Thom's Daily Audio

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This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hartmannreport.comToday, we held the first live session of the Thom Hartmann Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club.Thom Hartmann talked about his book, Who Killed the American Dream, as well as Unequal Protection, which inspired it.We welcomed a wide range of members to the live chat, and several asked Thom questions over the hour. Thank you to all who joined Thom and moderator Nigel today.The full hour is available to you, whether or not you are a subscriber, as this is the first live session.September Book of the MonthLooking Backward is available as a free download from Project Gutenberg.Each Sunday in September, Thom will post a summary of parts of the book, and paid subscribers can comment on their thoughts.To be able to comment on posts during the month, you’ll need to be a paid subscriber to the Hartmann Report.As a paid subscriber, you can comment on any of the posts at the Hartmann Report.On the last Sunday of the month, September 27, we will hold a live session on Substack, where you can ask Thom your questions and chat with other book club members. The live session starts at Noon ET / 9 am PT.Just Want the Book Club and Nothing Else?Visit this link: https://hartmannreport.com/account and set your preferences to the sections you would like to receive by email. You will need to be signed in.Enjoy reading!

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

Trump and his Republican partners in the destruction of American democracy really don’t want us to vote this fall or in 2028. And there’s a good reason for it, at least in their minds. Joyce Vance just pointed out that Howard Lutnick, Trump’s morbidly rich crony Commerce Secretary, claimed this week that they’d found over 24,000 noncitizens who’d illegally voted in the 2020 election. It’s a lie, of course, and a pretty naked one at that, but this will be the foundation for Republicans establishing even more draconian rules to prevent married women, racial minorities, city dwellers, and low-income people from voting this fall and in 2028. Also this week, the Center for American Progress released an extraordinarily disturbing fact sheet summarizing an investigation they published that documents fifteen separate, interlocking tactics the Trump administration, Republican governors, and GOP members of Congress are engaging in right now to rig this fall’s election.Their tactics range from firing the bipartisan Election Assistance Commissions’ commissioners to encouraging Red state voter purges to putting ICE agents outside polling places in clear violation of federal law.The six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court are also deciding, perhaps this week or next, whether to let Trump’s hand-picked Postmaster General have your mailman refuse to deliver your ballot if you’re not on Trump’s approved voter list. Trump’s executive order to do this has been blocked twice by a federal judge, noting that the Constitution is clear that only states run elections and the executive branch has no authority whatsoever to even try to regulate them. And now it’s in the hands of six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court. And the plain words of the Constitution — which references the “right to vote” six times, including five Amendments that say, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged…” — have never been an obstacle for Republicans on the Court. Just read the plain text of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments and compare that to ICE’s behavior, which the Court is allowing.Sadly, we need to be ready for anything, because Republicans now have a 58-year-long record of committing crimes and treason to get their men into the White House.— Nixon sabotaged LBJ’s Vietnam peace deal just before the election of 1968, an event LBJ and Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen called “treason” on a phone call that wasn’t released until decades after Johnson’s death. Because the war continued, Nixon beat Humphrey that year by lying that he had a “secret plan” to end the war, and an additional 20,000+ Americans and over an additional million Vietnamese died.— Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollah to hold the 52 hostages they’d taken during Carter’s presidency until after the election. Iran kept the deal destroying Carter’s chance in the 1980 election, and for six years Reagan secretly and illegally sold them American-made weapons in violation of the law. We remember that as the “Iran-Contra Scandal.”— Florida Governor Jeb Bush had 57,000 mostly Black Floridians purged from the voting rolls just months before the 2000 election, which let his brother George W. Bush squeak by with a 537 vote margin. When the Florida Supreme Court, smelling a rat, ordered a recount, five corrupt Republicans — including Bush’s father’s nominee Clarence Thomas — violated the state’s rights Tenth Amendment and blocked the recount, putting Bush into the White House even though a later recount found that Al Gore had won the election. President Jimmy Carter told me on my radio program: “I don’t think that George W. Bush won the election in 2000, and he probably lost Florida and nationwide…”— And then there was the GOP’s theft of the 2024 election. Greg Palast, a reporter with a masters’ degree in statistics, went through the official state-by-state statistics and found that 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls: 2,121,000 mail were ballots disqualified by Republican challenges, 1,216,000 provisional ballots were thrown away uncounted, 3.24 million new registrations were rejected or never processed, and 585,000 in-person ballots were “spoiled.” He found Black voters were four times as likely as white voters to have their mail ballot rejected; Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters were more than 3 times as likely as white people to be given provisional ballots that were never counted. Had that voter suppression not worked, he concluded, Kamala Harris would be president and the House and Senate may well be in Democratic hands.So, here we go again, only this time state-by-state voter suppression — remember when Texas AG Ken Paxton told Steve Bannon on the air that if he hadn’t blocked Houston from sending out mail-in ballots Trump would have lost Texas? — is getting a big boost from the feds under Trump’s control.— Trump and his lickspittles have fired or pushed out at least 75 career election security officials, gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and removed the Election Assistance Commission’s commissioners so the agency is now functionally dead.— The Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, now run by an apparatchik devoted to undoing civil rights, has threatened election officials in all 50 states with prison if they make even small errors in running their elections. The DOJ itself has sued more than 30 states trying to seize their voter files.— The FBI raided the Fulton County elections office with Tulsi Gabbard, then the Director of National Intelligence, standing over the process at the personal direction of Trump himself as agents hauled away hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots.— Steve Bannon has repeatedly promised — most recently this week — that ICE agents will defy the post-Civil War federal law that bans armed government officials from polling places. — And Trump has, on multiple occasions, floated declaring a national emergency or state of insurrection to shut down this fall’s elections, either nationwide or in places where Democratic majorities may win.Back in the old days, Nixon and Reagan at least had the decency to commit their treasonous election thefts in secret. Trump is now bragging about it, telling Congress that if they pass his voter suppression bill to prevent low-income people and married women from voting, “We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.” This is Putin-level corruption, right out in the open, and not a single Republican is pushing back as our national press tries their hardest to avoid discussing it.We’ve suffered through five illegitimate presidencies in the years since Nixon’s 1968 treason largely because our press has refused to investigate or tell the stories and Democratic leadership has been too timid to bring it up. You know how Republicans would be reacting if the shoe were on the other foot.This time the press can’t claim they just didn’t realize what was going on, as happened in 1968, 1980, 2000, and 2024: Trump and his cronies are doing all this right out in the open, and his advisors like Bannon are crowing about it on TV.So it’s time for all of us to raise some hell, letting our friends and neighbors know what’s happening, and demand that our elected officials act now to protect our elections. The number for Congress is 202-224-3121 and don’t forget to check your voter registration at vote.org, particularly if you live in a Red state.We just have a few weeks to go before early voting starts and we have a hell of a lot of work to do to get out the vote and keep it honest. Tag, we’re it!Louise’s Daily Song: “Same Old Crime” Comments on Thursday’s Daily Take:Are We On the Verge of a Progressive Revolution Like the New Deal?The vast majority of Americans (who wrongly think they are capitalists) are already indentured to America’s capitalist oligarchs via mortgages, credit card debt, and car loans.~ TomonthebeachFor those of us who pay attention, I think this is all true and we will try to make it happen. I worry, though, about those who need this but 1) don’t vote or 2) are persuaded by social media bots and vote MAGA. Living in a red state, I’m constantly discouraged by real voters who just keep voting their own economic suicide but are swayed by the culture wars. Our first step is to regain power in November. Then we must win in 2028 and make this a reality.~ LaurieRead the Article | See all CommentsGet the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news: My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

Do we stand on the edge of a grand new progressive era, with good wages for all, racial and gender equality and justice, and America joining the rest of the developed world with cheap college and healthcare paid for by rational taxes on the morbidly rich? Or will Trump gleefully overthrow American democracy, finish his ongoing project of shuttering or handing to his oligarch partners-in-crime our free press, and imprisoning more of us who object?When Mussolini put Antonio Gramsci, the founder of Italy’s Communist Party, in prison in 1927, Gramsci wrote from his prison cell that:“[T]he old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”That interregnum is passing right now here in America, the symptoms are obvious, and change is upon us.Two forces in American politics are similarly on a collision course today at two levels. Within the Democratic Party, it’s Clinton-era neoliberalism versus Bernie’s progressivism. In the overall political scene, it’s Trump’s and his captive GOP’s neofascism versus the entire spectrum of Democrats (both “corporate” and “progressive”) who, regardless of their differences, still embrace democracy.The problem corporate neoliberal Democrats, the heirs to Clintonism and Obamaism, face is that a majority of Americans are now clear that it simply doesn’t work. We’re sick of partial, corporate- and billionaire-aligned solutions to large problems that should best be handed by our government as part of the commons.— Trying to get affordable healthcare to all Americans via Obamacare, for example, is increasingly failing because the massive for-profit insurance industry it depended on is increasingly committed to squeezing every last penny out of us, regardless of how many of us die.— Trying to lift a majority of Americans back up into their parents’ middle class lifestyle is also failing, largely because the corporate wing of the Democrats dependent on campaign contributions from giant union-hating corporations have “mysteriously” failed in their proclaimed effort to increase unionization and the minimum wage.— Trying to give all Americans access to a college education without debt has failed because a large handful of big-bank-funded Democrats supported Bush’s bankruptcy “reform” in 2005 that outlawed using bankruptcy to discharge student debt. When Reagan came into office, roughly 80 percent of the cost of college was covered by state and federal money and college endowments; today that’s only around 20 percent; returning to 80% (and, thus, affordable college) is now a big legislative lift when our tax code is so skewed toward billionaires and massive corporations that the money for college is largely gone.Forty-five years of the Reagan Revolution being maintained by both parties have pretty much proven that neoliberal Democratic policies won’t be enough to either stop Trump’s full-on push to convert America into a fascist state, nor will they address the very real problems most Americans are experiencing today when it comes to being able to afford everything from rent to groceries to healthcare.Today’s generation of progressive Democrats, therefore, are taking a page from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and proposing genuinely big solutions to the massive problems that Democratic neoliberalism and Republican neofascism have produced. And they’re winning!This week’s primary results are just the latest indication that a progressive renaissance on par with the New Deal, or at least the Great Society, may be close to our doorstep.While media pundits seem baffled, it’s obvious to most of the rest of us that this is being driven by our middle class collapsing from two-thirds of us when Reagan took office in 1981 to around 41 percent of us today (and now it takes two paychecks to get there, whereas a family could be safe with a single wage-earner in 1981). Fully 60% of Americans now live paycheck-to-paycheck with virtually no savings, numbers we haven’t seen since the 1930s.— Five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have given billionaires and massive corporations virtual control over our elections as their corrupt Citizens United decision has allowed literally billions in dark money to flood every cycle.— Our privatized, profitized healthcare system, including the Medicare Advantage Scam, accounts (according to a recent study by Yale) for over 114,000 unnecessary American deaths every year and untold misery and loss of worker productivity.— While racist Republicans complain that we don’t have enough white babies, young people with college debt can’t afford to buy a house, marry, raise a family, or even start a small business.— Meanwhile, the top 1% own more wealth than the bottom 93% and one Nazi-saluting trillionaire racist owns more wealth than the entire bottom 50% of Americans, 174 million people.Our system has been rigged by 45 years of Reagan’s and Clinton’s neoliberalism, as I document in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and The Hidden History of the American Dream, and a clear majority of Americans have finally figured it out.Inequality has never, ever before been this bad in America, going all the way back to the 1700s. So, no surprise, Democrats who offer real solutions are winning primaries across the country and are poised to make huge electoral gains this fall, unless Trump and his shock troops succeed in pulling off the coup they’re clearly trying to make happen.While corporate Democrats and Republicans decry “radical,” “far left” and “democratic socialist” candidates (and a desperate Trump is calling them “communists”), opinion polling is explaining the election outcomes that are befuddling op-ed columnists and “middle of the road” candidates.— American voters tell pollsters they believe it’s obscene that one man (Musk) could have spent $290 million to make Trump president and that roughly one out of every six dollars spent in the 2024 election ($2.6 billion) came from just 100 billionaire families, virtually all of it funding GOP candidates. They want Citizens United overturned and a return to strict campaign finance limits.— They want healthcare that everybody has access to and everybody can afford, and the only option on the table for that is what most other advanced democracies in the world have: Medicare for All or its equivalent. Fully 90% of Democrats and 66% of all Americans want it, and want it now. We also need to take on drug prices, a battle that pharma-funded corporate Democrats and Republicans have fought against for decades.The solution to the high prices for everything isn’t just breaking up monopolies to bring back competition and small businesses (although that’s important); it also requires people to earn enough to live.Only 6% of the private workforce has a union representing them (it was a third of us before Reagan and the GOP declared war on unions in 1981) and the minimum wage FDR gave us as part of his New Deal is stuck at $7.25/hour when if it’d been inflation adjusted since the 1960s it’d be well over $15.A large part of the challenge average Americans face is because of the so-called K-shaped economy; the top is wide with a handful of billionaires controlling over half our wealth and the bottom is wide because of the impoverishment of our once-thriving middle class. The answer here is simple: return to the corporate and personal income tax rates from 1933-1981 that built the middle class and prevented the emergence of American oligarchs.Meanwhile, climate change is literally killing us and it’s beyond obscene that Trump and his Republican toadies lie about it with a straight face just to keep the fossil fuel industry money flowing into their pockets. Trump’s war on green energy is crippling our ability to grow industry, adding to home electric bills, and jacking up emissions, all because the industry’s fatcats took his deal and gave him millions to get elected.Foreign wars haven’t helped us either, with the Afghanistan and Iraq wars Bush and Cheney lied us into having cost around $8 trillion (and thousands of American lives); Trump’s newest illegal war with Iran is costing us a billion a day and crippling our ability to hold off Russia’s and China’s expansionist desires.Every single one of these issues are on the progressive agenda, whether you call it that or “democratic socialism” or just point out that it aligns with traditional Democratic Party traditions prior to the Clinton presidency.Every 80 years, it seems, we end up with a new progressive revolution, and we’re overdue for this generation’s. Progressive Democrats are leading the way, but none of it will work unless we all engage.Double-check your voter registration, throw a few dollars to your favorite candidates (ONLY use their campaign websites; never reply to a text message or email), and show up at your local Democratic Party to volunteer to help out.And share genuinely progressive and educational media — including this newsletter — with everybody you know. Organized people can overcome organized money as we saw with Angie Nixon’s primary victory in Florida and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s in Michigan.We can do this. Tag, we’re it!Louise’s Daily Song: “The New Deal Rising” The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Comments on Wednesday’s Daily Take:Grabbing Them by the Pussy: Trump Continues His Fifty-Year War on WomenHow I wish that Kristin Holmes had fired back loudly so everyone in the room could hear, “Well, will Ivanka and Tiffany eventually be sickened and embarrassed by having a father who is so callous and Vindictive?!” She could still do it in a tweet. What’s good for the goose...~ Jan FeelerTrump actually has an inferiority complex, and thus requires adulation, deference and obedience. and women who rebuff him, who confront him, they are the his biggest threat.The hell for Trump would be circled by women, laughing at him, rebuking him, ridiculing him, especially the size of his little mushroom penis.~ William FarrarRead the Article | See all CommentsGet the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news: My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

Yesterday, the guy Donald Trump had earlier endorsed for the House of Representatives who’d been accused of sexual crimes lost his Republican primary election. But the day before was even worse.Monday was a rough day for Trump’s ongoing lifelong war against women who dare stand up to him. In the morning, the Supreme Court told him for the second time to take a hike on his appeal of a jury’s finding that he’d raped E. Jean Carroll and had to pay her a bit over $5 million.In the afternoon, he reprised his disgusting and condescending slams on women, this time against CNN’s Kristen Holmes, calling her a “fake reporter,” saying she was “loud” and “boisterous” when she dared ask him why he’d ordered the military to scale back our exercises with our longtime ally South Korea in deference to the tender feelings of his dear friend Dictator Kim Jong Un.And then, amazingly, it got even uglier when his staff followed up and went after Holmes’ children. The official Rapid Response called her a “humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession” and spit out the following genuinely disgusting venom because she dared ask about Trump sucking up to the North Korean dictator:“Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”Her employer, CNN, responded with quiet dignity, pointing out that she’s one of the most respected journalists covering the White House and that she’d simply done her job by asking a tough, relevant question.Trump seems to have had a problem with women his entire life. He claimed that his personal Vietnam-era challenge wasn’t getting shot at in a foreign jungle but avoiding STDs from his much-publicized promiscuity. He cheated on each of this three wives, the last including having unprotected sex with (and paying off for their silence) both a porn star and a Playboy bunny.He particularly seems to prefer women who are immigrants from poverty-stricken countries, presumably because they’re more desperate and easy to control; the only American he married he was basically forced into because he got her pregnant while he was married to Ivana, his first wife, and then dumped her after starting an affair with Melania, who retains her Slovenian citizenship and has passed it along to their son.And it goes way beyond his personal life. Nine months ago he attacked Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey on Air Force One, snapping “Quiet. Quiet piggy” at her because she’d asked if there was anything serious about him in the Epstein files. Just a few days later it was ABC’s Mary Bruce’s turn to be verbally slapped around when she asked about the murder of Washington Post’s reporter Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia’s MBS, who’d given billions to Trump’s son-in-law.As the Society of Professional Journalists noted at the time, these weren’t isolated incidents but reflected a consistent and long-term pattern of Trump’s hostility against women. His press secretary tried to paper it over by claiming that Trump was “just being frank,” and claiming that his condescending, insulting language was why people elected him.Sadly, that observation is probably right-on-the-mark. Trump’s MAGA followers are notorious for their misogyny and bad manners, from “rolling coal” to “f**k your feelings” tee shirts to laughing at his jokes at the expense of women like Kamala Harris.His hot mic moment with Billy Bush is probably the most revealing self-portrait any American politician has ever given the electorate:“I moved on her, actually. You know she was down on Palm Beach. … I moved on her and I failed. I’ll admit it. I did try and f**k her. She was married. … And I moved on her very heavily in fact. I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said ‘I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.’ I took her out furniture. I moved on her like a b***h, but I couldn’t get there, and she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big, phony tits and everything. …[he sees the attractive young woman who is meeting their bus]“I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful - I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”And MAGA’s reaction to Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women? A giant shrug. Or perhaps, for many of the men in his base, envy. In addition to his name appearing in the Epstein files more often than anybody other than Epstein himself, including multiple FBI interviews alleging he’d raped a 14-year-old and beat up a 15-year-old for biting him when he forced her to give him a b*****b, at least 27 women have publicly accused him of sexual misconduct going all the way back to the 1970s.Jessica Leeds says he groped her on a commercial jet flight, Kristin Anderson testified that he thrust his hand up under her skirt in a nightclub, Jill Harth said he did the same thing at a business dinner with her boyfriend sitting right beside her, and Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos said he tried to force himself on her in a bungalow in Beverly Hills. For Stacy Williams it was a Trump groping at Trump Tower as Jeffrey Epstein watched, smiling, and his first wife, Ivana, described a night in 1989 when the hair replacement surgeon she’d recommended didn’t work out right so he tore out fistfuls of her hair and raped her (she later recanted).He went on Howard Stern’s radio program and bragged that when he owned the Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants he’d walk into their dressing rooms while they were naked so he could “inspect” them, proudly adding that he gets away with that sort of thing all the time. Former contestants agreed, saying he’d ogled them on multiple occasions. Buzzfeed found four women from the 1997 Miss Teen USA pageant he also owned who claimed he’d walked in on them naked, too, when some of them were only 15.And let’s not forget the anonymous plaintiff who called herself Katie Johnson who said in sworn testimony in a lawsuit that both Trump and Jeffrey Epstein repeatedly raped her at Epstein’s mansion when she was 13 and hoping to become a model. Her lawyer, Lisa Bloom, said she’d been essentially forced to drop the suit because she was terrified by multiple death threats, and it seems she’s been in hiding ever since.And then there’s the Epstein birthday book that the Wall Street Journal discovered and publicized, which not only discussed Trump and Epstein sharing a “wonderful secret” but also included a page from a Mar-a-Lago member who joked about selling Trump a “fully depreciated” woman for $22,500.When I was watching Trump attack CNN’s Kristin Holmes, the look on his face and the ferocity of his words, I was reminded of his brilliant niece, psychologist Mary Trump, telling me on my program about how his father Fred was a high-functioning sociopath, a story she also told in her bestselling book Too Much and Never Enough. I could easily imagine Fred talking the same way to a 7-year-old Donald before he sent him off to a military academy to get him out of his hair.While we don’t know Fred’s opinion of women (other than that his father made his first fortune running a brothel), we do know he was arrested in 1927 at a Klan rally in Queens, and 46 years later the Justice Department charged him and Donald with refusing to rent their apartments to Black people.Apparently, the lesson young Donald learned in that house was that empathy is a defect leading to weakness, contempt is a way of showing strength, and there’s nothing in the world worse than being a “loser.” Such men typically view women as objects to own rather than human beings, and Donald certainly seems to be acting that out on an astonishingly regular basis.So, it should be no surprise that he’d put three people on the Supreme Court who’d end women’s constitutional right to control over their own bodies; women have been dying in ER’s ever since, and now MAGA-type woman-hating and abusive men are using everything from abortion bounty laws to Flock cameras to stalk and control the women they think they own.The most alarming part of all this is that Donald Trump still has 92% support among Republicans who identify themselves as MAGAts, although that cohort of the GOP has fallen to around 60% of the party’s voters.Dictators are famous for their obsessions with masculinity, and we’re seeing that in spades among Trump and his lickspittles. He tweets pictures of himself as a superhero or a manly-man virtually every day, all while Whiskey Pete Hegseth proposes shooting up our troops with testosterone like he and Bob Kennedy do.The Tate brothers — who face rape, human-trafficking, and other criminal allegations around the abuse of women — are in tight with members of the Trump family. Justin Waller, a Tate associate, said Andrew Tate has even been giving young Barron “dating advice.”Whether this is blowback against the Me Too movement or Trump has simply succeeded in bringing the rapists, rape fans, and misogynists out of the woodwork is hard to know, but the damage the role model of this man and his family are doing to a generation of American boys and young men coming up will probably be inestimable.And where are the few Republicans left who find this a horror show? If they haven’t already joined the Lincoln Project or similar recovering-Republican groups, they appear to be hiding, hoping it’ll all go away soon.Sadly, it won’t. It’s going to take a generation to clean up America from the damage this sick man has done and is doing.Louise’s Daily Song: “Grab Them By The Pussy” Comments on Tuesday’s Daily Take:Trump Drops “Good Genetics” Bomb and Reopens a Dark Chapter in American HistoryThe Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould is a good book that describes how we cherry pick or manufacture data to support our hypotheses~ Burton RaabeYes, we are still a racist, sexist, misogynistic country or at least 33% is. Why women or members of minority groups continue to support these politicians is just frustrating and will lead to a financial/market downfall as greed and incompetence seem to be part of this too. I feel like the Dems are bringing a knife to a gun fight ( and don’t get me started on the stupidity of Biden’s inner circle and Merrick Garland). Maybe Jon Ossoff will be the new Obama.~ Mitch MoncriefRead the Article | See all CommentsGet the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news: My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

Yesterday at the White House, Trump held a photo op with a 16-year-old lifeguard, Ryder Williams, who’d pulled a drowning ten-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 boy’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 forty 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 that 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, that, 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 their 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. Louise’s Daily Song: “Trump Drops ‘Good Genes’ Bomb” Comments on Monday’s Daily Take:Republicans Rigged America’s Debt: Now We’re Paying the Billionaires ForeverNotice that during World War II, the war debt was paid by higher taxes on the rich at 90%. Now, when Trump asks for $1.5 trillion for the war in Iran, there is no mention that it should be paid for by raising the income tax rate on the Rich back to 90%.~ Jan D. Weir“Have you noticed how little news coverage our record national debt — and last month our hitting the largest budget deficit in American history — has gotten in the corporate press? That’s in part because Democrats have failed miserably at any effort to educate people — or generate outrage — about this scam.” We really need to ask why that is the case. We can justifiably suspect that corruption isn’t the sole province of our fascists.Tom HalsteadRead the Article | See all CommentsGet the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news: My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

There’s a reason everything is getting so expensive and inflation seems intractable, and it goes way beyond just Trump’s stupid war-of-choice in Iran. It explains why the morbidly rich keep getting richer while the rest of America struggles, and why people are paying absurd interest rates on everything from credit cards to home mortgages to car loans, and it all rolls back to a wild conspiracy Republicans hatched in the late 1970s and Reagan put into place in 1981.It starts with — thanks to three mind-bogglingly corrupt and illegitimate Republican presidents (Reagan, W. Bush, and Trump) — our national debt rolling past $40 trillion in the next few days, probably before Labor Day. That’s more than our entire nation’s total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — the sum of all goods and services produced in the last year, which came in just a whisker over $32 trillion.And we’re paying over a trillion dollars a year on that debt that was intentionally run up by those 3 Republican presidents and their buddies in Congress, which is a large part of why we’re the only developed country in the world where families can go bankrupt because somebody got sick and kids graduate from college with debt that will take them decades (if ever) to pay off.As if to shove it in our faces, last week Trump proposed a new cut in the capital gains tax that is pretty much exclusively paid by rich people who, instead of earning a paycheck that’s subject to a top 37%, today already only pay a top 20% tax on the money they make with their investments. To add insult to injury he just raised taxes on working class people’s wages by an average of $900 this year via the GOP’s Big Beautiful Bill that passed without a single Democratic vote.I remember when Reagan was cutting taxes and spending like a drunken sailor back in the 1980s (he and Bush Sr. after him tripled our nation’s debt) and I was constantly telling people:“Give me a $2 trillion credit card and I’ll show you what it’s like to live large, too.” But for some reason Democrats never picked up on the message that the GOP’s “fiscal conservatism” was a fraud, and generally still haven’t. That has to change.Trump, Mike Johnson, and John Thune are borrowing money at a rate that would’ve made Reagan blush. They added $1.8 trillion to our national debt in just the first ten months of this fiscal year (which started last October 1st) and we’ve paid interest on that debt to the tune of $1.17 trillion just so far this fiscal year, up 15 percent because all this debt is driving up bond yields.After all, when Reagan came into office our national debt was just a bit over $800 billion ($0.8 trillion) and when it was on the verge of hitting a trillion dollars he disingenuously told a joint session of Congress:“Our national debt is approaching $1 trillion. A few weeks ago I called such a figure, a trillion dollars, incomprehensible, and I’ve been trying ever since to think of a way to illustrate how big a trillion really is. And the best I could come up with is that if you had a stack of thousand-dollar bills in your hand only 4 inches high, you’d be a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of thousand-dollar bills 67 miles high.”Prior to Reagan’s presidency, we’d been steadily paying down our 106-percent-of-GDP debt from World War II; by the time he came into office in 1981, Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter (and their Congresses) had paid it down to a mere 31% of GDP. And while we were paying down that debt, we also built the interstate highway system, put into place free college and cheap mortgages for millions with the GI Bill, created Medicare and Medicaid, built thousands of new schools and hundreds of new hospitals, and sent men to the moon.We were able to do all that because during that entire New Deal era, right up until Reagan took office, the top marginal income tax rate on morbidly rich money hoarders ran between 70 and 91 percent.One could get rich, but it was nearly impossible to become an oligarch like today.Then Reagan took office and decided to follow Jude Wanniski’s advice to the letter, and everything changed. I’ve written about Jude’s “Two Santas” strategy often enough that regular readers can probably recite it in their sleep, but in essence it was: “Cut taxes on the rich and spend like a drunken sailor when a Republican is in the White House, and then scream about the national debt and demand cuts to social programs when a Democrat comes into office.”Reagan and Bush Sr. took our national debt from under $1 trillion and jacked it all the way up to $4.4 trillion in a mere 12 years. If you add up the impact of Reagan’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires and corporations, and add in the $8 trillion from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that GW Bush lied us into, it pretty much equals our entire ~$40 trillion national debt today. Jude was right, and his proposed scheme worked: because three corrupt Republican presidents have embraced his strategy, our national debt is now at 123% of GDP. And now Trump wants to give the Pentagon another $1.5 trillion next year, an explosion of “defense” spending that will re-stimulate the economy and add to our debt, crushing families as it spikes interest and inflation. Not to mention the billions he’s demanding from Congress right now to cover the costs of his and Bibi’s stupid war against Iran.And here’s where the story gets wild with a point that probably 95 out of 100 Americans don’t realize: that trillion-plus dollars we pay every year for interest on our national debt doesn’t just vanish or fly into outer space; most of it goes straight into the pockets and money bins of the morbidly rich.What a scam!Forty-five years of Reaganomics have converted what were once the tax bills for the morbidly rich into a source of extremely safe revenue for them, since they’re among the largest holders of US Treasuries. And we’re paying the bill to shovel all that interest money into their money bins. Money that flowed from the rich into the Treasury between the 1930s and 1980s as taxes now flows from the Treasury into the pockets of the extremely rich every quarter as interest payments, and it’s paid for by working people with their paychecks. We spend more making interest payments to rich people every year than we do on Defense or Medicare, and almost as much as we spend every year on Social Security; interest on the national debt is the second largest line-item in the entire national budget.And if that isn’t enough of a slap in the face, Todd Blanche signed an order saying the IRS is forever barred from examining Trump’s prior tax returns or those of his family. And the “anti-weaponization fund” was just a ruse; they’re now paying Trump’s buddies who committed crimes and were prosecuted for it out of existing Treasury funds. They never needed that fund. But Trump sure did want his ~$100 million tax bill that the IRS has been trying to collect for almost two decades wiped out. And now it is.That’s right, Todd Blanche handed Donald Trump ~$100 million of our tax dollars last week, and almost nobody in the media or Democratic leadership is even discussing it.The national debt itself isn’t the bomb we need to worry about; Japan’s is 237 percent of GDP (compared with our 121 percent) and they have universal healthcare, bullet trains that run on time, a life expectancy of 84 (ours is 79), and virtually no homelessness. What’s important is what we’ve bought with all those trillions we threw into our debt over the past 45 years.When Reagan was president and our press was falling all over itself to congratulate him on being an economic genius as he juiced our economy with deficit spending, Louise and I and our three kids lived in Germany. I still remember the first time one of our children was injured and we took her to the doctor’s office where they refused to let me pay for anything. There was no bill, no co-pay, no deductible, nothing.In the 1990s I was giving a speech at King’s College in London and we were staying at the home of the conference’s organizers. Our youngest was homeschooling then and thus traveling with us, and she came down with a pretty severe ear infection. The doctor drove over to their home at 10 at night, saw and diagnosed her, gave us a bottle of Amoxicillin, and refused to take a penny.Both countries were carrying huge debt loads themselves at that time, in part a hangover from WWII (Germany was around 60% of GDP and the UK was around 40%) but both spent their money on their people instead of tax cuts for the rich followed by interest payments to those same wealthy people.We, on the other hand, spent $40 trillion and got a billionaire class that’s now seized control of much of our media and political system.We Americans have already paid for universal healthcare and free college multiple times over in the years since Reagan began this GOP scam; we just never received them.Republicans think of our national debt as a giant wall they’ve erected around the New Deal and Great Society programs, a wall that’s been steadily squeezing us ever since Reagan declared war on working class people and unions in the 1980s. A wall that will keep out Medicare for All and free college.Have you noticed how little news coverage our record national debt — and last month our hitting the largest budget deficit in American history — has gotten in the corporate press? That’s in part because Democrats have failed miserably at any effort to educate people — or generate outrage — about this scam.And that has to change.I’m not suggesting that Democrats start behaving like how Republicans turn into “deficit hawks” every time a Democrat is in the White House. Instead, they need to be pointing out how Republicans have — for 45 years — forced working class people to pay the morbidly rich’s interest on the Treasuries they’re holding instead of making America a better place for average families like every other advanced democracy in the world has done.When Republicans loudly and self-righteously proclaim that America can’t afford Medicare for All or tuition-free college, we all need to be clear about what they’re really saying. They’re telling us that they’ve already spent that money, on themselves and their rich buddies, and stuck you and me with the debt and the interest payments.We can step into that information void created by our captured media and flaccid Democratic messaging. Tell everybody you know how this has screwed most of us, while making Musk, Ellison, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and their billionaire class richer than any pharaoh or king in world history. And demand that our candidates promise to raise taxes on the morbidly rich and corporations back up to reasonable levels while funding modern social programs like everybody else has.After all, we paid down most of our national debt once before following the most expensive war in world history, and we did it while building the world’s first more-than-half-of-us middle class because we taxed great wealth at rates requiring the morbidly rich to contribute to society like the rest of us. It worked then and it will work now, if we can just squeeze the political and moral courage out of our elected representatives.Democrats have a story to tell here that’s both true and devastating, but it appears that they’ll only tell it to America if we all make enough noise.If this piece helped you see the last 45 years a little more clearly, please share it with someone who still believes Republicans are good with money. Subscribing to and supporting the Hartmann Report keeps this kind of reporting free for everyone who needs it.Louise’s Daily Song: “Republicans Rigged America’s Debt”The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Comments on the Saturday Report:Saturday Report 8/15/26 — Trump Shocks 5,000 Sailors With Remark About Their Nine-Month Deployment…The AI information is very worrisome, but would laws by Congress or any other nation really begin to control its development? Sure, new rules might help guide things, but North Korea certainly is not going to stop doing...whatever it is doing with this. And for that matter people sitting in figurative basements all over the world will continue to play with these programs.~ docrwh WeilRepublicans aren’t republican; they oppose the very idea of a nation of laws and rights that apply equally to everyone. Nor are they conservatives, since they don’t believe in nature conservation or respecting the sacrifices that our military personnel make. They are reflexive and compulsive anti-liberals; whatever liberals are for, they are against, and with a bitter vengeance.~ Jeffrey HobbsRead the Article | See all CommentsGet the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news: My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe