The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication where all weekday articles are free and available to everyone. Please support my work to rescue democracy and save our planet by becoming a paid subscriber today and gain additional benefits If Putin Designed a Plan to Collapse America, What Would It Look Like?Undermine democracy. Destroy institutions. Divide the people. Loot the country. Collapse it from the inside out…
If Putin wanted to kill America, how would he best do it? Exactly like this: — Install a puppet or ally inside the government; as Lincoln foresaw, a tyrant doesn't need to invade. He just needs to rise from within. Trump has repeatedly echoed Kremlin talking points, undermined NATO, attacked Ukraine, praised autocrats, and created chaos at home. If Putin picked a candidate, it would be Trump — and the intelligence community has confirmed Russian efforts to help him win in both 2016 and 2020. — Dismantle American institutions from the inside; Putin's best move would be to encourage the erosion of U.S. government capacity: devalue science, underfund law enforcement, defund agencies, destroy trust in elections, and sabotage public health. All are happening as you read these words. — Stoke internal division; a divided America is a weak America. Putin's cyber and propaganda ops have long stoked racial hatred, anti-government sentiment, anti-vax ideology, and far-right extremism. Trump accelerates all of it. Musk's X (Twitter) has become a vector for disinformation, propaganda, and fascist apologia. — Weaken U.S. alliances around the world; Trump has repeatedly threatened to pull out of NATO, praised Putin's invasions, and undermined Western alliances. Now he is threatening our allies with the possibility of invasion. This is textbook Kremlin strategy — divide the West, and conquer its influence. Whether Trump and Musk are taking direct instructions from Putin or simply operating in ideological lockstep is a question of degree, not direction. The destruction they are today inflicting on America is strategic, not accidental; coordinated, not chaotic; and oligarchic, not populist. And whether Trump and Musk are doing it on Putin's instructions, acting out the Dark Enlightenment vision of a CEO America, or simply trying to wipe out any institutions that might challenge their exercise of raw power, that's exactly what's happening right now. The outcome is the same: the deliberate disempowerment of the American people and the dismantling of a liberal democratic order that has stood for 240 years. These two men and their enablers in the Trump regime are quite literally taking apart our American government while, at the same time, doing away with our protections against wealthy predators and destroying our international alliances. The Founders had this noble idea that, as I detail in The Hidden History of American Democracy, they'd largely borrowed from the Iroquois Confederacy and other northeastern tribes: people can govern themselves when power-hungry psychopaths are kept in check. It animated George Washington when he wrote:
And Abraham Lincoln, who rescued our nation from the fascist Confederate oligarchs who'd taken over the South and then dared try to bring down our democracy through warfare:
And here we are. So far, Trump and Musk have or are in the process of: — Gutting the IRS so badly that the country will lose an estimated $500 billion to morbidly rich tax cheats And that's just a partial "so far" list. Meanwhile, Trump is snatching students off the streets and transporting them to a brutal private for-profit prison in Louisiana with no due process whatsoever in clear defiance of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; proposing changes to voting laws that will prevent tens of millions of married women from casting a ballot; and threatening to seize foreign, sovereign lands by force. There are several factions at work here. — First, there's Trump himself, who's so filled with hate against the government that once threatened to imprison him for his crimes that he's more than happy to hand a meataxe to anybody who'll make government workers squeal in pain. — Next come Musk and the so-called PayPal Mafia of German, South African and homegrown billionaires who think women should not be allowed to vote, capitalism and democracy are incompatible with each other, and appear to have fantasies of ruling over a whites-only ethnonationalist state run like a corporation. — And finally, there are the old fashioned rightwing billionaires who simply don't want to pay their fair share in taxes or have their companies regulated; these are the guys who, for over 50 years, have been following the Powell Memo to build the infrastructure — media, legal, lobbying, think tanks, etc. — that has made all this possible today. Americans are starting to wake up to the damage these men (the ones driving the process are all white men) are doing and this weekend millions of protestors will show up in the streets of every city in America to make their discomfort and anger known. It's a beginning. If public opinion becomes too strong to ignore, it's possible some Republicans will decide that protecting our republic is more important than fearing a primary challenge funded by the richest man in the world; that could stop much of what Trump's doing dead in its tracks. On the other hand, it's entirely possible that such demonstrations could provoke Trump to fulfill his previous threats to follow the examples of Putin, Lukashenko, and Erdoğan and declare a state of insurrection, mobilizing the military against the citizens of America. At that point, all bets are off and the window to save American democracy will have shrunk to a matter of weeks or months. Whether Putin is running this show — as those who point to his reportedly regular phone conversations with Trump and Musk argue — or it's a homegrown effort to cripple our nation is almost irrelevant; the reality is that they're well down the road in a way that may be irreparable, at least within a generation or more. As my old friend Rob Kall points out over at OpEdNews.com, institutional knowledge is a critical resource for both companies and governments, and these mass firings are ripping it out of our nation's systems of governance leaving a hole that will take decades to re-fill. Thus, with Congress neutered and the courts half-paralyzed and moving slowly, it falls to us to stop this anti-American destruction spree. And that will require massive public expressions of outrage, demands for action, and relentless pressure on our politicians. The key to mobilizing public pressure is to make clear to Americans exactly what Trump and Musk are really up to. To help people understand that this regime's real agenda — which they are ruthlessly executing right in front of us — is to destroy the United States of America as it was and turn our country into something much more like Hungary or Russia. And, to the extent that our corporate media is too timid or too bought-off to raise the alarm, that work falls to us, to me and you. Tag, we're it. Pass it along. |
Monday, March 31, 2025
Something to Know - 31 March
When I read the contribution by Tom Hartman this morning, the story rang a bell with me. With no immediate verifiable evidence, I have always thought that Putin has something of a blackmail nature on Trump, and in true Putin KGB style, Putin owns Trump in so many ways, and has since way back in the late 1970's when Trump went sniffing around in the Soviet Union with designs of enlarging the Trump Hotel/Casino business. Trump got caught in a KGB snare, and has been owned since that time. Continuing on with this ownership, Trump entered into a partnership, and that is what we see today. Putin has used Trump's stupidity and ego to develop a plan to take over the United States in whatever way (by force or political invasion). This is a criminal conspiracy theory that I began to buy into when the financing of a Trump hotel in Baikal in an area of Tatarstan, Russia exposed some Russian oligarchs in a financial mess. This story played out years ago and was written about in the New Yorker Magazine. Later on, there were stories about Trump building luxury condo complexes in New York, which were purchased for tens of millions of dollars by Russian oligarchs who were using Trump's sales to launder the Russian rubles they had skimmed off from operations when rich Russians controlled all of the property when the Soviet Union privatized their industries. Trump was nothing more than a Russian Mob Laundromat. This operation and a few compromising videos of Trump (KOMPROMAT) is where we are today. Now, you may ask what all this squabbling about political control on the Ukraine between Trump and Putin is all about....I think it is nothing more than "fake theatre" to oppose theories that they are buddies. Trump owes Putin and his mob billions of dollars. This is my deep-down conspiracy theory.
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Juan Matute
The Harold Wilke House
Claremont, California
Who is Asset Kraznov?
(we know where he is)
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