Author: Thom Hartmann

Want to end Social Security? Just vote for Donald Trump or pretty much any Republican this fall. Every year that Donald Trump was president he proposed budgets that would have cut Social Security funding and benefits; in 2020 he even campaigned on ending the payroll tax — that funds it and Medicare — altogether. The Republican Study Committee, which claims 175 of the House’s 219 Republican members of Congress, released their annual budget proposals last summer, and, sure to form, they also called for the setup of draconian cuts to Social Security. Weirdly, the title of the section of their budget that cuts Social Security...

At a campaign stop in Ohio on July 22, JD Vance said that Kamala Harris should not lead America because she is not “grateful for it.” Vance told his nearly-all-White crowd: “You know, what I see? Want to take bets here? Want to start a betting pool just in this auditorium? If you want to lead this country, you should feel grateful for it, a sense of gratitude. I never hear that gratitude come through when I listen to Kamala Harris.” The White myth of America, which Vance echoed at his RNC speech, is that our nation was “built”...

Following both speeches by Vance and Trump at the RNC, the future trajectory of America if they are elected is pretty clear. First, it is important to acknowledge that this is no longer your (or my) father’s GOP. Vance is the pre-packaged, well-massaged “product” of a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who are enamored of the writings of Ayn Rand and David Koch’s Libertarian movement. Trump has made it clear he’s happy to go along with the Galt’s Gulch crowd, particularly if it makes him more money. These men are revolutionaries with little regard for political history or norms....

Historian Douglas Brinkley told the story on CNN about how after President Ronald Reagan was shot, when he woke up in the hospital, he told a friend nearby that the experience had transformed him, that he was now going to dedicate his life to peace. Not only did he not once blame the shooting on Democrats; Reagan instead largely followed through on that promise, Brinkley said, spending the rest of his presidency trying to rid the world of nuclear weapons. He later worked with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev trying, successfully, to de-escalate tensions between the U.S. and the USSR....

Donald Trump tells us we are experiencing “American carnage” and the solution is to round up and put into concentration camps 11 million immigrants; imprison prosecutors, judges, Democrats, and reporters he says criticized him; and replace the FBI and our court systems with his own armed cadre that is loyal to him. The Proud Boys are stepping up again, and he is embracing them. Seventy million Americans, and commentators across the massive rightwing media ecosystem, agree with him. How did we get here? The 1970s were a pivotal decade, and not just because it saw the end of the...

“Billionaire investor Ray Dalio warns U.S. is ‘on the brink’ and estimates a more than 1 in 3 chance of civil war.” – Fortune Magazine, May 16, 2024 Billionaires and civil war? A billionaire-funded Supreme Court Justice flew the American flag upside down outside his house after January 6th in apparent support of Donald Trump‘s attempt to overthrow our government. Americans for Tax Fairness reports that 50 billionaire families have, at this early stage, already injected almost a billion dollars into our political system — the overwhelming majority of it going to Republicans and in support of Donald Trump...