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Notes -
Is there anything to this: "The Coup We've Feared Has Already Happened"?
Is this what it seems like to me — just more lefty pearl-clutching and crying wolf — or is there something to the arguments James Bruno and Tonoccus McClain are making?
That substack is a bad take on it - the best version of the theory I have seen is spread across multiple posts on lawfaremedia.org. But the underlying story is absolutely serious, and as far as I can see it is true. The three-bullet version of the story is
The slightly longer version is:
The claim that Trump and Johnson are trying to change the US budget process to one where (at least as regards discretionary spending - the only changes to entitlement spending have been done in regular order through the OBBBA) Congress does not meaningfully exercise the power of the purse seems to me to be straightforwardly true.
A side note here: I find it fascinating how inflamed people become when they learn something the government directs is paid by people giving money voluntarily, rather than by money forcibly extracted from unwilling subjects. It's like the act of forcible extraction itself is the one that sanctifies the money and makes them fit for the official purposes, and otherwise it's impure and unfit for use. Thinking about it, though, it's probably not surprising - the same people probably are deeply suspicious of any action done by private individuals voluntarily cooperating (aka "business") and think that only giving all power and control to a small set of government functionaries can make anything those individuals do morally acceptable. Why spending money should be any different?
For a variety of government purposes, I probably wouldn't care all that much. For things like paying the military, it touches bad historical examples. At least part of the mess in Rome is attributable to individual generals slash political figures paying their armies effectively out of their own pocket. This not only breeds loyalty to an individual over the legitimacy of a system, but it also produced plenty of situations where the leader they were loyal to was making promises to pay them, only once they conquered some stuff and extracted loot (and political victory for the leader). It thus ties the military's individual remuneration directly to an individual political figure's political success.
IF one is not a total abolish-the-government libertarian/anarchist type and instead thinks that there is at least some value in having a democratic Constitutional system with civilian control of the military (yes, an extractive gang, but with some structure to try to align it), and CIVMIL relations that try to breed military loyalty primarily to said democratic Constitutional system rather than to the political success of individual political figures, then yeah, it's probably a good thing to have the foot soldiers be paid more by the abstract system and a formal process of the extractive gang as a whole rather than directly by particular extractive gang leaders.
We have the formal process and abstract system. Except it's broken, and being broken down further by the very same people who are now clutching the pearls about 0.05% of the military budget that is supplied as a short-term stopgap measure. Again, all the talk that this is about some high-minded principle is bullshit. It's not about "democratic Constitutional system", it's about hurting people on the ground so they lose faith in Trump and make them give money to the particular extractive gang leaders to distribute between their supporters. That's all.
I understand your perspective, but I don't see how this responded at all to my comment. You may think that the system is "broken" because your political opponents are leveraging their role in it against your preferred politician. Sure. I never contested that. I said something different, which I believe remains unaddressed.
No, it's the reverse - they are able to "leverage" it because it's broken. The whole "debt ceiling" debacle should never happen at all, let alone be happening year after year. But my main point it's not that, it's that discussing all these high-minded concepts is useless when we're dealing with a banal case of political extortion. Nobody is trying to change the basic principles under which US military operates, what Trump is doing is just trying to make people not suffer from the consequences of the brokenness of the system and its abuse. The pearl-clutchers may scream this is because he wants to turn US Army into a Pretorian guard loyal personally to him, but not only it has nothing to do with the truth, but they themselves know perfectly well it's false, they are just using it to try and fool some part of the public into putting pressure on Trump to achieve the real goal - getting the money. That's my point - considering all that as if it were a real argument about the real role of US Military is pointless, because there's no relevance for this discussion to the current events. It's all performative manipulation, not real discussion.
I think this is the main and best claim. It is likely true, in my view. That said, the context of this thread is that @MadMonzer presented an opposite view. Your response was, expressly, a "side note" on the general topic of whether it matters where/how money comes to gov't purposes. I was responding to that. It's not really responsive to my comments to just go all the way back, pre-side-note, and have your claim really be that the whole original premise is just false, anyway, as a contingent factual matter.
I'm here to talk about why people would, in general and in theory, care about the topic of your side note. Notice that your side note was not in any way connected to any contingent, on-the-ground, facts about what Trump or his political opponents are currently doing or trying to do.
Well, it is false. Moreover, as I noted, even people advancing this claim (I don't mean well-akshually-ers on internet forums, I mean politicians and media) don't really think it is true - they are just using it as a wedge to open the box with the sweet sweet budget money, and that's all. In the best case. That's like calling the opponent a Nazi - when it's done, they don't really think you are about to don the Hugo Boss uniform and invade Poland. They are just giving themselves permission to treat you like you already did. Same here - they are just giving themselves permission to treat Trump as if he already dismantled the democracy, even though he had no intent to, and they know it perfectly well - but that's not the reason to deny oneself a useful weapon!
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The government is not a charity, and empirically people don't donate to the government for altruistic reasons. So if the government is being funded by "voluntary" "donations" then the way to bet is that either the donations are not really voluntary and the constitutional requirements for raising taxes have been circumvented (as with the Nvidia and AMD deals) or the voluntary payments are not really donations and something has been sold non-transparently, probably at a loss.
Paying the troops with voluntary donations is a special case of badness - the fact that the Executive needs to go to Congress (and to do so regularly - the Constitution specifically prohibits long-term appropriations for the army) to pay the troops was intended as a key check on Executive power.
People donate to all kinds of causes for altruistic reasons. In fact, people have been known donating literally their lives to governments. And the government is not shy to demand it. We hear that it is our patriotic duty to give as much as we can to the government. But somehow this only is laudable when done under the penalty of jail, if you do it without the threat, you are a pervert. Is that some kind of BDSM thing I am not aware of?
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I am not inflamed by it, but I am deeply suspicious of the motives and incentives. Organizations or people with huge amounts of money are rarely motivated by a deep sense of charity. How did they get so much money in the first place if they're so kind and charitable? It's possible, but suspicious. So much of politics seems to be wink wink nudge nudge soft corruption: trading favors for favors in the future. It's bad and illegal for someone to pay the president $100 million personal money in exchange for cutting their taxes by $200 million. It's equally bad, but effectively legal for someone to donate $100 million to something the president wants done, and then for reasons that are definitely completely unrelated ;) their taxes get cut by $200 million, or some other legal change is made or not made in their favor.
In a hypothetical scenario where someone is actually genuinely out of the kindness of their heart donating money to government projects with literally no ulterior motives, no quid pro quo, no future favors or influence gained, I think that's fine. But how often do you think that really happens? It's usually bribery with just enough plausible deniability to stay out of jail.
Money forcibly taken is clean because the giver can't use it to extract concessions and manipulate the government.
Cool, now please do Open Society Foundations and Tides. Or Zuckerberg paying for elections. Or any of the thousands of other examples where people with huge amounts of money donated for causes directly benefitting some politicians.
How does "none of your damn business" grab you as an explanation? Unless you have a probable cause and a warrant, nobody owes you explanation about anything in their property, and it is certainly absolutely unwarranted to accuse a person of being a moral degenerate and possibly criminal just because he did not give away all his money yet.
It is completely legal for someone to give an NGO $100 million in exchange for the government not raising taxes by $200 million to finance the NGO. Though usually what happens they raise it anyway, the NGO gets $300 million and spends it on electing Democrats (well, that and buying large mansions, of course).
I don't know. Let's examine the whole multi-billion-dollar NGO network that is deeply intermeshed with governmental structures by now, especially on state and local level, and see? Somehow except a couple of DOGE folks nobody ever is interested in looking into that, and what you get for such interest is being called a Nazi.
If it's indeed so, then I prefer the bribery to pay for the soldier's salary and not for Governor's second cousin's yacht. If we're going to get rid of that bribery altogether, I would prefer to start from the latter, which had been going on forever and nobody ever showed any interest in it, and not with the former, which started just a week ago and somehow everybody is obsessed with intermixing private and government money. With this pattern, my strong suspicion is, as always, they don't give a whistle about any of the high-minded principles they cloak themselves in, and cynically use them to attack their political enemies, while in the same time doing the same thing ten times more, with gusto.
Yes, we never heard of the case when rich people could extract concessions and manipulate the government. I mean, until Trump came and ruined the perfect system.
I'm not even sure what sort of strawman you're attacking here, but it sure isn't me. I don't support any of the things that you're propping up as "but they do it too". They're all bad. I don't think Trump is any worse than the rest of the corrupt politicians taking money in exchange for political favors but... again... they're all bad.
Trump didn't take any money in exchange for political favors (at least in this case). But if it has been happening for 100 years, and people suddenly start screaming today about it, saying they suddenly discovered that they had principles all that time, but somehow stayed silent right up until that moment, but now they honestly declare "they all bad" - they are lying. They just want to use this as a weapon to attack Trump. As they would use anything to attack Trump, because the point is not any principles - the point is attacking Trump.
How could you possibly know that? The entire point of wink wink nudge nudge quid pro quo is that there isn't any concrete written contract. They don't have to have anything specific they want right now, they just have to be friendly to Trump and make him like them, and then the next time they ask him for a favor they're likely to get it because he likes them and he knows he owes them a favor according to unofficial business/politics etiquette. There is no evidence until they ask for the favor (behind closed doors) and get it with tons of plausible deniability.
Yeah. But bad people making motivated arguments for bad reasons doesn't automatically make them wrong. My burden in life appears to be doomed to living with a swarm of idiots on my own side of each issue screaming bad arguments in favor of things I believe and making it look bad. And I say this as someone center-right who is usually being disappointed by pro-Trump idiots making bad arguments in favor of his good policies I mostly agree with like on immigration. And the woke left get to knock down easy strawmen and become more convinced that their stupid policies are justified without ever hearing the actual good arguments. But in this case it's the idiots on the left who mostly agree with me making stupid arguments that don't hold weight because they've wasted all their credibility crying wolf over the last dozen non-issues, so this too looks like a non-issue even when they have a bit of a point.
Trump being right 70% of the time doesn't make him magically right all the time. I don't think he's any worse than any of the other politicians, but that doesn't make him right in this case, and it doesn't make criticisms of him factually wrong even if the critics are mostly biased and disingenuous and should be applying these arguments more broadly instead of waiting until now. They still have a point.
How could you? I think I have more base to claim the person is not a criminal if there's absolutely zero proof he is, than you do to claim he is a criminal with the same amount of proof.
Thank you.
It automatically makes their arguments dismissible. There's no point in considering argument if the whole framework of discussion is built just to manipulate you. Discussion makes sense when the goal is to find the truth. Or at least get closer to it somehow. If the goal is to just pull your strings, the right strategy is not to play the game at all.
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