Author: Thom Hartmann

At least four members of the most corrupt Supreme Court in American history have decided to help Trump delay his trial for trying to overthrow the government of the United States. Just like in 2000, when five Republicans on the Court ignored Al Gore’s probable (later found to be definite) win in Florida to put Bush in the White House, today’s Court is doing as much as they can to help Trump win this November. In a hail-Mary attempt to push his trials beyond the election, hoping he’d win with Putin’s help and could then pardon himself and gut...

Authoritarian governments are drawn from and always represent, first and foremost, the interests of the majority group within their country. Christians in 1933 Germany. Orthodox Slavs in Russia. Hindus in India. Whites in America. Authoritarian leaders bind themselves to these groups by defining members of minority groups as “the enemy” of the larger majority, demonizing them and subjecting them to economic and physical brutality under the nation’s laws. This is exactly the dynamic playing out right now in the nearly-all-White GOP. They have an extensive plan to exploit charges of “racism against White people” to seize control of the...

With nepo-daughter-in-law Lara Trump taking over the GOP, Donald Trump has essentially declared that the party of Reagan, the “old Republican Party,” was dead, arguing that it no longer exists in the form it had taken since the 1970s. At a Virginia rally a week ago Saturday, Trump said his neofascist MAGA movement has taken over the Republican Party, that it “represents 96%, and maybe 100%” of Republicans, and that, “We’re getting rid of the Romneys of the world. We want to get Romneys and those out.” While many in the GOP love the nativist, authoritarian turn the party’s taken, others...

While many trace the beginning of the modern rightwing fascist-friendly MAGA-type movement to the 1954 Brown v. Board decision and the way it put the John Birch Society on steroids, another interesting origin story for today’s GOP base is grounded in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In the years immediately leading up to the 1970 creation of the EPA, pollution in America had gotten so bad it was impossible to ignore and was quickly becoming a political issue. Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring in 1962, a book about how DDT was killing birds worldwide, that electrified Americans and...