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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.
This might actually be true about MAGA.
Now imagine how insufferable the opposing party’s candidate and campaign would have to be for nearly 80 million people to overlook the flaws of a corrupt, narcissistic, petty billionaire.
Yeschad.jpg. Trump is, at the level of personal character, one of the worst people to hold high public office - anywhere in the democratic world - in my lifetime. (I'm not considering his political views here - would you rather buy a used car from Donald Trump or Nigel Farage, or let your daughter work in their office?). The MAGA GOP who nominated him are bad people who should feel bad. The Democrats who failed to beat him are culpably incompetent and should also feel bad. Within the Democratic Party, I would say that the fixers who fixed the 2016 primary for Clinton and the people who concealed Biden's cognitive decline during the 2024 primary rise to the level of bad people.
The MAGA GOP who nominated Trump against Kamala Harris and the anti-white, anti-male coalition should feel bad? I sort of feel bad. I wish he wasn't such a reckless sociopath. I just don't feel as bad as I would if Kamala had won.
I think your comment nicely captures the moral asymmetry that occurs in anti-Trumpers when they start blaming people for supporting him. It happens constantly. The GOP are labeled as both wrong and bad, whereas Democrats were just wrong. Good people, but wrong. Democrats have their goodness to fall back on.
If you look outside the Western bubble, the social views of even moderate Republicans are quite liberal compared to average citizens of most non-Western nations. In other words, if Trump supporting Republicans are bad people because they fall short of elite Western progressive norms, something like 85% of the globe falls into the bad person category. That's right. The vast majority of world's people are bad, except for the Western liberal-progressive.
People have a deeply flawed choice to make between a couple bad options. One is Trump/Nigel Farage and the other is a group whose driving force is fundamentally at odds with the ideals that make a country a country, and whose end goals align more with creating economic zones with no shared memories, or obligations, or culture, or concern for what it means to be a citizen.
We have sociopaths that are (at least incidentally) willing to do what is necessary to make a society empathic, and we have empaths that are (at least incidentally) willing to do what is necessary to a make a society sociopathic. The gamble is that a society can survive a bad man more easily than it can survive a ruling class that no longer believes the society is real.
You are entitled to accuse me of motivated reasoning here, but the point I am making is symmetric. I have not claimed that MAGA are bad people because they have right-populist political views, I claimed they were bad people because they repealed the character floor for political leadership, arguably in 2016 and uncomplicatedly in 2024. My continued presence on the Motte should be a signal of good faith - if I believed that right-populists were per se bad people, why would I still be here?
You can't do politics without meeting good people sincerely pursuing political goals you do not share, or good people with different political views to you because they don't understand the issues, or (very occasionally if you are smart enough to be a Motteposter) good people with different political views to you because you don't understand the issues. My social circle contains Brexit supporters in both the first two groups, for example. I have less experience meeting MAGA normies, but I have spent enough time in red states to know that most Republicans, and even most Trump voters, are not evil.
But "Men as dishonest as Donald Trump should not hold high political office" used to be one of the things 90% of citizens agreed on. (So was "Men as uncouth as Donald Trump should not hold high political office" but I care about that a lot less). It isn't obvious why the standard bearer for "Deport the illegals and reshore manufacturing" needs to be a reckless sociopath. Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot weren't. Nigel Farage isn't. (Admittedly Boris Johnson is one.) I know Richard Hanania has a theory for why populism always leads to kakistocracy, but I think it proves too much.
You say it's arguable they were bad after 2016, while others probably claim they were bad after 2020 or 2024. Much of the mainstream blue tribe had already decided that people who dissented from certain social issue orthodoxies were morally suspect, not just wrong. That mattered because once the “bad” label was attached from ordinary disagreement, millions of people understandably stopped believing the mainstream was judging them in good faith. The anti-Trump crowd had made their decision to leverage moral condemnation even before they became the anti-Trump crowd. Sure, more people have become convinced that Trump supporters are bad people, but the social issue purity tests had begun way before that. That "bad" label attached itself to of millions of people before Trump was even a candidate. Were they 2 bad after 2016, and 3 bad after 2024?
I have a mixed circle of friends too. Half of my closest friends are liberal to liberal-progressive. Most of them avoid discussing the subject entirely and I watch what I say.
It may not be obvious why the standard bearer for "Deport the illegals and reshore manufacturing" needs to be a reckless sociopath, but I think the explanation is pretty apparent. Our institutions, media, universities, and social media helped create a synthetic moral consensus about which views were acceptable and which weren't. That consensus made ordinary conservative politicians susceptible to the same purity tests. The only individuals left willing to cut against the consensus and say what others felt were individuals who were already ostracized, or who simply just didn't give a fuck, or who were naturally disagreeable. In came Trump (a disagreeable narcissist who didn't give a fuck about playing by the rules), and later Elon (an Aspergian who is nearly impervious to social pressure).
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The character floor for political leadership was repealled on February 12th 1999, and wasn't it "the right" that voted to repeal it, but rather the same affluent liberals now complaining about their opponent's "lack of character".
Nor do I believe that Trump is "a reckless sociopath" or at least not any more so than Clinton or Obama were, rather he is simply not beholden to the pretenses of affluent liberals. You are trying to criticize him for not being "a proper gentleman" when not being a proper gentleman is a core component of his appeal.
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