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Notes -
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.
Insider trading? Family members selling access to the President? I am shocked, shocked to find that corruption is going on in here...
Well, not that shocked. Isn't this just business as usual? The sums are pretty small compared to the size of the Federal budget, and it's not like corruption in Washington is a new phenomenon.
And revealed preferences are showing that people don't actually care about this stuff much at all, that they only pretend to care to use it as a cudgel against the other side. To someone who genuinely thinks corruption is bad and should be stamped out as much as possible, that's horrifying.
Nah man, you don't get to say that, not after people screamed until they were blue in the face trying to point out the corruption of the democrats in the past few administrations only to be gaslit by the fucking government and media and have their lives ruined. You don't get to punish anyone who mentions corruption and then when you have silenced them claim their silence is proof they don't care.
It's not the hill I'd die on, necessarily, but I think it's coherent to care more about overt corruption like Trump's than about covert corruption like the Clintons' and Bidens' - in other words, to prefer the government to gaslight people about the corruption that's happening, if we must have corruption at all. A President who's overtly corrupt is fouling up the institutions themselves and eroding public trust by making a spectacle of his lack of morals. Meanwhile, a President who gives in to temptation in private, but understands and cares about the fact that he shouldn't, and tries very hard not to let it get out, is just one fallible man.
Do you exclusively get your news and information from Fox or some other right of center source? If not, how are you sure you are not conflating the overtness of Trump's corruption with the reporting frequency and tenor of the news sources from what you derive your feelings about what is happening?
While I don't think corruption is the most compelling example of this, I think immigration enforcement is (most of what has been reported on as unprecedented under Trump happened sometime under Biden or Obama and just no one noticed or cared to). But it is still an example. If there are thousands of reporters trying to report a thing, vs. two in the news sources your consume, your view is going to be skewed.
I actually think most people on the motte "Know" this, but far fewer act in accordance with their knowledge.
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I think the exact opposite. This seems like a conflict vs mistake theory thing to me - I think you are a better person than anyone who has or will run for president. Perhaps if you have generally good pious people in charge corruption can be better in secret. Perhaps. I think the incentives will still lead to disaster, but I can buy the argument. When you are run by halfwit narcissists though, overt corruption is intrinsically better because overt corruption must toe the line of public acceptability. Kickbacks, insider trading - all perfectly acceptable to the US public as has been amply demonstrated by everyone in power since at least 2008 (before then absolutely but 2008 is where it became obvious to everyone paying attention). Sex trafficking rings? Pedophilia? Those bloom in darkness.
Edit: added the line about my personal view
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What corruption were the past few Democratic administrations engaged in that exceeded the level of magnitude and blatantness that Trump is now engaged in? Even if you can list examples, why is your response to imply that makes Republicans immune from criticism now, rather than asserting that both parties deserve criticism when they're doing bad things?
You really don't know? How can you claim Trump is worse if you can't even list a few things off the top of your head. I even gave an example in the other comment (though you did remove it when quoting it, so maybe there's some gaze-averting going on).
This is why I originally said you're dismissing the argument that Trump doing better. Criticize him all you want, just don't act like MAGAs should be more outraged than they were about the previous administration. At least not without evidence.
Which comment are you referring to? I'm not trying to be obtuse here -- I did a ctrl+f on all your comments in this thread and nothing immediately stood out, but maybe I'm just missing something.
Biden's decline, a.k.a a chunk of his term being Weekend At Berney's-ed. The comment is here.
Edit: oh, did you edit the bit about Original Sin in? I don't recall seeing it before. In any case it doesn't matter to the argument, the decline was obvious long before the book was published.
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Oh you want data? Read all of the motte - it's all in there.
I point blank do not believe you care about corruption. At all. If you cared about corruption by anyone as much as you claim, you should already have investigated the claims against the previous administration, and you would have had no choice but to conclude that it at least looks fishy, and therefore you would have investigated it and you would now have bulletproof arguments that it wasn't corruption. Since you claim that you don't even know what corruption the previous administration has been accused of, I can safely conclude you don't care about corruption, you care about Trump.
And I did not imply that republicans are immune from criticism. My implication is that nobody gives a shit about corruption on their side anymore. I have been beating this drum for years, but I have been explicit about it since Trump's election - this is democrat's own fault. There is a point past which spite becomes an acceptable justification and they pushed the right there. They had plenty of warnings this was coming, plenty of people were willing to point out that the right would only tolerate two tier anarcho-tyranny for so long, but they were ignored. So now they reap the whirlwind.
I feel like I’m having a stroke.
If I’m reading you right, though, I think you’re jumping the gun. How do you know Ben doesn’t have a “bulletproof argument” for whatever it is you’ve got in mind?
I know he doesn't have bulletproof arguments for all of the DNC's corruption because the DNC are hopelessly corrupt. And if for some reason you imagine he has been a motte regular for years but somehow missed any discussion of DNC corruption in the past, he has no idea that the party is run like the Mafia and so on, his concern wasn't that there was corruption he didn't know about - he dismissed that idea out of hand - it was that the corruption exceeded that of Trump. I think it's pretty safe to conclude his concern is Trump, not corruption.
I’m sure he’s seen the discussion. I know I have. And yet I don’t share your conclusion either. It’s not because I hate Trump, but because I really do believe his administration is more flagrantly corrupt than Biden’s, Obama’s, or the DNC.
I wish you would give a specific comparison on insider trading or nepotism or something. How many politicians are given personal 747s?
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Again, I must insist you list out a few examples of the corruption you're talking about. Because I did investigate some of the more major allegations. The claim Biden "stole" the 2020 election was 99.9% pure hallucination/confabulation. The Hunter Biden stuff was true in regards to Hunter being a dirtbag but critically lacked the link connecting to Joe, which was always the point in the first place.
So what exactly are you talking about?
'Again I must insist' 'Because I did investigate' 'so what exactly are you talking about' - why are you talking like this? Are you trying to convince me this conversation has gone on a lot longer than it has? I can't see your investigations if you don't mention them and stick to exclusively handwaving away all claims of democrat corruption with Hanania links, can I?
But you tell on yourself anyway when you did investigate 'some of the more major allegations'. If all corruption concerns you as much as you claim you should be concerned by all of it, surely? You should be able to rattle off a list off the top of your head of bipartisan corruption.
Here's my list of 'some of the more major ones'. I don't really want to do this since it is beside the point that someone who cares about all corruption can not possibly be partisan in the US and yet you are.
There's yes election fraud, Hunter Biden's bullshit and the cover up 'to protect the election', covid policies, insider trading, the weaponisation of the doj, the deliberate sabotage of our borders, the politicisation of social media, basically everything the DNC has ever done and, of course, the puppet president bullshit.
So the Hunter Biden cover up is definitive, as is the weaponization of the doj and the puppet president shenanigans, as were covid control measures, insider trading and the politicisation of social media - those ones are bipartisan, yay. But you didn't know about any of them? This must be a massive blow.
First off you should know I have a fairly low threshold for abruptly ending conversations when the other person is disrespectful, uses ad hominems, or makes personal attacks. Nothing you've said so far passes that threshold yet (the comments I quoted are borderline), but I've been on this site long enough to know where it could be headed. When people resort to that I've found that it's best to just not respond to them much from then on. This is unfortunate since I come here explicitly to have my ideas tested, which I'd like to continue as long as both sides are generally respectful towards each other.
It seems as if I've annoyed you. If that's the case I apologize, as that's not my intention. The reason I'm "talking like this" is because I asked for specific examples, but in your reply you didn't give any and instead claimed it was obvious and that I should "read all of the motte" (?) but giving explicit examples really would was helpful so thank you for giving them. My issue with a lot of your examples is that they're not actually corruption -- many of them are bad on their own merits (e.g. border policies) -- but they're not corruption, they're just policies that you (and I) disagree with.
The "puppet president" stuff also isn't what I'd call a central example of corruption. It was also bad, and the Democrats deserve a lot of blame for it, and in some ways it rhymes with corruption since it erodes trust and involves implicit (and occasional explicit) lying, but it's different from, say, selling off pardons.
For the ones like Hunter Biden and the "stolen" election, the main claims of those are pretty much just blatantly false as I've already said. I'd say the Hunter Biden thing certainly would have been a central example of corruption, if the main claim was true.
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An associate involved in some of their dealings testified under oath that Joe was "the big guy" referred to as getting a cut -- maybe you don't believe him or whatever, but that doesn't seem like an hallucination to me?
This is in reference to Hunter's stuff, and it was a claim Hunter (or his associate) made to make it seem like Joe was intimately involved when he actually wasn't. Hunter wanted to make it seem like selling access to his dad was a good deal for the buyer, so that's why he said this even though it wasn't true. Republicans went over Joe's financial records with a fine-toothed comb and repeatedly found nothing.
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Which specific claims are you talking about here? Hunter Biden? Stolen election? Biden's "fuck all y'all I'm pardoning everyone" end-of-term pardons? The congressional insider trading thing? Or is there some other specific, credible, and concrete accusation of corruption that you are referring to?
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