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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.
It's interesting that so many of the replies here seem to be "yes, but the other side is worse" or "yes, we need to take the bad with the good" or even "yes Chad".
I'm a Trump fan but I abhor corruption and wouldn't want to turn a blind eye to it. That said...only two of your examples (if true) would count as corruption?
What makes a Melania Trump performance worth so much? How do you know the meme coin isn't a vehicle for corruption?
You get to advertise your movie to the maga or less-maga-but-conservative half the country thereabouts on "we have the presidents hot trophy wife in our movie."
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Trumps personal corruption is stupid and I honestly think he's just creating a void where bad actors and those confident in his insanity can profit. Timing stock purchases around tariff announcements is risky if you think Trump will back down at the last minute, as he has done before, so it just reflects a bet that Trump is actually pulling the trigger on something every suited economist is screaming will be stupid. The memecoin stuff is honestly just funny at this point and calling it access capitalism is dubious since access to Trump seems to be counterproductive - Musk is on the outs, and Susie Wiles is still by all accounts the main powerbroker.
Right now the bigger problem is that the irritating screeching makes it hard to filter genuine problems of Trump accruing personal gains through the power of the executive versus the normal machinery of government being somewhat incompetent. Everything Trump does is corruption destroying the republic, but yet it still stands, so at a certain point it is legit to ask what the hell this corruption actually is.
The mechanisms to hold Trump accountable are unfortunately degraded, and the question must be posed on whether such mechanisms ever would have worked as intended anyways. In such a degraded and polarized environment, we're going to end up in a vibeoff anyways. Wait, I just time travelled back from 2011, and its been a vibeoff since a decade ago. Elevatorgate raises its head again!
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