Daily Take: History Shows How the Transition to Tyranny Begins: By Punishing the Weak and Defying the Courts
The Hartmann Report
Thom Hartmann
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2026
⏱️ 21 minutes
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Summary
From Hitler to Putin to Orbán and Trump, the first step is always the same: act illegally, dare anyone to stop you, and behave like losing in court is only a delay…
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Transcript
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| 1:00.0 | History shows us how the transition to tyranny begins |
| 1:03.4 | by punishing the weak and defying the courts. |
| 1:08.2 | Donald Trump's crusade against Kilmar-Abrego-Garcia is on life support, as it may |
| 1:14.1 | finally be dismissed this week or naxed by Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Tennessee. But will that be the |
| 1:20.0 | end of this father's and husband's ordeal? On Monday, I told you about the historic pattern |
| 1:26.0 | associated with countries moving from democracy to tyranny. |
| 1:29.4 | First, they start breaking the law and ignoring the Constitution in small ways, and the more they get away with it and buy off or threaten politicians who may otherwise stop it, the more they do it. |
| 1:40.3 | We've been watching Trump do this almost from the first day of his second term in office. |
| 1:46.5 | Yesterday, I laid out the mechanism behind that. |
| 1:49.6 | The way men like Trump, who want to become dictators, co-opt the law by threatening law firms and the media, ignoring judges, and legally, verbally, or physically attacking the press, politicians, and regular citizens |
| 2:01.7 | who speak out. Trump has done all of these things already, too, just like Putin and Orban did when |
| 2:07.6 | they were deconstructing the democracies in Russia and Hungary. Today we look at how a country |
| 2:12.7 | finally fully crosses from being a self-correcting democracy into a rigid tyranny like those two |
| 2:18.7 | countries and how average people like us can identify that moment in time to do something about it |
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