Author: Thom Hartmann

Elon Musk is probably chuckling as Trump flails. The firestorm around the Epstein documents arguably started when he tweeted that Trump was in the files. Which has led to some significant changes in the Trump/media/politics/deep-state landscape that it is important to review. They include questions about the future of Trump, his cult followers, a possible power struggle between Trump and Murdoch, and JD Vance’s Presidential ambitions. To begin: if you want everything around the Epstein furor to make sense, all you have to understand is that Donald Trump has been leading a cult. Like Jim Jones did. Like Charles...

Former FBI agent Michael Fienberg has gone public, pointing out that the agency, under the leadership of Bongino and Patel, is purging itself of people who are not members of the Trump cult (my phrase, not his). Similar cult-like behavior is on vivid display with the White House press secretary, the head of DHS, and the head of the Department of Justice — among numerous other administration officials and elected Republicans — regularly spouting lies and half-truths that target women, immigrants, and Democrats. Marjorie Taylor Greene is implying that the children who died in the Texas floods were the...

A fascinating article in “The New York Times” by Kurt Gray, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, gives us the beginnings of an understanding of how and why social media is so destructive to society. Gray points out that most people assume humans have historically been predators, the metaphorical big cats of the jungle. In fact, Gray says, we’ve historically been prey, the victims of predators: “This picture of fearfulness is consistent with our understanding of human psychology. We’re hard-wired to detect threats quickly and to stay fixated on places where...

Progressives should not just be fighting the GOP, we should be learning from them. No, we should not be learning from their bizarro economics. We should not be discovering their selfish morality, misogyny, or racism, or selling ourselves out to the world’s richest man. But there is a vital lesson progressives must learn, which is how the far right took control of the Republican Party over a decade ago and forced the entire Conservative establishment to lurch so far to the Right that they have even dumped people like Liz Cheney and George W. Bush. If progressives hope to...

Trump is starting to lose big, from courtrooms, to the press increasingly calling him out, to millions of Americans showing up in the streets every few weeks. As anybody who has ever lived or worked in an autocratic state can tell you, a strongman or wannabe dictator is most dangerous when he’s on his back foot. Trump’s tariffs have put America on the verge of a serious inflationary recession, the Supreme Court and multiple lower courts have repeatedly ruled against him, his public approval polling is in the crapper, and even conservative publications and former Republican politicians (free from...

With almost no mention by our mainstream corporate press, Republicans in the House of Representatives are proposing to end all checks on the power of Donald Trump, effectively ending the American experiment of a democratic republic. It’s shockingly anti-American. Since the only branch of government standing against Trump right now is the courts, Republicans believe they’ve found a way to end that resistance. Here’s the backstory. The grand invention of our Founders, cribbed from the Iroquois Confederacy and following an outline Montesquieu suggested (based on his reading about Native Americans), was a three-branches-of-government system where each branch would act...