The Hartmann Report

09/24/2025

And this is how power enforces obedience: by making an example out of person after person, news outlet after news outlet, comedian after comedian, until the rest of us are too afraid to speak.

That’s the bigger story here. What Trump is doing isn’t politics. It’s the deliberate centralization of power, seizing it from the people and the media, silencing dissent, bending institutions to his will, and cloaking himself in immunity given him by six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

This isn’t scattershot; it’s systemic. And here’s the truth history tells us: once power is seized, it is rarely given back.

If Trump normalizes troops in cities, that precedent will endure. If he silences networks with FCC threats, that precedent will endure. If lawsuits against journalists succeed, that precedent will endure. Each act rewires the presidency into a throne for a would-be king.

And yet some Democrats act as if this is business as usual while the ground is ripped out from beneath us. Their weakness is complicity.

But democracy is not passive. It has always been the people who’ve seizing power back from kings, dictators, and colonizers. The Founders understood this when they wrote the Constitution to divide power across three branches of government. They fought to prevent a new form of monarchy. And now it’s our fight again.

What we must do is clear:

• Demand Congress block the abuse of emergency powers; contact your elect representatives every week.
• Push courts to stop executive overreach before precedents harden.
• Support independent journalism under attack.
• Push back hard against censorship of the media and corporations that bow their knee to Trump.
• Stand with those being punished: scientists, teachers, comedians, reporters, immigrants, protesters.
• Mobilize peacefully but relentlessly in the streets; No Kings Day is in a few weeks.
• Elect governors, legislators, and mayors who’ll serve as firewalls against federal occupation.

This is about power: who has it, who loses it, and whether it still belongs to the people.

If we do nothing, our children will ask what democracy was like, because they won’t have it. If we fight, we can still preserve the greatest system humanity has ever devised: a republic of laws, not autocrats.

Trump wants to be king. He’s already acting like one. The only question is whether we’ll kneel or rise, together, and take our democracy back.