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The Hartmann Report

Daily Take: Is Corruption the New American Dream — A Nation Rebuilt on the Gospel of the Grift?

The Hartmann Report

Thom Hartmann

Congress, Economics, Climate Change, The Hartmann Report, Debate, Democracy, America, Thom Hartmann, News

4.41.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2025

⏱️ 15 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Where honesty is punished, power is bought, and every rule has a price, Trump’s turned the dream of opportunity into an industry of deception…

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Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:57.8

Quince.com slash Tom.

1:00.6

Is corruption the new American dream? A nation rebuilt on the gospel of the grift?

1:07.9

When corruption becomes endemic, democracy dies from the inside out. Trump's family's

1:13.6

grift is teaching America's elites that power can be bought, just as it is in Putin's Russia and

1:19.7

Orban's Hungary, and it's already distorting our economy. When I was working for an international

1:25.7

relief agency in the early 1980s, I went into

1:28.3

Uganda during the war and famine that began when Tanzanian troops invaded to throw out

1:33.1

Idi Amin. To get there, I had to pay a $50 bribe to the Ugandan official at their embassy in

1:38.2

Nairobi to get my visa. When I was leaving through the half destroyed in Tebby Airport,

1:43.2

three soldiers pointed their

1:44.5

automatic weapons at my face and demanded half of whatever money I had before letting me go through

1:50.5

to the boarding area. In Haiti, a cabinet-level official tried to solicit a $15,000 bribe from me

1:57.9

in exchange for our agency getting permission to operate there. I turned it down.

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