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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.
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?
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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