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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.
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)
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.
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.
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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