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NYT has a primer on all the corruption that Trump has been engaging in:
Beyond this article, you could probably add a bunch more, like how White House aides are buying and selling stocks suspiciously timed around tariff announcements to make big profits.
The response to all of this from MAGA has been next to nonexistent. A handful of people have implied that maaaaaaaybe Trump shouldn't be doing this, but none of them remotely push the issue. When the left try to criticize this, most of MAGA either retorts with the broken record of Shellenberger arguments, or otherwise claims something Biden did was somehow worse, and Trump's corruption is implied to be good, actually. Isn't it wonderful living in an era when negative partisanship is the only political force that matters? Scandals and corruption used to be a thing that allowed the other party to come in and try to do better, but now they're used as a justification for the other side becoming even worse.
Trump could EO himself a billion dollars and as long as he stops immigration, deports all the migrants here and stops all funding for the foreign wars / foreign aide I'd still vote for him. The country has just gotten bad enough that normal crime doesn't really matter. The threat is existential.
Personally I suspect that this sort of corruption was always happening, we just didn't get coverage of it because the uniparty was in control and they didn't want to release things that overly damaged trust in the system. Now the knives are out and all the dirty laundry gets aired. I mean epstein was getting dirt on mega rich businessmen and influential politicians way back in the late 90s.
(there should be disclaimers on hanania links so people don't give him traffic against their will, or use archives)
Well look at all of the self dealing DOGE found. NYT was…against that and those numbers dwarf what they are reporting here.
And to your point re uniparty there is zero appetite to fix it because some republicans are in on it too.
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No, it is not. If the Taliban party had just gotten a majority of the votes in New Mexico, then I might be inclined to agree that your country faces an existential threat. But this does not happen. The only religious nutjobs getting elected to Congress are self-identifying as Christian, and even they do not pose an existential threat.
Sure, given current demographic trends, at some point in the future the non-hispanic whites will be a minority. But this is not the end of the world. I mean, plenty of Asians preferred living in the US (where they were a minority) to living in Asia, because by and large, being an ethnic minority is not that bad a deal in the US.
Since you beat the Brits, you had perhaps two conflicts which might be called existential: the civil war (in retrospect, the outcome was over-determined, if not in the 1860s, then in the 1900s) and the cold war (which was more of a threat to the world as a whole than to the US specifically).
Anyone who wants to tell you that any current political thing, be it Dobbs, immigration, Trump, Social Justice or whatever poses an existential threat to the US is very likely wrong. (The AI doomers at least have a plausible pathway in mind, though.)
I think there's a reasonable fear that the "being an ethnic minority is not that bad a deal in the US" is only the case because of the unusual and ahistoric forbearance of the existing ethnic majority. There's a disquieting dearth of places friendly to ethnic minorities that are not run by white people.
Singapore?
A noteworthy exception, but a Crown possession in living memory, and possibly not scalable past city-state.
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Instead, new mexico is ruled by a party that
Etc
I would rather have the Taliban start a legit civil war than let the enemy turn the US into a whole new thing.
Let me stop you right there. With the benefit of hindsight, the revival of the Taliban was already a forgone conclusion when GWB invaded Afghanistan. Within the US RoE, there was no way things could have gone differently. The US stayed for two decades -- easily a generation -- and the democratic state collapsed as soon as they left. They could have stayed for another generation and the outcome would have been the same.
(This is not to say that the retreat was well done, but that the alternative -- pouring resources into Afghanistan to keep the Taliban out of power forever -- was not worth it either from a geostrategic or an EA perspective.)
And, more significantly, Joe Biden was implementing the surrender agreement signed by Donald Trump in Doha in 2020.
The Deep State thought they could prevail upon Sleepy Joe to rat out of the deal, but I don't think they had any plans to win the war if they had done so. I don't know how much of the badly botched pull-out was Biden administration incompetence and how much was Deep State sabotage.
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New Mexico has low state capacity by US standards, though. Quite a bit of the lefty insanity from the top in New Mexico doesn't make it past the top.
Even the most "moderate" democrat will toe the party line when asked, or else face bullying or expulsion. All democrats are democrats.
And? I’m not claiming they’re moderates. I’m claiming they’re inneffective.
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Yeah, I think most of the state is mostly Democrat because they want to use the oil money for daycare, extra school, extra Medicaid, and whatnot. But not the "LGBTQ for 5 year olds" kind of school, just the "too bad we don't have more high achieving kids here, maybe we can teach the ones we have to read and do math if they just sit in a classroom for more hours" kind. It's not like the sheriffs want to enforce the governor's orders about disallowing guns or wearing masks alone in the desert, so they don't.
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"Ship of Theseus" existential, not "Destruction of Carthage" existential. Mass immigration and erosion of the civil religion threaten to transform the United States into something unrecognizable. That already happened once with Ellis Island immigration, and it is currently threatening to happen again as a consequence of the 60s cultural revolution.
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I find it amazing that on this day 1 year ago it would have been the true blue left who would have called for Hanania link disclaimers while now it's the right wingers doing the same, even though his views haven't really changed much in that time.
Particularly given that many of those same people have likely ridiculed the purity spirals on the left.
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By mid-2022 I could tell Hanania had exhausted his couple of interesting ideas, and it had become clear he wasn't at that 99.9th percentile of internal coherency that makes for an insightful commentator. I almost wrote a response to a comment here, saying that people were obviously overestimating Hanania's ability to invest into his own ideas. He was an r-strategist poster. And he was going to have to start wasting everybody's time to keep up with the meatgrinder of being a professional twitter wonk.
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Never really liked him as a populist since he's basically open borders. He seems to lack a basic understanding of humans. It's become especially grating now though since he's basically this term's Romney/McCain/Cheney. Being held up by all the left wing posters as a conservative with morals and principals, aka beliefs that align more with their own.
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I have been calling out Hanania's stupidity since at least 2023, and I'm no true blue
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Well yes, the strategy of farming hateclicks with deliberate offense is not especially dependent on actual opinions.
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There are still a few Hanania fans here, at least. He is a contrarian drifting towards the Yglesias level of annoying, but he still makes some good points.
I suppose I count as defending Hanania - I don't particularly like him, but I think hate for him here is absurdly overblown.
I will just straight-up defend Yglesias, though. I don't find him particularly annoying and he strikes me as effectively advocating for his preferred positions in a way that admits of rational argument and counter-argument. Well done him.
He can write reasonably when he wants to, but when he just wants to Boo Outgroup Yglesias gets really bad.
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The hate he gets is just a result of people putting him on a pedestal. If it wasn't for that, he'd be indistinguishable from the blur of faceless Substackers that no one cares about. I wouldn't even care that he's calling himself "elite human capital", it's the fact that others agree with his self-image that is absurd, and warrants the reaction to him.
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Biden's drug addled failson was on the god damned board of directors of a gas company in UKRAINE. Bloody Nancy Pelosi and all the rest of the house should be banned from even thinking about owning stock. The media can talk about Trump's supposed corruption until they are blue in the face, and it wouldn't matter for me one bit.
I really don’t understand what’s so bad about congresscritters insider trading. They’re using their connections to enrich their family members in harmless ways, what’s the problem? It isn’t like taking bribes or anything that might affect how they do their jobs.
It annihilates the illusion of a fair and lawful system, if I was insider trading the way they are the SEC would be setting up exploratory forward bases up my colon. Also it should be illegal for anyone in lawmaking or executive positions to retire and go work for the exact same companies they were supposed to make laws controlling. And it isn't, and everyone turns a blind eye, and if you bring that up with normies they don't even know wtf you're talking about. The media will not bring it up because they know how their bread gets buttered.
And then just knowing this is the state of play we're "supposed" to read the headlines in the Grand parent post and take it seriously. It's extremely aggravating.
You want smart, capable people in congress, right? They should get some opportunities to enrich themselves and their families that don’t cost anything to sweeten the pot.
But I don’t think we have a smart and capable Congress and we have them fattening themselves up.
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Well, hell, I'd at least think about voting for him if I thought he could or would carry out some of his grand promises. Every politician promises he will deliver incredible things, and if you vote for him and say "I don't care if he steals a billion dollar as long as he does all the things he promised to do" you are being taken for a rube.
He did actually stop immigration, though...
Trump has temporarily gotten it back to the levels that Obama had. He's done almost nothing in regards to helping ensure that will continue long-term.
You're saying it like it's a bad thing?
In American democracy, how would you propose to achieve ensuring some policy continues forever, regardless of what future voters or executives want, and how such a situation is different from a dictatorship?
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What you're saying is that it continuing long-term is entirely up to the next administration. If they want to return to open borders that will be their decision, not Trump's.
Trump could absolutely make the job of anyone seeking to explode immigration harder by changing the law, i.e. passing legislation, not just executive orders.
Under Article I, legislation must be passed by Congress. The President only has the power to veto or not.
The POTUS absolutely helps set legislative priorities. This is even more true for Trump, who's basically the God-King of the Republican Party at the moment.
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I have wondered if he could massively expand the APA notice-and-comment regime by executive fiat. He lost a number of cases to APA procedure questions in his first term (and seems somewhat likely to again), but "now all executive policy changes require 4 years of notice and comment, effective 60 days from now, conveniently the day before I leave office" seems like, if IMO a poor governance choice, the sort of live policy grenade Trump likes tossing.
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No he absolutely can't, that's what the Congress is supposed to do.
See my comment here.
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Yes, but if they reverse his policy, the responsibility for that is on them. If the non-MAGA politicians want to act like "adults in the room" they need to stop blaming the parents for not hiding the cookie jar out of their reach.
Sure, if they reverse the legislation that would be on them, but undoing legislation is much more difficult that just doing executive orders, which is how Biden basically got to defacto open borders via loophole.
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Why do you think he doesnt do that? "Le dumb" was kind of believable during the first admin, but now theres all sorts of people who could be doing that and presumably understand the importance of it. Why isnt e.g Vance writing an immigration bill?
I have a post rolling around in my head around that, but it basically comes down to Trump not really liking to do legislation since it's harder than doing EO's, and the party and especially the base broadly respecting that. Trump absolutely could pass sweeping immigration reform if he wanted to, but he doesn't really want to.
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The obvious answer for a skeptic is "because they're all - to a man, young or old, dumb or brilliant - basically amoral nihilists maximizing their short-term gains, not selfless statesmen invested in the long-term advancement of Republican ideals". eg Vance isn't even trying to write an actually effective immigration bill because he needs immigration to still be a live issue in 2032 so he can use it to win the Presidency then.
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Easier said than done. The administration right now is putting most of its energy into dismantling the federal bureaucracy in a way that will be difficult for a future administration to undo, but successive administrations being able to reverse the policies of previous administrations is a feature, not a bug, of American politics.
Trump could certainly push for laws that will make immigration much harder, establish enforcement norms that will require effort (and perhaps public, politically unpalatable action) to reverse, and generally make it difficult (but not impossible) for the next administration to roll it back and open the gates again. But that is not where he's actually focusing his efforts.
Yes, and that's a bad thing. He's spending his (legislative) efforts right now passing regressive tax cuts that will blow out the deficit even further. It would be much better if he focused on long-term immigration reform instead.
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Wasn't the problem with enforcement, and not the law?
Both the enforcement and the law were broken.
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