Thom Hartmann

Tonight at 9 p.m., Donald Trump will commandeer prime-time television for what he’s billing as a speech about “free and fair elections,” promising “really big news” and reportedly planning to unveil what his people describe as “newly declassified intelligence” about “foreign (Chinese Communist Party) interference” in the 2020 election.

Two days ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson stood at a podium and told America why the Pentagon needs an extra $350 billion:

“We’re fighting communism on our own shores.”

He followed that up on social media with, “THE BARBARIANS ARE INSIDE THE GATE!”

The communists and barbarians, in case you’re wondering, are you and your neighbors, and the proof is how we voted in Democratic primaries this spring.

Just the idea of returning to the McCarthy era of redbaiting like Johnson is doing here is obscene.

Every day now brings another story like these, and every one of them gets reported as if it was just a new, fresh outrage, each completely disconnected from yesterday’s new, fresh outrage.

But these steps Trump and his lickspittles are taking aren’t even remotely random. They’re part of a classic dictator’s checklist, and we know exactly what the checklist looks like because Vladimir Putin already worked through it, step-by-step, between 2000 and 2012, converting a struggling democracy into the police state that Russia is today. And he wasn’t the first; this goes from the days of Machiavelli through 20th century Europe to here, now.

Putin’s first move was the media. In 2001, masked “tax police” raided NTV, Russia’s last independent television network, and handed it to a state-controlled company; within a few years every national network answered to the Kremlin.

Here, Trump began by suing the networks for “defamation” (just like Putin did). Next, the FCC became a weapon aimed at broadcasters, the president slanders reporters from news organizations he dislikes, and Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon imposed press restrictions so severe that dozens of reporters turned in their credentials rather than sign away their independence, all while media consolidation shrinks the number of independent newsrooms every year. Trump’s loyal toady at the FCC is trying to blow up the 39% of ownership rule so a billionaire nepo-baby Trump ally can take over CNN along with CBS and dozens of other media outlets.

Putin’s second move was the oligarchs. In 2003 he arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man, and the message was instantly understood: wealth in Russia would henceforth serve the Kremlin or be confiscated by it. Loyal oligarchs got massively richer as I pointed out last Friday; disloyal ones got prison or exile. Here it’s more subtle, but the message is the same.

Senate and House Democrats are now formally investigating whether Trump’s pardons operate as a pay-to-play scheme, and the roster of the pardoned reads like a donor list: Forbes documented a $3.5 million contribution to Trump’s super PAC followed by a pardon for the donor’s father, and a pardon for Binance’s founder after his company steered literally billions of dollars through the Trump family’s crypto venture.

Crypto policy, fossil fuel policy, chip exports to foreign governments bearing gifts: it’s all for sale, and the morbidly rich are paying off Trump and the GOP to expand their fortunes.

Third came the security forces. Putin spent years building police and paramilitary units loyal to him personally rather than to Russian law; then in 2016 he created Rosgvardia, a national praetorian guard of some 340,000 troops answering directly to the president to “fight terrorism” and track down “illegal immigrants” within Russia.

Here, the Pentagon has ordered every state to stand up “quick reaction forces” totaling roughly 23,500 National Guard troops trained in batons, body shields, stun guns, and pepper spray, ready to deploy to American streets within hours of a presidential “emergency” order.

ICE has also grown into exactly the kind of federal force Putin would recognize, holding a record 70,766 people in a nationwide network of more than 200 “detention facilities,” with the American Immigration Council reporting that the administration’s stated goal was at least 100,000 detainees. Nearly all of this year’s detention growth has come from people with no criminal charges or convictions at all.

Seventy thousand human beings are now warehoused without meaningful due process in violation of the 4th through 8th Amendments, with billions being spent right now to expand that capacity for tens of thousands more. There’s a word for camps like that: history will use it even if today’s newspapers won’t.

Fourth, Putin criminalized the opposition. His “foreign agent” and “extremism” laws turned political dissent itself into a “security threat,” so that by the end even holding a blank sign in a public square got you beaten, arrested, or shot.

Here we have NSPM-7, the national security directive that treats progressive political activity as an “indicator of terrorism” (I’ve covered it in detail here). Trump spent his America 250 speech at Mount Rushmore calling on the nation to “vanquish communism from our shores,” and just this week he’s demanded that democratic socialism be “criminalized” and its elected leaders “deported.”

Like Putin did with the Duma (the Russian parliament) that threat includes sitting members of Congress, as well as the mayor of New York City and millions of American voters, all now reclassified by Trump and the GOP as an “enemy” to be imprisoned or removed from the country.

People brush it all off, saying Trump’s “merely being hyperbolic”; he’s not. He’s serious, just like Putin was and Hi**er was before him when he ran the exact same playbook.

Then came the courts, the history books, and the public square. Putin perfected what Russians bitterly call “Basmanny justice,” courts that reliably rule for the Kremlin.

Our Supreme Court’s Republican majority now routinely uses the so-called “shadow docket” — a procedure invented for actual time-sensitive government emergencies — to hand Trump, oligarchs, and the GOP wins without briefing, argument, or explanation, while expanding the flow of dark money that keeps Republican and (too many Democratic) politicians in fear of or in debt to “donors” who fund elections and give them what the Republicans on the Supreme Court now call “gratuities.”

Putin then imposed unified patriotic history textbooks; here in America we’re watching schools, universities, and libraries being bullied into teaching a white Christian nationalist version of American history while the America 250 celebration was converted into explicitly partisan pageantry, complete with banners of Trump’s face draped across federal buildings in Washington the way Stalin’s once papered Moscow.

And Putin fenced off the squares. This month the Secret Service, the Interior Department, and the White House released a plan for permanent fencing around Lafayette Park, the most storied protest ground in America. The official rationale is security after assassination attempts, but when you read the plan’s own language you see that it identifies the park as a “focal point” for demonstrations and promises that a permanent, properly anchored fence “would assist in de-escalating most potentially violent protest.”

In plain English, they’re walling off the place where Americans have gathered to petition their presidents since Jefferson’s day, over the objections of members of Congress, sixteen weeks before a midterm election.

And finally, there’s the foreign policy aspect of it all, because aspiring autocrats always have each other’s backs.

On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a campaign to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court (which has indicted Putin and Netanyahu) “brick by brick,” pledging a “whole-of-government response to systematically disable” the one tribunal on Earth that could someday prosecute the war crimes this administration keeps getting away with.

Then the State Department posted grant applications offering millions of dollars to European groups that share the administration’s “political philosophy” on “migration, sovereignty, and Western civilizational heritage,” aka rightwing white male Christian supremacy, presumably complete with N**i salutes.

So now our United States government is funding far-right movements inside allied democracies to pull them toward authoritarianism, precisely the operation Putin’s Internet Research Agency has run against us since the 2016 election, but now reported by the Financial Times as official American policy against other democracies.

Meanwhile Trump and Putin have spoken by phone fourteen times (that we know about) since Trump returned to office, most recently an 85-minute conversation on the Fourth of July, three weeks after the previous call, with another already scheduled. During that Independence Day call, Putin took the occasion to remind Trump of “Russia’s contribution to the formation of American statehood.” He’s enjoying his new role of mentor to the guy running our country.

I spent decades doing international relief work in countries run by despots and what struck me then, and haunts me now, is how little the formula varies from one country to the next. The details change with the language and the flag, but the architecture stays the same:

Control the airwaves, buy or break the rich, seize the legislature, build security forces loyal to one man, name an internal enemy, tame the judges, rewrite the schoolbooks, fence the squares, and befriend the world’s other strongmen and oligarchs.
I’ve worked in at least a dozen countries where every one of those boxes was checked, and the air feels different there. People lower their voices in restaurants. They glance around before they finish a sentence.

Which brings us to the one box Putin checked that Trump hasn’t yet, but it appears tonight’s address will be all about.

Many Americans don’t realize that Putin never abolished Russian elections. Russians still line up and vote in every cycle. He simply made the elections incapable of removing him: opponents disqualified or imprisoned or poisoned, ballot access controlled, observers expelled, the Russian equivalent of extreme gerrymandering, and vote counting supervised by loyalists.

His ideologist Vladislav Surkov dressed it up as “sovereign democracy.” And Putin’s method for capturing the machinery was always the same: manufacture or exploit an emergency, then present the seizure of the election as the remedy.

After the Beslan school massacre in 2004 — his first major effort — he used the nation’s grief to abolish the election of Russia’s governors entirely and appoint them himself. From there it was a straight line through oligarchy to dictatorship, as has happened so often in other countries throughout history.

Now look at what is predicted by insiders for tonight.

A primetime address about “free and fair elections,” built around supposedly declassified intelligence of foreign interference, delivered by a president who spent Monday claiming fraud in the Los Angeles mayoral primary and who has spent months demanding tighter federal control over how Americans vote in November.

All this while his House Speaker declares that this fall’s ballot question isn’t affordability, inflation, or wages but communism versus the republic. His administration games out ICE at polling places, put in new mail ballot restrictions through the Post Office, and will tonight provide their excuse for creating the machinery to challenge results they don’t like (when they can swing an election).

Emergency first, “reform” second. It’s Putin’s Beslan strategy almost to the last detail.

Have we gone so far down the road to fascism/Putinism that it’ll work? There are some concerning indicators, including what people at the highest levels of our government and within the most hallowed halls of American power have simply told us straight out.

In September 2022, the broadcast networks refused to air President Joe Biden’s Independence Hall speech about “threats to American democracy,” deeming it too “political”; one ran a game show and reruns instead.

That night, after receiving official, top-secret security briefings from American intelligence agencies that so alarmed him that he felt he had to alert the public, then-President Biden said, in part:

(The entire text is pasted below the end of this article)

“Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal.

“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic. …

“But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.

“These are hard things. …

“And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.

“They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.

“MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.

“They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.

“They look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th — brutally attacking law enforcement — not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger to the throat of our democracy, but they look at them as patriots.

“And they see their MAGA failure to stop a peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election as preparation for the [next] elections.

“They tried everything last time to nullify the votes of 81 million people. This time, they’re determined to succeed in thwarting the will of the people.”

It’s not like we weren’t warned. By the president of the United States, for G-d’s sake. And none of the corporate press said pretty much a single word about his speech or the networks’ refusal to carry it.

And none bothered to mention Biden’s warning when it was fulfilled this year as Donald Trump set about systematically firing tens of thousands of people from the Justice Department and its investigative and law enforcement divisions, and attempted to put the FBI Director in prison.

Last December, however, all four networks cleared their primetime schedules, interrupting the Survivor finale, for a nakedly partisan Trump address.

As of this moment, Poynter reports, the networks say they haven’t decided about tonight. AOC, among others, is explicitly calling on the networks to refuse to carry his address this time.

Watch what they do. Networks whose parent companies face federal investigations and merger reviews have a way of discovering the newsworthiness of whatever the man controlling those reviews wants them to say about him and his message.

Putin never had to nationalize every channel; after NTV, the rest fell into line on their own.

In every country I worked in where the formula succeeded, however, it succeeded because it was completed before enough people recognized the pattern, and America hasn’t yet reached that point.

Just listen to AOC or Sheldon Whitehouse or Bernie, among others; most real Democrats have already or are just now figuring this all out.

The pattern is increasingly obvious, even if the media never reports this holistically. The last box is still unchecked, and the machinery for protecting the vote still exists: courts that haven’t all capitulated, secretaries of state in both parties who take their oaths seriously, and most of all an electorate that just spent the spring primaries demonstrating it can turn out in numbers no one can quietly “manage.”

Putin’s system worked because most Russians didn’t see it coming and when it was finally there they (correctly) concluded that resistance was largely pointless. The single most dangerous thing Americans could do right now is reach that conclusion sixteen weeks early.

So listen carefully to what Trump says tonight and what Democrats and experts on fascism, Putin, and the future of America say in response.

We can discuss it all tomorrow on my radio/TV show and in the comments here and the comments to tomorrow’s Hartmann Report op-ed.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Authoritarian Playbook”

Trump is Following Putin’s “Dictator’s Checklist” and Tonight is the Next Step on the List Control information. Intimidate opponents. Capture institutions. Rewrite reality. And the final box may be closer than Americans think...

Is the Pentagon's New Weapon...Testosterone?

While American troops fight an actual war, the Secretary of Defense spent Wednesday filming a slick two-camera video announcing free testosterone replacement therapy for soldiers over thirty. He calls it the "High-T Department of War." Critics pounced on the irony. This is the same Pete Hegseth who banned gender-affirming hormone care for transgender troops, and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal noted his plan "is gender affirming care" by any honest definition.

Army veteran Fred Wellman called it a complete clown show and the dumbest possible focus for a wartime defense secretary. It'd be funny if it weren't so sad. We're asking young Americans to risk their lives overseas while their boss plays wellness influencer.

Our troops need armor, rest, and leaders who take war seriously. Instead they've got a TV host injecting the military with machismo while the real problems go untreated.

Coming up on the show today...

-- Trump is Following Putin’s “Dictator’s Checklist” and Tonight is the Next Step on the List

-- FCC Commissioners Took Lavish Gifts From the Company They Regulate and Who Gets to Own Your Local News?

-- Crazy Alert. Is the Pentagon's New Weapon...Testosterone?

-- Phil Ittner - Ukraine update

-- Is Trump's Inner Circle Cashing In on the Iran War?

-- Is Cuba Next on the War Menu?

-- Feed people Trump hates and go to prison

-- Big Lie Alert. Did American Missiles Kill 120 Children? Trump Says Maybe It's AI...

Coming Up Today Thursday, July 16, 2026 Crazy Alert. Is the Pentagon’s New Weapon...Testosterone?

Who Does Mike Johnson Think the Military Is For? Communists? Socialists? Americans?

House Speaker Mike Johnson wants Congress to hand the Pentagon another three hundred fifty billion dollars, on top of a record one point one trillion dollar military budget. Here's how he justified it. He said we're "fighting communism on our own shores." Think about that. The Speaker of the House says the American military needs more money to fight Americans.

This comes as Trump has threatened to deploy troops against what he calls the enemy within, and just reposted a video declaring democratic socialism must be criminalized and its leaders deported. Reuters counted Trump invoking communism at least eighty-one times in two weeks since progressive candidates won primaries across the country. The money would move through a GOP-only reconciliation bill, no Democratic votes needed. When politicians start calling their opponents enemies of the state, and then arm up to fight them, that's not national security.

That's how republics die.

Topics today...

-- Midterm Elections: The Con Always Works, Right Up Until the Moment it Doesn’t

-- Who Does Mike Johnson Think the Military Is For?

-- Your Tax Dollars Are Bankrolling Europe's Far Right

-- Karen Hunter on Topics of the day

-- Geeky Science! Why Your Flights are Getting So Bumpy?

-- Christopher Armitage - Conservatism: America's Personality Disorder

-- Did RFK Junior Break the Law to Rig the Midterms?

-- Trump Opens the Door to Killing Grizzly Bears

Coming Up Today Wednesday, July 15, 2026 Speaker Johnson wants a military budget for "fighting communism on our own shores." That's how republics die...