Thom Hartmann

Watch this incredible short video that filmmaker David Ambrose (who has a great Substack newsletter) just produced about the crisis of corporate personhood and how we got here. It mentions my new book Who Killed The American Dream as well, and is an incredible bit of film-making crunched into a tight 11 minutes that you’ll want to share with others.

— Trump just banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, because apparently the First Amendment now needs his signature to be valid. Yesterday afternoon, the man who refused to put his hand on the Bible when he swore an oath to uphold the Constitution just announced on his Nazi-infested failing social media site that those three news outlets will no longer be allowed into the White House Press Room. He added that, “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.” Back in his first term, he tried this by banning CNN’s Jim Acosta but a federal judge ordered Acosta’s press pass restored. So far this term courts have stopped him fully 75 times from violating the First Amendment’s provisions about a free press, something both Trump and his mentor and owner Putin hate and do everything they can to destroy. This ban came the same day our news media caught Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon lying to America about how many soldiers we’ve lost in Israel’s and Trump’s stupid war against Iran and CNN revealed that we almost got into a shooting war with China because an AI program hallucinated. Every news agency still allowed into the White House Press Room now must make a decision: do they defy the anti-American autocrat or roll over and pretend this is just the new normal? Stay tuned…

— More American soldiers have died in Trump’s Iran war than Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is willing to admit. Six different officials close to Pentagon casualty numbers tell The Washington Post that at least 22 service members have been killed by Iran with Russian targeting help, rather than the dozen dead that this administration acknowledges. This is the second time Whiskey Pete and his slobbering, testosterone-amped sycophants in the so-called “War Department” have been busted lying to us about casualty figures to make Trump and his stupid, illegal, criminal war look good. Back in July it was The New York Times that discovered Whiskey Pete had quietly dropped the casualty numbers from 18 to 14, claiming that the other four died during a Trump-declared “cease fire” and therefore weren’t “wartime casualties.” The Pentagon tried to bu****it the press and military families, who deserve an honest count. Congress has subpoena power and oversight responsibilities here: they damn well better use them.

— Armed federal agents at polling places is a felony crime and has been for more than a century, but Trump’s people keep floating it. Our laws that make it a federal felony to place any armed person in or near any polling place date back to the end of the Civil War, so yesterday Democracy Forward filed suit in federal court arguing...read more at

Saturday Report 9/19/26 — Who Stole the American Dream... The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion

Kennedy Center: Will Trump get away with 'if I can't have it, then no one gets it?" and does that apply to America too? Think about it...Will he blow up America just like the Kennedy Center - if we don't worship him?

Topics Today...
Hour 1…

-- Did Trump Just Make an Offer That Could Land His Lickspittles in Prison?

-- Trump Says ‘Big Decision’ Coming on Whether to ‘Annihilate’ Iran - This is nuts!

-- Will Trump get away with ‘if I can’t have it, then no one gets it?” and does that apply to America too? Think about it...

Hour 2…

-- Defiant GOP official in deep red state ‘under investigation’ by seething DOJ - all over the voter rolls....

-- No more book bans? How Florida students are pushing rightwingers out of school boards

-- Is the Blue Wave coming?

Hour 3…

-- Putin planning ‘rocket and drone strikes against Nato countries’ - Does trump care? Do Republicans?

-- Will Universal Studios, Owned by Comcast, Decide to Withhold Elon Musk Documentary?

-- Trump orders BLM to find public land for data centers...Say What?!

Coming Up Today Friday, September 18, 2026 Will Trump get away with ‘if I can’t have it, then no one gets it?” and does that apply to America too? Think about it...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Louise’s Daily Song: “The $5,000 Promise”
https://hartmannreport.com/p/did-trump-just-make-an-offer-that-2f2

Did Trump Just Make an Offer That Could Land His Lickspittles in Prison? Give Republicans Congress and Trump promises you $5,000. That extraordinary bargain raises a question America confronted nearly 90 years ago: how far can government power reach into the voting booth?

News Headlines, Thursday - PM Edition:

- Is the red wall cracking?
- Georgia slips
- A GOP congresswoman defies Trump
- Oklahoma mothers sue- A judge confronts Trump
- Senators back free speech
- Tradwives spook the FBI

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This is twisted! Trump told North Carolinians that he’ll withhold FEMA funding needed for hurricane relief unless the candidate he endorsed wins the midterms. Say What?!

Hour 1…

-- America Lost Trust in Its Government. Now Comes the Dangerous Part.

-- This is twisted! Trump told North Carolinians that he’ll withhold FEMA funding needed for hurricane relief unless the candidate he endorsed wins the midterms. Say What?!

-- A terrified and again TWISTED Trump threatens Canada and the EU

Hour 2…

-- Phil Ittner - Ukraine update

-- Will Trump impose sanctions on Russia, or is he more loyal to Putin than Lindsey Graham?

-- September’s book for Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers’ Book Club - Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887. The Book That Launched a Movement - Part 1 & 2

Hour 3…

-- Greg Palast - The Gestapo Meme That Became a Trump Executive Order - Are you on the citizenship list that doesn’t exist?

-- What would Abraham Lincoln say about Mike Johnson and Donald Trump trying to rig 2026?

-- Trump and Rubio allies are vying for control of Cuba’s assets if regime falls - Surprise! There are assets to loot…

Coming Up Today Thursday, September 17, 2026 This is twisted! Trump told North Carolinians that he’ll withhold FEMA funding needed for hurricane relief unless the candidate he endorsed wins the midterms. Say What?!

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

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

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

This follows Trump, last week, lying through his teeth on, saying that the Iranians had inflicted “no damage” and “no nothing” on US facilities and troops, 18 of whom are now dead with hundreds more hospitalized.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, that’s not the way this works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Louise’s Daily Song: “No More Looking Away”
https://hartmannreport.com/p/america-lost-trust-in-its-government-341

America Lost Trust in Its Government. Now Comes the Dangerous Part. With 89 percent saying corruption is widespread, history shows what can follow when citizens stop believing their institutions will hold criminals and the powerful accountable…