Author: Thom Hartmann

Donald Trump is a confidence man, a charlatan, an unrepentant liar whose deceits have cost at least a half-million Americans their lives. When Dustin Thompson was hauled before U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton for assaulting the Capitol police on January 6th, his defense lawyer, Samuel Shamansky, argued about Trump: “You had, frankly, a gangster who was in power. The vulnerable are seduced by the strong. That’s what happened.” The jury didn’t buy the argument and sent Thompson to prison, as US District Judge Reggie Walton, who was overseeing the case, said: “I think our democracy is in trouble because, unfortunately, we have...

When MAGA Mike Johnson gave his first press conference as House Speaker, it was obvious that billionaires picked the right guy. His performance was flawless. Slick, slimy, and unctuous. For example, even though every dollar the IRS spends auditing billionaires produces between $6 and $12 in added tax revenue to our government, Johnson insisted with a straight face that we need to cut over $14 billion from the IRS’ budget to “fully pay for” a package of military aid to Israel. No reporter — as is so often the case when interviewing Republicans — was willing to point out...

Jerusalem-based reporter Isabel Kershner recently wrote about the horrors since the October 7 attack and the worries Israelis have for how the ongoing war against Hamas may go. “All this is happening,” she noted in the article’s third paragraph, “amid a total breakdown of trust between the citizens and the state of Israel, and a collapse of everything Israelis believed in and relied on.” She then quoted a Tel Aviv author, Dorit Rabinyan, who spoke of the sobering reality Israelis are facing because they had chosen Benjamin Netanyahu as their prime minister: “We have woken to a terrible sobriety about whose hands...

On October 7, Hamas launched a brutal, horrific attack against civilians in Israel. While there is a very real history that has led up to this, there is no justification for it. Even in a state of war, civilians must be protected. This horror raises a couple of important questions. First, did Hamas somehow get inside information about Israel’s defenses that helped them pull this off? Second, how might this play out, how might it be resolved, and how can America and the world avoid the mistakes from previous but similar situations? Pondering these questions on October 7, I...

Kevin McCarthy is humiliated, the first Speaker in history to have been thrown out of his office by his own party or any political party, and the House has been thrown into chaos. By Matt Gaetz, a bizarre congressman under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for sex trafficking minor girls in Florida. Putin, Xi, and MBS are loving this, as it freezes America’s ability to defend our democratic ally Ukraine, further destabilizing the international order and providing China with a model for their hoped-for attack on Taiwan. And because Putin is loving it, Trump mandated it to his...