U.S. Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed speaks to supporters and the media during a campaign rally in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., August 2, 2026. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook

Do we stand on the edge of a grand new progressive era, with good wages for all, racial and gender equality and justice, and America joining the rest of the developed world with cheap college and healthcare paid for by rational taxes on the morbidly rich? Or will Trump gleefully overthrow American democracy, finish his ongoing project of shuttering or handing to his oligarch partners-in-crime our free press, and imprisoning more of us who object?

When Mussolini put Antonio Gramsci, the founder of Italy’s Communist Party, in prison in 1927, Gramsci wrote from his prison cell that:

“[T]he old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

That interregnum is passing right now here in America, the symptoms are obvious, and change is upon us.

The Hartmann Report

A Daily Newsletter of Renaissance Thinking about Progressive Politics, Economics, Science, and the Political News Issues of Our Day

By Thom Hartmann

Two forces in American politics are similarly on a collision course today at two levels. Within the Democratic Party, it’s Clinton-era neoliberalism versus Bernie’s progressivism. In the overall political scene, it’s Trump’s and his captive GOP’s neofascism versus the entire spectrum of Democrats (both “corporate” and “progressive”) who, regardless of their differences, still embrace democracy.

The problem corporate neoliberal Democrats, the heirs to Clintonism and Obamaism, face is that a majority of Americans are now clear that it simply doesn’t work. We’re sick of partial, corporate- and billionaire-aligned solutions to large problems that should best be handed by our government as part of the commons.

— Trying to get affordable healthcare to all Americans via Obamacare, for example, is increasingly failing because the massive for-profit insurance industry it depended on is increasingly committed to squeezing every last penny out of us, regardless of how many of us die.

— Trying to lift a majority of Americans back up into their parents’ middle class lifestyle is also failing, largely because the corporate wing of the Democrats dependent on campaign contributions from giant union-hating corporations have “mysteriously” failed in their proclaimed effort to increase unionization and the minimum wage.

— Trying to give all Americans access to a college education without debt has failed because a large handful of big-bank-funded Democrats supported Bush’s bankruptcy “reform” in 2005 that outlawed using bankruptcy to discharge student debt. When Reagan came into office, roughly 80 percent of the cost of college was covered by state and federal money and college endowments; today that’s only around 20 percent; returning to 80% (and, thus, affordable college) is now a big legislative lift when our tax code is so skewed toward billionaires and massive corporations that the money for college is largely gone.

Forty-five years of the Reagan Revolution being maintained by both parties have pretty much proven that neoliberal Democratic policies won’t be enough to either stop Trump’s full-on push to convert America into a fascist state, nor will they address the very real problems most Americans are experiencing today when it comes to being able to afford everything from rent to groceries to healthcare.

Today’s generation of progressive Democrats, therefore, are taking a page from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and proposing genuinely big solutions to the massive problems that Democratic neoliberalism and Republican neofascism have produced.

And they’re winning!

This week’s primary results are just the latest indication that a progressive renaissance on par with the New Deal, or at least the Great Society, may be close to our doorstep.

While media pundits seem baffled, it’s obvious to most of the rest of us that this is being driven by our middle class collapsing from two-thirds of us when Reagan took office in 1981 to around 41 percent of us today (and now it takes two paychecks to get there, whereas a family could be safe with a single wage-earner in 1981).

Fully 60% of Americans now live paycheck-to-paycheck with virtually no savings, numbers we haven’t seen since the 1930s.

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— Five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have given billionaires and massive corporations virtual control over our elections as their corrupt Citizens United decision has allowed literally billions in dark money to flood every cycle.

— Our privatized, profitized healthcare system, including the Medicare Advantage Scam, accounts (according to a recent study by Yale) for over 114,000 unnecessary American deaths every year and untold misery and loss of worker productivity.

— While racist Republicans complain that we don’t have enough white babies, young people with college debt can’t afford to buy a house, marry, raise a family, or even start a small business.

— Meanwhile, the top 1% own more wealth than the bottom 93% and one Nazi-saluting trillionaire racist owns more wealth than the entire bottom 50% of Americans, 174 million people.

Our system has been rigged by 45 years of Reagan’s and Clinton’s neoliberalism, as I document in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and The Hidden History of the American Dream, and a clear majority of Americans have finally figured it out.

Inequality has never, ever before been this bad in America, going all the way back to the 1700s. So, no surprise, Democrats who offer real solutions are winning primaries across the country and are poised to make huge electoral gains this fall, unless Trump and his shock troops succeed in pulling off the coup they’re clearly trying to make happen.

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While corporate Democrats and Republicans decry “radical,” “far left” and “democratic socialist” candidates (and a desperate Trump is calling them “communists”), opinion polling is explaining the election outcomes that are befuddling op-ed columnists and “middle of the road” candidates.

— American voters tell pollsters they believe it’s obscene that one man (Musk) could have spent $290 million to make Trump president and that roughly one out of every six dollars spent in the 2024 election ($2.6 billion) came from just 100 billionaire families, virtually all of it funding GOP candidates. They want Citizens United overturned and a return to strict campaign finance limits.

— They want healthcare that everybody has access to and everybody can afford, and the only option on the table for that is what most other advanced democracies in the world have: Medicare for All or its equivalent. Fully 90% of Democrats and 66% of all Americans want it, and want it now. We also need to take on drug prices, a battle that pharma-funded corporate Democrats and Republicans have fought against for decades.

The solution to the high prices for everything isn’t just breaking up monopolies to bring back competition and small businesses (although that’s important); it also requires people to earn enough to live.

Only 6% of the private workforce has a union representing them (it was a third of us before Reagan and the GOP declared war on unions in 1981) and the minimum wage FDR gave us as part of his New Deal is stuck at $7.25/hour when if it’d been inflation adjusted since the 1960s it’d be well over $15.

A large part of the challenge average Americans face is because of the so-called K-shaped economy; the top is wide with a handful of billionaires controlling over half our wealth and the bottom is wide because of the impoverishment of our once-thriving middle class.

The answer here is simple: return to the corporate and personal income tax rates from 1933-1981 that built the middle class and prevented the emergence of American oligarchs.

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Meanwhile, climate change is literally killing us and it’s beyond obscene that Trump and his Republican toadies lie about it with a straight face just to keep the fossil fuel industry money flowing into their pockets.

Trump’s war on green energy is crippling our ability to grow industry, adding to home electric bills, and jacking up emissions, all because the industry’s fatcats took his deal and gave him millions to get elected.

Foreign wars haven’t helped us either, with the Afghanistan and Iraq wars Bush and Cheney lied us into having cost around $8 trillion (and thousands of American lives); Trump’s newest illegal war with Iran is costing us a billion a day and crippling our ability to hold off Russia’s and China’s expansionist desires.

Every single one of these issues are on the progressive agenda, whether you call it that or “democratic socialism” or just point out that it aligns with traditional Democratic Party traditions prior to the Clinton presidency.

Every 80 years, it seems, we end up with a new progressive revolution, and we’re overdue for this generation’s. Progressive Democrats are leading the way, but none of it will work unless we all engage.

Double-check your voter registration, throw a few dollars to your favorite candidates (ONLY use their campaign websites; never reply to a text message or email), and show up at your local Democratic Party to volunteer to help out.

And share genuinely progressive and educational media — including this newsletter — with everybody you know. Organized people can overcome organized money as we saw with Angie Nixon’s primary victory in Florida and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s in Michigan.

We can do this. Tag, we’re it!

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U.S. President Donald Trump walks to speak with reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Michigan, U.S., July 27, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci

Trump just took steps to make it very difficult to prosecute money laundering, a crime he and his real estate buddies may well have been committing much of their felonious lives.

Last week we learned that Capital One Bank closed over 300 Trump Organization accounts back in 2021 because, they said, their internal fraud department had flagged illegal money-laundering activity. But on who’s behalf?

We know from the Mueller Report and public reporting that Putin spent millions and did his best via social media and hacking the DNC to get Donald Trump into the White House in 2016, and was probably doing the same in 2020 and 2024.

But what if there was a way for him to simply drop, say, $100 million right into political campaigns here in America that would back up or benefit Trump and his notorious crime family? Or simply give the money to Trump himself as thanks for screwing Ukraine and destroying America?

The Hartmann Report

A Daily Newsletter of Renaissance Thinking about Progressive Politics, Economics, Science, and the Political News Issues of Our Day

By Thom Hartmann

While federal law prohibits foreign governments, citizens, and corporations from spending money to influence our elections, the reality is that laws only work when there’s somebody to investigate crimes and enforce them.

And Trump is, right now, tearing apart the very institutions and transparency rules that we’d need to expose such a crime.

Specifically, our Treasury Department — run by Trump’s billionaire crony Scott Bessent — just this week put into place a new rule that would hand Putin that ability. Or any other foreign oligarch who wanted to use a shell corporation to buy his very own American politician.

Senator Sherrod Brown’s Corporate Transparency Act required corporations and LLCs to tell the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, FinCEN, who actually owns or controls them. That remote control, often handed through multiple shell companies, is called “beneficial ownership.” It’s all about finding out who, ultimately, benefits from the corporation or LLC’s activities.

This week, though, Bessent issued a new rule that not only ends that requirement but also directs the agency to delete all the beneficial-ownership information they currently hold on US persons (like Donald Trump and his kids) that could be used to prove past money laundering crimes.

This is critical stuff because money laundering is how drug money, bribes, stolen government money, tax evasion proceeds, or money belonging to a sanctioned oligarch can be pushed through corporations, trusts, real estate, banks, casinos, and multiple transactions until figuring out who originally supplied it becomes extraordinarily difficult if not impossible.

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And money laundering via real estate in America is a big, big business. As the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project notes in an report titled “U.S. Real Estate is No 1 Destination for Laundered Dirty Money,” we have “the weakest regulatory framework to counter real estate money laundering” among all of the G7 nations. They add:

“At least US$2.3 billion has been laundered over the past five years through U.S. real estate…” and “More than 80% of all U.S. cases involved money coming from abroad, and in 82% of cases, anonymous shell companies or complex corporate structures helped mask the identity of the property’s real owners.”

Most countries made this illegal decades ago, in some cases generations ago. And in the past decade Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom have tightened their own requirements to prevent this kind of money laundering, which in each of those countries and the US was mostly done through anonymous or all-cash real estate transactions done by shell companies.

And Trump and Bessent just killed off the cops on the beat here.

Trump’s apparently been up to his eyeballs in money laundering for much of his business career. As he pissed away the ~$400 million he got from his father, he repeatedly turned to Russian and other oligarchs to prop him up after multiple bankruptcies via these very kinds of real estate transactions that Treasury will no longer be looking at.

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In 2015, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino admitted to willful and repeated violations of federal anti-money-laundering laws. FinCEN fined Trump $10 million because, for some unknown reason (wink, wink), he failed to even bother to keep the required records that would have revealed criminal money laundering being done through his casinos.

Then there’s all that Russian money. Back in 2008 as Putin was consolidating his iron grip and quickly becoming a billionaire bloated with ill-gotten gains himself, Uday — er, Don Jr. — bragged to an audience at a real estate conference that Russians were “a pretty disproportionate cross-section” of the money flowing into the Trump Organization, adding:

“We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Qusay — er, Eric Trump — similarly bragged to Golf writer James Dodson, according to Dodson, that:

“We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

Reuters looked into it all in 2017 and found that at least 63 people with Russian passports or addresses had bought $98.4 million worth of property from Trump, roughly a third of that being owned by LLCs that were so impenetrable that Reuters couldn’t discover who was actually behind the Russian front men. (This sort of deal is exactly why Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act in 2021.)

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Trump’s SoHo property is another example. A lawsuit brought by Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank alleged that Trump associate Felix Sater helped Ilyas Khrapunov disguise about $3 million as down payments on three Trump SoHo condominiums as part of an alleged international money-laundering scheme involving money stolen from Kazakhstan.

And now the Trump administration is weakening the exact system designed to tell investigators who is actually behind these opaque corporations that serve as real estate money-laundering fronts for offshore criminals like Putin and his cronies.

Treasury has now not only eliminated their previous domestic beneficial-ownership reporting, FinCEN has also given banks a pass on beneficial-owner verification requirements when companies open additional accounts, and Bessent delayed until 2028 a separate anti-money-laundering rule for investment advisers.

And if a foreign actor wants to use his ill-gotten gains to influence an American election? Thanks to Trump refusing to appoint a needed member, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) doesn’t even have the quorum it needs to conduct its own enforcement of rules against foreigners jumping into our elections. Its own website repeatedly says it can’t function again until “the Commission regains a quorum.”

So, suppose Putin or one of his buddies throws millions of dirty Russian money into a corporation in that country, which then transfers that money into an American shell company run by a Trump crony, which then “legally” (under Citizens United) puts that money into a Trump-aligned SuperPAC, say “Patriotic Americans for Freedom LLC,” to pay for political advertising, on-the-ground operations, etc.

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The required FEC filing says that the money came from “Patriotic Americans for Freedom LLC,” but who’s behind that company that’s funding the campaign? That’s exactly the question that the “beneficial ownership” laws were designed to answer, and will now lead to a door slammed shut in the face of any reporter, investigator, or law enforcement agency that tries to look into it. And the FEC itself is paralyzed from doing anything about it.

So, here we have a regime headed by a guy who made much of his fortune via opaque foreign money — apparently much of it from Russia — and now he’s dismantling our ability to see who’s behind it. And deleting all the previous records that might have offered a clue to his own past crimes.

For Putin, throwing a few hundred million dollars into an American election would be pocket change, as it would be for the murderous dictator of Saudi Arabia or any other country that wanted a particular outcome from Trump or his corrupt lickspittles in the GOP.

And we know these foreign billionaires and dictators have a vested interest in how our system works; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be throwing literally billions of dollars into Trump family operations, from Trump’s crypto to Jared’s investment fund.

Forget making America great again; Trump is doubling down on making money laundering — which may have been the source of his financial survival throughout his 90s and early 2000s bankruptcies — great again.

This is truly the single most corrupt administration in American history.

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Democratic strategist James Carville, who advised former President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, speaking in New York City, on April 11, 2015. (Image: Eduardo Munoz for ICSS Livepic/via Reuters)

The Third Way has functionally declared their intention to purge the Democratic Party of progressives. They will not, in my opinion, get us the things progressiv…

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It seemed so trivial. Trump ordered the Interior Department to post signs along the walkways leading up to several of the museums that make up the Smithsonian system in Washington, DC warning people that they’d find “inaccurate information” therein. It was based on a bizarre “report” written by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council and released with…

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In his 1961 Farewell Address to the Nation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said:

“America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.”

Apparently “dreadful fear and hate” have won. A new Lloyd’s Register (the institution …

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Last night, Donald Trump essentially told us exactly what he will do this November. When reports start coming in that the Democrats are winning this fall, he will send in the troops.

He’ll point back to last night‘s speech and tell the nation:

“I told you so. I warned you. They rigged the election for the Democrats and now I have to stop it.”

He’ll mobiliz…

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Democratic primary elections, in particular, are showing us America is both in the midst of a deep crisis and is on the verge of what could be transformational, positive, life-altering political and economic change comparable to FDR’s New Deal.

It became obvious, really, in the first minute of New Year’s Day this year, when two things happened at once vividly showing us all the contrast and the crises around where America stands right now.

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Something happened inside the Supreme Court chamber on Thursday that almost never happens: Justice Sonia Sotomayor was so disgusted by what the six radical, on-the-take Republican appointees had just done that she read her dissent aloud from the bench, and Justice Samuel Alito, who’d written the majority opinion, snapped back at her in real time, a breach of the Court’s normally stage-managed decorum that left veteran reporters in the room visibly startled in slack-jawed amazement.

On the surface they were fighting about asylum seekers. But Sotomayor understood, as Alito surely did, that the real question wasn’t who gets to cross the border: it was whether the laws Congress writes still mean anything once a neofascist, imperial president (like Alito and his peers want) decides he’d rather not follow them because he’s above the law.

To understand this — and why it’s so insanely radical — look carefully at what the Court actually did in the two 6-3 all-Republican immigration rulings it handed down yesterday morning.

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It takes a particular kind of hubris to stand on the South Lawn of the White House, on a sitting president’s 80th birthday, calling the fights for a cage match that the president personally dreamed up, hosted, sat ringside for, and bought stock in, and then go on your podcast a day later and tell the rest of the country that anybody who noticed the poli…

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Earlier this week, a Cable TV host did an extended rant about how many cases Trump has lost in court, arguing that “these guys are really bad at what they do” or words to that effect. I beg to differ: they know exactly what they’re doing, and getting convictions to imprison protesters isn’t (yet — they haven’t yet finished building out their network of …

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I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capitol city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year.

The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious…

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Corporations can now vote in Delaware. And they’re doing it.

Seriously. Not dystopian science fiction or a new novel by an AI version of George Orwell. Actual corporations — what America’s first Supreme Court Justice, John Marshall, in 1819 called “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law” — are today voting i…

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Over at her Substack, the cartoonist and writer Aubrey Hirsch took a look at Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded “anti-weaponization” slush-fund and did something that should make every Republican in Washington squirm. She started doing the math. What if, she asked, we put that money toward something other than enriching Trump, his family, and the mob he summoned to the Capitol on January 6th, 2021?

Her list is devastating. With that $1.776 billion we could, she writes:

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Back in 2019, Donald Trump pointed at Hunter Biden’s brief “cup of coffee” with a Chinese banker during a 2013 ride on Air Force Two and turned it into the single biggest line of attack he ran against Joe Biden for the next five years.

The grift! The corruption! The selling-out of America! Oh, the humanity!!!

Trump told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that…

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Donald Trump isn’t just breaking norms, he’s running a live experiment on the limits of American power. Each move is a test: How far can a president go? What laws and how much of the Constitution can be ignored? And, most importantly, will anyone actually stop him?

It took the King of England to remind Congress that their job is to restrain a president, …

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Republicans are at it again, and it’s hard to overstate how chilling this is and what it tells you about the direction people in this Party want to take America.

Texas Congressman Chip Roy is preparing to introduce legislation he’s calling the “MAMDANI Act,” named after Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected democratic socialist mayor of New York City, tha…

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Some are suggesting it was a predictable TACO — “Tr…

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