declined to have his Attorney General prosecute his Secretary of Education.)

And here is Whiskey Pete doing it all over again.

Back in 2018, when a federal grand jury determined that Putin’s Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg had built fake American social media profiles to influence American public opinion in favor of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run, they criminally indicted 13 Russians and three Russian companies. Although they didn’t have Pentagon email addresses, they were doing essentially the same thing on behalf of Trump that these retired military officers are accused of.

It appears that history is repeating itself, although this time it’s Hegseth doing it instead of Putin.

Odds are close to impossible that Trump will have Todd Blanche indict Pete for these crimes, any more than Bush was willing to indict his Education Secretary Rod Paige over the Armstrong Williams crime. But there are other options.

— Any member of Congress can request the GAO to investigate and issue a formal legal decision on whether any of these arrangements violate Section 2241a and Section 8001.

— The Defense Department’s inspector general can be made to produce for Congress the appointment memoranda, position descriptions, ethics opinions, timekeeping records, and compensation for every “special government employee” and “highly qualified expert” hired into Hegseth’s office since January 2025.

— There’s also the Office of Special Counsel, which can take Hatch Act complaints about federal employees engaged in partisan political activity.

— And then there’s impeachment. A Cabinet secretary is a civil officer of the United States under Article II, Section 4 and thus vulnerable to impeachment and removal from office. While rare — only Ulysses Grant’s Secretary of War, William Balknap, has been impeached (in 1876) for corruptly using his office — it’s still an option should Democrats take over Congress come January.

And, in fact, there are already two articles of impeachment that have been dropped in the House against Whiskey Pete.

Shri Thanedar filed H.Res. 935 in December over the campaign of lethal strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and Yassamin Ansari led 14 members in filing H.Res. 1177 in April, containing six articles covering the “unauthorized war against Iran,” “violations of the law of armed conflict and the targeting of civilians,” “the reckless handling of sensitive military information,” “obstruction of congressional oversight,” and “conduct bringing disrepute upon the armed forces.”

Impeachment doesn’t have to be just about getting a conviction and removal from office. Even if it never makes it to the Senate, the process in the House forces evidence into the permanent public record under oath, and establishes for history that a crime was committed, even if it was never punished.

Both impeachment resolutions are sitting in the House Judiciary Committee, where congressional Republicans are trying to pretend they don’t exist.

Meanwhile, Hegseth appears to be exploring a run for president. Talk about deluded! And this week, Dan Driscoll, the Secretary of the Army, resigned, apparently because he is disgusted with Hegseth’s lack of competence and management skills.

So call your representative and your two senators at 202-224-3121 and politely ask them to request a formal GAO legal opinion on whether the Pentagon’s undisclosed influencer payroll violates 10 U.S.C. 2241a and triggers the Antideficiency Act.

Tell them you want the Pentagon’s inspector general to force production of appointment and compensation records for every special government employee in the Secretary’s office, and the Senior Service College Task Force report released, and a Hatch Act referral to the Office of Special Counsel.

And if your representative isn’t already a cosponsor of impeachment resolution H.Res. 1177, ask why not.

Then double-check your voter registration, and if this information was useful to you, share it, forward it, post it, and subscribe at hartmannreport.com so we can keep doing this work. Democracy isn’t a spectator sport, and it never was.

Last Thursday, a federal judge in Massachusetts put her foot down and stopped Trump’s Republican toadies on the Postal Board of Governors from seizing control of your mail-in ballot this fall. She noted that neither the Constitution nor Congress gives him or them that power and, besides that, there’s no time for states to comply with their demands.

They’re still trying, though, and if they’re unsuccessful, we can fully expect this scheme to reappear in the presidential election in 2 years with even greater intensity.

I’ve seen up-close-and-personal how this plays out when corrupt leaders driven by sex, money, and revenge take over a nation. It ain’t pretty.

Thanksgiving Day of 1980, I was the guest of host Sanford Ungar on NPR’s All Things Considered show, live from the famine zone of Kampala, Uganda, describing what I’d seen in the preceding days. Both times he asked me about soldiers (the country was militarily occupied by Tanzania at the time, them having evicted Idi Amin). The military cut the phone line and we had to re-dial.

I told him how Kampala, built on seven hills like Rome, was once one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but we’d been walking through burned-out buildings, broken glass, and confronted tens of thousands of hungry faces.

The city had no running water, and when the Commissioner of the Ministry of Rehabilitation met with Herr Müller and me, I apologized for arriving filthy in 4-day-old clothes; he told me not to worry about it as he hadn’t had a bath or shower in the two years the city had been “dry” since the war started. On one short morning walk, Herr Müller and I counted nine bodies.

We spent an afternoon at the Namalu “Detention Center” prison farm, one of Amin’s favorite torture sites, that was then a feeding station run by an Irish volunteer named Ann who gave each starving child a single bowl of ground corn and powdered milk every day. A few months after we met, Ann was shot dead by a sniper as she was feeding those kids.

Amin had fled the country in April of 1979 as the Tanzanians joined the opposition forces; he’d been gone almost two years when I got there, and the water still wasn’t running. The lesson for me was that bad men leading nations invariably corrupt or even destroy their institutions of government both to stay in charge and to enrich themselves and their families. And once the process starts, it begins to compound on itself until there’s little but wreckage left.

There’s a word for this, and a phrase that describes it.

Louise and I have been binge-watching a British crime series, The Chelsea Detective, and on the show we watched Sunday, one of the characters said to another that her cop grandfather had told her to “always watch for the holy trinity: sex, money, and revenge.”

Not only was she describing how to sort types of criminals, but she was also describing Donald Trump; there’s almost nothing in his public record for the past 50 years that doesn’t fall into one of those three categories.

In Idi Amin and Donald Trump’s cases, though, what separates them from run-of-the-mill criminals and abusers is that they weren’t concerned about the law restraining their worst impulses. If anything, once they seized power, the law protected those impulses and facilitated their acting them out.

The name for this type of government — where the leader is both a psychopath and has seized so much power he faces few or no legal or political restraints — is called “personalism.” It refers to the concentration of all decision-making and appointment-making power in a single man’s hands at the expense of everybody else except those in his inner circle (typically his family).

Democracy researchers Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Eric Frantz have put together what’s probably the world’s most comprehensive data set on this, detailing roughly 200 dictatorships since WWII. Titled How Dictatorships Work, it details how what I saw in Kampala (and roughly a dozen other countries in the years I did international relief work) comes about, and has deep lessons for us in today’s Trump and oligarch-run America.

Personalist rulers invariably — always, really — leave the countries they’ve ruled worse off than when they started and their damage typically long outlives them. Social scientist Max Weber called this patrimonialism: it’s when a ruler treats the nation, its commons, and its collective wealth as his own personal property to loot and share with his closest relatives and cronies.

Like converting the Department of Justice into your own personal instrument for revenge, blinding the IRS to your crimes, and tearing down the East Wing without asking anybody’s permission or advice. Or taking a country to war without congressional authorization. Or giving away federal lands to major donors and killing regulations to enhance their profits. Or his kids becoming defense contractors.

Once a country is essentially converted into the personalist property of one man, his family, and his billionaire cronies, his private lusts and grudges become public policy and the line defining the difference between his desires and the nation’s interests vanishes.

Putin, who appears to be tutoring Trump with their regular hour-long phone calls, ran this exact same sequence in Russia even though they still have elections and still claim that nation is a republic.

— His prosecutors went after the richest man in Russia when he started to defy Putin, then took apart his company and gave its pieces to Putin’s cronies.

— The Russian equivalent of the FCC broke the back of independent media; the press in Russia was brought to heel in fewer than two years with the help of a handful of loyal oligarchs who bought up the nation’s largest private media properties.

—Then came the “foreign agent” laws that, like Trump’s NSPM-7, categorized civil society organizations and dissenters as national security threats. And his illegal war to steal the wealth of Ukraine.

Instead of suspending the Russian constitution, Putin simply seized control of every one of the government’s agencies and their resources and redirected them all to supporting his iron-fisted rule while turning a blind eye to his looting the country.

Trump is doing the same thing here, from the IRS to the FBI to ICE to the Pentagon. For example, he replaced a real prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia with his personal attorney, Lindsey Halligan, who had no prosecutorial experience in her life, and within three weeks she’d come up with an indictment for Letitia James, the NY attorney general who’d won a half-billion-dollar fraud judgment against Trump.

When a federal judge blocked that for being illegal, Trump’s Justice Department tried to reindict James twice, in two different districts. So far only the refusal of grand juries to go along has prevented him from going full Putin, although the case is now in front of the Fourth Circuit appeals court dominated by Republican-appointed hard-right judges.

Now his DOJ has opened an investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the writer he sexually abused in New York, according to two juries who ordered him to pay her millions in damages. Again, right out of Putin’s and Amin’s playbook: sex and revenge, and all of his harassment of Carroll is paid for with our tax dollars.

Which brings us to the money. Trump’s net worth has tripled since he took office, mostly based on crypto scams that his own administration’s regulatory agencies legalized and authorized for him.

At the same time, billionaires Trump and Musk gutted the IRS by firing about a third of its enforcement staff. Yale’s budget lab says the 2025 DOGE personnel cuts alone will let billionaire tax cheats screw us out of at least $600 billion, all against the background of a current estimated $700 billion a year in routine tax cheating by the Epstein class.

The IRS under Trump is now auditing low-income families claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit at a rate 35 times higher that they audit the morbidly rich. Dwight Eisenhower and my Republican father are both rolling over in their graves.

Following Amin’s and Putin’s script, Poynter has documented more than a hundred federal actions against journalists and news outlets, with Trump personally responsible for roughly a fifth of them.

FBI agents raided a Washington Post reporter’s home in January, two independent journalists (including Don Lemon) were arrested for covering a protest in Minnesota, and now we discover the Pentagon is compiling a blacklist of reporters.

Trump’s NSPM-7 executive order categorized anybody who disagrees with his ideas of what patriotism, capitalism, or Christianity mean as a “potential terrorist,” leading now to Putin-like FBI and IRS investigations of nonprofits across the country. Instead of going after morbidly rich tax cheats, they’re now going after good-government organizations that personalist leader Trump considers a threat to his family’s and his cronies’ power and ability to loot our nation’s wealth.

Like in Uganda and Russia, too, the very rich are tossing in to support this personalist leader because it can mean billions of our tax dollars flowing into their money bins.

Republicans in Congress are cowering, as are their spokespeople on TV and in the press, while billionaires (both American and foreign) line up to shower Trump with gold bars and jet airplanes in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses.

Elon Musk has revived his America PAC for the midterms and, according to independent writer Lalisa Stands, is harvesting voter data in Texas in a way that’s, shall we say, less than transparent. Her article is worth a careful read and I’m looking forward to more corroboration as details continue to come out.

Which brings us to this November. History shows us that once the prosecutors have been captured, the tax collectors neutered, the reporters cowed, and the protesters labeled as terrorists, the only way to get a personalist leader out of power short of physical violence is with an election.

So, like with Amin and Putin before him, Trump and his lickspittles are doing everything they can to corrupt or even seize control of this fall’s and the 2028 elections. That’s on the docket of Judge Indira Talwani (who is dealing with the mail-in ballots issue) this coming week, along with multiple other efforts by state attorneys general and folks like Marc Elias. But they’re going up against the formidable power of the entire executive branch that possesses a functionally unlimited budget and has the power to imprison and even kill their “enemies” with impunity.

This is how former spy-chief Vladimir Putin became one of the richest men on the planet, having played the game Trump started last year, and as I was feeding starving refugees in Uganda, Idi Amin was living it up in a massive mansion in Jeddah with maids, cars, drivers, cooks, and concubines, all paid for by the same Saudi government that gave Jared Kushner billions. This is simply how personalist governance works.

In Federalist 51, James Madison notes that if men were angels we’d have no need for the checks on presidential power that he and his colleagues had written into the Constitution. They thought they’d built a system that could survive a bad president and, for the first 250 years, they appeared to be right.

Now, with Amin as a role model and Putin as a mentor, Trump is testing that system and the entire world is watching, aghast. Republicans in Congress and the states, who have the tools Madison gave them to stop our slide from democracy into personalist authoritarian rule, are simply standing around terrified while making up excuses and rationalizations for doing nothing or collecting their own shares of the loot.

Trump’s obsession with sex, money, and revenge is tearing America apart at the seams while it guts both our soft and hard power around the world, just as Putin had hoped.

At least until this November. The GOP‘s cowardice means only you and I can stop this insanity and we’ll have to do it at the polling places this fall.

Yesterday at the White House, Trump held a photo op with a 16-year-old lifeguard, Ryder Williams, who’d pulled a drowning 10-year-old out of a dangerous surf in Santa Cruz. For any other president, it would have been a sweet, feel-good moment. Trump, though, turned it into something dark — and most of our press either missed it or politely pretended to.

After giving the award, Trump looked at the blonde teen’s parents and said:

“You did a good job. It’s good genetics. When you look at him, you can see, really good.”

People in the room chuckled nervously as some probably realized what Trump was really saying. Others seemed clueless. Mediaite wrote the story up and wondered out loud if Trump was trying to invoke the infamous Sydney Sweeney “great jeans” commercial.

But Trump wasn’t riffing on the jeans ad. He was sharing, in the Oval office and on camera, something he’s been saying for 40 years, his racist “racehorse genetics” theory of human evolution. And it’s something that, when it comes out of other people’s mouths, has ended careers.

For example, back in 1988 on Martin Luther King Day, CBS’s sports commentator Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder was asked by a reporter about the progress that Black people were making in the field of sports.

Snyder told the reporter that Black athletes were doing well because “the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have a big black kid,” and that a Black athlete was better than most whites “because he’s been bred to be that way.”

CBS fired him the next day because everybody in America understood instantly what he had said and where it came from.

Thirty-eight years later, the President of the United States says essentially the same thing about human beings in the White House and gets laughs and a write-up about denim.

This was not a slip of the tongue. The same year Jimmy The Greek was fired, Trump told Oprah on her show that his success was the result of being “born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.” (Forget the fact that his father gave him ~$400 million.) He told a rally audience in 2016 that, with him, “winning is innate” and some people just “have the winning gene.”

Michael D’Antonio who wrote one of the early Trump biographies and knew the family, told PBS’s Frontline program that they all subscribed to the so-called “racehorse theory of human development.”

That theory says that because breeding top racehorses with each other produces more top racehorses then, similarly, a superior man and a superior woman will produce superior children. He even once complimented a roomful of British businessmen on their superior “bloodlines” and praised notorious antisemite Henry Ford’s “good bloodlines” while touring a Ford plant.

Talking to an all-white audience in Bemidji, Minnesota in 2020, Trump warned about the Black Somali refugees who’d settled in that state, saying:

“You [white people] have good genes, you know that, right? A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

On rightwing talk host Hugh Hewitt’s hate radio show, he said:

“Now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

Trump’s “racehorse theory” isn’t just some throwaway line or colorful figure of speech; it’s from the foundational myth of one of the darkest times in American history, the eugenics (“racial hygiene”) movement that reached its peak during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, a notorious racist who screened the Klan recruiting film Birth of a Nation at the White House. Hitler based his “final solution” on American and British eugenics literature that encouraged the isolation and sterilization of “inferior” people.

That led to the racist 1924 Immigration Act that later turned away Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s death camps, and the Supreme Court blessed a model sterilization law for “inferior” humans in their 1927 Buck v Bell decision. German lawyers translated that decision and used it as the framework for the Third Reich’s own 1933 sterilization law that preceded and ultimately set up the Holocaust.

Tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized against their will back then, and at the Nuremberg trials multiple German defendants argued that they were “simply following American science.”

But the racehorse theory of humanity wasn’t even new in the 1920s: slavery was justified in this country for centuries based on the supposed inferiority of Black people. Crainiometry — the “science” of determining how “advanced” a person is by measuring their skull — was rolled out in the 19th century as a way of proving whites were the most advanced race.

In 1851, a Louisiana physician named Samuel Cartwright published a nationally distributed pamphlet claiming that enslaved people who’d run away from their plantations were doing so because they suffered from a mental illness he called “drapetomania.” He explicitly wrote that God had made Black people “naturally submissive,” so when they rose up or escaped, it was because they were expressing symptoms of that mental pathology.

Southern politicians trying to justify Jim Crow after the failure of Reconstruction used the same trick MAGA racists use today, citing crime and imprisonment statistics by way of “proving” that Black people are simply “born bad.” As noted Substack author Rohn Kenyatta writes:

“The manifestation of this racism and white supremacy need not be blatant as it is often cloaked in stories on crime, poverty, voting rights, illiteracy and ‘civil rights.’”

The whole point of Trump’s racehorse theory is to provide a pseudo-scientific explanation for the outcome of centuries of institutionalized racism. Today, while the median white family has assets of around $285,000 (home and car ownership, retirement funds, etc.), the median Black household is only worth $45,000.

Trump doesn’t want you to know why, and his good or bad genes proclamations are designed to make us ignore everything from unequal access to the GI Bill and Redlining to plain old racism.

Trump’s complained that the Smithsonian dwells too much on “how bad slavery was” and his executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” nailed eight Smithsonian museums under White House review for having displays about “how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been” without, presumably, discussing the failure of their genes.

As a result of his administration’s racist pressure, the National Park Service is rewriting its exhibits on slavery at Independence Hall, one of the more prominent places where George Washington held people in slavery. It wasn’t that Washington was a racist, Trump would presumably tell you, but that the people he enslaved deserved it because of their inferior genes.

And much of the GOP is right there with him. Congressman Steve King spent years babbling about how white people have contributed more than “any other subgroup of people” to western civilization, warning that “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

Tommy Tuberville, when asked whether white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military, answered, “I call them Americans.” Steve Scalise became House Majority Leader after bragging that he’d spoken to a 2002 convention of Klan Grand Wizard David Duke’s European-American Unity and Rights Organization. A reporter said he’d called himself “David Duke without the baggage,” although Scalese disputes it.

When Politico exposed a group of Young Republican leaders having a group chat that was filled with jokes about gas chambers and Hitler admiration, JD Vance called the negative reaction “pearl clutching.” Tucker Carlson hosted open racist Nick Fuentes on his show for a friendly hour, and the president of the Heritage Foundation went so far as to defend them both.

Trump’s acting undersecretary for public policy, Darren Beattie, says America should “pay smart people to have more kids, disincentivize stupid people from having kids,” and Bob Kennedy is pushing changes in Title X to implicitly encourage white women to have more babies.

None of this is new even to the modern GOP. In his first campaign stop after winning the Republican nomination for president, Ronald Reagan spoke to an all-white audience near Philadelphia, Mississippi, a few miles from where Klansmen sheriff’s deputies had brutally murdered 3 civil rights workers (it was made into the movie “Mississippi Burning”). His topic? “State’s rights.” And we all know what that means, as did his audience.

And in July 2016, Donald Trump Jr. stood on that same stage stumping for his father, and proudly bragged that Reagan had launched his campaign from it.

Trump’s “racehorse theory” of humanity is a racist lie that was built to justify slavery and Jim Crow, and then paved the road to Auschwitz.

Democrats and the media need to start saying so out loud every time he invokes it.

“People are disappearing into this no man’s land. They have no connection to their new country, and they also apparently have no legal rights.” —Immigration rights attorney Alma David, quoted in The New York Times

“Terrible things are happening outside... poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.” — Anne Frank diary entry January 13, 1943

Authoritarianism doesn’t just begin when a government embraces brutality. It steps in on cats’ feet when brutality becomes politically useful, legally routinized, and morally acceptable because a government has first declared its victims undeserving of our empathy. When average people in the bureaucracy just “do their jobs” inflicting horrors on other humans simply because they’ve been declared “the other.”

Outside of military coups like Pinochet’s Chile, countries don’t generally slide from republican democracies into totalitarianism and fascism in a single step. There’s a process, and it always begins with the government deciding that some people simply don’t deserve the basic human rights that have been foundational to western civilization for centuries.

The Trump regime’s treatment of Roberto Mosquera, profiled at length in the New York Times by Nicholas Casey, shows just how far down this terrible road we’ve already traveled.

Mosquera has been held for a year without trial or legal due process in a maximum security prison in the tiny landlocked southern African country most people have never heard of, Eswatini, one of the world’s few remaining pure kingdoms that was formerly known as Swaziland. The 59-year-old father of four is slowly going blind from untreated glaucoma, and apparently will be held there for the rest of his life.

He first came to America at the age of 12 as part of the 1980 Mariel boatlift from Cuba. He fell in with a local Hispanic gang and ended up being accused of shooting a member of a different gang in the leg (he insists he didn’t do it and wasn’t there at the time). He served his time in an American prison and, when he got out, reinvented his life.

He became a born-again Christian, got married and had four American citizen daughters, and became a plumber, rising through the ranks to foreman. The Times quoted his former boss as saying he’d turned his life around and:

“He wasn’t just a hard worker; he inspired the guys around him,” he said.

He was also in the United States legally (in part because Cuba isn’t accepting deportees), and checked in with the feds every year to renew his work permit. The last time he showed up, however, he was told his permit was being withdrawn and he was seized and taken through a series of brutal detention facilities and eventually put on a plane to Africa, a continent he’d never visited. As the Times notes:

“That was more than a year ago. Mosquera still sits in that same maximum-security prison with nowhere to go. No charges against him. No way to appeal his predicament. No sign that he will ever be freed. Cuba has not signaled any willingness to take him, and Mosquera says he has no desire to go there. Eswatini will not release him from prison, even though he served his time in the United States and committed no crime in Africa.”

In other words, we’re watching the creation of human beings who can be pushed outside the normal protections of law, geography, community, and ultimately even public attention. Roberto has been “disappeared” by Trump and Miller and is now in prison for what may be the rest of his life, and this all happened without his ever having stood before a judge or jury.

Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution were grounded in the idea that all humans are born with human rights, even though it took this nation centuries to get seriously close to living by its own creed.

Instead of referring to “citizens,” the Constitution repeatedly mentions “persons,” a word that encompasses all humans. Consider, for example, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, part of the Bill of Rights:

4th Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

5th Amendment: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury…; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” (emphasis added)

These, in part, constitute what’s called due process, which is repeated in the Fourteenth Amendment’s first section “…nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Most of the tens of thousands of people ICE is now holding in its custody or who have been deported are there without ever having stood before an actual Article 3 judge. Their rights are being ignored.

The process the Trump regime is now pursuing is to obliterate what Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt called, “The right to have rights.” In Chapter 9 (“The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man”) of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, she elaborated on what happened when the butchers, bakers, and shopkeepers got jobs in the Nazi detention camps:

“The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.”

She realized that the gravest crisis of human rights is grounded in a government arguing, in its behavior, that some humans aren’t fully human and therefore aren’t entitled to basic human rights. A stateless person herself for 18 years, this idea of governments denying the basic humanity of less-favored groups was at the core of much of her writing.

With Roberto Mosquera and the thousands of others Trump and Miller are paying millions of our taxpayer dollars to foreign prisons to hold until they die, we’re watching play out here in America that very transition from a decent, rights-respecting government into a rogue and lawless regime.

We’ve danced with this before, of course. The entire history of the institution of slavery was grounded in the proclamation of the southern states that Black people weren’t fully human. More recently, George W. Bush humiliated America on the world stage by sanctioning torture and murder in Abu Ghraib and other foreign prisons and black sites, along with its assertion that Gitmo was beyond the reach of American human rights law or the US Constitution.

But this is a modern, whole-of-government approach to dehumanizing nonwhite people in the name of immigration enforcement, with a hundred-billion-dollar budget. And now ICE is buying electric shock gloves for themselves, to ratchet up the brutality.

Republicans in Congress funded, and the Trump regime has built, a massive machine to Make America White Again, considerations of “woke” concepts like rights be damned. And it’s growing and becoming more hostile to average Americans and their concerns by the day.

Nobody in a democratic republic should have the power to make people disappear. It’s antithetical to the very idea of our form of government.

When this regime has been relegated to the dustbin of history, we’ll have a hell of a big job reestablishing this country’s once-vaunted embrace of human rights. There will have to be either full-on trials or something like the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

We should be doing the planning now.

Trump just took steps to make it very difficult to prosecute money laundering, a crime he and his real estate buddies may well have been committing much of their felonious lives.

This month, we learned that Capital One Bank closed more than 300 Trump Organization accounts back in 2021 because, they said, their internal fraud department had flagged illegal money-laundering activity. But on who’s behalf?

We know from the Mueller Report and public reporting that Putin spent millions and did his best via social media and hacking the DNC to get Donald Trump into the White House in 2016, and was probably doing the same in 2020 and 2024.

But what if there was a way for him to simply drop, say, $100 million right into political campaigns here in America that would back up or benefit Trump and his notorious crime family? Or simply give the money to Trump himself as thanks for screwing Ukraine and destroying America?

While federal law prohibits foreign governments, citizens, and corporations from spending money to influence our elections, the reality is that laws only work when there’s somebody to investigate crimes and enforce them.

And Trump is, right now, tearing apart the very institutions and transparency rules that we’d need to expose such a crime.

Specifically, our Treasury Department — run by Trump’s billionaire crony Scott Bessent — just this week put into place a new rule that would hand Putin that ability. Or any other foreign oligarch who wanted to use a shell corporation to buy his very own American politician.

Senator Sherrod Brown’s Corporate Transparency Act required corporations and LLCs to tell the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, FinCEN, who actually owns or controls them. That remote control, often handed through multiple shell companies, is called “beneficial ownership.” It’s all about finding out who, ultimately, benefits from the corporation or LLC’s activities.

This week, though, Bessent issued a new rule that not only ends that requirement but also directs the agency to delete all the beneficial-ownership information they currently hold on U.S. persons (like Donald Trump and his kids) that could be used to prove past money laundering crimes.

This is critical stuff because money laundering is how drug money, bribes, stolen government money, tax evasion proceeds, or money belonging to a sanctioned oligarch can be pushed through corporations, trusts, real estate, banks, casinos, and multiple transactions until figuring out who originally supplied it becomes extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible.

And money laundering via real estate in America is a big, big business. As the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project notes in a report titled “U.S. Real Estate is No 1 Destination for Laundered Dirty Money,” we have “the weakest regulatory framework to counter real estate money laundering” among all of the G7 nations. They add:

“At least US$2.3 billion has been laundered over the past five years through U.S. real estate…” and “More than 80% of all U.S. cases involved money coming from abroad, and in 82% of cases, anonymous shell companies or complex corporate structures helped mask the identity of the property’s real owners.”

Most countries made this illegal decades ago, in some cases generations ago. And in the past decade, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom have tightened their own requirements to prevent this kind of money laundering, which in each of those countries and the U.S. was mostly done through anonymous or all-cash real estate transactions done by shell companies.

And Trump and Bessent just killed off the cops on the beat here.

Trump’s apparently been up to his eyeballs in money laundering for much of his business career. As he wasted the ~$400 million he got from his father, he repeatedly turned to Russian and other oligarchs to prop him up after multiple bankruptcies via these very kinds of real estate transactions that the Treasury will no longer be looking at.

In 2015, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino admitted to willful and repeated violations of federal anti-money-laundering laws. FinCEN fined Trump $10 million because, for some unknown reason (wink, wink), he failed to even bother to keep the required records that would have revealed criminal money laundering being done through his casinos.

Then there’s all that Russian money. Back in 2008 as Putin was consolidating his iron grip and quickly becoming a billionaire bloated with ill-gotten gains himself, Uday — er, Don Jr. — bragged to an audience at a real estate conference that Russians were “a pretty disproportionate cross-section” of the money flowing into the Trump Organization, adding:

“We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Qusay — er, Eric Trump — similarly bragged to Golf writer James Dodson, according to Dodson, that:

“We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

Reuters looked into it all in 2017 and found that at least 63 people with Russian passports or addresses had bought $98.4 million worth of property from Trump, roughly a third of that being owned by LLCs that were so impenetrable that Reuters couldn’t discover who was actually behind the Russian front men. (This sort of deal is exactly why Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act in 2021.)

Trump’s SoHo property is another example. A lawsuit brought by Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank alleged that Trump associate Felix Sater helped Ilyas Khrapunov disguise about $3 million as down payments on three Trump SoHo condominiums as part of an alleged international money-laundering scheme involving money stolen from Kazakhstan.

And now the Trump administration is weakening the exact system designed to tell investigators who is actually behind these opaque corporations that serve as real estate money-laundering fronts for offshore criminals like Putin and his cronies.

Treasury has now not only eliminated their previous domestic beneficial-ownership reporting, FinCEN has also given banks a pass on beneficial-owner verification requirements when companies open additional accounts, and Bessent delayed until 2028 a separate anti-money-laundering rule for investment advisers.

And if a foreign actor wants to use his ill-gotten gains to influence an American election? Thanks to Trump refusing to appoint a needed member, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) doesn’t even have the quorum it needs to conduct its own enforcement of rules against foreigners jumping into our elections. Its own website repeatedly says it can’t function again until “the Commission regains a quorum.”

So, suppose Putin or one of his buddies throws millions of dirty Russian money into a corporation in that country, which then transfers that money into an American shell company run by a Trump crony, which then “legally” (under Citizens United) puts that money into a Trump-aligned SuperPAC, say “Patriotic Americans for Freedom LLC,” to pay for political advertising, on-the-ground operations, etc.

The required FEC filing says that the money came from “Patriotic Americans for Freedom LLC,” but who’s behind that company that’s funding the campaign? That’s exactly the question that the “beneficial ownership” laws were designed to answer, and will now lead to a door slammed shut in the face of any reporter, investigator, or law enforcement agency that tries to look into it. And the FEC itself is paralyzed from doing anything about it.

So, here we have a regime headed by a guy who made much of his fortune via opaque foreign money — apparently much of it from Russia — and now he’s dismantling our ability to see who’s behind it. And deleting all the previous records that might have offered a clue to his own past crimes.

For Putin, throwing a few hundred million dollars into an American election would be pocket change, as it would be for the murderous dictator of Saudi Arabia or any other country that wanted a particular outcome from Trump or his corrupt lickspittles in the GOP.

And we know these foreign billionaires and dictators have a vested interest in how our system works; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be throwing literally billions of dollars into Trump family operations, from Trump’s crypto to Jared’s investment fund.

Forget making America great again; Trump is doubling down on making money laundering — which may have been the source of his financial survival throughout his 90s and early 2000s bankruptcies — great again.

This is truly the single most corrupt administration in American history.

Back in the days when conservatives were so hungry for media platforms that they’d come on progressive shows, I used to regularly debate Wayne Allen Root (here and here, for example). Instead of trying to convince me, though, Root has recently taken to giving Trump ideas about things to do, like stealing the election this fall.

On his show on “Real” America’s Voice, Root told Trump:

“Let me put an idea in your head. Because it’s so hard to get the Senate to do anything, now they’re on recess, they never get anything done. If they never get the SAVE America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections. …

“And the Supreme Court ruled in 1983, under Reagan, in INS vs. Chadha that if you declare a national security emergency as the President of the United States, they can’t challenge it. It can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.

“So if you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail-in ballots, and you don’t even need the Senate’s vote.”

Trump seemed both unsurprised and unfazed, as if this were a regular topic of conversation in the White House.

“Let me just say that stranger things have happened,” he replied, adding, “OK, I’ll leave it at that.”

Since 1968, stealing elections has become a sport for Republicans. That was the year that Nixon was running for president against VP Hubert Humphrey — who had just successfully negotiated peace between North and South Vietnam — when Nixon had his people reach out to the leaders of South Vietnam and promise them riches if they’d refuse to go to Paris and sign the deal.

When the FBI informed President Johnson about it, he correctly called it “treason,” although we didn’t learn about it until years later when the LBJ Library released the tapes.

In 1980, it was Reagan’s turn to steal an election. Jimmy Carter was riding high in the wake of Nixon’s resignation and VP Agnew’s stepping down to avoid a bribery prosecution, but then the Iranians seized the American embassy in Tehran.

The president of Iran, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, wanted to release the hostages and had worked out a deal with Carter to do just that, but the Reagan campaign met with the Ayatollah’s people and promised to sell them weapons and military spare parts if they’d just hold the hostages until after the election, destroying Carter’s re-election chances.

The hostages were released, by way of sealing the deal, at the exact moment when Reagan put his hand on the bible to be sworn in, and for years Reagan shipped them banned weaponry until the deal was busted wide open as the Iran-Contra Scandal.

In 2000, Republicans knew the election would probably come down to Florida, the state then run by candidate George W. Bush’s brother Jeb, so Jeb had his secretary of state purge at least 50,000 Black people from the voting rolls just months before the election. His brother won the state, and thus the White House, by 537 votes: it would have been an epic loss without that last-minute voter purge. And then five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court shut down the Florida Supreme Court-mandated recount, which would’ve revealed the purge.

None of these Republican election thefts are controversial; all are well-documented.

As was Trump’s willingness to see his own Vice President, Mike Pence, hanged by an angry mob if that was what it’d take to keep Donald in the White House for another four years. It’s safe to assume that if he was okay with that, there’s nothing off the table for this fall.

While Trump’s legal power to seize control of our election this fall is in dispute, his ability to disrupt it isn’t.

— He’s already issued an executive order directing the Post Office to refuse to deliver ballots to or from citizens not on his approved voter list or in states that refused to give him their voter rolls. Postmaster General David Steiner says he’s willing to do what Trump wants.
— A federal judge back last October ordered ICE to provide his court with the details of ICE’s plans for this fall’s election and, 10 months later, they’re still stonewalling, refusing to turn over any internal documents.
— Reuters reported last month that White House officials had already discussed declaring a national emergency and creating a federal voting task force, including ways of bypassing the Election Assistance Commission and seizing control of voting and vote-tabulating machines.
— Voters in 41 states have election deniers on the ballot this fall, while dozens of known election deniers have taken control of election-running positions across the country.

So, given that the feds are not only not going to help but are actively working toward rigging or even seizing control of this November’s election, it’s going to be up to us and the individual states to make sure our voices are heard and our votes are properly counted.

We should be thinking of this as an election continuity exercise that may not be necessary but, like wearing a seatbelt, could be essential if Trump tries to repeat 2020 in some way. At the moment, he’s essentially a cornered rat.

Therefore, Democrats must:

— Educate Americans about the Constitution, which hands elections off to the states exclusively with only minimal federal standards.
— If Trump tries to claim a national emergency — even if it has a real basis, like Iran hitting us hard or some other 9/11-type event, Americans need to know that we held elections through the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Republican Great Depression, both World Wars, and through other times of national crisis, and 2026 must not be an exception.
— States need to prepare for litigation with complaints, TRO motions, and even appellate briefs composed and ready to file on a moment’s notice. Taking days to fully respond to a Trump attempt to blow up our elections could be disastrous, as Al Gore learned 26 years ago.
— Involve Republicans when we can find the rare ones who will put country above party. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia pushed back in 2021 when Trump tried to get him to “find” roughly eleven thousand ballots; we must be looking for other Republicans who may have enough integrity to resist a Trump-led coup attempt.
— Steel the spines of our election administrators by having their backs, both legally and physically. Secretaries of state, county clerks, election boards and governors should all know in advance exactly who has authority to order what. The last thing we want are thousands of local election officials asking, “Are we supposed to comply?” on Election Day. When coup attempts work it’s typically because they used the element of surprise to their benefit; we need to blunt that weapon.
— Prepare for Trump’s goons — federal (like ICE or the National Guard) or Proud Boys/Klan-types — around polling places. This is a violation of a federal law that dates back to the Civil War; it’s illegal for “troops or armed men” to show up at any polling places in the country, and the penalty is five years in prison.
— Encourage early voting and other ways to build redundancy into our election systems, and tell people to check their voter registration now at vote.org, particularly if they live in a Red state, as those states have been actively and aggressively purging their voting rolls for months now, especially in their blue cities.
— Be prepared for the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court to intervene, as they did in the 2000 election, to try to hand various elections to Republicans. They’ve already granted Trump sweeping immunity from criminal acts, presumably including election fraud.
— Finally, as Al Gore can tell you from sad experience, we need to prepare for the inevitable onslaught of rightwing propaganda calling elections into question and claiming fraud.

People old enough to remember how the GOP gamed this in Florida in 2000 know what I’m talking about; Republican congressional staffers flew down to Florida (along with John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) to pound on counting center windows and demand the election Al Gore won be given to the “rightful winner,” George W. Bush.

While Trump can’t legally cancel the election, the more he and his toadies can cast doubt on its legitimacy, the more likely it is that they can pull off the same type of coup as Republicans did in 1968, 1980, and 2000.

For over a decade now, close races immediately produce Republican claims of fraud: lawyers, election officials and communications systems must be fully prepared to deal with lies and propaganda long before November.

Contact your local elections office and volunteer to help out if you can; rightwingers are doing so right now, particularly in places where they can challenge mail-in vote signatures. We need to be there, too.

Better safe than sorry, as the old saying goes. Pass it along…

With all but two Republican senators voting to make Todd Blanche our Attorney General, Donald Trump just walked away from a $100 million fine for tax fraud that the IRS has been trying to collect from him for over a decade. This was the centerpiece of the “settlement” that Blanche wrote up that says that Trump, Uday and Qusay, Jared and Ivanka, Tiffany and Boulos, and even Barron will never again have to worry about paying taxes or ever being audited. It may well even extend to their business partners.

Meanwhile, last week Capital One bank submitted sworn testimony to a court that back in 2021 they shut down and closed 385 Trump-owned businesses because their fraud department — and its leader, a man with “extensive financial fraud law enforcement experience” — believed Trump’s businesses were engaging in illegal money laundering and the bank wanted nothing to do with it.

Even more astonishing, neither of these revelations from the past two weeks made more than the tiniest stir in our corporate media, which is increasingly afraid of crossing Trump or his neofascist billionaire buddies. There’s a meme that’s traveling around the internet right now that’s shockingly on-the-nose:

“It’s so weird how everybody simply accepts that Trump is a criminal and a Russian stooge and then goes on about their days.”

Setting aside the legal horror show this all represents for a moment, this mind-boggling level of corruption is political gold that will destroy Trump — and today’s Democratic leadership is wasting it.

Democrats are (continuously, it seems) debating what should be their campaign strategy, their main through-line message, for the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Every faction and special interest group in the country is pushing their own idea, but there’s one overarching concept — one word — that can encompass most all of them and do so with a proven political punch:

“Corruption.”

At every level, ever since the Reagan Revolution, the heart of Republican policies has been the naked corruption of our American political and economic systems by billionaires and giant corporations. Since the 1980s, Republicans have sold their corruption with slogans like, “Government is the problem, not the solution,” and “Let the market decide,” but their real message is, “Turn it all over to billionaires and their corporations.” The result has been:

— Tax cuts and loopholes for billionaires and big corporations that, in aggregate since 1981, add up to more than our total national debt of $39 trillion (in other words, Republicans borrowed $39 trillion in our names that our kids will repay and gave all of it to the morbidly rich).
— Reagan’s 1983 suspension of enforcement of the anti-trust laws that has caused every industry in America to become a form of monopoly dominated by five or fewer massive corporations, gutting small business competition and raising prices.
— Five on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court ruling that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as “free speech,” handing our elections over to the highest bidders.
— Virtually every legacy federal regulatory agency being run today by industry insiders working on a revolving-door basis.
— Members of Congress and the corrupt Trump regime engaging in insider trading with impunity; for $100,000 a month, Trump‘s Nazi-infested social media site will even sell you insider information.
— A GOP-aligned military-industrial complex that’s essentially taken over Pentagon procurement.
— An anti-labor Labor Department; an anti-education Education department; an anti-civil rights Civil Rights enforcement agency; an anti-environment Environmental Protection Agency; etc…
— Trump’s mysterious pardons that always seem to go to people who’ve given him millions of dollars (after Giuliani claimed he and Trump were selling pardons for two million each and splitting the money).
— Gutting of the Internal Revenue Service so that wealthy tax cheats and multinational corporations can more easily evade taxes with near-impunity.
— The systematic sabotage and even privatization of public institutions — from the US Postal Service to public schools to prisons — so Republican-donor corporations can profit off the essential services that used to be considered part of the commons.
— The rivers of dark money after Citizens United that’re letting billionaires and corporations secretly pour functionally unlimited amounts of cash into our elections with zero accountability.
— Using the Federal Communications Commission to loosen media ownership rules for Trump’s billionaire and nepo-baby buddies while, at the same time, threatening to shut down or force sales of those outlets that don’t sing Trump’s praises.
— Red-state and federal voter suppression laws that make it harder for poor, young, female, and minority voters to have a say in our democracy.
— The Republican Party’s multi-decade refusal to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices causing Americans to pay the highest prescription costs in the developed world.
— Paralyzing the Federal Election Commission so even the most bizarre and blatant violations of what’s left of our election laws by Republican politicians are never even investigated, much less prosecuted.
— The use of tax havens and trade policy to encourage offshoring American jobs while bigshot executives reap record profits and bonuses, hollowing out the American middle class.
— The Republican normalization of lobbyists literally writing legislation via groups like the Koch-funded ALEC, ensuring laws are crafted to benefit industries and billionaires rather than the public.
— Rewriting environmental and labor rules for the benefit of polluting industries, often done brazenly and in the open by Trump appointees with direct financial stakes in the companies or industries they’re supposed to regulate.
— The strategic packing of the federal courts with hardcore rightwing/neofascist judges that ensures decades of rulings that favor corporate and billionaire power, weakens labor and consumer protections, and shields Trump’s corruption from any kind of meaningful accountability.

Republicans understand the power of mobilizing the public’s outrage against the corruption that they themselves have participated in for over 40 years. Astonishingly, cynically, that’s the meta-message to Trump’s main campaign slogan each of the three times he’s run for president: “Drain the swamp.”

And it worked, even though it was an outrageous lie.

Democrats, who have actually been trying to do something about corruption for years, need to appropriate the anti-corruption theme as their main message for 2026 and 2028. Because, universally, it works.

— When working in Russia, I witnessed the way Alexi Navalny came so close to taking down Putin that the Russian dictator ordered him murdered; it was done via Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. It systematically and relentlessly exposed the ways Putin and his cronies were looting their nation’s government while passing out favors to oligarchs willing to align themselves with them.

— In the 1980s, I was working for a German international relief organization in The Philippines when Cory Aquino mobilized an anti-corruption message against the Marcos dynasty; the week Marcos and his wife fled the country I was bumped off Philippine Airlines flights five days in a row because so many of their cronies were appropriating all the seats (the airline was run by a crony).

— When Jair Bolsonaro first successfully ran for president of Brazil it was on a campaign against the corruption that “Operation Car Wash” had exposed in the Lula administration. When elected, Bolsonaro, instead of ending the corruption, slid right into the system and expanded it, leading to his own ultimate downfall and current imprisonment.

— In Delhi, activist Anna Hazare’s 2011 anti-corruption hunger strike ignited a nationwide movement that helped spur passage of India’s Lokpal anti-corruption law and led his former allies to found the Aam Aadmi Party, which rose from scratch to power in Delhi on a clean-government platform.

— And, of course, it was the anti-corruption message of the EuroMaidan “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014 that lifted then-comedian and TV star Volodymyr Zelenskyy into the presidency of Ukraine.

From Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Era of the early 20th century to the present, anti-corruption messages have repeatedly proven to be one of the most potent forces in American politics, too.

— In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt built a foundation of mass support by casting monopolies as a “corrupt alliance” between the morbidly rich and our government, while the exposure of William M “Boss” Tweed’s graft by Thomas Nast’s biting cartoons helped bring down New York’s Tammany Hall.

— The Watergate scandal turned corrupt abuse of power into a national reckoning that forced Richard Nixon from office and fueled sweeping electoral gains for reformers like Jimmy Carter, while more recent scandals like George Santos’ lies and loss reinforced “clean government” as a winning local message.

— At the national level, Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” campaign and the “rigged system” critiques by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren show that, across the ideological spectrum, framing political battles as struggle against entrenched, self-dealing elites remains one of the most consistently reliable ways to get energized voters to the polls and win power.

It makes perfect sense that this should be the Democrats’ main strategy: the core philosophy of the GOP that was first made explicit by the Reagan administration — “greed is good” — openly invites corruption.

As we’ve seen in virtually every congressional vote over the past four decades, Republican politicians are now entirely in the pockets of the fossil fuel, health insurance, tax preparation, and weapons industries, among others.

Whether it’s the corrupt collusion between the Kushner and Netanyahu families that helped lead us into an illegal war against Iran, the billions Trump’s family has made in crypto and other schemes, the insider trading on the war, putting industry insiders in charge of regulatory agencies, or the DeSantis and Paxton/Abbott corruption scandals, there are vivid examples of Republican corruption laying on the public ground all over the country in plain sight.

Every Democrat in America should scan their local horizon for examples of corruption they can use against Republicans because, for the GOP, corruption has become a way of life.

The words “Republican corruption” should be continuously on Democrats’ lips, whether campaigning, speaking to constituents, or making media appearances.

Hammer these corrupt SOBs with their own crimes against democracy and the middle class, and Democrats will see results like Magyar, Zelenskyy, Aquino, and so many others have achieved.

It’s simple, easy, and powerful: “It’s the corruption, stupid!”

The Third Way has functionally declared its intention to purge the Democratic Party of progressives. They will not, in my opinion, get us the things progressives are working for and most Americans and the large majority of Democrats want:

— A national healthcare program that covers everybody
— Free or affordable college
— A clean environment and relief from climate wilding
— Reasonable taxation for billionaires and corporations
— Affordable housing and groceries
— Widespread unionization and an increased minimum wage
— An end to the brutality of ICE and the frantic construction of concentration camps.

These corporate Democrats just formally declared war on those candidates who eschew corporate money, and that has the potential to destroy our chances this fall. But to understand how this tear in the Democratic Party came about and why, a bit of history is vital:

In 1961, President John Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson had been pushing hard for expansion of the New Deal, with their centerpiece being a new program to provide healthcare for seniors that could eventually serve all Americans.

The program’s author, Robert Ball, was emphatic that his new “Medicare” program was designed so it could easily become a national healthcare system simply by reducing the eligibility age by a decade every year or two until everybody was covered.

This alarmed the crap out of Republicans and the insurance industry that backed them so much that actor Ronald Reagan — then working for General Electric doing a weekly GE Theater program beamed into millions of American homes nationwide — recorded a 33 RPM LP album called “A Time for Choosing” that argued that Medicare would cement the communist/socialist takeover of America.

My dad, a Republican activist, got a copy in the mail and I listened to it several times that year. I can still remember Reagan intoning with his so-smooth and authoritative radio announcer’s voice:

“One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. …
Behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day, as Norman Thomas said, we will awake to find that we have socialism.”

It was an all-out call-to-arms for Republicans to flood Congress with letters and calls opposing this new “socialist” program that the young Democratic president was advocating.

Reagan traveled over 250,000 miles across America that year, speaking to business groups from coast to coast, and his message was consistent with one of the last statements he made on that record:

“If you don’t do this and if I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Kennedy was assassinated before he could get the legislation passed and, in the wake of that, as the nation mourned, LBJ got both Medicare and Medicaid through Congress and into law.

Now convinced that America was on an irreversible path to tyranny, Republicans began looking for ways to finally, once and for all, destroy the Democratic Party that had so heartily embraced “socialism/communism.” Their target would be the single largest source of funding for Democratic candidates: labor unions, which had been legalized in 1935 by FDR.

That effort became real in 1981 when a newly elected President Reagan kneecapped PATCO, the air traffic controllers union, destroying it in a single week as he kicked off the Republican War on Labor™ that continues to this day.

Their explicit goal was to turn America into a single-party state with Democrats never again holding power in a meaningful way; this, the Brahmins of the Republican Party argued, would prevent the “creeping socialism” of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society from ever expanding any farther.

By 1985, Reagan’s Republican War on Labor™ had reduced union membership in the private sector from a high of 34.8% to a mere 14.6% of American workers. Democratic politicians were panicking, so a group of them got together and basically decided that there was merit to be found in the old cliché, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

That year they created the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), with its leadership made up of Al From (the principal founder), Bill Clinton, Sam Nunn, Chuck Robb, and Joe Lieberman.

They called the DLC strategy a “third way” to do politics; its program included:

— welfare “reform” to push people back to work
— free trade (NAFTA)
— deficit reduction by cutting social programs
— financial deregulation for banks and real estate
— support for globalization and shipping factories overseas
— partnership with corporate America

That last part — the partnership with corporate America — became the cornerstone to Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign; by that time the unions had been so badly gutted that corporate money authorized by the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Bellotti decision became the key to funding his successful effort to become president. In the UK, Tony Blair was traveling down the same path.

Democratic politicians started choosing which industries to get into bed with. White collar industries were most favored, particularly banking, insurance, and pharma. The middle class was slipping away, but with the unions still largely dead there wasn’t a viable alternative to corporate support until the internet matured in the early 2000s.

Which came along during George W. Bush’s presidency, as social media grew and politicians took to the worldwide web in huge numbers.

Facing the possibility that Democrats might be able to fundraise directly from the public with this new internet thing, in 2005 a group of people including Jonathan Cowan, Matt Bennett, Jim Kessler, and Nancy Hale founded a new group associated with the Democratic Party called the Third Way.

Describing themselves as committed to “democratic capitalism,” they explicitly recommend Democratic politicians maintain relationships with wealthy donors, use capitalism as the framework for Democratic governance, create “partnerships” with business, and push “market-oriented solutions.”

And now they’re going to war with those Democrats who want to take the Party back to its FDR/LBJ New Deal/Great Society roots.

In an article titled “Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left,” The New York Times reports:

“‘We are preparing for the next war that is coming,’ said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism.”

Third Way founder Cowen added, referencing Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan:

“It is deeply troubling to see radical, far-left candidates winning in places that are potentially presidential swing states.”

The simple reality that Third Way understands is that on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court have — in 5-4 all-Republican-appointee decisions — legalized a corrupt oligarchic system where massive corporations, foreign governments, and morbidly rich individuals can essentially buy elections for their favored candidates.

What they miss is that most Americans — and a majority of Democrats (as we can see by recent progressive wins) — are absolutely sick of and disgusted by this system.

Instead of joining progressives in working to tear it down, they’re choosing to work to keep the corporate-owned Democrats in power and keep those unwilling to take PAC money out.

The majority (56%) of Americans and 77% of Democrats would like, for example, for the “socialist” Medicare program that Reagan warned us about to be available to all Americans.

But a recent Third Way memo, titled “Read This Before Supporting Medicare for All,” argues that Medicare for All has repeatedly failed politically, cites unsuccessful state-level efforts in Vermont, Colorado, California, and Oregon, and concludes that instead we should build on the corporate-run status quo:

“The Affordable Care Act is popular and provides a strong foundation on which to build.”

Democratic candidates have enough of a struggle against the hundreds of billionaire families who’ve thrown in with the GOP without their corporate-funded “allies” stirring up more controversy and dissension.

I’ve written before about how Greens and the Working Families Party have helped Republicans win elections; in this critical year when the future of American democracy is hanging by a thread, Democrats shouldn’t also have to be looking over their shoulders from Clinton’s Third Way wing of the party.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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