The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink
by Thom Hartmann
View on GoodreadsProgressive talk-radio host Thom Hartmann's 2025 polemic-and-analysis of the Trump second-term opening — written from the left-populist tradition Hartmann has occupied for decades, as both diagnostic and call to action.
Core ideas
- Hartmann's framework runs through the populist-progressive tradition (Bryan, La Follette, FDR) — Trump is treated as the right-populist endpoint of a long abandonment of left-populist economics by the Democratic Party, which left an opening for the wrong kind of populism to fill.
- The "broken man" framing is psychological — Hartmann argues Trump's specific personality dysfunction is necessary to make sense of the political behavior, and that treating it as ordinary partisan strategy misreads what's happening.
- The "world on the brink" half of the title is the book's policy concern — climate, democracy, financial stability all on simultaneous deteriorating trajectories that compound through 2028.
Published2025
Pages224
ISBN9798890571861
ReadJan 2026
