Author: Thom Hartmann

A fragile ego: When Trump’s mythos collapses it may drag fervent followers into his narcissistic downfall

In President Biden‘s speech on September 1, he spoke tough truths that had to be said out-loud. This country is under attack from within. And the attack is led by a madman. Donald Trump may be about to throw America into a crisis that could make January 6th look like a romp in the park. It has to do with something called “narcissistic collapse.” Trump is a classic extroverted, grandiose narcissist of such severity that numerous professionals in the psychology field have pointed out how he could easily be diagnosed as suffering severe Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Narcissists of...

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An autocratic realignment: What if Trump’s conspiracy plot went well beyond what the public knows?

There was, it increasingly appears, a conspiracy involving some in the most senior levels of the Trump administration to end American representative democracy and replace it with a strongman oligarchy along the lines of Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary. This would be followed, after the January 20th swearing-in of Trump for a second term, by a complete realignment of US foreign policy away from NATO and the EU and toward oligarchic, autocratic nations like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary. As the possibility of this traitorous plan becomes increasingly visible, the GOP, after a frantic two weeks of not...

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Statutory Corruption: When saving trillions of dollars and millions of American lives is not enough

Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Lindsey Graham had a debate on Fox Nation on June 13. Sanders asked: “In the United States, Lindsey, we spend twice as much per capita on health care compared to the people of any other country, while major countries like Canada, the U.K., Germany manage to supply health care to all their people. Why is that?” The simple answer is the same reason we have an ongoing climate crisis and a student loan crisis that Republicans refuse to let Congress address: the legal bribery of politicians like Lindsey Graham. How much money would it...

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A Political Cash Cow: How Big Business uses inflation to increase profits and derail democracy

“[T]he monopoly which our manufacturers have obtained against us … like an overgrown standing army, has become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature.” — Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776 There has lots of speculation about what may be causing today’s terrible inflation to continue to rise. Is it rebound demand from COVID? Too much “quantitative easing” stimulus from the Fed? Chinese botched-Covid supply chain issues? Saudi Arabia withholding oil from world markets? Russia’s terrorist campaign against Ukraine? Obviously, all are contributing factors. But the price of oil is now below $95 and...

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Reinventing Treason: When four illegitimate Republican presidents each abandon democracy

Dwight Eisenhower was arguably the last Republican president who believed in democracy, the rule of law, and that government should do what the people want. From 1960 to today a series of leaders within the Republican Party have abandoned the democracy that American soldiers fought the Revolutionary War to secure, the Civil War to defend here at home, and World War II in Europe and the Pacific to defend around the world. This has brought us a series of criminal Republican presidents and corrupt Republican Supreme Court justices, who’ve legalized political bribery while devastating voting and civil rights. None...

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Political scientists have tried for three generations to figure out why Republicans detest public schools

For three generations political scientists have tried to figure out exactly why Republicans have been so dead set against public schools. One theory is that, like Donald Trump famously said, they “love the poorly educated.” Uninformed – or mal-informed: there is a difference between “poorly educated” and “less educated,” people are easier to manipulate than those who are well-educated. Another theory is that the billionaires who took over the GOP in the 1980s simply hate the idea of paying taxes to support the education of the kids of people who fail to get rich on their own by “pulling themselves...

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