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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 removable at-will by the President.
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.
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.
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."
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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?
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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 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.
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.
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.
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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.
No clue what this is in reference to.
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.
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)
How many examples would you like?
$47k is as much income tax as has been withheld from my 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?
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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?
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.
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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.
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".
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"
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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.
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.
Trump used the memecoin to effectively sell pardons off to people.
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.
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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.
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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.
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