The Hartmann Report

07/14/2025

History shows that when working people lose access to opportunity and stability, populism and extremism rise. They demand scapegoats and embrace demagogues. In early 20th-century Europe, economic collapse and inequality paved the way for authoritarian regimes. The result was two world wars.

We’re now staring into the jaws of what political scientists call the Thucydides Trap: when a rising power (China) threatens a dominant one (the U.S.), and conflict becomes almost inevitable. Combine that with economic unrest, and it’s a recipe for disaster.

Trump is already stoking this fire.

According to the Financial Times, his administration is pressuring Japan and Australia to pledge support for a potential war over Taiwan. His undersecretary of defense, Elbridge Colby, is demanding troop commitments while simultaneously throwing U.S. alliances into chaos.

Worse, Trump is floating bizarre geoeconomic weapons: charging allied nations for access to U.S. financial markets, forcing them to buy long-term Treasury bonds, and tying military protection to economic tribute. He killed our main source of soft power, USAID, and has silenced the Voice of America.

This isn’t diplomacy: it’s shakedown politics dressed up as strategy. As the Financial Times reported, it’s part of Trump’s wider attempt to abandon cooperation in favor of coercion.

These are the hallmarks of an empire in decline, and that amplifies the danger of both domestic fascist takeover and a third world war.

When a nation abandons real wealth creation, concentrates power in a corrupt elite, abandons its public infrastructure, and pursues reckless foreign policy, the mass of people become outraged.

They rarely understand who did this to them — giving autocrats like Putin, Hitler, Orbán, and Trump the opportunity to assign blame to minorities and attack their political enemies — but they do know they’ve been screwed.

As public sentiment boils over and billionaire-owned media like Fox “News” and billionaire social media owners like Zuckerberg and Musk use invisible, secret algorithms to increase their own profits by promoting and amplifying raw hate and rage, the outcomes, as we’ve seen throughout history, are predictable:

— Minority and political scapegoats are blamed.
— Borders are militarized.
— Political violence explodes.
— Journalism gives way to propaganda.
— Financial crashes trigger democratic backsliding in the name of “emergency measures.”
— War looms.

This is the road Trump and his toadies in the GOP have put us on.

Trump is poisoning our economy while destabilizing international diplomacy. He just fired 1,200 career professionals from the State Department, crippling our ability to engage in diplomacy and maintain peace.

He’s wrecking the low-wage workforce and our food supplies through immigration crackdowns and ICE raids.

He’s slowing growth and destroying small businesses with tariffs and erratic trade policies.

All while planning to expand ICE into an unaccountable, masked, nationwide secret-police-style paramilitary force that is already being used to suppress dissent and attack Democratic politicians, while it continues to terrorize immigrant communities.

Democrats and people of conscience must do more than hope the courts will stop this; the courts will not save us. We must speak out with moral clarity, economic fluency, and relentless courage.