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Notes -
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:
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 removal at-will by the President.
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:
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."
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".
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