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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"
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).
I think there is a good case to be made that a fig leaf is still nudity. If I see the bare ass of someone, I will not say hm, they might be nude, but they might also be not nude because they have covered their genitals. Phrases like full frontal nudity exist to describe the notable absence of any fig leafs.
Corruption also exists on a spectrum. A company bankrolling a congressional candidate will generally not be stupid enough to make an agreement in writing where the candidate pledges to vote in their interest. No, they are merely supporting democracy and exercising their freedom of speech rights, which seem pretty unlimited for corporate citizens as of Citizens United. When the congressman later listens carefully to the company's representative making their case, that is merely because the company is a big employer in his state, not because they are a donor, you see. It will be very hard to prove the opposite.
Other cases are more blatant. Foreign powers gifting Trump airplanes. Fraudsters getting presidential pardons in exchange for investing in his memecoins.
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