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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   3971 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 removal at-will by the President.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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