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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.
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.
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"
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.
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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