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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23978 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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Is presidential corruption still culture war?

You may or may not remember that back in January of this year President Trump, in his personal capacity, sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion in damages related to leaks of his tax returns by a contractor back in 2018-2020. I don't want to dig into the merits of the case as such, except I'll note the legal discussion I've read seems to have a consensus that the case is very weak. It is also very unusual for a sitting President to be suing the government he is in charge of. There are obvious conflicts of interest involved. So much so the judge in that case issued an order for the parties to explain how they are actually adverse to each other, how they disagree, so that the cases and controversies requirement of the constitution is satisfied.

As of today, it seems we may never find out how good the claims are or aren't, how adverse the parties are or aren't. Trump filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss his lawsuit, pursuant to the establishment of a $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund". It's not even clear to me the fund is going to be administered by the United States government, as paragraph C provides:

Within 60 days of the Effective Date, the United States shall provide the U.S. Department of the Treasury with all necessary forms and documentation to direct a payment of $1,776,000,000 to an account for the sole use by the Anti-Weaponization Fun ("Designated Account"). The corpus of the Anti-Weaponization Fund's funding does not represent the value of any claim by Plaintiffs, but rather is based on the projected valuation of future claimants' claims.

Is this going to be the new normal? If you're President and Congress won't give you the money you want to pay your friends and allies you can get however much you want with this one weird trick!

ETA:

ABC reports that the fund will be overseen by a five-member commission appointed by the Attorney General, but the members will all be removable at-will by the President.

The discussion that feels most balanced regarding the settlement from my perspective was this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Zl4L2OZXFC4

It will percolate through time that this is one of the most corrupt administration in early 21st century US history.

Update on this, some of the police officers who were violently attacked during the events of Jan 6th are suing to block the settlement https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/05/20/trump-fund-lawsuit-capitol-riot-irs.html

One of their argument is that there's a real possibility the money will go to rewarding the cop beaters and other violent thugs who went after them.

Their suit also says the new fund endangers their lives and safety by encouraging "those who enacted violence in the President's name to continue to do so."

"Dunn and Hodges already face credible threats of death and violence on regular basis; the Fund substantially increases the danger," the suit says. "Second, if allowed to begin making payments, the Fund will directly finance the violent operations of rioters, paramilitaries, and their supporters who threatened Plaintiffs' lives that day, and continue to do so."

Letting violent criminals off for attacking cops was already despicable, it'll be downright subsidizing it if they start getting paid for it too. Paying people who attacked police could encourage other attacks in the future.

It does not strike me as at all plausible that a court case would have resulted in this decision. Is there a mechanism for a judge blocking it?

That's the fun part. We all get to find out, together.

Certainly the people who support the judiciary branch hates this kind of corruption. When both Democrats and Republicans are unpopular due to transgressions like this (no matter that Obama did X and then Trump did X^2), then the time is ripe for a third party. Unfortunately I think US will be held back by first-past-the-vote again.

MAGA is the most corrupt political movement in my lifetime in the US. It might be the most corrupt movement in US history, though I'm not sure how it would compare to some of the stuff in the Gilded Age. Republicans deflect the open corruption of Trump by presuming (mostly without evidence) that "all politicians do it, Trump is just honest about it!!!" Then they go off on something like Hunter Biden or Congressional stock trades, which involve like 1/100th of the value of what Trump is doing.

And Dems don't care that much either, as they'd rather focus on hallucinations like Trump raping children with Epstein. The corruption might appear in the laundry lists of grievances they throw out against Trump, but it's hardly a motivating factor for most.

This might actually be true about MAGA.

Now imagine how insufferable the opposing party’s candidate and campaign would have to be for nearly 80 million people to overlook the flaws of a corrupt, narcissistic, petty billionaire.

You're not wrong. I also think wokists are vile.

The only solution is to keep demanding each side do better without regard to what the other side is doing, even though each side would really prefer to use their outgroup's sins as a blank check to be as terrible as they want.

The only solution is to keep demanding each side do better without regard to what the other side is doing, even though each side would really prefer to use their outgroup's sins as a blank check to be as terrible as they want.

This has been my personal hobby horse since November 2016 when Trump's victory caught me square in the jaw. As someone who firmly believed that diversity was our strength, it seemed to me that obviously the right thing to do was to seek to understand those who thought so differently like me and my ilk that they were willing to vote for someone like him, but it's been depressing to see that most of my side are firmly in the camp of "their sins justify ours; in fact, when you think about it, our sins are actually virtues, because they're directed at the Bad Guys." I enjoy beating the meat as much as any other guy, but I think I'm fatigued of beating a dead horse at this point.

Well put! It really sucks to see both sides engaged in an arms race to see who can be worse. At least have a little bit of introspection and be willing to say "that thing our side is doing is bad, and although I don't support the outgroup, we still shouldn't do that".

Selective rigor is not a marginal problem that you have the luxury of ignoring.

It really sucks to see both sides engaged in an arms race to see who can be worse.

This is a war. How do you expect a war to operate?

[EDIT] - My estimation of your reasonableness and sincerity has been trending upward of late, so let me put a little more effort into this.

If you offer people a choice between "laws are enforced against you, laws will not be enforced against your enemies" and "laws will not be enforced at all", some people will choose the former and some will choose the later. The people who choose the former will die out, and you will be left with only the people who choose the latter. When this happens, the problem is not that people aren't upholding the law, the problem is that there is no law to uphold. A lot of people, myself included, believe this is the situation we find ourselves in. Appealing to the majesty of the law is not going to shift us, because we do not observe majesty of the law, but rather fractal deceit. You can think such an assessment is foolish in the extreme, but at some point you should probably consider explaining why it is foolish. Just for starters, I note that Trump does not appear to have used the FBI to censor conversation of and cover up evidence of his alleged corrupt activities, as we now know the previous administration absolutely did. In your view, does the Trump administration get points for not engaging in this particular "arms race to see who can be worse?"

My estimation of your reasonableness and sincerity has been trending upward of late, so let me put a little more effort into this.

Thank you for this, not just for the compliment but the longer post as well that makes for a far better discussion point.

My overall philosophical retort is this post.

To this point specifically, I'm not appealing to the "majesty of the law". I agree that if one side is selectively enforcing rules against you while exempting themselves, then unilaterally disarming is suicidal. I essentially said that in the hypocrisy post, that some hypocrisy is justified when refusing to reciprocate leaves you permanently disadvantaged.

But the point where I disagree is the jump from "the outgroup abused power" to "there is not law to uphold" or "our side now gets a blank check and none of our sins count" as I've been effectively hearing from MAGA apologists on this site and on others. Most of Trump's corruption doesn't directly advantage MAGA as a movement, and in fact does some amount of harm. MAGA as something other than just a Trumpist personality cult would be stronger if everything else was the same, except that Trump didn't sell off pardons. There would be some momentary discomfort as the right had to undergo self-criticism, but it would emerge stronger for it. The fact that it mostly refuses to do so is a cancer that eats it from the inside.

My position isn't "never fight back", it's that people should be very clear about what counts as fighting back, and not trying to launder every act of corruption as defensive necessity. If the claim is "the law is already dead", then the burden is on you to explain why a specific escalation improves the situation rather than just helping to bury it.

In your view, does the Trump administration get points for not engaging in this particular "arms race to see who can be worse?"

Yes! Or rather I'd frame it as Trump not losing points in this instance while Biden would have.

This would carry more weight if Trump's approval wasn't cratering and we didn't have an endless parade of clueless swing voters saying they thought he was just going to use his inflationary policies to lower egg prices. Trump benefited tremendously from gentle, sanewashing media coverage during the election. It's example #1,032,548 of people getting suckered by the most embarrassingly transparent conman. They really ought to have known better, but it's not evidence of much but the fact that most people aren't very discerning.

Yeschad.jpg. Trump is, at the level of personal character, one of the worst people to hold high public office - anywhere in the democratic world - in my lifetime. (I'm not considering his political views here - would you rather buy a used car from Donald Trump or Nigel Farage, or let your daughter work in their office?). The MAGA GOP who nominated him are bad people who should feel bad. The Democrats who failed to beat him are culpably incompetent and should also feel bad. Within the Democratic Party, I would say that the fixers who fixed the 2016 primary for Clinton and the people who concealed Biden's cognitive decline during the 2024 primary rise to the level of bad people.

The MAGA GOP who nominated Trump against Kamala Harris and the anti-white, anti-male coalition should feel bad? I sort of feel bad. I wish he wasn't such a reckless sociopath. I just don't feel as bad as I would if Kamala had won.

I think your comment nicely captures the moral asymmetry that occurs in anti-Trumpers when they start blaming people for supporting him. It happens constantly. The GOP are labeled as both wrong and bad, whereas Democrats were just wrong. Good people, but wrong. Democrats have their goodness to fall back on.

If you look outside the Western bubble, the social views of even moderate Republicans are quite liberal compared to average citizens of most non-Western nations. In other words, if Trump supporting Republicans are bad people because they fall short of elite Western progressive norms, something like 85% of the globe falls into the bad person category. That's right. The vast majority of world's people are bad, except for the Western liberal-progressive.

People have a deeply flawed choice to make between a couple bad options. One is Trump/Nigel Farage and the other is a group whose driving force is fundamentally at odds with the ideals that make a country a country, and whose end goals align more with creating economic zones with no shared memories, or obligations, or culture, or concern for what it means to be a citizen.

We have sociopaths that are (at least incidentally) willing to do what is necessary to make a society empathic, and we have empaths that are (at least incidentally) willing to do what is necessary to a make a society sociopathic. The gamble is that a society can survive a bad man more easily than it can survive a ruling class that no longer believes the society is real.

You are entitled to accuse me of motivated reasoning here, but the point I am making is symmetric. I have not claimed that MAGA are bad people because they have right-populist political views, I claimed they were bad people because they repealed the character floor for political leadership, arguably in 2016 and uncomplicatedly in 2024. My continued presence on the Motte should be a signal of good faith - if I believed that right-populists were per se bad people, why would I still be here?

You can't do politics without meeting good people sincerely pursuing political goals you do not share, or good people with different political views to you because they don't understand the issues, or (very occasionally if you are smart enough to be a Motteposter) good people with different political views to you because you don't understand the issues. My social circle contains Brexit supporters in both the first two groups, for example. I have less experience meeting MAGA normies, but I have spent enough time in red states to know that most Republicans, and even most Trump voters, are not evil.

But "Men as dishonest as Donald Trump should not hold high political office" used to be one of the things 90% of citizens agreed on. (So was "Men as uncouth as Donald Trump should not hold high political office" but I care about that a lot less). It isn't obvious why the standard bearer for "Deport the illegals and reshore manufacturing" needs to be a reckless sociopath. Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot weren't. Nigel Farage isn't. (Admittedly Boris Johnson is one.) I know Richard Hanania has a theory for why populism always leads to kakistocracy, but I think it proves too much.

I wish there had been a way to make legible to progressives just how much moral authority they would be squandering with some of us by going all-in on trans issues. I just can't care about condemnation from the weird alien species that didn't call that shit stupid from the jump.

You're affirming my priors.

Look, usually for such a low effort boo-outgroup post I'd just give you a warning, or maybe even let it pass depending on obnoxious and how deep in the thread it is. But I meant what I said-- you are a sockpuppet who just created this account, you are probably a ban evader, and when I look at your comment history, it's mostly just you being a jerk.

I'm sure you'll be back with another account, but this one is done.

But there is not, because progressives believe their moral authority is self-sustaining. (Hence zero attempt by them to fix things; if "it was everyone else's problem" is rewarded electorally, they'll be correct.)

You say it's arguable they were bad after 2016, while others probably claim they were bad after 2020 or 2024. Much of the mainstream blue tribe had already decided that people who dissented from certain social issue orthodoxies were morally suspect, not just wrong. That mattered because once the “bad” label was attached from ordinary disagreement, millions of people understandably stopped believing the mainstream was judging them in good faith. The anti-Trump crowd had made their decision to leverage moral condemnation even before they became the anti-Trump crowd. Sure, more people have become convinced that Trump supporters are bad people, but the social issue purity tests had begun way before that. That "bad" label attached itself to of millions of people before Trump was even a candidate. Were they 2 bad after 2016, and 3 bad after 2024?

I have a mixed circle of friends too. Half of my closest friends are liberal to liberal-progressive. Most of them avoid discussing the subject entirely and I watch what I say.

It may not be obvious why the standard bearer for "Deport the illegals and reshore manufacturing" needs to be a reckless sociopath, but I think the explanation is pretty apparent. Our institutions, media, universities, and social media helped create a synthetic moral consensus about which views were acceptable and which weren't. That consensus made ordinary conservative politicians susceptible to the same purity tests. The only individuals left willing to cut against the consensus and say what others felt were individuals who were already ostracized, or who simply just didn't give a fuck, or who were naturally disagreeable. In came Trump (a disagreeable narcissist who didn't give a fuck about playing by the rules), and later Elon (an Aspergian who is nearly impervious to social pressure).

The character floor for political leadership was repealled on February 12th 1999, and wasn't it "the right" that voted to repeal it, but rather the same affluent liberals now complaining about their opponent's "lack of character".

Nor do I believe that Trump is "a reckless sociopath" or at least not any more so than Clinton or Obama were, rather he is simply not beholden to the pretenses of affluent liberals. You are trying to criticize him for not being "a proper gentleman" when not being a proper gentleman is a core component of his appeal.

That seems like a fully generalizable counterargument. "Imagine how bad the IDF must have been in Gaza around 2007 for the Gazans to elect that band of murderous thugs called Hamas as their government". "Imagine what the wife must have said to her husband to drive him to kill and dismember her".

Yeah, people make comparative choices, and people who disagree (usually redditors) often contort those into moral endorsements. In this case, the comparative choice of voting for Trump is being analogized to supporting Hamas or a man murdering his wife and dismembering her.

usually redditors

Unkind, unnecessary

I don't think "preferring one candidate over another" is generalizable to "murdering someone."

I don't know how you can say this with a straight face when the last President blanket pardoned his own son for more than a decade of crimes.

He even did it preemptively, pardoning him for actions he could have taken in the future, all the way to the end of the Presidential term.

That same son made millions on bogus board positions in Ukraine which were obviously bribes. Ukraine which blew up into a war during that President's term, and where billions of dollars have been thrown down a black hole.

So, there's a really high bar for corrupt political movements.

millions

Single digit millions. The highest serious estimate I have seen is that the whole "Biden crime family" operation netted $10-20 million. Two orders of magnitude less than the Trump family's buckraking. Also an order of magnitude less than Clinton family buckraking or the various financial scandals of the Hastert-DeLay paedoCongress, so I don't think you can claim that the Bidens were unusually corrupt by the standards of pre-Trump American politics.

I think the problem is that so many types of grift have been conflated.

  1. Trump financially exploiting his own supporters (crypto, SPACs, trump media, trump sons promoting bullshit products and companies, trump steak type stuff). The left and never-trump republicans spoke about this far, far too much. Nobody cares when a fool is parted from his money by the leader he worships.

  2. The usual bribes for friends and family members, as happened with eg Biden and as happens with Trump and his sons joining the boards of various startups that want some funding or regulatory allowance or serve a particular foreign interest or whatever.

  3. The Saudi/Gulf money. Strong connections to the GOP for many decades. The Bush family were close. The Kushner fund. I don’t think there’s anything particularly new here.

  4. The Trump self-promotion. Random third world countries touting future TRUMP hotels, TRUMP casinos and so on. This is venal but it ties into Trump’s brand, which has always been multi asset and fully integrated. The president making casino deals while he’s on diplomatic business, and rolling the two into one arrangement is on brand and expected, his supporters don’t care and there was every expectation he would do this before being elected.

  5. Specific, “third world” style direct extraction of public funds with no fig leaf. This is where, for example, an African oil minister directly siphons a cut of every oil deal into a personal Swiss bank account. Or where the Lebanese ex central bank chief allegedly took a tiny cut of every transaction they did and had it diverted to a personal account for decades. Trump has arguably engaged in this with eg the current 1.78bn slush fund ‘deal’, and there are smaller but numerous previous examples.

The problem is that if you’ve spent years whining about 1-4, reporting 5 carries less weight.

If the crypto and SPACs were just about ripping off Trump's own supporters, I would agree with your point re. 1. But with all of 1, 3 and 4 the problem is not that Trump is getting paid, it is that some of the people paying Trump are smart enough to know what they are doing, and we can assume that they are getting something in return. But we don't know what is being sold, and in some cases (especially the crypto) we don't even know who it is being sold to.

One example where we do know is that Trump changed his views on the Tiktok ban around the time Tiktok investor Jeff Yass invested in the Truth Social SPAC. That moves the SPAC from scamming his own supporters to accepting bribes from a proxy for a Communist dictatorship.

Nobody thinks the Saudis deal with Jared Kushner is purely commercial. The question is whether this is a tip for his work on something which benefits both Saudi and US interests (presumably the Abraham accords), or whether it is a bribe for some piece of as-yet secret work which benefits Saudi interests and hurts US interests. Even if it is a tip, the dollar amount is so much larger than the customary and reasonable gift given in that kind of situation that it would be improper under conventional business or political ethics. When Eric Trump announces the groundbreaking on Trump Hotel Durkadurkastan, we don't know if it is a purely commercial transaction, a tip, or a bribe. (But we do know that the Durkadurkastanis see this as a distinction without a difference).

In addition, all five of your points involve dollar amounts which were 1-2 orders of magnitude higher under Trump than under previous corrupt presidents. For me, this is absolutely critical, although I agree that the average swing voter is innumerate and doesn't care. I don't think the Saudis paid Jared Kushner a few hundred million dollars* for a small favour, whereas people were willing to pay Hunter Biden a few hundred thousand dollars just to set up some meetings.

* My estimate of the NPV of the management fees on the $2 billion investment over the life of the fund, assuming the standard 2-and-20 fee.

Here’s my read of this:

  • Dollar amounts aren’t really a good indicator here. If someone paid Hunter Biden $2m it doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have paid him $20m. Maybe Hunter felt that the former figure was the most he was willing to accept without embarrassing his father. It doesn’t really say anything about the services provided or resources available.

  • The really big money is kind of arbitrary. Kushner is unlikely to lose much more than many comparable managers the Saudis do business with, who also charge under a broadly comparable fee structure. Unlike a fully fake job or classic bribery / facilitation payment, there isn’t necessarily an absolute or even guaranteed relative loss on the actual capital spent.

  • Most people who think they can get something out of Trump lose. This is a truth through his entire career. Say what you will about him, he has screwed the screwers every single time. Countless well-educated, conniving types have tried to play him and they’ve all lost, throughout his business and political career. The man has a combination of natural instincts, zero loyalty and zero honor. The concept of a favor owed (by him) is anathema to his identity. Those who try to do business with him almost never win, whether the enterprise is a success or failure.

Pardoning his son was easily the most despicable act in Biden's presidency. But it was not a Tuesday. There is no long and proud tradition of Democratic presidents handing out preemptive pardons like candy.

With Trump, a pardon of some fraudster in exchange to cash (or investment in his shitcoins, which amounts to the same thing) is mostly a Tuesday.

Nor do I think it is sound to insinuate that the support of the Ukraine in the war was a reaction of Ukrainians buying access to Biden through his son. A lot of countries support Ukraine, not all had a president's son on some shady board of directors.

Supporting Ukraine was totally in character for US foreign policy between 1950 and 2005. To my knowledge, Ukraine does not even have a well-funded lobby organization to bribe congressmen to vote for military aid, unlike some other country which received 10G$ a year during a conflict viewed slightly more controversially in the Western world. But AIPAC makes a bad case to argue that the Dems are the party of corruption because MAGA's support for Israel's military causes makes Biden's look modest.

It is well known that there was a bit of a swamp in DC. Big donors would probably not be willing to spend on PACs if the politicians were all unwavering loyal to their ideas and the will of the people. There is certainly a revolving door between policymakers and the industries which they regulate. Nobody believes that a politician paid as an advisor for some company is really giving advice worth his salary.

To try a slightly unhygienic metaphor, if DC was a swimming pool it would be well known that people sometimes piss in it. When Biden pardoned his son for any and all crimes, that was akin to standing on the pool's side and openly pissing into it.

But what Trump is doing is getting up to the topmost board of the diving tower, pulling down his trunks, squatting at the end and letting turd after turd drop in the pool.

Pardoning his son was easily the most despicable act in Biden's presidency

Pardoning his son was one of the few human acts Biden did as president, and he shouldn't have lied about it.

All the other political pardons were despicable.

If that would have been the only way to prevent his son from being locked up in federal prison due to malicious prosecution for as long as MAGA would hold power, I might agree with you.

But my general take on the finances of the Biden family is that they would probably have managed to buy a plane ticket to Vancouver and rent him a room in the outskirts. It seems unlikely that Trump would have offered Canada sufficient concessions to get them to extradite him, "we lowered our tariffs by ten percent but in turn we got Hunter Biden" would not play well with his voters -- they were never chanting about locking him up the way they were about Mrs Clinton. Sure, Trump would probably have wasted a few millions of taxpayer money to charge him with everything on the book, but in the end he would have been a target of opportunity rather than Trump's white whale.

Biden feeling the need to do anything about Hunter was a clear vote of no confidence in the US justice system. That is already a pretty damning signal to send by the president. But the fact that he did not pick the option available to most Americans in a similar situation -- exile -- is a hundred times more damning still. It is basically saying

Fuck equality before the law. I am president Biden, and I will not get on a plane to see my son for Chrismas like he was some Iranian or Chinese exile, like he was some commoner. If the price I need to pay for my convenience is to make it common knowledge that laws don't apply to the rich and the powerful (to the degree that anyone was still doubting that after Epstein), it is a price I will pay gladly.

Basically, every one of the millions of anti-ICE protesters has more balls (irrespective of gender identity) than all of the Biden family put together. They know that the eye of Sauron could fall on them at any minute and they could charged with making a false statement to a bank a decade ago, and that they would not have a powerful daddy who would pay Trump a bribe or make some deal getting them favorable prison conditions.

A great president would say that if the government imprisoned the innocent, then the right place for their innocent son would be to be imprisoned with his fellow countrymen. A decent president would send his son to comfortable exile -- about a million times less harsh than what random penniless political refugees or Assange have taken upon them to escape unjust punishment. Only a despicable president would refuse to make any trade-offs with regards to the signals he sends to his people.

Biden wasn't really the center of a political movement though, and I think Democrats were a lot more willing to call him out for things like the Hunter pardon. At most, I saw people quietly understanding of Biden breaking with principle to protect family, though I still got the sense there was general disapproval for the pardoning on the Left.

As a third party voter, I have been disgusted by both parties, but I really do think the dynamic is that Obama and Biden did X, and Trump is doing X^2, as /u/lollol put it. It creates a weird dynamic, because I'm happy to condemn them all and say that Trump is still worse in most cases (even if his actions aren't totally unprecedented), but it feels like a lot on the Right are in the position where they both need Trump and are happy that he's punishing the people that they hate, and so they're unwilling to engage in more than light critique with hedging like, "the only difference is that Trump is doing what everyone always did out in the open."

The reason you believe that Trump is doing x^2 is because of a dishonest and biased media environment. It is not because Trump is worse.

they're unwilling to engage in more than light critique with hedging like, "the only difference is that Trump is doing what everyone always did out in the open."

Where are the criticisms for Biden? Honestly, where are they? Where are the people denouncing the pardons? Calling for them to be overturned, or for the pardoned people to be strung up on things they haven't been pardoned for? Where, in other words, is the action? Where is the demonstration of these values applied to anyone other than Trump? Because I no longer trust anyone who applies standards to Trump due to repeated lessons teaching me otherwise.

You Are Still Crying Wolf.

I mean, the Trump crypto scandal and conflict of interest web related to it alone dwarfs literally each and every similar corruption scandal of the Biden administration put together, just on the basis of plain facts of the people and timing involved...

It kinda hard to take "You are crying wolf!" seriously when said wolf has finished off half of the sheep and is starting to eye the shepard.

I mean, did he not start another retarded middle eastern war, another retarded trade war, put a retard in charge of HHS, blow the deficit into the stratosphere? On top of that, he's doing his level best to raise gas prices past peak biden, and beat bidens record on inflation.

Those are all real, undeniable facts. I don't think the "biased media" is sneaking out at night and changing the price at the gas station or launching bombing raids on Iran.

put a retard in charge of HHS

You are, of course, referring to the person that abolished minimum age recommendations for trans hormone treatments and surgeries, right?

I wanted RFK in office, and I wanted the trade war, so if that's a wolf, then sign me up, I love wolves now. No, the wolf is the fascist strongman that has never come, not MAHA or Chinese tariffs.

The Iran war is Israelf leading the US by the nose, again, still. I would love an anti-Israel president, but not so much that I'll support and anti-white candidate.

The deficit. Ha, what a fun joke. Nobody gives a shit about the deficit, and we've barely pretended in the last ten years. Also funny that Harris would somehow be different, or better, on the deficit. That's just baked in, nobody will ever vote to stop giving away free money. That's simply the failure of Democracy. Given that, I'll take what I can get elsewhere.

The dishonest media only cares about this shit when it's Trump in charge, then they get completely silent when Democrats are in charge. So yes, all your stuff is real, and it really gets blown out of proportion when it makes Republicans look bad, and it gets smothered when it makes Democrats look bad. That's the media bias I'm talking about, and that's the crying wolf.

You Are Still Crying Wolf.

I am not "still" crying wolf. I didn't really start being truly, deeply worried about Trump until April 2025.

Before that, I had convinced myself that Trump 1 hadn't been that bad, that despite the weekly outrage articles from the mainstream media, he had mostly governed as any Republican would have. But I really do think Trump 2 has been different.

Where are the criticisms for Biden? Honestly, where are they? Where are the people denouncing the pardons? Calling for them to be overturned, or for the pardoned people to be strung up on things they haven't been pardoned for? Where, in other words, is the action? Where is the demonstration of these values applied to anyone other than Trump? Because I no longer trust anyone who applies standards to Trump due to repeated lessons teaching me otherwise.

I mean, I commented this a year ago.

I had convinced myself that Trump 1 hadn't been that bad

Trump 1 really wasn't that bad. A core message of Trump's 2024 primary campaign was that Trump 1 not being that bad was a mistake that only Trump 2 could fix.

FWIW, I read Trump as a wolf after his response to the 2020 election results.

The big problem is that the rest of the world has to suffer due to Trump 2. If he was only destroying his own country by now I'd long since have made peace with the fact that the US is a democracy getting the government it deserves and it is not for the rest of us to save it from itself. A bit like those nature documentaries where no matter how terrible the thing which is happening, the cardinal rule is that you don't intervene. But alas we don't have that luxury.

I suppose we are in agreement then. The democrats do not have any moral high ground to criticize Trump, and given how eagerly every single institution in the world threw themselves behind the Democrats and against Trump, it's not just the Democrats who have eroded their own high ground. Everything, every criticism, turns into a partisan complaint, and can be dismissed as partisan complaint because there is no other ground on which to complain.

But I really do think Trump 2 has been different.

Yeah, almost as if four years of bullshit lawfare will change a man. Almost as if eroding your credibility to attack your enemies might empower those very same enemies, and remove any restraints they once had.

For me, I don't want someone to govern as a republican. I learned in July 2024 that everyone to the left of Le Pen considers themselves interchangeable, so I've taken them at their word. There is no center, there is only pro- and anti- migration. It's hard for me to care about anything outside of this, and any criticisms I have of Trump come from where he has strayed from this core issues (like in Iran).

In other words, I cannot spare this man. He fights.

everyone to the left of Le Pen considers themselves interchangeable

It's incredible to me that you can write this with (presumably) a straight face. Really? Really? The infamously prone to squabble center, left, and far left? Consider themselves interchangeable? What? I presume you're talking about the assassination attempt but I not only don't see what specifically you'd be referring to but also fail to see how this translates to "there is only pro- and anti-migration" as if the two things are directly linked.

The infamously prone to squabble center, left, and far left?

In the sense that there's a rounding error of liberals that are really, truly willing to oppose progressives and leftists, they're interchangeable. They squabble, absolutely, but no one to their left is an enemy.

They'll fire a Mexican construction worker for making the OK sign, while thinking odious weasel Hasan Piker is the future of the party. Racism is fine as long as it has a progressive gloss. Advocating for violence is okay as long as it has a progressive gloss. Having a full-on Nazi tattoo and saying women are responsible for getting raped is peachy if there's a D next to your name, but god forbid Elon move his arm in a silly way.

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Please, tell me what conclusion I am meant to draw when competing parties conspire to not contest elections so that they, between them, keep out a third party.

What that looks like to me is everyone to the left of Le Pen in agreement that they're all substitutes for one another, that they're all functionally interchangeable, and that it doesn't matter if it's communist or centrist.

The infamously prone to squabble center, left, and far left?

Yes, the fact that they're infamously prone to squabble, yet worked in perfect synchronicity when it mattered, reinforces my conclusion. If they were really different, they would have squabbled, but they're not, and they were faced with a genuine threat, so they dropped the game and played serious.

I presume you're talking about the assassination attempt

I'm talking about the French Election in 2024, which is why I mentioned Le Pen by name.

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It'd be trivially easy to provide some links so we can make an objective comparison over some directly comparable figures for the 'corruption' that has occurred 'in our lifetime.'

I bet an LLM could put together the data in <5 minutes.

Is there a reason you don't even do that sort of effort when you seemingly have such a passionate belief in the claim?

Just wondering.

My personal bugbear is the $Trump meme coin which is exceptional for the scale x blatantness.

One of the big issues surrounding talks of corruption is that people have excessively expansive views of what is considered "corruption" when it comes to their outgroup, often devolving to little more than "they're doing something (anything) I disagree with". But I can't recall anything that comes close to what Trump did with the memcoin.

I think it is at least fair to define "corruption" as something that explicitly involves using one's political authority, which the people 'entrusted' to you, for personal enrichment in a way that is actively detrimental to your constituency. Which differentiates it from 'merely' "shady business practices" that one would find in the private sector.

I don't think anyone can truly level 'corruption' charges at politicians or government officials who publish tell-all books. But there are clearly ways to use that as an avenue for corruption.

And when it comes to the insider trading, I'm not sure I'd call it 'corrupt' to make trades on your own investment account when you know legislation has passed that will likely cause market movements in a certain direction. I WOULD call it corrupt to influence the passage of legislation specifically to improve your own portfolio.

Maybe we can't disentangle those enough to matter.

Now, I'm less tolerant of the practice of "hey donate X million dollars to my family's non-profit org and I'll make some solid efforts to get that favorable bill passed."

Trump sort of skirts this definition at times because he clearly has his personal/business identity... which is 'separate' from his political identity. But he certainly borrows the aura from his political authority as a means of boosting his business interests.

Here's a few actions of his that I could consider corrupt:

(But I remember Biden's pardon and commutation spree in his last weeks in office, so there's some broader context to consider)

  • Directing government contracts to Friends or family members in a way that explicitly skips the normal process and/or inflates the costs.

  • Using Governmental agencies to prosecute business rivals or silence otherwise lawful critics.

What's kind of funny is that Trump does like to initiate lawfare against his opponents, but he more often just sues them like any private citizen would instead of getting some random gov't agency to go after the targets of his ire.

What sort of actions has he taken that might fit well with such a list?

The 2 I'd cite for a list that Trump is going above and beyond are:

  • Giving pardons to people who have helped him in one way or the other, like the Binance founder as well as Trevor Milton
  • Hosting multiple private events for holders of the Trump meme coin, essentially doing what Republicans accused Hunter --> Joe Biden of doing, but doing it far more directly and at greater scale. Also enacting crypto-friendly legislation that Trump would personally benefit from.
  • Refusing to divest from his businesses while President, which has been common practice for Presidents for a while now, and which causes conflict-of-interest issues to pop up constantly.

But then a lot of it comes from the laundry list of other things he's doing. Other politicians might skirt around things that are similar, but I can't name any other single politician that has as many as Trump. Things like:

  • Accepting a luxury jumbo jet from Qatar, after signing favorable deals with them including billions/trillions in economic commitments and giving them an unusually strong security guarantee.
  • Many of the deals his sons are doing, trying to implicitly profit from the fact that their father is the POTUS.
  • Using pardons to assist political allies like the J6 rioters, Roger Stone, Charles Kushner, and Paul Manafort
  • Charging the Secret Service at Trump properties well above normal government rates, meaning taxpayer money flowed into the President's business because of his official protection needs.

What makes it hard for me to care about the meme coin is that crypto is inherently speculative. The coin itself is not worth anything, and in order to cash out for real money, someone needs to want buy the coin from the hold co. If stupid people want to give Trump money by buying his shitcoin that's their choice. I don't think the government needs to be in the business of telling individuals which worthless investments they can make. I've seen some reporting that its used as a monetized access channel but is that any different than normal political bribery, "donate to my super-pac, give my failson a board seat and I'll have you over for dinner"

I don't think it should be reduced to "stupid people falling for an obvious scam". It seems to have been a vehicle for bribes.

But anger at this is either just TDS or weird edge case rules lawyering. People are "ok"* with the former ways of taking bribes so outrage over this new and improved way of taking a bribe (that is in some ways far more visible) is just special pleading

*: People are ok with it in that they accept that its a common practice, they might dislike it but because its accepted practice they aren't outraged by it. Having arbitrary rules on how a bribe can be taken is just that: arbitrary.

People are not in fact OK with the current method of "bribes" but more to the point I've literally never had a conversation about modern bribery in US politics that didn't end with someone conceding "oh yeah well actually those rules on the books actually make at least a half decent amount of sense". People's perception of how bribery works (even a good chunk of otherwise smart and informed people) almost always involves a pretty inaccurate mental model that doesn't represent the facts as we know them.

"People are okay with nudity when there's a fig leaf covering the genitals, but are outraged when the leaf isn't there!"

The meaning of nudity is that there's no fig leaf covering anything and, as such, someone being okay with fig leaf covering the genitals isn't being okay with nudity, they're being okay with something close to nudity but isn't nudity. Corruption, on the other hand, is something that exists mostly orthogonal to what is or isn't covering it (there's certainly an appearance component of corruption, where the mere appearance of corruption is corruption in itself, even if, in actuality, behind closed doors, everything is on the up and up, but I don't think that's relevant in this case).

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Anyone who complained about Hunter Biden's exploits should also be complaining about the multiple private events Trump has held for coin holders. Instead, MAGA shows volcanic rage at the former while the latter is shunted to the realm of "hard for me to care".

Also, Trump is using the coin as a conduit to basically sell off pardons.

Yeah because MAGA folks are just tribal conflict theorists. Expecting any sort of nuanced or balanced take from them, any sort of principles, is something they shed long ago in their quest for vengeance and power. And the apple does not fall far from the tree here, the mirror behavior is the TDS or Prog folks who show volcanic rage at this but hardly care when its some progressive causes. Trying to hold either to a set of principles is futile because they have none.

A more accurate way to phrase this would be "principles are clearly not adaptive in the current sociopolitical enviornment."

This is not a mistake blues or reds are making. Principles are not, in fact, adaptive, and fixing that is not something individuals or even individual tribes can accomplish, and probably is not something that can be accomplished at all in a values-incoherent environment.

Sure, I've never been accused of having good phrasing. Other people always word things better than I can.

Are principles ever adaptive? A core part of the value of principles is that they act as a very costly signal. If it were easy to have them, or they are adaptive to an environment it wouldn't be a very good signal. People would adopt them for the adaptability. The value of having principles is that it communicates that people can trust you, and depend on you. Regardless of the shifting tides of the sociopolitical currents.

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I don't really know about (or care about) crypto, so it was more than the few minutes I was willing to spend to unravel that Forbes article to understand what was going on there.

But I'll go on the record and say that generally, offering pardons to people who have made you personal money is Bad.

But I'll go on the record and say that generally, offering pardons to people who have made you personal money is Bad.

Thanks, I genuinely appreciate that. That’s the kind of thing I wish were more common.

MAGA can think Democrats are worse. They can think Republicans are the lesser evil. But at some point, if your own side does something bad, you have to be able to say so without immediately changing the subject.

That kind of logic would go a lot farther if you could start it by admitting when your side does something bad. This conversation starts with the IRS illegally leaking Trump’s records and those of a hundred of his allies and we’re supposed to quickly trot past that so we can discuss the latest Trump Bad crying wolf.

Yeah, that's one of my hobby horses. The things we argue about are very granular! No single sub-sub-sub argument is going to change someone's macro conclusions (and in most cases, they shouldn't!). Conceding a point is like folding a hand in poker. It hardly means you're out of the game, much less a career, unless you got wildly out over your skis.

Plainly absurd, you only need to look at wtf was going on with USAID and the ficticious X millions for gay condom art to zanzibar to see your statement is absurd. In fact the money was flowing for Dems propaganda and elections.

I don't think 'gay condom art' is the best metonym for 'worthless USAID spending'; if it convinces some fraction of gay people to wrap their todgers, there will be fewer cases of HIV transmission, leading to less need for funding anti-retroviral medications, which I recall many esteamed members of this forum found objectionable.

The bullshit line items were like

$5.5 million to improve the lives of LGBT individuals in Uganda, $14 million to identify LGBT leaders in Cambodia, $425,000 to train Indonesian coffee companies on how to be more gender friendly, $15 million for condoms to the Taliban

Which I'm sure none of those were real, that money went right back to the US and was used for election campaigns, and paying off the media to run hit pieces on Trump and conservatives. it was quite telling when USAID was struck suddenly the unflinching left MSM machine flinched and the amount of perfectly synchronized "gay opps" across the media landscaped plummeted. The various leftie propaganda channels were running around like chickens with their heads cut off instead of the usual lockstep perfectly manicured talking points.

damn i really chose the cheapest of the bullshit line items and everyone got to pretend that it was a meaningless amount instead of a synecdoche for a larger set of problems.

ficticious X millions for gay condom art to zanzibar

No clue what this is in reference to.

I think that is comedic exaggeration. USAID was funding similar things. Trans theaterperformances and whatnot. Raw progressive culture warring funded by my tax dollars. Also I presume graft in which a cut is kept by a non profit.

I don't want to excuse everything Trump has done by pointing to the excesses of the other side. On the other hand, now suddenly they care that Republicans (or Trumpists) are getting a taste of this.

Presumably a joke about USAID funding all sorts of nonsense and no one has really tracked through everything they did like navigating the Darien Gap, but the closest specific example is probably the Columbian trans opera.

Sure, that stuff looks like nonsense. Practically anything that goes to fund art or "culture" more broadly probably has a chance to end up funding some woke nonsense. That stuff is bad and it's good that Trump canned it.

In terms of comparison though, $47K is quite small.

$47K is quite small.

It's one memorable and culture-warry grant out of 6,000.

That doesn't help the "USAID spending was corruption" case. It highlights how insubstantial the objections are and how feeble the attempts to draw an equivalence to Trump's corruption are. The argument is, essentially, that spending money on things conservatives don't like is fraudulent and that these petty amounts are equivalent to direct abuse of office for personal gain and billions in direct self-dealing.

(Underlying all of this was the incredible mendacity of DOGE and assorted fellow travelers in their claims of finding fraud/waste, such that any individual allegation can't be taken seriously without significant additional investigation)

these petty amounts

One grant is a petty amount, but a memorable synecdoche.

Are 6000 grants a petty amount?

Is the total of Medicare fraud, home health fraud, home child care fraud, disability fraud a "petty amount"?

Nobody "serious" seems to give a shit about fraud when it happens on their team or by their favored constituencies, but I'm quite certain that all the other kinds of fraud are orders of magnitude more expensive than whatever Trump has done. His is concentrated and gaudy; the other kinds are diffuse. Cutting off a finger or two versus death by a thousand cuts.

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How many examples would you like?

$47k is as much income tax as has been withheld from me from 2018-2025. I don't think the fruit of my labor for eight years of my life is quite small, and I don't think nearly a decade of taxes extracted from me should be spent on this crap.

Eight years of my life for a trans opera in Colombia. Rooting it out isn't mendacity, it's what I voted for.

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to be clear, that 6,000 is for 2025, not over USAID's lifetime, correct?

Yes, good point, my understanding is that was the total number of current grants before they got slashed.

Definitely not the total number of lifetime grants.

In terms of comparison though, $47K is quite small.

It's one program, out of many thousands of programs. I think we can agree that it's selected for how well it fits the point. Do you believe it was an unrepresentative outlier? If it was an unrepresentative outlier, how did it get approved in the first place?

USAID's 2025 budget was 34 billion dollars, a roughly 30% increase over the 2001-2024 average of 23 billion.

What's your estimate for the percentage of that .536 trillion dollars that amounted to something between conspicuous waste and taxpayer funding of Blue Tribe partisan political activity?

Why do you think this activity required a ~33% increase in 2025 specifically?

clearly i've forgotten how to argue here and how many people will pretend not to understand things.

thank you for improving the context.

My first thought was inflation might explain a good chunk of it but the chart on wikipedia indicates the increase in USAID outpaces inflation (11.8 billion in 2001 should be equal to $21.13 billion in 2024), and also seems like USAID funds really started increasing in 2021. Also that 23 billion is the average after accounting for inflation in 2023 dollars. Wikipedia also says 2023 was an exception year with $16 billion in funds for Ukraine but even accounting for that 2023 had 43.79 - 16 = 27.79 billion which is above the average of 23 billion.

Considering under which admin USAID funding really ramped up I think it's fair to conclude it would've likely kept going up if Kama was president.

To say nothing of the multiple trillion dollar bills passed under Biden that did nothing but siphon money to leftists. In terms of scale of corruption, all of American history combined looks like amateurs compared to the modern progressive movement. They just manifestly hold an explicit "it's (D)ifferent and good when we do it" mentality and then mindkill themselves into retardation when they get asked questions like "Why does it cost $150 billion to NOT build a rail line?"

If the hand of god reached down and stripped out all corruption from America, Donald Trump would still be a billionaire and half the Democrat party would be wearing a barrel with suspenders.

The issue is that Trump is siphoning money to himself. Siphoning money to your voters is arguably part of what a politician is supposed to do. The leftist interest groups supported things that were part of Biden's political program. This is what he is supposed to spend money on. Fulfilling campaign promises and furthering the political agenda of his party.

Using your presidential authority to funnel public money to yourself and your family is clearly different, and much more corrupt. This seems to clearly be what Trump is doing with this.

If the hand of god reached down and stripped out all corruption from America, Donald Trump would still be a billionaire

Are you going to seriously claim that a guy who did real estate and development in New York City, in the 1970s and 80s, bares not a whiff of corruption?

No, he's quite open about that just being how the game was played. I'm noting that there was actual economic productivity beyond the way permits and approvals are gatekept behind donations.

multiple trillion dollar bills passed under Biden that did nothing but siphon money to leftists.

What bills are you referring to? I'm sure somewhere in the appropriations there might have been a few dozen million that got directed to progressive NGOs -- and I'd consider that a bad thing, mind you -- but nothing to the level of "multiple trillion dollar bills that did nothing but siphon money to leftists".

Why does it cost $150 billion to NOT build a rail line?

This is an issue of excessive regulation, not corruption. It's still a big problem and is a stain on California's reputation (and by extension all left-wing governance), but it's different then something like Trump's memecoin.

The Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure bill. Both shoveled out insane amounts of money for ostensible purposes that never materialized because all the cash was absorbed into the pockets of Democrat interest groups that donate to and organize in favor of the Democrats.

Just so with your point about over-regulation. If the state government instructs the agencies to devise "regulations" that siphon money away from ostensible purposes and into the pockets of allied groups that donate back to the politicians, that's actually even worse than regular corruption because it's institutionalized and on-going and metastasizes corruption towards the state in general.

Memecoin, by contrast, is piker shit that only hurts the people involved.

For what it's worth, bills were voted in by congress, the legislative body, which were voted in by voters, so at least in some sense that's the will of the people that insane amount of money were shoveled into ostensible purposes.

Here it's Trump's IRS pitting against Trump's DOJ, both under the executive, making a settlement. Not a judge ordered settlement, but the two comes to settlement (wink wink nod nod) together.

Sarah Isgur (Trump 1 DOJ spokesperson) makes a good point that the proper way would have been to "en banc" the case so that the statue of limitation is frozen. The case would have resumed when Trump is merely a citizen and not the current president, and he would have likely won because the case is pretty solid.

She commented that the judge of the case asked a legal point on how: "It is unclear to this Court whether the Parties are sufficiently adverse to each other so as to satisfy [the Constitution’s] case or controversy requirement.". The judge then asked that both sides submit more information to answer and make claim their position on the point she made. Then conveniently the two teams (and remember, they both work for Trump) drop the case and settle two days before the judge's deadline.

Look, if Congress pass laws to appropriate this $1.7 billion for the same purpose, there won't be an outcry because again, in some sense it flows from the will of the people. Like almost all crimes, it's how you do something that's important, not what was achieved.

edit1: "the outcry would be less justified"

and he would have likely won because the case is pretty solid.

I do not think he would have won to the tune of $1.776 billion. He hasn't alleged specific financial losses due to his tax returns being leaked, and you can't get that much money out of a jury based on pure embarrassment.

You are right and that is true. There is a motte of "they are guilty" and there is a bailey of "the consequences should be this".

What’s your opinion on the IRS illegally leaking Trump’s tax records in the first place?

I am of the opinion that we never found out the extent of the guilt/liability because the process of the law was not carried out to its conclusion when the IRS and DOJ decided to settle behind close doors essentially. No judge, no jury, and certainly no congress. All I know about the case that has been decided so far is that the leaker, Charles Littlejohn, is definitely guilty and was sentenced to the maximum sentence under the law

If I have to put a number based on vibes and information I know at the moment, let's say confidence percentage (I'm not well versed in terminology for opinion/prediction) I would say:

  1. 0%: there was an org-wide conspiracy that the entirety of the IRS organization from the top of the chain of command down to the rank-and-file organized themselves so that they can leak Trump's tax return through a contractor.
  2. 100%: Littlejohn is guilty of leaking Trump's and thousands of other high net worth individuals tax returns.
  3. <1%: there was a particular conspiracy of close-knitted people that instigated Littlejohn to be the leaker and fall guy in such a way that Littlejohn thought he had the idea of his own will and therefore they can't be implicated.
  4. 1%: there was a particular conspiracy of close-knitted people that included Littlejohn and he decided to be the fall guy and is really good at not being a snitch.
  5. 5%: IRS was negligent in the hiring and vetting of Littlejohn as the contractor
  6. 1%: IRS was criminally negligent in the hiring and vetting of Littlejohn as the contractor
  7. <5%: IRS was illegally negligent in the hiring and vetting of Littlejohn as the contractor
  8. 80%: IRS was negligent in the designing, creating, maintaining, monitoring, and auditing the processes that led to Littlejohn be able to access, download, and leak the tax returns of Trump and other high net worth individuals.
  9. <20%: IRS was criminally negligent in the designing, creating, maintaining, monitoring, and auditing the processes that led to Littlejohn be able to access, download, and leak the tax returns of Trump and other high net worth individuals.
  10. 70%: IRS was illegally negligent in the designing, creating, maintaining, monitoring, and auditing the processes that led to Littlejohn be able to access, download, and leak the tax returns of Trump and other high net worth individuals.

If I have to couch the case so far from my perspective in this forum's terminology. The motte is that "the leak was bad", and the bailey is "the consequences of the leak should be this". The laws are clear and the leaker was guilty and sentenced when it comes to his case. When it comes to the IRS case though, the process of the law was not carried out so it's all murky and easy to understand as being viewed as unjust by a certain part of the public, especially when the consequences are now being reported as:

  1. third party settlements of over a billion dollars
  2. a group of individuals are now "immune from IRS audits"

The Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure bill. Both shoveled out insane amounts of money

These shoveled money everywhere. Sure, woke leftists ended up getting some amount of it I'm sure. But Texas also got a crapton of money for being the model state in rolling out renewable energy.

If the state government instructs the agencies to devise "regulations" that siphon money away

I don't know of many, if any examples of this happening. What usually occurs is the regulations have a decent reason to exist but which probably fail a cost-benefit analysis on net, with the reasoning that the optimal number of people dying to environmental hazards is not necessarily zero. And then a lot of them get abused by NIMBYs grasping for any veto-points they can find.

Memecoin, by contrast, is piker shit that only hurts the people involved.

Trump used the memecoin to effectively sell pardons off to people.

And then a lot of them get abused by NIMBYs grasping for any veto-points they can find.

Was it here that someone mentioned that green projects run into some of the worst NIBMY obstructionism?

I wouldn't be surprised. The fact that Texas is lapping California when it comes to clean energy initiatives is a dire indictment of leftist governance at the state/local level.

The hard, reflexive Anti-Trump position tends to rely so much on “Tails you lose, Heads I win” that it barely registers to me anymore, I just assume when most people open their mouths to take these positions they’re engaging in it and I’m rarely proven wrong.

It’s a semi reliable anti-compass at this point; more or less consistently points in the opposite direction of the plain truth.

It's the opposite for me. I've never heard anything convincing from a right con about anything idological, only "X is terrible!", followed by "X didn't happen, you got mad at a fiction." followed as the moon succeeds the sun by "Well the fact that I was so easily fooled shows that X is terrible, even though it didn't happen"

Congressional stock trades, which involve like 1/100th of the value of what Trump is doing.

Nancy Pelosi's net worth is $280 million, so if we boldly say that's all corrupt stock trades it's more like 1/6ish of the new slush fund.

mostly i think it's funny that the guy motivated by obama's mic drop is largely rerunning the obama playbook cranked up a notch.

Is presidential corruption still culture war?

The snarky remark would be that presidential corruption is not culture war, but Tuesday.

I have seen precious few people arguing here against the proposition that Trump is obviously leveraging the opportunities of office to enrich himself, his family, his legacy as a president and close allies. I think his apologists here would rather argue that prior politicians were not less corrupt, but only less obviously corrupt (for the most part, excepting Biden's pardons here), or that he is entitled to loot the treasury after his opponents tried to go after his money through lawfare, or that he is still better than a non-corrupt leftist for unrelated reasons.

Let’s accept for the sake of argument that Donald Trump was targeted by the federal government or agents within the federal government. (This is my position.) What does a “non-corrupt” settlement look like? Money is typically what’s awarded to victims in such cases. This is not a hypothetical or meant in a sarcastic spirit: I believe that Trump and conservatives have been targeted by the federal government over the last decade, so what’s the alternative mechanism here that would make them whole that would not be labeled corrupt? Is there one? If you can imagine one I’d like to hear it. Because to me it seems that to believe that Trump was targeted makes this settlement a priori not corrupt. Unless you can envision some other settlement that threads this needle.

In this specific case, we have to look at the statute that was violated. It calls for either actual damages or statutory damages of $1,000 per disclosure. Since the latter would only get him $36,000 or thereabouts, he obviously wants to go for the former (the complaint asks for both, however the statutory damage claim relies on a theory that it's a separate violation for everyone who saw the records, a theory that the Supreme Court has previously rejected). This is rarely done in the real cases, and is especially difficult here, since it's difficult to assign an amount certain to the losses. A fact pattern where actual damages would be proven would be if a guy owns a business, it's leaked to customers that the IRS is investigating the business, and there's an obvious dropoff in earnings following the disclosure. This is where things get really difficult for Trump, since in a properly adversarial proceeding you wouldn't discuss settlement until after discovery is substantially complete.

I've settled a lot of cases and most economic damage claims are pretty straightforward. Assuming you have medical/repair bills, a normal salary, and a condition that prevents you from working. More speculative damages are a fucking mess. I have a case that's been going on forever where a guy is claiming damages from a business that he and his brother were going to start but couldn't because of his injury. The Plaintiff was deposed for 9 days, the brother for 17 days, another brother and the elderly mother were deposed, we deposed the brother's sketchy, unlicensed accountant/business advisor. The Plaintiff produced a business analysis document he had prepared before the suit. The defense hired their own economic expert to refute the report, which was hearsay anyway because it wasn't prepared for preparation and he can't produce a rep from the company that produced it. The case was filed in 2013; I took it over in 2023 and it's currently listed to go to trial in September but it's been on many trial lists and I would be shocked if it doesn't get removed again.

Now take a guy like Trump whose wheelings and dealings are a lot more complicated than a guy who wanted to open a fucking gas station and subject his finances to this kind of scrutiny. Considering that the leaked tax returns showed he had been claiming business losses for decades, proof of actual damages would likely require that he was losing even more money after the disclosures, unless he could point to a deal worth a certain amount that got cancelled or something like that. In other words, all of the sensitive financial information that Trump didn't want to disclose to begin with would now be at issue, along with information from years that weren't disclosed. If you don't think this is fair, keep in mind that the defense wouldn't be trying to get this information from him; they would just as soon not see it entered into evidence. He would have to submit it voluntarily and put himself up for deposition or the court would just dismiss the damage claim for lack of evidence. Assuming he can prove actual damages, punitive damages are a possibility in this case, though it's hard to estimate what they would be. (It's a matter of dispute, for complicated reasons, whether punitive damages would be available if the plaintiff were only able to prove statutory damages).

So what's it worth? Assuming a pre-discovery settlement, spitballing based on the assumption that discovery is going to be long and costly and unlikely to prove anything definitive, and that a jury is going to be unwilling to give Trump (who isn't exactly doing badly) more money than they would to a personal injury plaintiff who suffered serious damages, I'd probably throw 3 million out there and see what their counteroffer is. If it's something in the ballpark, say 10 million or under, I'd start negotiating. But anything more than that and I'd ask counsel if he had a case management order in mind or if he wants me to make a proposal first. I don't think there's any way Trump sticks with this if he actually has to go through with litigation. I don't think there's any way Trump is going to be able to prove that he's anywhere close to 1.8 billion dollars poorer because of these disclosures.

The leak was not just done to hurt his business, it was done to hurt him as president. Maybe the law doesn't penalize that (though that's what I'd think punitive damages are supposed to be for) but it should.

Let’s accept for the sake of argument that Donald Trump was targeted by the federal government or agents within the federal government. (This is my position.) What does a “non-corrupt” settlement look like?

I am tempted to say that they could dismiss the case without prejudice; sign a tolling agreement; and let Trump re-file after he leaves office. They could even mutually agree on a venue which is middle of the road in terms of red/blue.

The issue I see is that TDS is just so intense and pervasive. Ok, it's a bit "boo outgroup," but my sense is that the Left is perfectly willing to demonstrate in front of judges' houses; to identify and intimidate jurors; to socially ostracize decision makers who don't make the decisions they want; etc. Which makes it very hard for Trump to get a fair trial.

TDS is made up, the real TDS is the prion conservatives caught when Rush limbaug's earthly remains drifted heavenwards from the incinerator as his soul fell straight to hell, that tells them people not liking someone who goes out of their way to be unlikable, people thinking an open fraudster and convicted felon might do more fraud and more felonies, thinking an open liar might tell lies, is some sort of social contagion that they are above.

You can't separate the fact that people hate the dude from the fact that he deserves to be hated. The due ran a fraudulent charity, and one of the things the fraud money bought was a self portrait! That is hallmark movie villain shit!

Is he bad? Yes. Is he literally going to have all his political opponents rounded up and killed? No. I'll protect my sources a little, but I've seen significant chunks of the SJ side of politics saying (paraphrased) "when they come to kill us all, are you still just going to tell us to 'vote harder'? Let's fight the fascists!"

This is important. If someone is Literally Hitler, tactics that have large collateral damage (like open revolt and assassinations) are on the table. It is really bad that a lot of SJ is concluding wrongly that that's the case and advocating those tactics. I mean, Christ, Trump literally got shot a couple of years ago.

So a lot of people are dangerously wrong (deranged) in the same way (syndrome) specifically about Trump. Sounds like a useful term to coin, even if it's sometimes misapplied.

people thinking an open fraudster and convicted felon might do more fraud and more felonies

Not the best callout since there is a significant and influential strain of liberal-progressivism that doesn't think you should judge people based on past behavior.

well, if they're rapists and murderers and serial assaulters, those guys you can't judge. for political enemies they should always be assumed evil to the core.

thinking an open liar might tell lies

lol. Matt Yglesias still has a job! Shall we coin YDS? Does every journalist and 2020-era bestseller get their own acronym?

TDS is made up

Based on my experiences, I would have to disagree with this. For example, I have a family member who regularly tells me stories along the lines of "Can you believe what Trump did/said?!" And it's always something totally unreasonable. And then when I look into it, it always turns out to be a wild distortion of the truth. Typically the press has played that game where they don't say anything literally false, but they print true statements out of context in order to give a completely false impression. And they interpret what Trump says in a maximally uncharitable way. Then this family member picks up that false impression and runs with it.

But what's interesting is that this family member never learns. When I request proof of what Trump supposedly did/said, she gets quiet and forgets about it. Then a few weeks later she is repeating some new lie.

So the first question I have is this:

Do you agree that there are people like that out there?

Second, do you agree that it's reasonable to call this attitude "Trump Derangement Syndrome"?

I think "even though the bad guy is known to be bad, I am going to try to distinguish the bad things he did do from the bad things he didn't do" is a fundamentally autistic way of thinking. Once normies know someone is a bad guy, they just put him in the "bad" bucket and believe everything bad about him and disbelieve everything good.

The term "Clinton Derangement Syndrome" wasn't used at the time, but there was a similar phenomenon where conservatives, even otherwise sensible ones, who had (correctly) worked out that he was a bad man started believing every negative rumour about him (and his wife) including the obviously silly ones, and a similar pro-Clinton litany of obnoxious efforts to psychoanalyse them. Something similar happened among small groups of anti-Obama and anti-GW Bush political obsessives, but on a much smaller scale because normies didn't see Obama or GW Bush as bad people.

People as venal, chronically dishonest, sexually incontinent, and reckless as Clinton and Trump normally get jailed or at least driven out of public life in disgrace.

I think "even though the bad guy is known to be bad, I am going to try to distinguish the bad things he did do from the bad things he didn't do" is a fundamentally autistic way of thinking. Once normies know someone is a bad guy, they just put him in the "bad" bucket and believe everything bad about him and disbelieve everything good.

I think there's more to it than that: part of the issue is that with the polarization of American politics; the capture of mainstream media by the Left; and the popularity of social media, people end up in these echo chambers where these sorts of beliefs get heavily reinforced.

But in any event, let's suppose for the sake of argument that, for whatever reason, there are a bunch of people out there who, as you put it, believe everything bad about Trump and don't believe anything good about him. And that a lot of them are so passionate in their beliefs, they will attempt to socially pressure and ostracize anyone who is perceived as supporting Trump in any way.

If there are enough people like that (and my impression is that there are), then it becomes difficult, or even impossible, for Trump to get a fair trial in a court of law.

Edit: To put it another way, if there is someone who is widely believed (rightly or wrongly) to be "venal, chronically dishonest, sexually incontinent, and reckless," and that person is the victim or wrongdoing (maybe his tax returns get released; or he's walking down the street and a car runs into him; or whatever), he still should have the right to compensation for his injuries. And a procedure to seek compensation which isn't stacked against him.

You can't separate the fact that people hate the dude from the fact that he deserves to be hated.

You can note that lots of other people deserve to be hated, and for some reason the people who hate this guy often love those other people with zero reservations.

The due ran a fraudulent charity, and one of the things the fraud money bought was a self portrait! That is hallmark movie villain shit!

Wow, that sounds really bad. I assume this was one of the felonies he was convicted of, right?

Consider his peers:

  • A serial rapist who burned a few dozen women and children alive on national TV in a botched propaganda stunt.

  • a dry-drunk who lied the nation into multiple pointless, fruitless, ruinous wars, resulting in more than a million dead, the devastation of multiple entire countries, and the foreclosure of the nation's economic future.

  • A guy who directly and intentionally armed drug cartels in a bid to more effectively undermine the constitution, resulting in numerous murders of innocent civilians.

  • A senile kleptocrat who had innocent civilians murdered in an attempt to intimidate the public into surrendering their human rights.

...But those guys are just fine, because the problem is hallmark movie villainy, not multiple rapes and murders and massacres and whole nations turned into killing fields.

A senile kleptocrat who had innocent civilians murdered in an attempt to intimidate the public into surrendering their human rights.

To what action of Mr Biden is this alluding? (I'm guessing that the first three are Mr Clinton and the Branch Davidian fiasco, Mr Bush and the War Of Terror, and Mr Obama and 'Fast and Furious'?)

It's referring to the Malinowski and Deschler shootings, among others.

I actually don't mind this result. As far as Trump's corruption goes, this is more or less justifiable.

What I cannot accept is his behavior to enrich himself and his family through crypto scams and pay to play, even going so far as to pardon clear-cut criminals because they donated to his campaign. That stuff boils my blood. He used to say 'drain the swamp' but seems to have pivoted to 'become the swamp'.

Dude’s a billionaire reality TV real estate agent. How did he ever convince people that he wasn’t the swamp?

He ran on being a part of the swamp and therefore knowing more than anyone how to deal with it.

Dude’s a billionaire reality TV real estate agent. How did he ever convince people that he wasn’t the swamp?

Because he talks like common sense grandpa ("crime is bad, kill our enemies, etc) instead of like a focus-grouped actor wearing a Normal Human skinsuit.

Plus the swamp went on a 10 year long unhinged berserker rage about him, which is great for credibility in that regard.

He doesn't look, act or talk like swamp, and the swamp hates him with an open and visceral hatred. It's a fair deduction. It's also the reason nobody else could compete - any potential contender gets hailed by pundits and immediately it taints them in the eyes of the anti-swamp crowd.

There are some limited tools to have a moderately adversarial hearing on this sort of topic (eg, some of the cy pres abuses at least involved companies pretending to not want to plea guilty even if the terms were incredibly favorable for the claimed conduct), and some that have pretenses of adversarial hearings (eg, the ‘totally independent’ racial and environmental NGOs the Obama and Biden admin didn’t protest too much). I doubt these would quite the typical Dem or NeverTrumper, but they’d be less overtly partisan to centrists or the politically ignorant.

Of course, the obvious follow-up question is whether those options actually work, here. The absence of any non-partisan adjudicators, or of any even-handed partisans, does not make the odds look good, never mind certain, even where the facts are clear. If neither Vullo nor Palin can fly, appeals to fair courts are a loser.

But this still stinks.

Eventually the Dems will be back in power and all of these people (and especially the Trump family, and lol if they think a pardon will save them) are going to be the subject of extreme, unrestricted nuclear lawfare, whether or not it’s justified. A few smart lawyers and associates will sneak out with some profit, but the problem with democratically elected corruption is that it only works if you either stay in power, or come from a third world country (so you can just flee to Switzerland or Monaco or Singapore with your gains). The Trump sons are extremely stupid so don’t seem to recognize this, and Kushner is keeping his distance beyond the foreign policy stuff (and he already has the Saudis’ money locked up). Once Trump is gone and can’t run again Republican loyalty to Trump will be very short-lived, establishment reps have no reason to bat for him, and the populist wing of the Massie / Carlson type is turning on him or already has, and it’s only a year and a half in. Who is going to defend him once he’s out of power? Lindsey Graham? They can’t even flee because any country would gladly extradite them for favor with a future admin.

So I think the TDS around this is kind of stupid. If you want to see the Trump family face consequences for this venality, I’m pretty sure you’ll get your wish. In the meantime, maybe SCOTUS can at least do one or two useful things.

Eventually the Dems will be back in power and all of these people (and especially the Trump family, and lol if they think a pardon will save them) are going to be the subject of extreme, unrestricted nuclear lawfare, whether or not it’s justified.

Thus, if they are going to get the penalty, they may as well commit the offense.

In the US justice system, a generally fair justice system where convictions of innocents are rare (something like 5% at worse, and those are skewed towards people with extremely bad luck in evidence stacked against them), the difference between doing the crime and not can be massive.

That doesn't mean lawfare doesn't happen, you can harass innocents over bullshit charges of course. But actual severe penalties are pretty much entirely resigned to the guilty. If you're doing the time, you did the crime.

Convictions of innocents being rare doesn't imply the system is fair, because you have to take base rates into account. It may be that they are rare because few innocents are targeted, but of the ones who are targeted, the conviction rate is high.

I don’t know why people would assume Dems will be in power again under the adversarial format.

  1. Dems haven’t nominated a legitimate candidate for POTUS since I guess Hillary. The current crop are not good candidates. Dems are highly unpopular.

  2. I don’t have any faith we can transition power again and probably should be looking for options not to. You can’t turn the country over to Mamdanis or Karen Bass. They are foreign agents. Complete aliens to me.

Win in 2028 because of next incompetent Dem candidate. If it comes to it do the coup.

I still don’t understand why people say Trump can’t run again. He can just nominate his sons or Vance and essentially still be in power. He’s going to be at the White House daily under any of those administrations. He’s not leaving.

Uh, I think you should recalibrate.

If the current Democrat oeuvre is illegitimate, whatever that means, then you shouldn’t have to worry about transferring power to them. Conversely, if they’re getting ahold of the country, are they really so unpopular, especially when the government structure favors Republicans?

Also, suggesting a coup because you don’t have faith in your ability to give up power is…one hell of an own goal.

If a movement existed that was running for office on re-enslaving blacks, and it looked like this movement had a good chance of winning the election, how do you think black people should respond to that? How would you respond to that, yourself?

Democracy is not a universal solution. It is entirely possible to vote your way out of having a functional country. This is not, I think, a hazard that you can "trust the experts" to assess risk on your behalf.

Blue Tribe is evidently in favor of a variety of government actions to which I believe large-scale lawless violence is a reasonable response. Maybe I am unusual in making such an assessment, but if I am not, we are well into the deep end with no clear path back to solid ground.

It may be useful to consider Trump as a coordination mechanism, rather than a solution in and of himself. What is the proper response to Blues weaponizing the IRS against Reds' ability to organize politically? If I offered you a trade where a president of your choice got to disburse 1.776 billion dollars, and in exchange I get to use the IRS to attack your tribe's ability to coordinate politically for the indefinite future, is that a trade you would accept?

Again, and again, and again, Trump is the moderate, gentle voice of piece. This is as good as it's going to be, and it's never going to be this good again.

the current Democrat oeuvre is illegitimate, whatever that means

It's not the word I'd choose but given the 2020 and 2024 elections, neither candidate was chosen under what I would call normal circumstances. For that matter 2016 was memorably biased by the DNC but probably not in a way that substantially mattered.

if they’re getting ahold of the country, are they really so unpopular

Absolutely! That's the horror of the two-party system and substantial polarization.

Even in 2020 Dems as a party were net-unfavorable, but slightly less unfavorable than Republicans. My understanding is favorability has not improved, but the gap may have increased a bit.

I don’t care about popularity. I only believe in Democracy in western nations. Demographically we are more like LATAM now. That region is better off with military dictatorships with a revolving door of Rubios in charge. The left is like LATAM left now with Mamdani types.

Curious as to why you put Mamdani in the ranks of the Latam left.

And demographically, the USA is still something like 60 percent white, yes?

You need a 100% voting block to make that work. Which we don’t have.

Mamdani seems like third world leftists. He’s not Latam but seems connected to same type.

Reactionary predictions on elections like these have had a terrible track record in 2016, to some degree in 2020, and then very much in 2024. The US public has swapped the party in the White House with near metronomic frequency. If anything, the populist age has only made that tendency even more pronounced. The only thing that would stop this is the end of democracy in the US.

Even during the decades of single-party house/congress control, the Presidency was swapping sides pretty regularly.

He’s not leaving.

The man is 80 years old, he's leaving at some point.

There is a good chance he lives close to 100. He’s never drank etc. Also he stays fairly active like Buffet or Munger (probably solid lifestyle comps). 20 more years is not unreasonable.

He is already in visible decline. Even if he is alive at age 90 in 2036, he won't be functioning at the level needed to keep the show going, let alone actually wield power.

People say this a lot. But I don’t see it. I can’t tell who’s doing wishful thinking. It looks to me like he’s in his prime. And a lot of people want to say he’s declining because they want him out of politics. Regardless MAGA isn’t one man anymore. A team has formed around him and he has lots of kids.

x to doubt. He eats a lot of McDonald's and thinks that cardio is actively bad for you.

And much like Joe Biden, he might be alive but he will not be 100% of himself throughout his sunset years.

...he stays fairly active....

That's not what I heard. It was my understanding that he believes the human body to be akin to a non-rechargeable battery, used up faster if one moves more.

The fact that Trump has happened to preside over some major high leverage situations in world history (ie AI, and also having more SCOTUS picks than average) makes me have a horrifying/fantastic thought, depending on one's point of view. What if Trump ends up being right on the "living" side of the longevity escape velocity, such that immortality is achieved such that whatever therapies are required for it are implemented on him just seconds before he would have died? We certainly live in interesting times, and that would make it interestinger still.

Dems haven’t nominated a legitimate candidate for POTUS since I guess Hillary. The current crop are not good candidates. Dems are highly unpopular.

Did you forget Biden winning in 2020?

Win in 2028 because of next incompetent Dem candidate

62% Democrat, 38% Republican and that's despite the possibility of coup and election fuckery since it requires the inauguration.

You forget he was senile?

Did you forget Biden winning in 2020?

Terrible candidate but just a weird year all around. Trump probably wins if Covid doesn't kill so many old people a year or two early, they might not be many QALY but they were sure important for Republican electoral chances.

That’s kind of like blaming South Carolina for the Civil War. Sure, they provided the most visible reason, but there was no shortage of alternatives.

COVID killed fewer than 250,000 Americans by November 2020. Unless those were all concentrated in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin, they weren’t going to translate into a Trump victory. They certainly didn’t approach the 7,000,000 popular-vote difference.

The obvious second-order effect is voters blaming the current administration for a dead or dying family member. That might get you closer.

Personally, I’d credit the massive economic recession.

That’s kind of like blaming South Carolina for the Civil War.

So, basically accurate.

My prediction going into COVID in March 2020, which might have been on here but I'm not sure, was that 500,000 was my over/under number. Fewer dead than that and Trump would win, more dead than that and Trump would lose.

You also have a lot of old people who didn't vote at all for various reasons. Fear of getting sick, inability to get to the polls, etc. This didn't cross over perfectly with politics as most people think, probably closer to 70-80%, which is a vast supermajority but not 100%, there were also a lot of Republicans or Dale Gribble covidiots out there.

It was a weird year where everyone and everything was weird, so it's easy to write off the result as not terribly indicative of what's going on. Like a baseball game with multiple rain stoppages.

yeah the correct statement is "trump probably wins if COVID doesn't tank the economy" the late 2019 economy was legitimately awesome, and it's a real bummer it got nuked because once again, we must always do what is best for old people.

I don't think corruption is valent anymore to most people. To generalize the views I tend to see: if you're on the right, you don't believe all the mainstream media lies about Trump, or alternatively you tolerate Trump's misbehavior because we NEEDED him to save our country; if you're on the left, you already assumed Trump was the devil so this kind of thing is just another drop in the pond.

But I actually had my mind changed on this recently. I don't know if we have any other Tangle readers here? They posted an extensive piece on Trump's corruption a few weeks ago that kind of opened my mind to the extent of what this administration is up to. Article here. I'd be curious to hear what other Trump supporters' thoughts are on it. I've noticed since reading it that my emotional response to Trump has become more negative, and I think I'm more open to left-wing commentary on the Trump admin. Was this what i needed to de-program me from MAGA brainwashing? Only time will tell.

I'm finding the article you described as so convincing rather... underwhelming.

Some of them are blatant reaching, like this:

For instance: The Trump Organization launched Trump Mobile, a branded phone that costs $499 and an additional $47.45/month for the “47” plan. The Trump organization does not manufacture the phone or provide cell service (the phone itself has yet to be released, and the network will be operated by Liberty Mobile Wireless). Instead, Trump licenses his name to the deal and then promotes it using the presidential brand while he is in office — all at a cool profit.

The man has been putting his name on everything from buildings to steaks for decades. You could argue he should have stopped doing this while in office out of a sense of propriety or decorum or whatever, but there's no obvious "corruption" there. Some of the other examples are clear conflicts of interest, which are bad, but they don't seem any worse than the conflicts of interest that were pointed out with stuff like Hunter Biden, or the Clintons and the Uranium One deal etc.

It also doesn't really matter who started it or the level that it occurs. This isn't two people taking potshots at each other, so much of the corruption in this sense is just stealing from the American people.

It's seeing someone take candy from an innocent baby and going "I should steal candy from babies too". The vengeance narrative is not a good defense, but it's the only thing that even slightly appears acceptable because stealing from a baby (or from American taxpayers) is obviously wrong.

If the Dems are doing corrupt government settlements or committing fraud, and stealing from babies they should be stopped, not joined. The same way if you see a burgler breaking into someone's house, if you jump in and start looting homes too, you're not actually better.

It's seeing someone take candy from an innocent baby and going "I should steal candy from babies too". The vengeance narrative is not a good defense, but it's the only thing that even slightly appears acceptable because stealing from a baby (or from American taxpayers) is obviously wrong.

That framing does not work. "Stealing candy from a baby" is a meme because the baby is a) helpless, b) doesn't have anything worth stealing but you're doing it anyway. As a result from b), you're likely doing it for a stupid ego reason rather than some strategic gain. Here, the baby is not helpless, is the richest collective entity on earth, and the Democrats (and now Republicans) have been appropriating that money to fund their political ambitions.

So, no, not at all like your analogy.

That framing does not work. "Stealing candy from a baby" is a meme because the baby is a) helpless, b) doesn't have anything worth stealing but you're doing it anyway

So if the baby could fight back even a little and had a few dollars in his hand, it's ok? No, theft is wrong.

Here, the baby is not helpless, is the richest collective entity on earth, and the Democrats (and now Republicans) have been appropriating that money to fund their political ambitions.

Sure, Americans are one of the wealthiest groups on the planet and they're looking to fight back (vote against Trump and the Republicans in the midterm and 2028) according to prediction markets right now. That doesn't morally justify looting the public coffers even more.

you don't believe all the mainstream media lies about Trump

I merely assume that there's corruption everywhere, in every administration, and that what is [accurately] reported on with Trump is about how much there is more generally. The rest of it just won't get reported on, because the [old] media is Conservative/D/Blue and is therefore party to it whenever their candidates hold office.

So when it comes time to hold him (or rather, his party and successor) to account for that, what kind of barometer shall I use to determine, on a scale from Nothingburger to Iran-Contra, how bad it actually was? Because all the information I have, if I watch the news, is that him being elected was already infinity corrupt, and now I'm expected to believe there's an infinity + 1 like every other first-grader who just lost an argument.

Yup, that's pretty much where I was at before I read the linked article. However it now seems to me that both the scale and the completely unabashed nature of corruption in the Trump admin is in a league of its own.

What part of the article made you think that? It seemed meandering and stupid.

We know we're living in the late republic, it's not culture war anymore. Oh, sure, the TDS crowd will get very conspicuously upset about Trump corruption again. But no one else cares.

Fuck you, I care.

Be polite.

What was the “late republic” turning point in your view?

The New Deal.

So how would you have handled the Depression? If you woke up on 4th March, 1933 as Mr Roosevelt, how would you have proceeded, knowing that your active attempts to solve the problem are the only thing keeping the Republic from falling to either the jackboots or the proletarian abyss?

It’s a dumb question because the monetary policy playbook has advanced since 1933 and there are things any modern mainstream economist would say should have been done, like massive monetary expansion to counteract ruinous deflation, which is the main thing that prolonged the depression because borrowing and lending ground to a halt, people hoarded cash etc. At the time people looked at Germany in the 20s and worried about hyperinflation, a lot of basic monetary policy levers weren’t really understood fully.

I was thinking more along the lines of The Great Society.

I would say gay marriage in the USA. That is when crybulling really really picked up and people started seeing the USA as just a set of ill gotten spoils that needed to be redistributed.

Probably 9/11 is the previous point, but I think up to 2010 things were pretty normal.

I would say gay marriage in the USA. That is when crybulling really really picked up and people started seeing the USA as just a set of ill gotten spoils that needed to be redistributed.

Gay marriage seems to be the least zero-sum of the progressive causes (arguably deliberately selected to be that way) and it's much younger than the drive for racial or class based redistribution.

Gay marriage seems to be the least zero-sum of the progressive causes

I think this may be precisely why it was a turning point. The tactics used to win this battle - "born this way," "how does two loving men/women getting married and getting [marriage rights] affect you?" - were so successful in large part because it was so close to zero-sum. But once that battle was won, the same activists applied the same tactics to other things which were not nearly so close to zero-sum (insisting that MTF transwomen be treated exactly the same as women in every context is the most obvious example, but smaller scale examples in things like representation in fiction also count), which resulted in significant push back, which resulted in the activists take the "beatings will continue until morale improves" approach.

Yes but afterwards the activist industrial complex spilled into all the other causes. And they managed to instill their monoculture in the tech giants for almost a decade. Now of course the workers there are scared because of the layoffs and are less politically active - as the obedient drones should be, but do you remember the first Trump admin?

I would say gay marriage in the USA.

Any thoughts as to why this point, and why the 9/11 before this too? Culture shock?

I would say that this is the time social networks started to become influential, dissatisfied millennials were looking for outlet, the blue tribe convinced itself that its values are universal and must be imposed on the infidels, because the only good jobs left were in FAANG they had to be diversified and so on.

9/11 was the date post cold war world order ended. And 90s were indeed the golden age of the west - democratization of tech, the anarchy that was the early internet, the creative explosion in gaming, the unwritten belief that history has ended.

Gaming was so much better back then, despite the actual graphics and hardware being much worse. Chalk it up to culture wars ruining a lot of gaming storylines.

But no one else cares.

At a time where consumer sentiment is at the lowest on record, with food and gas and general prices increasing from war/tariffs/etc other choices, I'm not sure "no one cares" is going to be true about a story of the president funneling their taxes towards his personal profit. This is the sort of behavior and outlook that has his approval rating collapsed and Dems sweeping the midterms. People already are struggling, the message of "they cut food support to pay for his friends" is gonna hit pretty hard.

People caring about gas prices does not make them care about corrupt lawsuit settlements- they just care about gas prices.

"they cut food support to pay for his friends" is gonna hit pretty hard

seems to have had no effect in massachusetts politics cutting school funding.

Food and gas prices hit hard, and Republicans are going to lose on that.

Nobody really gives a shit about corruption, though.

with food and gas and general prices increasing from war/tariffs/etc other choices, I'm not sure "no one cares"

"With crime increasing from rape/jaywalking/etc".

No one cares about tariffs or "corruption", but the war is a disaster.

Even if you don't think the average normie is smart enough to directly link the tariff nonsense to increasing prices, a stagnant economy, and businesses struggling more, those effects are still noticed. For example 1,700 workers at this Goodyear plant just noticed the effects of tariffs. When tariffs took down the long lasting family business sawmill in Roper, NC I'm sure the owner and his employees and customers noticed. On their own a few sufferings here and there won't be noticed, but it's not on their own. Small businesses around the country have been struggling by this unconstitutional theft of their money.

Even some of the bigger businesses have been struggling to weather the costs. They raised prices, lowered reinvestment spending, or cut profit margins (dissuading future investment), etc etc.

You have advanced TDS. For a more balanced view on the ground, I've heard some general grumbling about gas, but it's not nearly as hot a topic as it was in, say, the Bush administration. Current gas prices are still $0.50 cheaper than their peak under Biden, with large regional variation that mostly boils down to "Democrats hate the economy". I've only heard a few people complain about general prices, and every one of them was a 100% Democrat voter. Actual store prices haven't moved in a noticeable way, especially compared to Bidenflation, aside from a few spike categories like ground beef and coffee that seem to be more about industry circumstances than tariffs.

Consumer sentiment has hit a record low so I guess the average American also has advanced TDS.

Actual store prices haven't moved in a noticeable way, especially compared to Bidenflation, aside from a few spike categories like ground beef and coffee that seem to be more about industry circumstances than tariffs.

The YOY inflation rate is almost 4%, the traditional target is 2%. We're at almost double price growth than normal.

Notice how you present anecdotes, I present data.

3.8% (per your source, ~1% of which is gas) is still solidly better than the 9.1% we hit a few years ago. Yes, gas prices are up and that's Bad, but the catastrophic consequences predicted by people who suddenly can comprehend second order effects in only this single situation have been greatly exaggerated.

Voters don't seem to be particularly happy with the "sure prices keep going up really fast but at least it's not as fast as the peak of Biden". They wanted low prices, this has been said over and over and over and over again in focus groups and polling and even just obvious when looking at the no 1 pro Trump sign I saw in my Republican >+20 district. I had neighbors and coworkers and other acquaintances talking about how prices were going to be normal, something that the Trump campaign was constantly promising like “A vote for Trump means your groceries will be cheaper.”

It hasn't happened. People are even more dour than before (see consumer sentiment). They've gone through two admins of extreme inflation and aren't feeling satiated by "at least it's a little slower than peak". They want normal. His approval on inflation is now worse than Biden because they're sick of it. The American people got lied to and at least Biden had some cover of COVID and Russia. Trump's choices are entirely his own and thus they blame the inflation on him.

People do still care about the tariffs, even if they’re less visible than gas prices. Businesses in particular.

War can be swept under the rug if it's won quickly and decisively, and it can't thought of as a war to the general public. Like the military operation to get Maduro out of power, that worked well, nobody thought if it as a lightning quick war.

The pentagon better get winning then. Personally I think that even genocide in Iran will be better for Trump than quagmire.

He should have just knocked out all the power plants and oil refineries and escalated as needed, if he was going to wipe out the IRGC leaders anyway. No half measures for a large decentralized military like Iran. A sizable ground troop force should have been mobilized.

High gas prices could be tolerated in the short term, even for the remainder of Trump's term if the long term benefit was the permanent neutralization of a hostile enemy state. It could have been spun as win that way.

Instead, we have this constant barrage of threats to do what should have already been done. The remnants of the IRGC see this as political weakness and are going to wait Trump out like Carter and get a better reparations/nuclear deal from whoever is the next democrat president. At the very least they will wait until November to see if the midterms are indicating weakness in the future.

I'm not sure that knocking out the power plants and oil refineries would affect Iran's ability to deter commercial ships from transiting the Strait of Hormuz or make the Iranian leadership more likely to make a deal.

Iran's drone and missile arsenal doesn't depend on the power plants and oil refineries. They might be able to keep the Strait closed to commercial shipping all the way until the midterms with their current remaining arsenal, unless the US launches a ground invasion.

The Iranian leadership likely sees this war as existential and views the idea of surrendering after getting their power plants and oil refineries knocked out as being the equivalent of putting themselves in Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi's position (killed by their own domestic political opponents after the West launched a military operation that allowed those political opponents to come to power). Even if they don't get killed after surrendering, they would probably get Maduroed, their lives as they knew them over. In any case, if they are not surrendering after being directly targeted for assassination, often successfully, I don't know why they would surrender after power plants and oil refineries get bombed.

Bombing their civilian infrastructure would weaken Iran long-term, but at the cost of a lot of bad PR for the US, a general reduction in the US' soft power in the world.

A ground invasion would work pretty swiftly and effectively, but Trump does not seem to have the will to do it for whatever reason.

Iran's drone and missile arsenal doesn't depend on the power plants and oil refineries.

Not in the short term, certainly, but it would impact the long-term economics of a future regime pretty negatively. IIRC Iraq didn't manage to fully rebuild its damaged infrastructure from 1991 until after 2003. Missile factories require power and raw materials.

But actually destroying it isn't cheaply or quickly reversible, and makes a friendly future regime less plausible.

Even if they don't get killed after surrendering, they would probably get Maduroed, their lives as they knew them over.

If anything, it seems the Trump doctrine is more flexible with this than the Bush era: the rest of that regime is still running Venezuela, with the, uh, implication leading to some foreign policy changes, not "we're bringing democracy and planning elections".

And honestly the changes being requested don't sound that onerous to me: stop funding proxies and instability in the region, stop enrichment, and probably tone down the rhetoric on US/IL and internal jackboots, in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Not saying it's an easy ask, but it doesn't seem to include "submit to international war crimes/human rights trials".

Taking out the power plants is to reduce their industrial capacity to wage war, it's part of a total war strategy to defeat a resilient opponent. Taking out the oil facilitiies removes their oil income, income used to support their purchases of military hardware and raw resources. All this assumes ground troops will be deployed, or it will be just pointless destruction, as it has been so far.

This is the minimum commitment needed to subjugate Iran, otherwise surrender and reparations are likely. That can be a valid path too, but "surrender" is not part of Trump's vocabulary.

Yeah, but that's why this one is a disaster. No one was too upset about the earlier engagement with Iran that supposedly obliterated their nuclear program, but here they've stepped in it, and it doesn't look like they have a plan to get out.

This is what your country's parties only offering up two midwit incompetents to choose from gets you. Anyone who had studied Iran would have known that they would grab the world economy by the balls by blocking the Strait.

I think there was always at least a small chance that Iran would have collapsed, war is unpredictable. But it was marketed by Bibi to Trump as a near-sure thing, and possibly implied that Israel would tidy up any loose ends quietly.

Now Trump is stuck and I don't see any Israeli military support for this war Bibi marketed as an easy win. Somewhere, a lot of people are pointing fingers at each other to avoid being a scapegoat for this debacle.

Given the mosaic setup of the irgc, the chance may have been 0.

Only Donald Trump could pardon the January 6 defendants and then ruin their lives under the guise of charity. Here's how I see this playing out:

  • Independent Democratic group sues the government to stop the payments
  • Long fight over standing ensues
  • Democrats win White House in 2028; DOJ takes over case
  • In the meantime, a bunch of January 6 defendants have received checks from the fund
  • DOJ files new lawsuit against the fund's administrators, along with everyone who received a check
  • Having spent the money before the Democratic takeover, the fund is now administered by stooges who have no money or interest in actually fighting the suit and are only named as an essential party
  • The suit is now an unwieldy mass of defendants, most of whom have hired local counsel who aren't in a position to litigate the complex, novel legal issues involved
  • January 6 defendants who didn't immediately put their money into escrow are forced into the Hobson's choice of spending it on legal representation or settling by paying a large amount of their meagure fortune to the Preschooler's Trans Education Fund.

Only Donald Trump could pardon the January 6 defendants and then ruin their lives under the guise of charity

I think this boils down to "If Trump does this, then the Democrats will escalate"

Well maybe, but you could just as easily say "If the Democrats escalate, then some future Republican will escalate even more." Well, maybe not. Perhaps people on both sides subconsciously believe that for the most part, the Democrats are the party of "Defect!" I think there are a lot of reasons Trump is intensely unpopular with the Left, not the least of which is that they pretty much automatically hate all Republican presidents. But I do think that @JTarrou kind of has a point that the Left is rather upset that Trump "does politics back to them."

It isn't an escalation if all they're trying to do is get the money back. While going after people who had nothing to with the impropriety of the payments may seem unfair, it's something the government does all the time. In this case, though, the government might not have a choice. If Trump had structured the settlement so the money went directly to him, and he then gave the money away, it would be a straightforward case of suing him to get the money back. But instead, he wants to implement a complicated system where he creates a quasi-government agency that he controls and uses it to distribute the money. If he gets sued in the future he's going to argue that since he never took any of the money he's not on the hook to pay it back. If this agency or commission or whatever still has the money, then it's easy, but if they've already given it away, then the government has to go after whom it was given to. Any litigation surrounding this is going to be incredibly complicated, and any attorney is going to have to sue anyone whom they plausibly have a claim against. Given that the money is to be distributed by what is a quasi-government agency, this takes on a similar tenor as going after any other government benefit overpayment.

In other words, it's not escalation, just the nature of litigation. I'm currently defending a case where we forced the plaintiff to sue his daughter. He's not asking for any damages, but I have an argument that she's liable for contribution (which I probably won't use). She still had to hire her own attorney, and the claim isn't covered by insurance. Whenever you file a lawsuit, you have to account for the possibility that there is going to be some blowback that can affect third parties you didn't intend to involve.

It isn't an escalation if all they're trying to do is get the money back.

In other words, it's not escalation, just the nature of litigation.

Is there precedent for the government trying to void a settlement agreement on these sorts of grounds?

To put the question another way, has any US agency gone to court and argued that settlement agreements signed on behalf of the United States during the previous administration are invalid and therefore the government should be able to recoup the settlement proceeds?

I've never heard of this happening, but if it's a regular practice, then I'll agree it's not an escalation.

One of the underappreciated tragedies of the second Trump administration is the wholesale destruction of the credibility the Justice Department had spent 200 years building. What was once one of the most respected institutions among attorneys and judges alike has been reduced to having the reputation of the kind of lawyer you hire out of the yellow pages, and the only people who are willing to work for them are those who would otherwise be practicing divorce law in West Virginia. Judges as recently as two years ago gave the government wide deference because it was assumed that they wouldn't launch a prosecution unless the case had merit, wouldn't make an argument that didn't have merit, and would comply with judicial orders.

When you come up with a set of seven criteria and tell me that unless meeting all of them is something the government regularly does, then doing so this time will meet some broad definition of "escalation" conveniently ignores the fact that six months ago the president would use a bullshit collusive lawsuit to get personal access to taxpayer money that hadn't been appropriated by congress would have seemed completely unthinkable. Settlement agreements are voidable if there was a conflict of interest. The Federal government regularly goes after people who received funds that were improperly distributed, even when those people aren't at fault. Putting two and two together and letting a court decide isn't escalation.

Settlement agreements are voidable if there was a conflict of interest.

I'm not sure I understand this, can you give me a couple of examples so I know what you are talking about? I've never heard of the government entering into a settlement agreement and the agreement later being voided due to there having been a conflict of interest. I suspect you are confusing settlements that require judicial approval, such as class actions, with settlements that do not require judicial approval.

The Federal government regularly goes after people who received funds that were improperly distributed, even when those people aren't at fault.

Again, can you give me a couple of examples? The word "improperly" is vague. I certainly agree that if you receive money you were never eligible for, you are potentially on the hook. But if the eligibility criteria are changed retroactively?

They're called collusive suits, where the parties aren't actually in opposition and are using the court to achieve some objective other than redressing a legitimate wrong. They may be permitted at the state level in certain circumstances to achieve various policy objectives, but they're prohibited at the Federal level due to the case and controversy requirement, and are considered a form of fraud.

To give an example, suppose I'm the sole director of a nonprofit, and there's an elderly volunteer who is going through some hard times and I want to help him out. The law says that I can't just give him the money, since it has to be used for legitimate business, and I don't want to hire him as a full time employee because that opens up all kinds of bullshit with insurance, taxes, and the like.

He injures himself while volunteering. The injuries aren't serious, but there's a legitimate claim worth about a thousand dollars . I tell him to sue the nonprofit, and I agree to settle the case for ten thousand dollars. As far as the accounts are concerned, it just looks like a settlement for a lawsuit, nothing to see here. But if the State AG finds out, you're in trouble.

There are other kinds of collusive suits, some of which are entirely fraudulent, and if you're expecting something exactly on point, keep in mind that in most knotty legal issues, there isn't going to be one. I rarely do legal research in my practice, but when I do I don't expect to find some showstopper, because if one existed I wouldn't be arguing in the first place. All we can go by is general principles.

The Social Security Administration discovers nearly 2 million instances of overpayment per year, about 30% of which are administrative errors. While you may argue that they weren't entitled to the money, the point I'm trying to make is that these people are completely innocent of any wrongdoing, yet they are still required to repay the money.

When a court vacates a settlement due to fraud, what they're saying is that the recipient wasn't entitled to the money. It's as simple as that. The settlement never existed, legally speaking. It was illegal. It's not as if Congress came back and passed a law that retroactively invalidated the settlement. Realistically, my scenario isn't going to happen, because I don't see any money being distributed. Somebody will file a suit, a judge will issue an injunction preventing the funds from being distributed, and the issue will be tied up in litigation until the sun expands into a red giant and swallows the earth.

but they're prohibited at the Federal level due to the case and controversy requirement, and are considered a form of fraud.

Ok, so can you point to a situation where the settlement agreement in such a suit was later voided on this basis?

While you may argue that they weren't entitled to the money, the point I'm trying to make is that these people are completely innocent of any wrongdoing, yet they are still required to repay the money.

Ok, but so what? There's clearly precedent for situations where a person receives money they should not have received by the standards or rules in place at the time. I am asking about situations where the person receives money consistent with the standards in place at the time but those standards are later changed. Are you able to point to such a situation?

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Most previous cases revolve around active fraud, noncompliance or unintentional mispayments, although I'll note that the latter have pretty wide avenues for relief and you get deep into equittable relief estoppel whatever really quick. Even there, a lot of the clawbacks come under other specific statutory authorization.

I can't find anything that's about intentional disbursements that a different DOJ later concluded were unauthorized. Even Iran-Contra didn't get unwound like Rov_Scam's hypothesizing: the feds tried and had some legal success to pull back money the executive spent and definitely didn't 'legitimately' have, but never got the money back, there was a much more constrained appropriations interface, and it was a mess in general.

EDIT: on the other hand, this isn't a settlement-settlement; because it's not reviewed by a judge, voiding it has a lot more options available.

on the other hand, this isn't a settlement-settlement; because it's not reviewed by a judge

I think that -- generally speaking -- settlements of legal claims do not need to be reviewed by a judge to be binding. I'm not sure how this Anti-Weaponization Fund will work, but presumably a claimant completes some kind of documentation; at some point the fund offers the person money; and, if the claimant accepts the offer, he signs some kind of release. Presumably if the claimant supplied false (and important) information in connection with his documentation, that would potentially be a basis for the government to take the position that the settlement is void and the money needs to be paid back. Absent that, I'm skeptical that there's much precedent for trying to recoup the money on the ground that the underlying settlement was collusive; or ultra vires; or whatever. So that if a future administration tried to do so, it could reasonably seen as escalation.

Here's a question: When the Trump administration cut off funding for a lot of USAID recipients, did the US also file lawsuits to recoup monies already paid? If not, that's another area for possible future escalation.

I think that -- generally speaking -- settlements of legal claims do not need to be reviewed by a judge to be binding.

A purely contractual settlement has the defendant and claimant sign an agreement to end the lawsuit; it is remedied by bringing a court case again (though the second time, it's for breach of contract). These don't have to be reviewed by a judge unless there is a breach, and the standard is very generous toward the non-breaching party.

A judicially enforced settlement is one that's been presented to and accepted by a judge, and formally become part of the settlement of the case. These have to be reviewed first, but they become res judicata and a breach of the settlement terms can be punished with contempt.

When the Trump administration cut off funding for a lot of USAID recipients, did the US also file lawsuits to recoup monies already paid? If not, that's another area for possible future escalation.

As far as I can tell, no. The closest I can find was the big EPA fund held at CitiBank, but there it was still an attempt to go for funds awarded to Citibank rather than delivered to the grantees.

Does this "people on both sides" framing that we see time and time again actually predict politics accurately? The internet, and really any sort of mass media, likes centering people on "sides" whose political position really does amount to this sort of mutually recursive tribalism (do whatever is most Right/Left, which is whatever pisses off the Left/Right the most, which is whatever is least Left/Right, which is whatever pisses off the Right/Left the most...); but those people's votes and political allegiances are largely locked in and the only way in which they have agency at all is producing and responding to hype (in states of low hype they might become so apathetic that they themselves fail to turn out to vote; in states of high hype they produce an infectious mood that might assume some of the reality distortion field nature). Meanwhile, somehow the system keeps equilibrating in such a fashion that neither "side" has a majority and so elections are decided by a marginal set of people who stubbornly refuse to hate Republicans for being Republican, or Democrats for being Democrat, and in fact are so mercenary that it is hard to ascribe to them any principles at all other than "gas should be cheap, my investments should perform well and my candidate should be hype rather than a loser".

Does this "people on both sides" framing that we see time and time again actually predict politics accurately?

Meanwhile, somehow the system keeps equilibrating in such a fashion that neither "side" has a majority and so elections are decided by a marginal set of people who stubbornly refuse to hate Republicans for being Republican, or Democrats for being Democrat, and in fact are so mercenary that it is hard to ascribe to them any principles at all other than "gas should be cheap, my investments should perform well and my candidate should be hype rather than a loser".

If you are talking about predicting who wins the elections, I would say you are probably right. In terms of lawfare, partisanship, resistance, etc. though, it's pretty much human nature that if one said hits the defect button, the other side is more likely to defect once it gets the opportunity.

If the Trump administration hands out millions of dollars in settlements to January 6 protestors, conservative organizations, etc., will a future democratic administration turn around and sue them? I actually tend to doubt it; it's rather a big escalation. But even so, mutual escalation obviously can spin wildly out of control very quickly.

That is sort of true, I think, but as long as the grounding provided by elections persists, this seems like a natural damper on any spinning out of control. Wild defections tend to be bad for the handful of things that the mercenary voters do care about, except perhaps the hype/vibes dimension; and even there, the jury is still out on whether Trump (as a candidate whose hype value was entirely built on promising to press defect) was just an outlier in this regard. (Biden surely was the least "own the cons" candidate of the last three fielded by the Dems, and he alone managed to eke out a win against Trump.)

... I'm not a fan of the collusive settlements here, but you do realize what you're proposing, right?

There's something deeply ironic about chasing unsophisticated people who used a program claiming to compensate them for the government's past unreasonable enforcement, without cognizance of guilt, culpability, wrong-doing, or even ability to pay, but there's a pretty obvious ramification and 'next step' for it...

... and it's one the Trump admin could start yesterday, if you keep spelling it out.

Ironic or not, it's not like these kind of clawbacks aren't par for the course. If a welfare recipient gets an overpayment, even if it was because of a cockup on the government's part, the government still expects them to pay it back. They might cut them a break due to financial hardship, but they still have to go through the process. When I was doing bankruptcy, I regularly had to tell clients that no, you can't pay your brother the money you owe him before you file, because the trustee will sue your brother to get it back, and no, you can't offer your best friend your hunting camp as part of a deal too good to be true, or the trustee will have that transfer undone. But as I plan to elaborate on in another comment, the government might not have a choice.

This is just spoils, which is somewhat politics as normal. What is more worrying is his pure vindictive streak in relation to spoils. For example, the House and Senate both unanimously passed an anodyne bill to fund water supplies for rural Coloradoans - Trump vetoed it and the House bowed down and didn't un-veto it. A few days ago, Colorado governor Jared Polis pardons Tina Peters, the lady who tried to demonstrate election fraud (and ended up showing that it was her own Republican number 2 that caused an 'anomaly') - and Trump passes the funding. Lauren Boebert even points this out but doesn't stop kissing the ring.

example, the House and Senate both unanimously passed an anodyne bill to fund water supplies for rural Coloradoans - Trump vetoed it and the House bowed down and didn't un-veto it.

The hilarious part of this too is that being rural, they were likely a more MAGA centric area. So Trump was taking revenge on his own supporters and hoping Polis wasn't a cruel monster and would have enough empathy for the rurals to play ball.

This is not unique behavior from Trump

This is old stuff, this is how lawfare is done. You troll around the courts until your party is in office, then you settle the case for yourself, and give billions of taxpayer money to "Charitable organizations" that happen to be your political allies, and that's how you fund your politics. The only thing that is new is that Trump is doing it on the Republican side, rather than this being a one-party thing due to the control of major cities.

Complain about corruption if you want, but no tool of lawfare stays in only one toolbox. The entire reason the left hates Trump is that he does politics back to them. They used the Deep State to leak private financial records? Now Trump hits back. After a hundred felony counts and the blanket decade-pardons, I don't ever want to hear a criticism of Trump's dirty dealings without the full disclaimer. It's not corruption when the other side has been doing it for eighty years, but it is very precious special pleading.

If it’s such old stuff, why didn’t you bother to give an example? C’mon, surely Nixon or LBJ tried it, at least. We’ve got 80 years of sordid machine politics to choose from. One of them has to be more concrete than your sense of unfairness.

The entire reason the left hates Trump is that he does politics back to them.

The hate was in full swing before he ever got into office. He ran on a platform of barbecuing sacred cows. Then he spent four years bumbling around, trying to figure out how to turn on the gas. If he’d been “doing politics” he might actually have accomplished something.

complain about corruption if you want,

Gladly. It is positively shameful how much corruption is being excused with a pansy-ass “well, the other guys do it!” Maybe we should elect somebody to do something about it. Drain the swamp, as it were.

FULL DISCLAIMER: I think lawfare is bad! I think Biden’s pardon bullshit was a travesty and a miscarriage of justice! No one should be above the law. Am I allowed to critique the obvious corruption, now?

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/doj-eliminates-obama-era-slush-200100938.html

The practice of directing funds to nonprofits with a mission somehow related to the harm done by the accused was adopted under the Obama administration. The practice resulted in millions of dollars being funneled to social service agencies and advocacy groups especially when it came to settlements with large financial institutions.

Gladly. It is positively shameful how much corruption is being excused with a pansy-ass “well, the other guys do it!” Maybe we should elect somebody to do something about it. Drain the swamp, as it were.

Can you think of any Democrats with any anti-corruption credibility? For example, anyone who has called for the ending of the mass healthcare/welfare fraud and the punishment of those responsible?

For comparison, the Trump admin just shut down a bunch of fake hospice businesses that were raking in billions of dollars in fraud, somewhere between "benignly tolerated" and "openly abetted" by the local Democrats. LA alone was $600 million, over a third of the settlement in the OP.

Good on them. This is a good crackdown, as far as I can tell.

The problem with looking for examples is that everybody, Democrats included, wants to claim credit for the big wins. Newsom can say that he’s proud of this bust; that plus ten dollars might get you a cup of California coffee. For related reasons, Democrats railing against Trump corruption are about as controversial and brave as Republicans concerned about Hillary’s emails.

If I had to pick Congressmen, I’ve got a soft spot for Jason Crow, who’s a bit of a grandstander but at least seems earnest about insider trading laws. Kirsten Gillibrand is another one who’s serious about the subject.

The only thing that is new is that Trump is doing it on the Republican side, rather than this being a one-party thing due to the control of major cities.

Yes, and that he's doing it with no real fig leaf at all. Rov_Scam above described how the Democrats could get revenge ("settling by paying a large amount of their meagure fortune to the Preschooler's Trans Education Fund")... by just doing the thing they do anyway.

I am also baffled that people do not know this. We had many such cases around BLM riots - rioters were arrested, they sued the local PD for excessive violence and sympathetic government enthusiastically settles. It is now basically accepted way of financing political players on par with "learing center" frauds, US AID frauds, or frauds via other supposed NGOs that are solely financed from government to do party activism.

It is the way how parties are financed in current day-and-age everywhere including in Europe. This type of legal corruption is now baked into the society, it is how business is done and it is inevitable. Your local political activist protests with understanding, that his legal fees will be covered by some leftist activist group who in turn understand that they will get financed from some fake project or settled lawsuit with possible career moves from activism into local, state or federal bureaucracy or maybe some consultant job. This is how millions of people live and do business, it is the same system that was in place in Rome with politicians having their client network attached like leeches on tax systems and monopolies etc.

Refusing to play this game means that you will lose and then get laughed off the stage by cynical progressive wonks as a stupid moron. They can now gleefully claim for decades how the right does not have institutional brainpower and numbers and support network from low level activists to high level people in academia and other institutions. Of course they don't have them, they refused to play the game for decades, and let the opposition entrench deeply into all the systems.

Just one example of this racket - in half of US states 0,5% or more of all building budget has to be spend on art.

This does not strike me as inherently a racket. It's perfectly anodyne in western civilization for the government to spend money on public art, not just brutalist utilitarian concrete. Has been since the Romans. No doubt there is corruption in what artists get the commission, particularly if it's always avant-garde artists whose aesthetics are light-years away from the kinds of statues and decorations people actually want in their neighborhoods - but a small fraction of the budget being reserved for art is not in principle outrageous or even surprising.

It is the way how parties are financed in current day-and-age everywhere including in Europe.

This type of collusive litigation is not a thing in Europe - in general the UK has less government-by-litigation than the US, and civil law countries have a lot less. In most of Continental Europe, there is direct on-budget government funding of political parties tied to the numbers of votes they receive or the number of seats they win. Everywhere, there is direct on-budget government funding of left-wing GONGOs.

They used the Deep State to leak private financial records?

We used to have the question of "who was president in 2020?", now we have the question of "who was president in 2018?". He was the guy in charge! He's suing himself for his own administration's failure to properly secure information.

Is your contention that Trump ordered his own IRS to leak his financial records? Or was that part of the "resistance" so popular in the first Trump term?

It's his administration, I don't know what rules he or his appointees did or didn't have in place for protecting against leaks by employees but ultimately the buck stops with the boss.

This is nonsensical. Was Obama responsible for the Washington Navy Yard shooting because 'the buck stops with the boss'?

He wasn't responsible for pulling the trigger, but yes - as Commander in Chief Obama was ultimately responsible for both security at the Navy Yard and the security clearance system that allowed Alexis to keep a clearance despite his criminal and psychiatric records. This is the whole point of having a unitary executive - The Buck Stops Here, as the sign on Truman's Oval Office desk says.

That the US generally allows autolitigation is well-established law - if as owner-manager of your own company you injure yourself on the job due to your own negligence, you can sue the company for having a negligent boss. (And you might want to if the company has third-party liability insurance that will pay the damages). But there is a reason places like Lowering the Bar and Above the Law will post the casefile and publicly mock you for it.

It is also part of a consistent pattern of behaviour on the part of Trump. His 2024 campaign was almost as much against his own first administration as against the Biden administration. Both Trump and his supporters in the country think he wasn't really in charge in the 2016-20 period and shouldn't be blamed for what happened.

Do you think we should abolish the Civil Service? Going back to the patronage system would make your position here much more tenable.

Looking into this, and wow, Congress really did pass an indefinite uncapped appropriation for the federal judgement fund with no substantive limitations. The statute for unauthorized tax information disclosure which Trump sued under allows punitive damages with no statutory cap. This settlement is actually 100% legal.

How many other loopholes like this are there in the United States Code?

The incredible part is that the lawsuit isn't even just about something the federal government did, but something the federal government did under Trump. Regardless of your thoughts about the Biden or Obama admins, allowing this logic is insane and incentivizes every future president to "harm" themselves or allies (and they of course don't even have to actually show any real harm cause it's all done through settlements!), sue themselves, and then distribute taxpayer money among themselves, their friends and other allies. It blatantly turns the government, and the American taxpayer, into a personal piggy bank.

This was already standard practice under Obama and Biden. https://www.cato.org/blog/justice-department-revives-slush-fund-settlements

Those were real lawsuits that the government filed where the defendants were going to have to pay someone no matter what, the only question being how much and to whom. It's not a practice I endorse, but it's in a totally different league than personally suing an entity you control in a case that would go nowhere for no reason other than extracting money out of them that they wouldn't have to pay if the suit actually went forward.

Both settlements mentioned in that article were between adverse parties. The innovation in this case is that Trump is funding a slush fund settlement by suing himself.

I agree with @JTarrou that the fundamental tactic is a very old left-wing one. Trump's version is more brazen in its corruption in two ways:

  • The policy change requested is a direct cash payment to Trump's allies with no pretence of a service provided in exchange, as opposed to the expansion of a government programme which hires his allies at above-market salaries.
  • When lefty NGOs sue Democratic state and local governments, they go to a lot of effort to create the impression that the settlement is negotiated between adverse parties. Trump just admits that he is suing himself.

You could say "more brazen", or you could say "more honest".

Trump has been saying this openly from the beginning, how he legally bribed all the right people because that's how the world works. His schtick has always been "I'm a member of the corrupt elite, but on your side, as proven by the hatred of your opponents".

Much of the horror at his various schemes and policies has been the breaking of kayfabe, which of course is always part of kayfabe. No, Europe, you don't have an independent foreign policy, now pay your dues and be good client states. Yes, we will fuck over our enemies and replace their governments if we can. Yes, we do want their oil. No, you can't legalize discrimination against the majority of the country in the name of anti-discrimination. It breaks all the social norms and self-delusions of the ruling elite.

Different type of settlement use. I'd agree it's abusive still but those aren't the case of the defendant and plaintiff being the same person, nor are they over actions their own admin did. Those settlements are a pretty common thing to see at the state level too.

Meanwhile not aware of anything like what Trump is doing in political history, even at the state level.

I double checked with ChatGPT too

Governors suing other state officials or legislatures over separation-of-powers disputes.

Governors continuing lawsuits filed before taking office.

Attorneys general suing agencies nominally under the same state government but independently controlled.

But an active governor directly suing agencies under their own control and then settling it internally for money or concessions favorable to themselves is not something with many clear precedents.

Starting a lawsuit against your own admin for actions under your authority and control while in office isn't even precedented at the state government level.

But ok let's say you're right and they're the same. Who is paying for this corruption? Ordinary Americans. Your logic is "The Dems robbed innocent citizens, so we should too"??

My logic is that the Dems are funding their political activism with taxpayer money, and have been for a very long time. This has been entirely uncontroversial to you personally. It is ridiculous to expect that the other party will hold to their "principles" and let them have a structural advantage permanently. Eventually, they will find someone who will exploit all the loopholes their opponents have been. Like Trump.

I can summarize all TDS with the childhood lament "Mommy he hit me back!".

My logic is that the Dems are funding their political activism with taxpayer money, and have been for a very long time. This has been entirely uncontroversial to you personally.

Well if we're making shit up about each other without knowing what the other believes, I guess you could do a lot worse.

I can summarize all TDS with the childhood lament "Mommy he hit me back!".

But it's not the Dem politicians who are paying for this, it's the American taxpayers.

So even if it's completely true that the Dems have done this exact thing over and over again, the logic here is actually "But mommy, he took candy from an innocent baby! I wanna steal candy from babies too!" instead of leaving the damn baby and his candy alone.

"Vengeance" here is just an excuse to steal from ordinary Americans, because there is no other even somewhat palatable defense anyone can present.

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We don't get that option, we only get Trump or the Democrats.

If corruption bothers you, politics is going to be a rough hobby.

something the federal government did under Trump.

You mean things that Trump tried to stop and complained about as they were happening?

Can it really be the case that you are arguing that Trump would never play 4D chess?

4D chess is itself a bad meme that fails to explain anything about Trump. (You wouldn’t say have faith that LeBron James will win because he’s playing 4D chess, although in a literal sense that’s what basketball is.)

But also, Trump did not pretend to fight his persecution so he could do this later. He fought and won, that’s all.

Was Trump not president during 2019-2020? The IRS was under his control. Now maybe he was too incompetent as a boss to ensure that the workers under him don't leak things, but that seems like his fault and I don't get why the American taxpayer should have to pay him or his allies for his own fuck ups.

First of all a large part of this settlement is wrapping up lawsuits of Trump allies suing the Biden IRS for unfairly targeting them.

Second of all, obviously in a system of separated powers the president can’t just unilaterally impose his will. We allowed American democracy to become this frankensystem of empowered bureaucrats and who answered to no one. We called it the “Deep State” although when we used this term people imagined that we meant secret council conspiracies and complained. But now, of course, Trump has won and is being allowed to remake the government. What you call “incompetence” is the consequence of a big dramatic fight that has lasted the last ten years.

First of all a large part of this settlement is wrapping up lawsuits of Trump allies suing the Biden IRS for unfairly targeting them.

Then why is it specifically focused around the Trump lawsuit against the Trump government? "But what about other things that is more defensible!" is the literal motte and bailey.

Defend the actual thing and explain why American taxpayers (who are already facing a >100% GDP deficit and rising costs due to campaign lies not being followed) should now have to pay billions for a settlement in a Trump v Trump admin suit.

Second of all, obviously in a system of separated powers the president can’t just unilaterally impose his will.

Damn, I wonder why the founding fathers did that.

Except the modern US is system of unaccountable power and not of separated one. You have many agencies that are neither accountable to the president nor the congress and have the capacity to make and enforce regulations as if they are both.

Except the modern US is system of unaccountable power and not of separated one. You have many agencies that are neither accountable to the president nor the congress and have the capacity to make and enforce regulations as if they are both.

That's explicitly not true. If Congress passed a bill and the president signed it (or it was veto proof), then they could shut down and change any congressionally created agency in any manner they wish. That Congress chooses not to do this does not make it unaccountable.

You should at least have an accurate complaint when you're upset about something.

The IRS was out of control and lawlessly leaked his tax returns. This is a reoccurring problem with Federal bureaucracies illegally defying the Executive if he's a Republican.

The IRS was out of control

Isn't the appropriate phrasing here "Trump had lost control of the IRS," or even "Trump never established control of the IRS"?

Aside from the optical issues of sueing yourself, it reveals the deeper issue. Trump has done little to nothing to actually change the systemic problems of government bureaucracy; instead, he's most interested in simple legible money, which he'll skim off the top and distribute as spoils to his allies. This does nothing to actually change the culture, but it's an equilibrium satisfying to both sides: bureaucracy keeps getting their paychecks, and now Trump hanger-ons get paychecks too. Even Trump haters get something too: more outrage of the day to cement their sense of identity.

The only losers are taxpayers and people who want effective government.

Trump has done little to nothing to actually change the systemic problems of government bureaucracy...

... back when the records were leaked. I think Trump has learned from this.

Now maybe he was too incompetent as a boss to ensure that the workers under him don't leak things,

I don't think competence is the limiting factor in something like this. Without resorting to scifi or fantasy, it's hard to fathom how the POTUS could be sufficiently "competent" as to guarantee that no leaks in the entire federal government happens ever. Of course, the buck stops with the POTUS, but also, e.g. we don't execute the POTUS every time someone in the federal government is convicted of treason, and I think the reason we don't is that we don't assign blame to the POTUS for every individual crime that anyone working under him commits (maybe we should! The world might be a lot better in a lot of ways). And I think it's reasonable to believe that not assigning such blame is the correct thing to do.

POTUS appoints the people who run the agencies or appoints the people who appoints the people and so on and so forth. Like you said, the buck stops with them.

Does that mean they get personal blame for everything a random employee does? No. But it's still nonsense logic to try to sue your administration for what your admin did.

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POTUS appoints the people who run the agencies or appoints the people who appoints the people and so on and so forth. Like you said, the buck stops with them.

Do you know what the civil service system is?

To answer Iconochasm's question for you, @magicalkittycat, below a certain level the people in the IRS (and most other government organs) are not considered "political appointees" and can't be fired without cause, due to the Pendleton Act. This is fine when dealing with individual loose cannons, as if they do something crazy they'll be fired for cause. The problem Donald Trump has, however, is that the #Resistance to him is/was systemic, and systemic sabotage is resistant to investigation because the rebellious employees will cover for each other against probes by management (and the Pendleton Act also stops political hiring to those positions, so the workaround of "bring in a bunch of new blood that's been vetted against the offending ideology, and use them to spy on the rest to spot the bad apples" was also blocked), so getting the evidence to fire people for cause is/was actually very difficult.

Does that mean they get personal blame for everything a random employee does? No. But it's still nonsense logic to try to sue your administration for what your admin did.

That'd depend heavily on the precise set of details. As you said, the POTUS doesn't get personal blame for everything a random employee does.

Yes, but if you establish this as a precedent then the next president to come along can just wink wink nudge nudge and trigger similar events performatively: publicly complaining while secretly encouraging it behind closed doors in order to enrich themselves. Even if Trump as trailblazer did not set this up on purpose, it is a trail we do not want blazed.

Obama blazed this trail. Eric Holder would sue companies over disparate impact (which is an impossible standard to follow), then make them pay out a big DOJ slush fund in settlement. Which itself is just an extension of the NGO-government pipeline Democrats long-go pioneered. There is no new precedent here, the government has been suing itself to achieve ends it could not achieve democratically for a loooooong time now.

Clinton blazed the trail, Obama reinforced it, and now that the Democrats are getting a taste of thier own "machine" politics style medicine they don't like it.

Are Democrat politicians paying for the fund or is it the average American taxpayer who has to pay?

The US taxpayer. See all the wailing and gnashing of teeth surrounding DOGE and the cuts to USAID early lat year.

If an NGO has to cease operations because DOGE cut its funding, it was never really a "Non-government Organization" to begin with.

American taxpayer pays either way, that's how the government works.

I dislike the system but I'd rather pay people abused by the IRS than a bunch of NGOs trailblazing through the Darien Gap or campaigning for more two-tiered justice system or whatever.

The government is the party that did the thing he sued for. If he is not allowed to use that tactic here because the taxpayers pay for the government, that would essentially make the government immune to being sued.

Of course the details for Democrat cases depends on the case in question. For the BLM example linked above by georgioz, the taxpayer did indeed pay (by these same standards).

This is nonsense, of course. Government is just people. There's a person who did the thing that he sued for, and that person has a name and a birthday and an address. That person can have their property taken away and can be imprisoned.

Why should I have to pay for the crimes of the government?

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The IRS under Obama targeted conservatives. They looked at your political action group and determined if you were conservative before deciding if you would get an audit or not. This is all public knowledge and nobody was made to suffer for this except Lois Lerner eventually losing her job.

We even had a fight a few years later in the Biden years over expanding the IRS and adding more agents so they could audit more people. Nothing was ever done to make sure they won’t target conservatives again, but we will just pretend that that isn’t related because those are two separate storylines so connecting those two dots is a non-sequitur. Result: the IRS that targeted conservatives and was never punished for it got more powerful.

Now that the government reaches a settlement every Trump critic wants to call this a Trump corruption case. ? Well, what is the federal government supposed to do? In fact, we now have a richly-established norm of NGOs and activists suing the federal government and so that their political allies who run the government can settle. Welcome to the world you made. This kind of thing happened all the time under Obama, all the time, all the time! — remember when companies were made to pay settlements directly into DOJ slush funds?— and I still hear about how the only scandal Obama ever had was his tan suit.

It is also very unusual for a sitting President to be suing the government he is in charge of.

It’s very unusual for the government to target conservative political groups! And the sitting president over made-up stories that he colluded with Russia. And all of his allies for process crimes such as entrapment while being interviewed by FBI agents who didn’t tell you they were investigating you. And et cetera et cetera etc. It would have been really easy for Trump not to sue the government if they hadn’t wronged him in the first place!

I would really actually enjoy a good argument about why exactly this is even corruption. All I see online is a lot of pointing from people very selectively not mentioning the government’s extremely well-documented political campaigns against conservatives, Trump, and Trump’s allies. What else did we think would happen? People who were harassed by the government actually have a right to settle to make themselves whole, and this is what happens when those same people win control of that government. What did you think would happen after spying on his campaign? $1.776 Billion is getting off easy.

While I agree that Russia independently attempted to intercede in the 2016 election on Trump's behalf rather than in collusion, I can't think of a more "secretly in cahoots with Putin" move possible than invading Iran in 2026.

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This is a wild statement with some hefty logical problems you might want to offer some evidence to counteract.

At a time where the Russian war effort has been struggling against Ukraine's new advancements, they've been flooded with new money from a drop in sanctions and surging oil prices. They're arguably one of the only true winners out of the whole Iran war fiasco!

That's some bizarre logic based on a lot of very shaky assumptions. But it probably helps to start with the theory......

Russia independently attempted to intercede in the 2016 election on Trump's behalf

This seems highly in line with conventional wisdom and official government findings. What is supposed to be controversial, the "independently" part?!

I can't think of a more "secretly in cahoots with Putin" move possible than invading Iran in 2026

As noted in a different reply, the obvious logic would be higher oil prices and the Strait of Hormuz closure creating higher oil prices for Russia and an impetus to ease sanctions on Russian oil, as indeed the US has done. Mostly joking, but I was also mostly joking a couple months ago (IRL, not on here) when I speculated that a hilarious consequence of the Iran war would probably be the US getting rid of sanctions on Russian oil. That US resources are tied up in Iran, leaving less logistic and budget room to support Ukraine, is icing on the cake, not to mention the seeming erosion of US face and soft power.

So absolutely anything that adjusts the price of oil is proof positive of Russian stoogery?

That should be a long list!

That's not what I am claiming at all. I am merely pointing out the comedy that there were few choices that would have simultaneously been so beneficial for Russia and so detrimental for the US and Europe. (Perhaps intervening on Ukraine's behalf could be considered more beneficial to Russia, but having that conflict settled wouls come with at least some Western benefits.)

My personal view is simply that Trump 2 is an extraordinarily incompetent administration.

If this is so detrimental to Europe and obviously incompetent, why is Kier Starmer easing the same sanctions?

The defunct Tories pounce:

The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, posted on X: “After 18 months of ‘standing up to Putin’ the Labour govt quietly issued a licence allowing imports of Russian oil refined in third countries.

“Yesterday Labour MPs voted against UK oil and gas licences. We are now importing from Russia instead of drilling in the North Sea. Insane.”

why is Kier Starmer easing the same sanctions?

Easing the sanctions is not the part that is so harmful to US/European interests; the conditions creating the need to ease the sanctions, i.e., the US-Iran war, are the part that is harmful to Western interests. Easing the sanctions is an understandable attempt to lessen the pain created by the Iran military action that has gone on far longer than planned and come with drastically larger consequences than planned.

The incompetent part is Trump's choice to embark on the Iranian adventure in the first place. I'm not really qualified to judge the competence of the operation itself, but it seems to me like Trump probably did not get great or blunt enough advice on this front.

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While I agree that Russia independently attempted to intercede in the 2016 election on Trump's behalf rather than in collusion

Did they? AIUI, they preferred Hilary because they'd already bought her and thought she was a known (weak) quantity. The "intercessions" I'm aware of were a mix of general shit-stirring and (probable) ass-covering after the DNC hack was caught.

Invading Russia’s ally is in accords with Russia?

Russia is not Iran's ally except perhaps in the sense of convenience.

That applies to all of Russia's allies and most allies in general. Doesn't make them not allies.

I still think that Iran falls pretty low on Russia's list of allies. Russia's had a habit of slow-walking/refusing to sell/deliver systems to Iran that would really inconvenience Israel, and they have worked against Iran's nuclear aspirations.

In contrast, it is rare for people to refer to Israel as a Russian ally (even though they have decent relations and act in ways that benefit each other), and I think the reason is that Israel doesn't show up to the I HATE USA CLUBHOUSE, whereas Iran hangs out there all the time (moreso even than Russia) and thus whenever Moscow and Washington are at odds Tehran can be expected to "take sides" in a way that Israel won't. But in that sense, I think "Iran is Russia's ally" says more about Iran's relationship with the US than it does their relationship with Moscow.

Absolutely - it drastically raised oil prices and created reasons to ease sanctions on Russian oil. I would not recommend being Russia's ally.

It's rare that I agree with you but you're 100% right about this. It's a travesty that groups who are subject to wrongs perpetrated by the very governments that are supposed to protect them are often left with no recourse and no compensation. While I can certainly sympathize with a small group of conservatives who were unfairly targeted by the IRS under the Obama administration, that is unfortunately nothing compared with the millions of Black Americans who are still suffering as the result of official government policy. First, after being brought here against their will to perform manual labor, slavery was enshrined within the US Constitution for the first 80 or so years of our nation's existence. Following abolition, things didn't get much better, as they were routinely discriminated against, often as a matter of official government policy, and routinely denied the very rights the Reconstruction Amendments sought to recognize. Even in areas where discrimination was not enshrined into law, they were still almost universally denied the opportunity to work in good jobs, live where they wanted to, and otherwise be treated like any other member of society. The results of these centuries of discrimination have been nothing short of catastrophic for Black Americans; even as we enacted legislation to address these wrongs in the 1960s, Blacks still lag behind others in almost every metric.

Given these circumstances, one would think that providing some sort of reparation for the harms the government has inflicted upon blacks would be a no-brainer in these more enlightened times, but that has unfortunately not been the case. Fully half of the country seeks to blame Blacks themselves for their own plight, arguing that if they only were willing to work a little harder things would magically improve for them. Some even wave their hands and explain the situation through the simple intellectual and moral inferiority of Blacks, echoing the slave masters of 200 years ago. Even on the left, the more wishy-washy white people voice concerns about what reparations would look like, who would qualify for them, and a host of other practical concerns that would threaten to sink any program from the beginning. Righting these wrongs has become all but politically impossible.

Luckily, though, Donald J. Trump has unlocked the cheat code to get around an ineffective, even hostile Congress. All that is needed in the next Democratic administration is for a civil rights group to file a class action suit against the US government. No legitimate claim? No problem! This will never get close to an actual courtroom, as president AOC will be more than happy to offer a generous settlement package before the first motion is filed. No debate, no working out the messy details, just pick a strategy and go for it. Because when you look at all that's happened, $1.619 trillion is getting off easy.

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Fully half of the country seeks to blame Blacks themselves for their own plight

Probably because the Asians don't have the same problems, despite Chinese Exclusion Acts and Japanese Internment.

If government intervention were sufficient to explain the difference, we'd see it there, too.

But we don't, and that requires explanation.

You know all this, of course, so I'm not sure why you're playing dumb here.

Eric Holder already did this. The government sued companies over disparate impact then made them settle by paying into a DOJ slush fund they used to impose DEI rules across the private sector. For that reason your sarcasm falls flat: this post-Trump hypothetical you want to imagine is literally already the status quo. That horse left the barn ten years ago.

Except that's the complete opposite of what happened here. The government did not sue Trump.

I think I can imagine a hypothetical where the government used a thin pretext to use the power of the law against Trump

Insane compromise- every black American gets a one time payment of $1,000,000. Fiscal constraint is fake anyways. In exchange, we get a civil rights act for conservatives, decades of official favoritism, entire government departments dedicated to protecting conservatives from blue state governments, a school curriculum about the plight of conservatives, etc.

After sixty years we can swap around who's in what seat again.

To be clear, I'm not actually in favor of reparations. But why compromise when the power of the bullshit lawsuit is at your disposal?

Because Our Democracy is suffering from the lack of representation of schizophrenia. It all went downhill when Lyndon LaRouche retired from politics, I tell you.

Eh, not a great comparison.

Trump is a case of a specific wrong against specific people perpetrated by specific agencies. Its then a general payout from the government to the conservative movement in general.

Black slavery was also all of those levels of specificity. But with enough time removed it is instead all moved to generalities. Its black people in general that were wronged, its white people in general that carried it out, and its supposed to be paid for by all americans in general.

The areas where I say "general" are the problem.

For IRS targeting: I would have liked to see specific people in the IRS or the Obama administration sent to jail for the IRS tax targeting. I'd like to see unconstitutional orders treated the same way the military treats illegal orders. "I was ordered to break the constitution so its not my fault" should be an admission of guilt not a defense against prosecution. Bribing off the republicans seems like something that politicians on both sides are happy to take as a "compromise" rather than handing out punitive sentences and discouraging similar things in the future.

For slavery I'll give you a very specific example. I'll remove as many generalities as I can.

My ancestors owned slaves. We are close to a 100% certain that we know some of the descendants of those slaves (slaves tended to take on the last names of their former masters when they were freed). Lets say we can identify approximately 100 descendants of both the slave owner, and 100 descendants of the slaves. Its been about 5 generations. Assume no intermarriage so everyone is generally tracing only 1/32ndth of their ancestry to this generation.

None of the wealth acquired from the slave owning is still around. There is one house that was the former plantation house, but it was lost in bankruptcy and then re-bought. Nearly all other wealth of the slave owning family was also lost in that bankruptcy (took place in the 1880s).

How much do I a descendant of the slave owner owe to a descendant of the slave?

I believe you are making an accelerationists argument. The issue is the right believes this is only the second move in the process. Tat was already played the last decade in their view. So playing tit is now necessary. If your going to threaten acceleration for a perceived past wrong then you still need to punish in the second round.

These things are all fairly bad but before you go to a new equilibrium you needed to follow thru with your vengeance.

I am very much not an accelerationist. I have a family, a home, and a stable life. If there is such a thing as a "freezist" that is what I am.

Norms violations in politics are handled are handled in one of two ways. One way is that you punish the violators. The other way is that you imitate the violators. The first one protects the norm, the second one fully destroys it.

If you want norms to remain you have to punish people who violate them. This is an anti-accelerationist stance.

Actually meant to reply above you. But I do think some of the let Trump do these things come from accelerationists type views.

If your going to threaten acceleration for a perceived past wrong then you still need to punish in the second round.

Even that's not a defense here! It's not Obama and Biden paying for the fund, it's regular American taxpayers who lose when you funnel government funding to yourself. Unless the right considers their enemies to be regular everyday taxpaying American citizens (which tbf might increasingly be becoming the case now), the idea that this is the vengeance to be had makes no sense.

I think at this point most Americans just think government money is fake. And the commons have been shat on so might as well get some for your side. Along with long-term benefits for your side of building patronage networks.

I understand what you're saying but that's all besides the point. Whether it's a one to one comparison or not, a bullshit lawsuit is a bullshit lawsuit,.and unless the courts undo this, you're opening up the possibility that anyone can use a bullshit lawsuit to fund whatever pet projects you can't get congressional appropriation for.

I followed your topic down the rabbit hole. You brought up the slavery comparison, not me. If its besides the point, then you agree with what I first said about it being a bad comparison.

opening up the possibility that anyone can use a bullshit lawsuit to fund whatever pet projects you can't get congressional appropriation for.

As others have pointed out, this is not opening that possibility. The ability to influence policy and set preferences via lawsuits has existed for at least two decades. Easy one to find:

The outcome of Massachusetts v. EPA in 2007 was that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases qualify as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act, allowing the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate their emissions. This landmark decision affirmed the responsibility of the EPA to address climate pollution and protect public health.

Via an act of supreme court the EPA was granted sweeping jurisdiction over all greenhouse gas emissions. Which is any gas burning engine.

I'm sorry to have to put it this way but I think you're missing my point. They differ in many ways, yes, but none of which are important. The only principle that matters here is that the attorney general has the authority to appropriate arbitrarily large amounts of money provided they are done under the guise of a settlement, regardless of whether there is a conflict of of interest. None of the differences you point out are limiting factors in any legal sense, and part of the reason I selected the example I did was to make it clear how wide-ranging the implications of this are. You shouldn't have to think too hard to find examples of how this process can be abused for ends you vehemently disagree with even if you insist on a more apt comparison. I can think of a few myself right off the bat, but I'm not going to play a game where some irrelevant difference is nitpicked as though disproving the example shoots down my entire argument and means that this maneuver can only be used for pro-MAGA aims. As I said, the consequences are wide-ranging.

I don't know what to tell you, this has been happening for at least a decade.

Volkswagen "Diesel gate" settlement. The bank of America and Citi group settlement.

It's common enough that in 2017 Trump 1 banned the practice of having government settlements give money to third party NGOs that were not victims or parties of the original case.

I don't have to imagine it being abused for causes I don't like (I don't even like this cause.) Because it has already been abused repeatedly.

I just get frustrated when I see some story that is basically "Democrats outraged that trump is flagrantly violating a norm that they have been quietly violating for a decade".

It's not that I'm happy with Trump violating the norm, I just see it as already dead.

This is about the fiftieth time I've seen this brought up in this thread alone and my head is about to explode because people evidently don't understand the difference between a plaintiff and a defendant in litigation. These aren't just arbitrary labels we give the parties, but important distinctions. They indicate who initiated the litigation and delineate various burdens and obligations. The plaintiff is the person who initiates the suit, alleging that they have been wronged by the defendant. The plaintiff has the obligation of producing evidence to support their claim and to meet the burden that the law requires. If the case involves money damages, a jury decides if the defendant is liable and if so, how much he owes. But juries can be unpredictable, and in most cases, the parties involved have a good idea of what the case is worth, so usually they'll agree to settle the case before it gets that far.

In the cases you're referring to, the government was the plaintiff. They thought certain companies had broken the law, and sued them to collect money damages. the government did not control these companies, and the only way they could get them to pay anything is if they either got a judgment against them or the threat of a judgment induced them to settle. In these cases, the companies had the option of either settling or letting a jury decide how much they would pay, and they decided that they were better off settling. In the Trump case, the government was the defendant. Full disclosure: I am an attorney who represents defendants in civil suits. We almost always settle these suits before trial. I can confidently say that, at no time in my firm's history have we ever settled a case for several thousand times the previous highest settlement for the same cause of action, let alone without seeing any of the evidence.

Another important thing is that, in the cases you're referring to, no one in the Justice Department who was involved in the litigation was also working for the companies who were sued in a position where they could sign off on the settlement. When that happens it's called a conflict of interest. If, for instance, the attorney handling the Volkswagen case was also on the board of directors for Volkswagen, that would be very bad. You see, government lawyers work for the American people, and as much as we may disagree with the current administration's priorities, most of us agree that that it would be very bad if he let Volkswagen off easy because he didn't want it to affect the stock price too much. On the other hand, he also has a duty to Volkswagen shareholders, who wouldn't want him to make a bad deal so that he can curry favor with his politician bosses. For this reason, governments and companies have policies in place that discuss what to do if one of these conflicts exists. Generally speaking, you want to be as up-front about a conflict as you can, and there are very strict ethical guidelines that must be followed.

For example, I used to represent a company that my dad worked for. That's not a conflict in itself, but if my dad sued the company, I wouldn't be allowed to defend them, because I might not be fair. In a similar vein, even though I don't represent the company anymore, I can't represent someone who is suing them for certain things, because I was entrusted with certain knowledge of their legal strategy that wouldn't be fair for the plaintiff to have. If I represent the company in my dad's suit, and we settled, and the company were to find out about it, that would be grounds for them to vacate the settlement agreement. I would also get sued for malpractice and find myself in front of an ethics panel, but that's another story. Luckily, as far as I know, nobody who was involved in the cases you refer to had a conflict of interest. We can thus assume that these settlements were made at arm's length, which means that both sides were negotiating in good faith and not trying to sandbag their cases.

In the Trump IRS case, Trump was the plaintiff, meaning that he was trying to get as much money as possible. He was also the defendant, in the sense that he was the immediate supervisor of the person authorized to spend the defendant's money. But that money wasn't his to spend however he wanted; he owed a duty to the people to spend it in accordance with the law and not simply take it for himself. When politicians take public money for themselves, that's called corruption. We usually don't have to worry about corruption in these cases because most of the attorneys who work for the government have traditionally taken their jobs very seriously and tried to make sure that the money was only spent if absolutely necessary. When Todd Blanche announced a deal where Trump would be paid approximately 500 times the largest tax disclosure settlement in IRS history despite not seeing any evidence that it was warranted, that's called the appearance of impropriety. When Obama, or Eric Holder, or whoever, wanted to make their deals, they had to persuade their adversaries that they would lose in court and were better off agreeing to a deal. They didn't have the luxury of simply instructing the CEO of Volkswagen or whoever to make the payments. The fact that Trump did have that kind of power is why this case is more concerning than anything Obama did.

I apologize for the condescending tone, but I get frustrated when I see an understanding of civil procedure below that of the average People's Court viewer and an understanding of ethics that would get them fired from any normal job.

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There's no difference between the government suing a private company (which does not want to pay billions of dollars in restitution, to NGOs or anyone else) and the government suing itself?

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The difference is that this power was effectively created by SCOTUS decision, not a "settlement" between two complying parties. If you want to complain that the executive has continued to accrue power through expanding agency scope and congressional inaction... you'd be right but that's not related to the issue of a colluding settlement.

I don't feel there is a significant or meaningful difference between pretending to be adversarial and just dropping the pretending.

In fact, we now have a richly-established norm of NGOs and activists suing the federal government and so that their political allies who run the government can settle. Welcome to the world you made.

If I recall, that used to be a major issue with shipbuilding. Might still be, even.

The "$1776 million" is, astonishingly, missing from most headlines, which is almost as insane to me.

That Trump incorporated a meme into the settlement is not newsworthy. I am, however, offended by the innumerate journalists who round down to $1.7 billion.

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