News from The Hartmann Report

 

— A Dangerous Deal Behind Closed Doors: Is Trump Letting Putin Reshape U.S. Foreign Policy? Putin offered to stop sharing intel with Iran if the US just cuts off Ukraine so he can kill as many people there as possible. This is going to be a tough one for Trump, since he’s been Putin’s guy for decades and pretty much always does exactly what Putin tells him to; he’s even hung Putin’s picture in the White House along with the pictures of past American presidents as a gesture of groveling homage. 

But there’s still strong support for Ukraine in Congress, even among a majority of Republicans, and, as Politico notes: “[T]he sheer existence of such a proposal has sparked concern among European diplomats, who worry Moscow is trying to drive a wedge between Europe and the U.S. at a critical moment for transatlantic relations.” 

As if Putin hasn’t already succeeded — with his regular secret phone calls with Trump — in driving a wedge between the US and Europe. Trump is now constantly trash-talking the EU, NATO, and Zelenskyy using language that’s almost always nearly identical to Putin’s. Trump thought he was a great war tactician and strategist and could, with his fellow corrupt politician Bibi Netanyahu, try what no American president had before been stupid enough to do and attack Iran. 

It backfired (as, apparently, General Caine predicted) and now he’s frantic, so get ready for this to get a hell of lot messier as Trump’s now bringing a new warship and thousands of marines into the Gulf while Bibi gleefully escalates into a bloody killing spree against civilians in both Lebanon and Iran, much like he did in Gaza. Only this time, Trump and America will own this war…

— Cuban Missile Crisis 2.0: Will Trump Confront Putin, or Fold? As a favor to his friend/boss/owner Putin, Trump has suspended most worldwide sanctions on the sale of Russian oil, so now two massive tankers filled with Russian oil are steaming their way to Cuba, which Trump has had under siege (a war crime) long enough that power systems are collapsing, people are going hungry, hospitals are shutting down, and the island is in total crisis. 

(Previously, they’d been getting their oil from Venezuela, but Trump put an end to that when he took out Maduro.) So, to tighten the screws on Cuba, Trump’s Treasury poodle, billionaire Scott Bessent, just had the Treasury Department on Thursday publish a new list of countries that we’ll block from accepting Russian oil, and the only country on the list is Cuba. It appears that the tankers are still steaming toward the island nation, and when they get there it’ll be a whole new crisis for Trump. Does he stand up to Putin and block the tankers or even seize them? 

Or will he stand down and let Putin “save the day” for the Cubans? And if the former, could this spark a confrontation that rivals the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we were just hours away from nuclear war? And what about refugees? Rightwing Senator Tom Cotton asked the CENTCOM general in charge this past week, “Are we prepared for any kind of humanitarian crisis in Cuba—the possible flow of refugees, other civil disorder that may threaten our interests, especially if the decrepit, corrupt Castro regime finally falls or flees?” General Donovan told him they’re preparing Gitmo to deal with the refugees, which is pretty bizarre given the scale and scope of this crisis. The mind-boggling incompetence and bad faith of the Trump regime is both astonishing and dangerous. Keep an eye on this one.

— Will Colombia be the next country Trump invades or whose leadership he tries to decapitate? Trump has ordered his lickspittles Pam Bondi and Ka$h Patel to open criminal investigations into Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a move similar to what preceded his invasion of Venezuela where he abducted President Maduro and brought him to the US to face charges. 

The orange man-baby is apparently infuriated that Petro has called out his criminal activities in blowing up small boats in the Caribbean and his snatching Maduro, both clearly illegal under both US and international law. Step by step, country by country, it appears that Trump reading those “Collected Speeches of Adolf Hitler” that sat beside his bed for years (per Ivana’s autobiography) have sunk in. He’s the first leader of a western nation to invade two countries and threaten a third within a year since the 1930s in Europe. What’s next? France? Greenland? Oh, yeah, that’s already “on the table…”

— America’s Healthcare Collapse Is Here, and It Was Written into Law. Just as Democrats predicted when the One Big Beautiful Bill passed with all-Republican votes, millions of Americans are now uninsured. In addition to giving billionaires around $5 trillion in tax cuts, the OBBB also did away with the most recent Obamacare subsidies, jacking people’s healthcare premiums into the stratosphere. The result has been that millions of families — about one in ten previously covered by the Affordable Care Act — are now lacking any sort of medical insurance whatsoever. 

Republicans are delighted, and Trump’s offering a new “cheap” ACA plan with $31,000 deductibles, a genuinely insane idea in a country where 60% of Americans can end up homeless if they’re hit with an unexpected $1000 expense. 

But, hey, the billionaires got their tax cut so now they’re paying virtually nothing in taxes, including billionaire Trump, his multimillionaire kids and wife, the 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and the hundreds of billionaires who’ve ponied up hundreds of millions to fund his campaigns, ballroom, library, crypto, and every other scam he can dream up. Life’s good when you’re morbidly rich; the rest of us can “just eat cake” — when we can find stale packages of it in the dumpsters behind America’s grocery stores.

— Another death in ICE custody: How many more before anyone is held accountable? The 14th person to die in ICE custody so far this year is a 19-year-old young man named Royer Perez-Jimenez. He was mysteriously declared dead — although ICE refuses to release the medical examiner’s report and cause of death — this past Monday. 

The facility had been shut down by Biden because of “worms in food, malfunctioning toilets and overflowing sewage” and “a near-fatal carbon monoxide leaks last November; and regular exposure to highly dangerous levels of a toxic disinfectant chemical spray linked to severe medical harms” among other outrages. 

Miller and Trump ordered the concentration camp re-opened when they took over the government. ICE claimed they’d arrested Royer for having committed a crime but are now refused to produce an arrest warrant or any details of why he was snatched and detained. But some ICE agent, somewhere, made another $2500 on the “got another brown person” bounty, in addition to the $150,000 annual salary and $60,000 signing bonus. Why the hell can’t we pay teachers like this?

— Meet the new Kyrsten Sinema: John Fetterman. Sinema famously sold out her party and her country in exchange for campaign contributions and other gifts; now, it appears, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senator John Fetterman is doing the same. 

He’s declared he’ll support former MMA fighter Markwayne Mullin (who’s totally unqualified; he doesn’t have a college degree, no experience in law enforcement, and no management experience whatsoever) to run the 200,000+ employee Department of Homeland Security, replacing Kristi Noem who’s leaving enshrouded in scandal. 

Even Republican committee Chairman Rand Paul is voting against Mullin. Fetterman’s also supporting Trump’s attacks on Iran, Bibi Netanyahu’s war crimes in Gaza, and the GOP’s voter suppression SAVE Act. Democrats in Pennsylvania are furious, but Fetterman has another 3 years to go before they can vote him out of office. Every new Congress, Republicans identify one or two Democrats they can seduce, threaten, bribe, or otherwise sway to betray their own party. Last time around it was Sinema and Joe Manchin; this time it’s Fetterman. It’s sick.

The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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

 

The drumbeats for expanding our (and Israel’s) war with Iran are loud. Cable news panels talk about strategy. Politicians talk about deterrence. Pentagon briefings talk about targets and timelines. But there’s one thing missing from almost every conversation in Washington. Risk. Not the geopolitical kind. Not the think-tank kind. Real risk. The kind that lands in your living room in the form of a letter from the government telling your family that your child is being sent to war.

For most of modern America’s leaders — and certainly for generations of the Trump family — that risk simply doesn’t exist. We live in a country where fewer than one percent of the population serves in the military. The burden of fighting America’s wars has been placed on a narrow slice of our people. They’re mostly working class, many come from rural communities, and many join because it’s one of the few stable ways to get healthcare, education benefits, and a future.

Meanwhile the people who debate whether we should be bombing Iran are almost never sending their own kids. That didn’t used to be the case. During World War II nearly every American family had someone in uniform. War was a shared national sacrifice, and politicians understood that every decision they made could cost the life of one of theirs or their neighbor’s son or daughter.

I remember well how Vietnam brought that reality home in a different way. I hated it, protested against it, got kicked out of school for those protests, and still curse LBJ and Nixon for their lies that killed over 50,000 of my fellow citizens. But that, in retrospect, is exactly how it should be. That protest/debate was a good thing for our nation, every bit as good as the war was wrong and bad.

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

The draft was what forced our country, our families from coast-to-coast, to confront the human cost of war. And eventually it forced our government to end that war. In 1973 Richard Nixon and Congress ended the draft and created today’s all-volunteer military. The argument sounded reasonable at the time, particularly after the upheaval of Vietnam. A professional military would be more skilled and more motivated, they said. It would be more competent, even more lethal.

But then something else happened because the draft ended: war became easier for politicians to throw our military into, because the dissenting voices in the ranks had vanished. When only a tiny slice of Americans is at risk for fighting, bleeding, and dying, the political price of launching a war drops dramatically. 

Congress members can vote for military action without worrying that their own children or those of their constituents will pay the price. Television pundits can cheer for bombing campaigns without imagining their own kids in uniform.

The result has been nearly nonstop war for half a century, from Reagan’s attack on Grenada straight through to today. Afghanistan lasted twenty years. Iraq dragged on for nearly two decades. The United States has been involved in military operations across the Middle East and Africa that most Americans can barely locate on a map.

Now we’re staring at the possibility that Trump’s attacks against Iran could metastasize into World War III. The stakes here are much higher than George W. Bush’s wars that he told his biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, were fought to get him a second term in the White House. Iran isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan: it’s a nation of nearly ninety million people with a large military, deep regional alliances, and the ability to disrupt global energy markets overnight. It’s twice the size of Iraq or Texas.

And a war there could ignite the entire Middle East, which could easily spread to Europe (and already has, in a minor way, with Iran’s attacks on Cyprus and their missiles sent at Turkey). As we deplete our munitions, it might also encourage China to try to take Taiwan. Yet the discussion among Republicans in Washington sounds strangely casual. Analysts debate air strikes on TV and guess about retaliation scenarios the way sports commentators pontificate about playoff strategies. Pete Hegseth struts and preens for the camera like a tough guy. All because it’s easy to talk that way when you know your family won’t be fighting.

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

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

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

And it’s successful: other than Israel, which has its own unique problems, you’re not hearing much bellicose war rhetoric from any of those nations’ leaders. If we had that here, do you think Republicans would still talk so casually about war with Iran? Would Congress rush to authorize military force if their own sons and daughters might be called up next month? History suggests the answer is no.

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

Shared sacrifice, in other words, produces democratic accountability. And right now, America doesn’t have that. Instead, we’ve created a system where war is something that happens to somebody else, that roughly one percent who volunteer. It’s fought by someone else’s kids. It’s endured by someone else’s family.

That’s not how a democracy is supposed to work. The Founders of our republic deeply distrusted standing armies, so much so that they wrote into the Constitution that the army must be funded every two years or it will cease to exist. It’s right there in Article I, forcing our country to reevaluate our military and its use every time Congress reconvenes:

“The Congress shall have Power…To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;” They believed that America should only go to war when the public truly understood the stakes and Congress had engaged in a vigorous, public debate about it. That’s why declaring war was not among the powers the Constitution gives the president.

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

And ignoring that concern is how Trump got us here: the all-volunteer military quietly erased that safeguard. Don’t take me wrong: the men and women who volunteer to serve our nation deserve enormous respect. They’ve carried the weight of America’s wars with courage and sacrifice. The problem isn’t them: it’s the rest of us. 

When the risks of war are concentrated in a small segment of society, the rest of the nation stops paying attention. Politicians face less pressure, military interventions multiply, and wealthy defense contractors prosper.

The human cost of war, in other words, gets hidden. But a fair national draft would change that overnight. It wouldn’t make America more warlike: history shows it would do the opposite. If every family knew their children could be sent to fight, Americans would demand diplomacy first, second, and third. Wars would still happen when they truly had to, but they wouldn’t happen so casually. A president who just orders the troops to start shooting at a country like Iran would be held to account by every family in the country.

As the war with Iran grows hotter, we should be asking a simple question that almost nobody in Washington wants to hear: “If the road to war with Tehran required the sons and daughters of the billionaire and political class to march beside everyone else’s kids, would we still be there?”

-Thom Hartmann

"Trump is Putin’s toady"

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

The Washington Post, which first reported on this, quoted a Russian military expert as saying that Iran is now “making very precise hits on early-warning radars or over-the-horizon radars,” seeming to validate the concern. The article added: “Iran possesses only a handful of military-grade satellites, and no satellite constellation of its own, which would make imagery provided by Russia’s much more advanced space capabilities highly valuable — particularly as the Kremlin has honed its own targeting after years of war in Ukraine…”

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

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

His fellow real estate billionaire, Steve Witkoff (whose sons are making billions with Trump’s sons in the Middle East and has been regularly traveling to Moscow for private meetings with Putin) similarly shrugged off the report, telling CNBC: “I can tell you that yesterday, on the call with [President Trump], the Russians said they have not been sharing. That’s what they said. So, we can take them at their word, but they did say that.” Witkoff later added, “Let’s hope that they’re not sharing.”

Putin himself, though, was nowhere near as circumspect, saying: “On my part, I want to confirm our unwavering support of Tehran and our solidarity with our Iranian friends. Russia has been and will remain the Islamic Republic’s reliable partner.”

As if to confirm that Trump is Putin’s toady, just last week, in the wake of Iran shutting off the Strait of Hormuz and cutting oil supplies to Asia and the Subcontinent, our president signed a waiver to our Russia sanctions so Putin can now sell unlimited amounts of Russian oil directly to India. Every time Putin says “Jump,” Trump asks, “How high?” Which raises the question: “Why? Why does Trump always give Putin whatever he wants and why is he so terrified of speaking out against him?”

Is it possible that Trump is actively working for Putin? What if Putin somehow owns him? Or is blackmailing him? And has been running him as an Russian asset since at least 2017? That sort of treason would be more important than Russian agents Robert Hanssen (life without parole), Aldrich Ames (life without parole), or Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (death penalty).

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

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

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

But what if it goes beyond that? What if Putin has owned him for years? From Russian oligarchs laundering money through Trump’s operations — real estate is the most common device used worldwide for money laundering — to keeping him alive in his most difficult times, like those multiple bankruptcies in the 1990s when he almost lost everything?

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

Which begs the question: exactly how much damage might Trump have already done to our nation, and what does he have planned for the next three years of this second term? And is he getting ongoing day-to-day instructions from Putin, which explains why he’s so reluctant to discuss their conversations, as Rachel Maddow recently documented?

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

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

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf. Throughout the campaign, Manafort let Russian intelligence know where Trump needed help, and when, and it appears Russia jumped in to social media to provide the needed help. Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison and ended any investigations. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia.

As The New York Times noted in 2020: “[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”

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

The Washington Post reported in 2022 that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations. Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin, who has agents in those countries, told him to? Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he thinks he can make money off them. Or he’s scared.

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

When Robert Mueller’s FBI team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled. The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump himself trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

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

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

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes: “These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen. And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

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

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble. That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later): “The source was considered the highest-level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official. “According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

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

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

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post: “There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

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

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

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

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

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

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election. In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

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

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled, “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”: “Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin. The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car… But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

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

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

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

And now, to complicate matters, it appears Elon Musk took with him access to the payroll records of all of our nation’s spies and other foreign intelligence agents. The Elon Musk who, himself, The Wall Street Journal reports has also reportedly been having his own secret conversations with Putin. If it turns out the Trump has been acting as an agent for Russia, how long might this have been going on?

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

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

As 2016 and 2018 investigations by The Guardian found: “Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a ‘conspiratorial’ informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.”

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

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

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

The KGB’s psychological profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not much of a deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he should run for president in the US. Much to the astonishment and jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

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

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

As The Guardian reported in 2021: “The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful ‘active measure’ executed by a new KGB asset.

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

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

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

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

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

Around the time he was leaving office, Trump pardoned Flynn, essentially burying the entire story. From campaigning to destroy NATO to selling out Ukraine to letting Russia help kill American soldiers in the Gulf region, Trump’s goal appears to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.” The big question is, “Why?”

The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

The Most Dangerous Weapon Ever Aimed at America Isn't a Missile. It's the deliberate, systematic destruction of your ability to know what's real...

We got more lies this morning from the Pentagon press briefing. They’re now up to 17 different rationalizations for the attack on Iran, none of which makes sense. To paraphrase Rod Serling, consider what happened in Minab, Iran.

A Tomahawk cruise missile, an American weapon, a weapon that Iran doesn’t own and can’t fire, struck a girls’ elementary school. One hundred and seventy-five people are dead, most of them little girls who showed up that morning to learn to read. And Donald Trump stood in front of cameras and said Iran did it. He lied. About dead children. Without blinking. And his crew backed him up, even knowing it was a lie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles and David Koch alone spent hundreds of millions of dollars seeding distrust in climate science, in government, in the very idea that collective action could solve collective problems. And they were just the tip of a massive iceberg. This wasn’t an accident; it was a strategy. And that strategy had one ultimate goal: to create a population of Americans so skeptical of institutions, so distrustful of expertise, so certain that everyone is lying all the time, that they’d be willing to believe anything.

Donald Trump didn’t create those people. They were created for him by these cynical billionaires. And that means that removing Trump from power won’t dismantle the machine. Unless it’s defeated along with Trump, it’ll just produce another Trump, a smarter one, one who doesn’t make his lies and corruption quite so obvious.

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

That’s a man who woke up every single morning with the intention of deceiving the American people. That isn’t occasional dishonesty or spin: it’s a psychopathy — pathological lying — deployed as a governing strategy. And it worked for Trump, just like it worked for Mussolini, Hitler, Putin, and Orbán before him.

— He told people that Barack Obama, a man who released his birth certificate, a man whose Hawaiian birth was verified by state officials, a man who graduated from Harvard Law, was secretly a Kenyan. Millions of people believed it then and millions still do to this day.

— He told people three million illegal ballots were cast against him in 2016 and that he won in 2020. While repeated investigations by reporters, federal agencies, and even courts (including the Supreme Court) found no evidence, he keeps saying it anyway.

— He told people Covid would disappear. “One day, like a miracle, it’ll just go away.” Over a half-million Americans are in the ground because of the lies Trump told during those early critical months when action could’ve saved lives.

— And then he told us all the biggest lie of all, the lie that almost ended the American experiment with democracy. When he lost in 2020 — lost fairly, lost decisively, lost in a contest that his own Attorney General, his own Homeland Security officials, his own judges said was legitimate — Donald Trump told his followers the election had been stolen.

Sixty-plus lawsuits, thrown out by every court that heard them. Even his own people told him the fraud claims weren’t true. Nonetheless, he lied about it anyway. Louder. On repeat. For months. And on January 6th, 2021, his mob stormed the United States Capitol, our Capitol, the symbol of 250 years of democratic governance, because this twisted man had spent months pouring gasoline on their rage and then lit the match at a rally a few blocks away.

People died. Police officers were beaten and four of them died. Members of Congress hid under their desks. And Donald Trump giddily watched it on television and did nothing for hours. That’s who’s running the United States of America right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t be.

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

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

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

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

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

We’ve been watching someone kick at them for fifty years. Trump is just the most recent, least sophisticated, and grossest wrecking ball they finally decided to throw at us. And a hundred and sixty children in Minab are dead, and the men responsible are pointing their fingers at the country they bombed and saying, “Iran did it.” Trump is basically inviting Iranian partisans to attack America with the ferocity and style of 9/11, hoping it’ll provoke a “rally around the president” moment like Bush got and the Reichstag Fire did.

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

This is what it looks like when a democracy is in genuine danger. The rightwing lie machine was built to make you feel like nothing you do matters. Like it’s all just too big. Like you’re way too small. Like the liars always win, so, “Why bother?” That’s both the first and the last lie they need you to believe. Don’t.

 -Thom Hartmann

Questions Need to be Answered

 

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

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

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

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

A fourth round had already been scheduled for Vienna the following week to work through the technical details following final discussions in Tehran. The Iranian foreign minister told reporters his team was ready to stay and keep talking for as long as it took. And then, less than 48 hours after those talks in Switzerland concluded, the bombs began to fall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If the Iranians were right that they were “negotiated” into a kill box, no government facing an existential American ultimatum will ever be able to assume our good faith again. The damage this administration is doing to American credibility isn’t abstract or temporary: when a country uses the negotiating table as a targeting opportunity, it poisons the well for every administration that comes after it.

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

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

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

-Thom Hartmann

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

And here at home Trump is musing about using Iranian interference in our 2020 election as an excuse to issue an emergency executive order to seize control of the upcoming November midterm election. Which is particularly ironic, given that the well-documented Iranian intervention that year was designed to help get Trump reelected (after all, he’d just torn up the JCPOA nuclear deal) and avoid a Biden administration from coming into power.

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

And it’s early days. As Winston Churchill famously said in 1936 about war: “Once the signal is given, no one can predict how far events will go.”

America’s Founders and the Framers of our Constitution not only would have agreed with Churchill but saw a president seizing war powers from Congress as an existential threat to the republic. On April 20, 1795, James Madison, who had just helped shepherd through the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and would become President of the United States in the following decade, wrote: “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.”

Reflecting on the ability of a president to use war as an excuse to become a virtual dictator, Madison continued his letter: “In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive [President] is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war...and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation,” our fourth President and the Father of the Constitution concluded, “could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” 

Since Madison’s warning, “continual warfare” has been used both in fiction and in the real world. In the novel 1984 by George Orwell, the way a seemingly democratic president kept his nation in a continual state of repression was by having a continuous war.

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

And, as George W. Bush told his biographer in 1999: “One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as commander in chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

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

“In order to get elected, @BarackObama will start a war with Iran.” (2011)
“Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective…” (2011)
“@BarackObama will attack Iran in the not too distant future because it will help him win the election.” (2012)
“Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin — watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate.” (2012)
“I predict that President Obama will at some point attack Iran in order to save face!” (2013)
“Remember what I said about @BarackObama attacking Iran before the election…” (2012)

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

But it compounds his constant ignoring of constitutional limits on presidential power ranging from gutting federal agencies without authorization to having ICE routinely ignore court orders, flagrantly violate the Fourth Amendment, and daily lie to the American people. Nobody invested in peace or democracy is mourning the death of the Iranian dictator or the possible unraveling of its theocracy. But must we do it in a way that breaks both US and international law?

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

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

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

-Thom Hartmann

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

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

Now, it looks like Trump and the people around him are seriously considering declaring an emergency to let them seize control of this November’s elections, according to reporting yesterday in The Washington Post: “Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.”

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

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

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

But given how badly Trump’s doing in the polls today, even all these efforts don’t look like they’ll be enough to keep the House and Senate in Republican hands. So now Trump toadies like Jerome Corsi (the creator of the Birther movement and the Swift Boat slurs, who’s been a guest on my program multiple times) have an idea: just imitate what Putin, Orbán, Hitler, and other dictators have done to hang onto power when they get unpopular: declare an emergency and use it to rig the election.

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

These aren’t fringe anonymous trolls on some obscure message board; they’re people operating in proximity to the president of the United States. Corsi arguably destroyed John Kerry’s chances in 2004 and lit the Birther fuse that catapulted Trump into political fame. And they’re floating the idea that if normal democratic processes don’t produce the “right” outcome, they could help create a fake crisis to seize control of the election nationally.

If you’ve studied history — and you know I have — that’s the moment when the hair on the back of your neck should stand up. Because this isn’t new, creative, or even uniquely American: it’s straight out of the authoritarian playbook.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History shows us, over and over again, that when a nation loses its democracy to an aspiring autocrat, the language and strategy used is always the same. “The nation is under threat.” “The moment is an emergency.” “Normal rules must be suspended — just temporarily — to save the country.” And in every case, “temporary” turned out to be the most dangerous word of all.

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

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

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

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

-Thom Hartmann