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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, 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.
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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