Any pocket will do
Yet more outrageous monetizing of everything by the monster:
Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him, according to people familiar with the matter, who added that any settlement might ultimately be approved by senior department officials who defended him or those in his orbit.
The situation has no parallel in American history, as Mr. Trump, a presidential candidate, was pursued by federal law enforcement and eventually won the election, taking over the very government that must now review his claims. It is also the starkest example yet of potential ethical conflicts created by installing the president’s former lawyers atop the Justice Department.
Just a tad.
Mr. Trump submitted complaints through an administrative claim process that often is the precursor to lawsuits. The first claim, lodged in late 2023, seeks damages for a number of purported violations of his rights, including the F.B.I. and special counsel investigation into Russian election tampering and possible connections to the 2016 Trump campaign, according to people familiar with the matter. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the claim has not been made public.
The second complaint, filed in the summer of 2024, accuses the F.B.I. of violating Mr. Trump’s privacy by searching Mar-a-Lago, his club and residence in Florida, in 2022 for classified documents. It also accuses the Justice Department of malicious prosecution in charging him with mishandling sensitive records after he left office.
All bullshit, but since he now tells the Justice Department what to do (in a way that previous presidents didn’t have the gall to do) it doesn’t matter that it’s bullshit. The rules are that Trump wins and everyone else loses.
“What a travesty,” said Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University. “The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.”
He added: “And then to have people in the Justice Department decide whether his claim should be successful or not, and these are the people who serve him deciding whether he wins or loses. It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.”
So is everything else.
It’s too bad the Justice Department didn’t have the guts to go ahead and prosecute him for Jan. 6 when they had the chance. Turns out there is such a thing as being too careful.
They had four years and they threw them away.
The Democratic Party’s biggest mistake was not prosecuting GW Bush for war crimes. That set the precedent.
When Donald Trump had the crowd chanting “lock her up” at his rallies, Hillary Clinton cemented this by saying that was what they did in developing states. It was the wrong response, expressing a fatal flaw in the party as a whole.
The Democratic Party’s central flaw is its absolute fear of alienating conservatives, this terror that if they hold Republicans to account for crimes it will tear the country apart, and the idea that it is a virtue not to pursue such cases. It became political impunity as policy.
Which means when you got a serial criminal like Donald Trump, it was too little too late. The culture had seeped in, and is now part of actual law due to the supremely bought Supreme Court.
This overbearing centrism where we see the villains of past administrations on stage with Democratic candidates is just dirty dealing.
There has to be a culture shift away from this “reach across the aisle” concept of “civilized” politics. There are more important things than a cancerous bipartisanship. Any deal reached with the Republicans isn’t worth the breath it was spoken in, they are inherently dishonourable.
It isn’t just Donald Trump; to MAGA and Republicans in general committing fraud is being “smart”. White collar criminality is part of the political and business culture of the right. Heck, look at the mega-churches and the prosperity gospel, it is their religion.
Once Trump is out of office, assuming the US survives as an entity, there needs to be a culture shift. There need to be prosecutions, and there need to be amendments to the constitution to allow for dismissing Supreme Court justices for corruption. This idea that accountability is what dictators do, has brought the US close enough to dictatorship where it may well already be one.
The Democratic Party’s willingness to hold itself to account is great, but it is only half the equation. It needs to hold the Republicans to account too – and if the Republicans want to whine they can do it from a jail cell.
I agree with Bruce. This rampant, thieving corruption is the logical conclusion (jeebus, I hope it’s the conclusion) of a trend from Reagan through GWB. In the October Surprise, Reagan paid Iran to keep American hostages to secure his election over Carter; he never faced any charges for that treason. GWB faked reasons to make war on Iraq, using the September 11 attacks as an excuse. As we said at the time, “It’s a good thing he wasn’t President when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor; he might have invaded Brazil.” Clearly war crimes were initiated by W, but nothing happened.
Failure by the Democrats to do anything significant in response to Republican corruption and mendacity opened the path for Trump, the most corrupt and mendacious man to ever be President. He only wanted to be President out of spite and greed, anger that people were making fun of him and the knowledge he could use his position to enrich himself without anybody stopping him. Trump doesn’t care too much about foreign policy – he has no idea where other countries are – but he is full on Latin American Dictator in his drive to use corruption to enrich himself personally.
This is what we get. And America can never heal and go back to integrity and democracy unless the perpetrators of this debacle are prosecuted. Which, honestly, I find unlikely given the Democrats would rather run around screaming about identity politics and genner idenninny and Israel. Simple good government, institutional integrity, and prosperity for all are very boring compared with the freedom of furries to teach about yiffing in elementary school. The upshot is that we are left with a permanently shittier country, which will stumble from corruption to corruption until it collapses.
This is the outgrowth of ‘be nice’ and also the endless media drumbeat about how we all want the best for the country, we just disagree on what that is. The failure to report accurately on what was happening, and refusing to tell the truth about presidential lies, preferring instead to act as though it was just a different opinion of the data. The media has become too close to the establishment, and has a vested interest in not telling the truth because their job depends on lying; this is a perversion of the idea of free media.
It is also the outgrowth of a culture that values entertainment as the value of politics. “Boring” is death to television and internet sites, and facts are boring (to some people, not to me, and I suspect not to most of the people on this site). Trump means ratings; ratings means profits; profits means promotions and raises for journalists. Everyone wins, except reality and the country.
The gender issue didn’t help, either, since the Democrats were obviously on the side of non-factual in that controversy. They are as willing to suspend reality when it suits them, which makes it more difficult to call out the Republicans for their assorted fantasies. The Republicans have no such scruples. They will call out the Democrats for every transgression or misstatement of fact, even though most of these they have to make up. The gender issue gave them a valuable gift: the ability to tell the truth about Democrat fantasies.
The voters are also to blame. They demand entertainment and instant gratification. A candidate who is policy oriented bores them. A candidate who is knowledgeable and informed bores them, and angers them by being ‘elite’. The media happily jumps on that bandwagon, labeling anyone who talks about the boring, but most important, parts ‘condescending’ ‘east-coast elite’ ‘out of touch’ and ‘wonky’. I have been given all sorts of reasons for why people vote the way they do….one person I know voted for Mitt Romney because he had good hair. Another didn’t want to vote for Hillary Clinton because she was ambitious.
Our system is broken. We broke it – all of us working together. Trump came along and took a sledge hammer to the shards, but it was already in so many pieces that it was like Humpty Dumpty – couldn’t be put back together again. I think there are several trends that led inevitably to this. One is the nearly unchecked worship of capitalism, so sacred that regulations are seen as obscenities, even to a lot of the people who are helped by the regulations. It’s difficult to get even the Democrats to sing the praises of regulation. Another is the cult of celebrity. Also, the idea that ‘feelings’ are more important than facts. The cult of the individual doesn’t help, either. I believe in a certain level of individualism, in that we are all relatively free to explore our interests within the bounds of society. Too many people have taken that to an extreme, where any attempt to regulate your behavior through laws or social customs is seen as bad, as mindless conformity, or worse. And, of course, there is the way we teach history, politics, and economics. There is also the tendency of the Democrats to throw some of their base under the bus to avoid looking like they are practicing ‘identity politics’ – usually women, Native Americans, and people of color. There is, of course, one section of their base where they are ecstatic to practice ‘identity politics’ – the one identity that is actively delusional about identity.
Of course, a lot of the problem comes from the general mantra of ‘be nice’, which Republicans rarely follow and Democrats usually do. When a Democrat strays from the ‘be nice’ mode, they pay heavily. When a Republican does, they are rewarded. Reagan and the Bushes followed ‘be nice’ to some extent; they allowed others to do the dirty work and talk smack about their opponents (Karl Rove, for instance).