Thom's Daily Audio

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Yesterday, the guy Donald Trump had earlier endorsed for the House of Representatives who’d been accused of sexual crimes lost his Republican primary election. But the day before was even worse.

Monday was a rough day for Trump’s ongoing lifelong war against women who dare stand up to him. In the morning, the Supreme Court told him for the second time to take a hike on his appeal of a jury’s finding that he’d raped E. Jean Carroll and had to pay her a bit over $5 million.

In the afternoon, he reprised his disgusting and condescending slams on women, this time against CNN’s Kristen Holmes, calling her a “fake reporter,” saying she was “loud” and “boisterous” when she dared ask him why he’d ordered the military to scale back our exercises with our longtime ally South Korea in deference to the tender feelings of his dear friend Dictator Kim Jong Un.

And then, amazingly, it got even uglier when his staff followed up and went after Holmes’ children. The official Rapid Response called her a “humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession” and spit out the following genuinely disgusting venom because she dared ask about Trump sucking up to the North Korean dictator:

“Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”

Her employer, CNN, responded with quiet dignity, pointing out that she’s one of the most respected journalists covering the White House and that she’d simply done her job by asking a tough, relevant question.

Trump seems to have had a problem with women his entire life. He claimed that his personal Vietnam-era challenge wasn’t getting shot at in a foreign jungle but avoiding STDs from his much-publicized promiscuity. He cheated on each of this three wives, the last including having unprotected sex with (and paying off for their silence) both a porn star and a Playboy bunny.

He particularly seems to prefer women who are immigrants from poverty-stricken countries, presumably because they’re more desperate and easy to control; the only American he married he was basically forced into because he got her pregnant while he was married to Ivana, his first wife, and then dumped her after starting an affair with Melania, who retains her Slovenian citizenship and has passed it along to their son.

And it goes way beyond his personal life. Nine months ago he attacked Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey on Air Force One, snapping “Quiet. Quiet piggy” at her because she’d asked if there was anything serious about him in the Epstein files. Just a few days later it was ABC’s Mary Bruce’s turn to be verbally slapped around when she asked about the murder of Washington Post’s reporter Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia’s MBS, who’d given billions to Trump’s son-in-law.

As the Society of Professional Journalists noted at the time, these weren’t isolated incidents but reflected a consistent and long-term pattern of Trump’s hostility against women. His press secretary tried to paper it over by claiming that Trump was “just being frank,” and claiming that his condescending, insulting language was why people elected him.

Sadly, that observation is probably right-on-the-mark. Trump’s MAGA followers are notorious for their misogyny and bad manners, from “rolling coal” to “f**k your feelings” tee shirts to laughing at his jokes at the expense of women like Kamala Harris.

His hot mic moment with Billy Bush is probably the most revealing self-portrait any American politician has ever given the electorate:

“I moved on her, actually. You know she was down on Palm Beach. … I moved on her and I failed. I’ll admit it. I did try and f**k her. She was married. … And I moved on her very heavily in fact. I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said ‘I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.’ I took her out furniture. I moved on her like a b***h, but I couldn’t get there, and she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big, phony tits and everything. …

[he sees the attractive young woman who is meeting their bus]

“I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful - I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

And MAGA’s reaction to Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women? A giant shrug. Or perhaps, for many of the men in his base, envy.

In addition to his name appearing in the Epstein files more often than anybody other than Epstein himself, including multiple FBI interviews alleging he’d raped a 14-year-old and beat up a 15-year-old for biting him when he forced her to give him a b*****b, at least 27 women have publicly accused him of sexual misconduct going all the way back to the 1970s.

Jessica Leeds says he groped her on a commercial jet flight, Kristin Anderson testified that he thrust his hand up under her skirt in a nightclub, Jill Harth said he did the same thing at a business dinner with her boyfriend sitting right beside her, and Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos said he tried to force himself on her in a bungalow in Beverly Hills.

For Stacy Williams it was a Trump groping at Trump Tower as Jeffrey Epstein watched, smiling, and his first wife, Ivana, described a night in 1989 when the hair replacement surgeon she’d recommended didn’t work out right so he tore out fistfuls of her hair and raped her (she later recanted).

He went on Howard Stern’s radio program and bragged that when he owned the Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants he’d walk into their dressing rooms while they were naked so he could “inspect” them, proudly adding that he gets away with that sort of thing all the time.

Former contestants agreed, saying he’d ogled them on multiple occasions. Buzzfeed found four women from the 1997 Miss Teen USA pageant he also owned who claimed he’d walked in on them naked, too, when some of them were only 15.

And let’s not forget the anonymous plaintiff who called herself Katie Johnson who said in sworn testimony in a lawsuit that both Trump and Jeffrey Epstein repeatedly raped her at Epstein’s mansion when she was 13 and hoping to become a model. Her lawyer, Lisa Bloom, said she’d been essentially forced to drop the suit because she was terrified by multiple death threats, and it seems she’s been in hiding ever since.

And then there’s the Epstein birthday book that the Wall Street Journal discovered and publicized, which not only discussed Trump and Epstein sharing a “wonderful secret” but also included a page from a Mar-a-Lago member who joked about selling Trump a “fully depreciated” woman for $22,500.

When I was watching Trump attack CNN’s Kristin Holmes, the look on his face and the ferocity of his words, I was reminded of his brilliant niece, psychologist Mary Trump, telling me on my program about how his father Fred was a high-functioning sociopath, a story she also told in her bestselling book Too Much and Never Enough. I could easily imagine Fred talking the same way to a 7-year-old Donald before he sent him off to a military academy to get him out of his hair.

While we don’t know Fred’s opinion of women (other than that his father made his first fortune running a brothel), we do know he was arrested in 1927 at a Klan rally in Queens, and 46 years later the Justice Department charged him and Donald with refusing to rent their apartments to Black people.

Apparently, the lesson young Donald learned in that house was that empathy is a defect leading to weakness, contempt is a way of showing strength, and there’s nothing in the world worse than being a “loser.” Such men typically view women as objects to own rather than human beings, and Donald certainly seems to be acting that out on an astonishingly regular basis.

So, it should be no surprise that he’d…

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This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here:

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

Yesterday at the White House, Trump held a photo op with a 16-year-old lifeguard, Ryder Williams, who’d pulled a drowning ten-year-old out of a dangerous surf in Santa Cruz. For any other president, it would have been a sweet, feel-good moment. Trump, though, turned it into something dark and most of our press either missed it or politely pretended to.

After giving the award, Trump looked at the blonde boy’s parents and said:

“You did a good job. It’s good genetics. When you look at him, you can see, really good.”

People in the room chuckled nervously as some probably realized what Trump was really saying. Others seemed clueless. Mediaite wrote the story up and wondered out loud if Trump was trying to invoke the infamous Sydney Sweeney “great jeans” commercial.

But Trump wasn’t riffing on the jeans ad. He was sharing, in the Oval office and on camera, something he’s been saying for forty years, his racist “racehorse genetics” theory of human evolution, and it’s something that when it comes out of other people’s mouths has ended careers.

For example, back in 1988 on Martin Luther King Day, CBS’s sports commentator Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder was asked by a reporter about the progress that Black people were making in the field of sports.

Snyder told the reporter that Black athletes were doing well because “the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have a big black kid,” and that a Black athlete was better that most whites “because he’s been bred to be that way.” CBS fired him the next day because everybody in America understood instantly what he had said and where it came from.

Thirty-eight years later, the President of the United States says essentially the same thing about human beings in the White House and gets laughs and a write-up about denim.

This was not a slip of the tongue. The same year Jimmy The Greek was fired, Trump told Oprah on her show that his success was the result of being “born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.” (Forget the fact that his father gave him ~$400 million.) He told a rally audience in 2016 that with him “winning is innate” and some people just “have the winning gene.”

Michael D’Antonio who wrote one of the early Trump biographies and knew the family, told PBS’s Frontline program that they all subscribed to the so-called “racehorse theory of human development.”

That theory says that because breeding top racehorses with each other produces more top racehorses, that, similarly, a superior man and a superior woman will produce superior children. He even once complimented a roomful of British businessmen on their superior “bloodlines” and praised notorious antisemite Henry Ford’s “good bloodlines” while touring a Ford plant.

Talking to an all-white audience in Bemidji, Minnesota in 2020 Trump warned about the Black Somali refugees who’d settled in that state, saying:

“You [white people] have good genes, you know that, right? A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

On rightwing talk host Hugh Hewitt’s hate radio show, he said:

“Now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

Trump’s “racehorse theory” isn’t just some throwaway line or colorful figure of speech; it’s from the foundational myth of one of the darkest times in American history, the eugenics (“racial hygiene”) movement that reached its peak during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, a notorious racist who screened the Klan recruiting film Birth of a Nation at the White House. Hitler based his “final solution” on American and British eugenics literature that encouraged the isolation and sterilization of “inferior” people.

That led to the racist 1924 Immigration Act that later turned away Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s death camps, and the Supreme Court blessed a model sterilization law for “inferior” humans in their 1927 Buck v Bell decision. German lawyers translated that decision and used it as the framework for the Third Reich’s own 1933 sterilization law that preceded and ultimately set up the Holocaust.

Tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized against their will back then, and at the Nuremberg trials multiple German defendants argued that they were “simply following American science.”

But the racehorse theory of humanity wasn’t even new in the 1920s: slavery was justified in this country for centuries based on the supposed inferiority of Black people. Crainiometry — the “science” of determining how “advanced” a person is by measuring their skull — was rolled out in the 19th century as a way of proving whites were the most advanced race.

In 1851, a Louisiana physician named Samuel Cartwright published a nationally-distributed pamphlet claiming that enslaved people who’d run away from their plantations were doing so because they suffered from a mental illness he called “drapetomania.” He explicitly wrote that God had made Black people “naturally submissive” so when they rose up or escaped it was because they were expressing symptoms of that mental pathology.

Southern politicians trying to justify Jim Crow after the failure of Reconstruction used the same trick MAGA racists use today, citing crime and imprisonment statistics by way of “proving” that Black people are simply “born bad.” As noted Substack author Rohn Kenyatta writes:

“The manifestation of this racism and white supremacy need not be blatant as it is often cloaked in stories on crime, poverty, voting rights, illiteracy and ‘civil rights.’”

The whole point of Trump’s racehorse theory is to provide a pseudo-scientific explanation for the outcome of centuries of institutionalized racism. Today, while the median white family has assets of around $285,000 (home and car ownership, retirement funds, etc.) the median Black household is only worth $45,000.

Trump doesn’t want you to know why, and his good or bad genes proclamations are designed to make us ignore everything from unequal access to the GI Bill and Redlining to plain old racism.

Trump’s complained that the Smithsonian dwells too much on “how bad slavery was” and his executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” nailed eight Smithsonian museums under White House review for having displays about “how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been” without, presumably, discussing the failure of their genes.

As a result of his administration’s racist pressure, the National Park Service is rewriting their exhibits on slavery at Independence Hall, one of the more prominent places where George Washington held people in slavery. It wasn’t that Washington was a racist, Trump would presumably tell you, but that the people he enslaved deserved it because of their inferior genes.

And much of the GOP is right there with him. Congressman Steve King spent years babbling about how white people have contributed more than “any other subgroup of people” to western civilization, warning that “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

Tommy Tuberville, when asked whether white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military, answered, “I call them Americans.” Steve Scalise became House Majority Leader after bragging that he’d spoken to a 2002 convention of Klan Grand Wizard David Duke’s European-American Unity and Rights Organization. A reporter said he’d called himself “David Duke without the baggage,” although Scalese disputes it.

When Politico exposed a group of Young Republican leaders having a group chat that was filled with jokes about gas chambers and Hitler admiration, JD Vance called the negative reaction “pearl clutching.” Tucker Carlson hosted open racist Nick Fuentes on his show for a friendly hour, and the president of the Heritage Foundation went so far as to defend them both.

Trump’s acting undersecretary for public policy, Darren Beattie, says America should “pay smart people to …

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This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here:

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

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There’s a reason everything is getting so expensive and inflation seems intractable, and it goes way beyond just Trump’s stupid war-of-choice in Iran. It explains why the morbidly rich keep getting richer while the rest of America struggles, and why people are paying absurd interest rates on everything from credit cards to home mortgages to car loans, and it all rolls back to a wild conspiracy Republicans hatched in the late 1970s and Reagan put into place in 1981.

It starts with — thanks to three mind-bogglingly corrupt and illegitimate Republican presidents (Reagan, W. Bush, and Trump) — our national debt rolling past $40 trillion in the next few days, probably before Labor Day. That’s more than our entire nation’s total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — the sum of all goods and services produced in the last year, which came in just a whisker over $32 trillion.

And we’re paying over a trillion dollars a year on that debt that was intentionally run up by those 3 Republican presidents and their buddies in Congress, which is a large part of why we’re the only developed country in the world where families can go bankrupt because somebody got sick and kids graduate from college with debt that will take them decades (if ever) to pay off.

As if to shove it in our faces, last week Trump proposed a new cut in the capital gains tax that is pretty much exclusively paid by rich people who, instead of earning a paycheck that’s subject to a top 37%, today already only pay a top 20% tax on the money they make with their investments. To add insult to injury he just raised taxes on working class people’s wages by an average of $900 this year via the GOP’s Big Beautiful Bill that passed without a single Democratic vote.

I remember when Reagan was cutting taxes and spending like a drunken sailor back in the 1980s (he and Bush Sr. after him tripled our nation’s debt) and I was constantly telling people:

“Give me a $2 trillion credit card and I’ll show you what it’s like to live large, too.”

But for some reason Democrats never picked up on the message that the GOP’s “fiscal conservatism” was a fraud, and generally still haven’t. That has to change.

Trump, Mike Johnson, and John Thune are borrowing money at a rate that would’ve made Reagan blush. They added $1.8 trillion to our national debt in just the first ten months of this fiscal year (which started last October 1st) and we’ve paid interest on that debt to the tune of $1.17 trillion just so far this fiscal year, up 15 percent because all this debt is driving up bond yields.

After all, when Reagan came into office our national debt was just a bit over $800 billion ($0.8 trillion) and when it was on the verge of hitting a trillion dollars he disingenuously told a joint session of Congress:

“Our national debt is approaching $1 trillion. A few weeks ago I called such a figure, a trillion dollars, incomprehensible, and I’ve been trying ever since to think of a way to illustrate how big a trillion really is. And the best I could come up with is that if you had a stack of thousand-dollar bills in your hand only 4 inches high, you’d be a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of thousand-dollar bills 67 miles high.”

Prior to Reagan’s presidency, we’d been steadily paying down our 106-percent-of-GDP debt from World War II; by the time he came into office in 1981, Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter (and their Congresses) had paid it down to a mere 31% of GDP.

And while we were paying down that debt, we also built the interstate highway system, put into place free college and cheap mortgages for millions with the GI Bill, created Medicare and Medicaid, built thousands of new schools and hundreds of new hospitals, and sent men to the moon.

We were able to do all that because during that entire New Deal era, right up until Reagan took office, the top marginal income tax rate on morbidly rich money hoarders ran between 70 and 91 percent.

One could get rich, but it was nearly impossible to become an oligarch like today.

Then Reagan took office and decided to follow Jude Wanniski’s advice to the letter, and everything changed. I’ve written about Jude’s “Two Santas” strategy often enough that regular readers can probably recite it in their sleep, but in essence it was:

“Cut taxes on the rich and spend like a drunken sailor when a Republican is in the White House, and then scream about the national debt and demand cuts to social programs when a Democrat comes into office.”

Reagan and Bush Sr. took our national debt from under $1 trillion and jacked it all the way up to $4.4 trillion in a mere 12 years. If you add up the impact of Reagan’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires and corporations, and add in the $8 trillion from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that GW Bush lied us into, it pretty much equals our entire ~$40 trillion national debt today.

Jude was right, and his proposed scheme worked: because three corrupt Republican presidents have embraced his strategy, our national debt is now at 123% of GDP.

And now Trump wants to give the Pentagon another $1.5 trillion next year, an explosion of “defense” spending that will re-stimulate the economy and add to our debt, crushing families as it spikes interest and inflation. Not to mention the billions he’s demanding from Congress right now to cover the costs of his and Bibi’s stupid war against Iran.

And here’s where the story gets wild with a point that probably 95 out of 100 Americans don’t realize: that trillion-plus dollars we pay every year for interest on our national debt doesn’t just vanish or fly into outer space; most of it goes straight into the pockets and money bins of the morbidly rich.

What a scam!

Forty-five years of Reaganomics have converted what were once the tax bills for the morbidly rich into a source of extremely safe revenue for them, since they’re among the largest holders of US Treasuries. And we’re paying the bill to shovel all that interest money into their money bins.

Money that flowed from the rich into the Treasury between the 1930s and 1980s as taxes now flows from the Treasury into the pockets of the extremely rich every quarter as interest payments, and it’s paid for by working people with their paychecks.

We spend more making interest payments to rich people every year than we do on Defense or Medicare, and almost as much as we spend every year on Social Security; interest on the national debt is the second largest line-item in the entire national budget.

And if that isn’t enough of a slap in the face, Todd Blanche signed an order saying the IRS is forever barred from examining Trump’s prior tax returns or those of his family. And the “anti-weaponization fund” was just a ruse; they’re now paying Trump’s buddies who committed crimes and were prosecuted for it out of existing Treasury funds.

They never needed that fund. But Trump sure did want his ~$100 million tax bill that the IRS has been trying to collect for almost two decades wiped out. And now it is.

That’s right, Todd Blanche handed Donald Trump ~$100 million of our tax dollars last week, and almost nobody in the media or Democratic leadership is even discussing it.

The national debt itself isn’t the bomb we need to worry about; Japan’s is 237 percent of GDP (compared with our 121 percent) and they have universal healthcare, bullet trains that run on time, a life expectancy of 84 (ours is 79), and virtually no homelessness.

What’s important is what we’ve bought with all those trillions we threw into our debt over the past 45 years.

When Reagan was president and our press was falling all over itself to congratulate him on being an economic genius as he juiced our economy with deficit spending, Louise and I and our three kids lived in Germany. I still remember the first time one of our children was injured and we took her to the doctor’s office where they refused to let me pay for anything. There was no bill, no co-pay, no deductible, nothing.

In the 1990s I …

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here:

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe