Thom Hartmann
Stories by Thom Hartmann
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For Decades, Americans Learned the Treasonous Truth After the Votes Were Counted. This Time Is Different.
Republicans have gotten away with it four times now, in a big way. Each time it was because Democrats didn’t realize — until it was too late — the crimes the GOP was willing to perpetrate just to seize and hold power. This time, for the first time since 1968, it may be different. In…
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What Desperate Regimes Do Before They Fall
Donald Trump is already telling us he’s going to try to steal the 2026 election, and the fact that he’s saying it now, months in advance, is the whole tell. Back in February he stood up and declared that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” floated taking over the vote in fifteen states his party…
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Rule #1 in the Dictator’s Playbook: Crush One to Warn a Thousand
Earlier this week, a Cable TV host did an extended rant about how many cases Trump has lost in court, arguing that “these guys are really bad at what they do” or words to that effect. I beg to differ: they know exactly what they’re doing, and getting convictions to imprison protesters isn’t (yet —…
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History Will Call Them Monsters: The Politicians Who Cage Children and Called It Patriotism
These people are monsters. Louise and I know what child abuse can do to children. In our late 20s, back in 1978, we started a residential treatment facility for severely abused children and ran it for five years. Louise’s first intake was a girl who was the daughter of her sister by her father; he’d…
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Are Today’s “Evil, Heartless Bastards” Rebuilding the Confederacy?
Yesterday, Louise and I drove home from a ham radio convention in Seaside, Oregon and on the roughly 2-hour drive listened to rightwing radio. It was like stepping into a time machine tuned to the 1860s. One host was pounding on how “our tax dollars” are being used to support “those dirty Somalis” in Minnesota…
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Trump’s Masked Goons are a Criminal’s Dream
It was January 20, 2025, the day Donald Trump returned to the White House promising the largest mass deportation operation in American history, when a hooded man kicked down the bedroom door of a Mexican immigrant in Greensboro, North Carolina, shouting “ICE! ICE!” The man raised his hands. He thought he was being arrested. Instead,…
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Why America is Falling Apart
America seems to be failing, both at home and around the world. But why? David French published a thoughtful op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times titled The Fire of Stupidity Can’t Be Contained, identifying many of the symptoms of our national decline and wondering out loud why this is happening now. His best guess is…
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America Just Expanded Voting Rights To Corporations. Yes, Really.
Corporations can now vote in Delaware. And they’re doing it. Seriously. Not dystopian science fiction or a new novel by an AI version of George Orwell. Actual corporations — what America’s first Supreme Court Justice, John Marshall, in 1819 called “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law” — are today…
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Trump’s Next Big Lie: Declaring Victory in Iran While America Loses
The war Donald Trump started with Iran in February is now collapsing, slowly and predictably, into the same theater of fraud he’s run his entire life. So get ready for the next Big Lie: it’s coming as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning. Three months in, his bombing campaign has done less damage…
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America’s Deadliest Con: How Racism Keeps Millions Sick While Helping Healthcare Billionaires Cash In
America has 51 billionaires who made their money from our profit-driven healthcare system, the only one in the developed world. It’s not only obscene that they’re taking so much money from so many of us who have so little; it’s also killing all of us. We’re among the worst — and most expensive — healthcare…
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Republicans Found $1.8 Billion Overnight for Trump’s Thugs — So Why Are Seniors Choosing Between Food and Medicine?
Over at her Substack, the cartoonist and writer Aubrey Hirsch took a look at Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded “anti-weaponization” slush-fund and did something that should make every Republican in Washington squirm. She started doing the math. What if, she asked, we put that money toward something other than enriching Trump, his family, and the…
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Jeff Bezos’ Tax Scam: Why Billionaires Want Their Workers to Stop Paying Taxes
The fourth richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, told CNBC yesterday that he doesn’t think people making $70,000 a year should pay a penny in income taxes. For him, that’s a threefer. First, it gets millions of Americans on the “we shouldn’t ever pay any income taxes at all” train that’s been rolling for…
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“People Have Got to Know Whether or Not Their President Is a Crook…”
In November of 1973, with Watergate closing in around him and his approval rating in free fall, Richard Nixon stood in front of four hundred newspaper editors at Disney World in Orlando and said something that, whatever else you think of the man, revealed an instinct that has gone entirely extinct in today’s Republican Party.…
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What Happens When a President Stops Obeying the Constitution?
Back when I was a kid in Lansing, Michigan, my father used to tell me that the difference between America and the places his Army buddies had fought through in Europe and Asia wasn’t the size of our buildings or the strength of our army. It was, he said, that here a cop couldn’t kick…
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What Happens If “They” Win?
The United States and the Republic of China (the official name for Taiwan) — one of the world’s most vibrant and functional democracies — have had a formal defense relationship since 1955. Last week, Donald Trump — who’s been withholding since last year two shipments totaling $25 billion worth of US military hardware Taiwan has…
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They’re Coming for Our Voter Rolls: Millions Could Vanish Before Election Day
We have shocking news this week from CNN: Trump is preparing to illegally purge tens of millions of Democratic voters from voter rolls nationally, just in time for the election. Just like Modi did to win overwhelmingly in India, following the GOP’s playbook. This follows John Roberts and Sam Alito blatantly using phony, cooked numbers…
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How Rightwing Billionaires Created a Faux Movement and Used It to Rob America Blind
For decades, many Democrats have suspected what’s now being confirmed in plain English by a Trump insider. Ashley St. Clair — the 27-year-old former Turning Point USA brand ambassador and mother of one of Elon’s 14 kids who built a million-follower platform on X and became one of MAGA’s most visible young women — has spent…
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Was the 2024 Election Stolen, Not by Ballots, but by Algorithms?
It sure looks like tech billionaires and foreign dictatorships gave us Trump in 2024. This is as bad as the massive Russian bot presence on Facebook and Twitter back in 2016 that Robert Mueller documented gave Trump the presidency the last time. A peer-reviewed study released yesterday in Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal,…
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They Blew Up the Debt, Stalled America’s Future, and Stuck You With the Bill. All to Enrich the Top 1% and Win Elections…
Republicans yesterday proposed an appropriations bill that will allocate a billion dollars to pay for Trump’s Golden Epstein Dance Hall (aka “Ballroom”). Every penny of it will be borrowed and we’ll be paying interest on that money for the rest of our lifetimes unless something dramatic changes. This year, America will spend over a trillion…
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Trump Is Making Khrushchev’s “We Will Bury You” Real for Putin. Why?
Nikita Khrushchev famously said “We will bury you” (“My vas pokhoronim”) to Western ambassadors in Moscow on November 18, 1956. Seventy years later, it appears that Russia’s goal is being realized. Putin called Trump last Wednesday and they talked for almost two hours; fewer than three days later, America announced we’re pulling 5,000 US troops…
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Maine Just Delivered a Brutal Wake-Up Call to Democrats. Will It Land?
(Today is the May 1st National Day of Action; I’ll be wearing a black armband on TV and millions will be skipping school, work, and shopping to protest Trump and his fascist policies…) Maine just handed Democrats a wake-up call that they’d damn well better actually listen to this time. Governor Janet Mills suspended her…
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Trump Is Trying to be King, and It’s Past Time to Stop Him!
Donald Trump isn’t just breaking norms, he’s running a live experiment on the limits of American power. Each move is a test: How far can a president go? What laws and how much of the Constitution can be ignored? And, most importantly, will anyone actually stop him? It took the King of England to remind…
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Why Haven’t Republicans Done Anything to Help Working People in Over 40 Years?
Gallup just found that only 10% of Americans approve of the job Republicans in Congress are doing, with 86% actively disapproving of the GOP’s behavior. Turns out, there’s a reason. Yesterday on my nationally syndicated radio/TV/SiriusXM/YouTube program a fellow called to ask how long I’d been running my contest. It started more than 20 years…
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From Surveillance State to Kill Machine: Has the Line Already Been Crossed?
Ever think a drone could chase you down the street or fire a bullet through your living room window because you pissed off Trump, Miller, or their ICE thugs? If the answer is “that’s science fiction,” please read on: that reality may be only a few months away, and every single part of the spying…
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The Strategy That Built America’s Middle Class Still Works, So Why Won’t Democrats Deploy It?
The “liberal” commentators are shocked. It was reported yesterday that Graham Platner, the Democrat who’ll most likely win the primary to run for the US Senate from Maine, has staked out some “truly radical” positions. The former Marine combat veteran and oyster farmer has called for: — Impeaching Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for the…
