Author: Thom Hartmann

Cult of Trump: Why the only core organizing principle for MAGA Republicans is fealty to a convicted felon

Donald Trump is now a felon, busted for and convicted of stealing the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton and the American people. Our criminal justice system has worked, and there will almost certainly be some political fallout to both Trump and the GOP. Nonetheless, odds are he will not see a day in jail or even a particularly punishing fine and will probably be long dead before his lawyers finish with his inevitable years, perhaps decades, of appeals. But what will this mean for America? How will it affect our political system and the Republican Party, which he has...

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Premature Mortality: Scientific study finds women in Red States are twice as likely to die before age 31

It sure looks like Republicans want women to die. Particularly if they are teenagers and have the temerity to be sexually active. This is highlighted by what has to qualify as the most shocking scientific study of the year, published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network and titled Teen Pregnancy and Risk of Premature Mortality. The result of the study of over 2.2 million women who experienced teen and pre-teen pregnancies (the youngest in the study gave birth at 9 years of age, although most were older teens) is best summarized by the subhead in the...

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Trump’s COVID Legacy: The intentional decision to let Black and Hispanic Americans in Blue states die

Critics contend that in 2020, from March 13 through April 7, Donald Trump and Jared Kushner planned and executed an intentional, racially-based mass murder of American citizens for purely political purposes, and their actions were virtually ignored by the American mainstream media. On March 13, 2020 COVID had begun to rapidly spread across the United States, despite Trump’s earlier promise that the virus would be “contained” and was “no big deal.” Back in February of that year, as it was hitting China hard, he hd told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that the disease was far more dangerous than...

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Concern grows over corruption of Supreme Court that could set stage for next coup attempt by Trump

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...

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Seeds of doubt: Why enemies of Democracy always target the public trust of government

When the Nixon scandals were at their height, 36 percent of Americans told pollsters they still had a “high degree of trust in the American government.” According to Pew, that metric stands at 16 percent. In 2016, Russian intelligence hacked both the RNC and the DNC. They never revealed the dirt they got on the RNC, but, at Donald Trump’s request, they handed off DNC data including Hillary’s emails to the media with the (successful) goal of destroying America’s trust in her. Yesterday, we learned from reporting by The Guardian that Alexander Smirnov, the Russian agent who began peddling lies about Hunter and...

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Driven by fear and hate: Why Trump promotes the delusion that White people are victims of racism

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...

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