Author: Thom Hartmann

“Precedent” sounds boring and wonky. In reality, it is the way past criminal Republican presidents have taught those who followed them to break the law. This is the shocking story of how Republican presidents taught each other to break the law, and how if Trump is not prosecuted the next Republican president will try to end democracy in the United States of America. Trump has broken multiple past presidential precedents and established entirely new ones that — unless they are punished and outlawed — provide a template for the next Republican president who wants to turn America into a...

The moral panic currently sweeping America about Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been covered ad nauseum by the press and commentators across the political spectrum. What nobody is talking about, though, is the why of this particular issue at this particular time. As a result, we are mistaking the tool for the goal. Moral panics, when driven by politicians, are usually just tools. This CRT moral panic is a tool being used by a coalition of interests to achieve their own goals, none of which have anything to do with teaching or not-teaching the history of race in America....

With the Republican Party turning to Trumpism, and the Democratic Party returning to their progressive roots, will we have an honest debate this election year in our media? “What you see is what you get” is an old cliche, but it has endured all these centuries because there was so much truth in it. “Don’t listen to what people say, instead look at what they do” is another truism we can apply to inform us about today’s politics. The past forty years have seen three Republican and three Democratic presidencies, and the modern priorities and values of each Party...

Christopher Sheats wanted no part of the insanity the rich people in the rest of his state were ginning up. The wealthiest plantation owners of Alabama had hatched a scheme to join up with the fabulously rich planters of several nearby states and try to take down the government of the United States. They had the money to make it happen, controlled most of the political power in the state, and had already required thousands of Alabama’s young men to prepare their slave patrol militias for a much larger war against their own nation. But Sheats was from the...

Donald Trump is now telling us that having Mike Pence overturn the electoral college result would have been “perfectly legal.” He is dead wrong, both factually and conceptually, and his admission should lead him straight to a jail cell. The electoral college was not put in place so that a president and vice president could randomly choose to extend their own power forever. If anything, it was the opposite. America’s Founders and Framers thought they could use the Electoral College to prevent somebody like Donald Trump from ever becoming president. Unfortunately, they were wrong, and now we are paying...

The Republican Party has lost all its legitimacy because, in the past few decades, it has become a white supremacist version of what Father of the Constitution James Madison called a “faction.” Loosely, a “faction“ is a “special interest” group of people who are willing to damage the interests of other people just to gain their own benefit. And, as Madison warned us, factions destroy democracies. Here is how it is playing out right now, as a Trump-inspired faction continues to consolidate their control over the larger Republican Party, dragging it deeper and deeper into the swamp of racism...