To be very honest, I suspect we wouldn't like each other. I don't trust you, and I don't agree with MANY of your takes. But it's time to get past the differences we can, and give credit where due.
So, Thank you for this! It is something worth passing along to other people; as a summary of our circumstances and of Trumps malignantly narcissistic destruction. This is indeed how civilizations fall, and he is an extremely effective wrecking ball.
What frustrates me so much is that, for the reasons you've outlined above, there are lots of good reasons to dislike Trump and think he's unfit for the office of President. He's greedy, he's corrupt, he's dishonest, he's unprincipled, he has no respect for the rule of law, he's a scam artist and so on.
And yet it feels like whenever the left-leaning media criticises him, they tend to lead off by talking about his latest "racist dog-whistle", conspiratorial nonsense about how all the letters in his latest tweet add up to 1488, or absurd fantasies that he has concrete plans to transform the USA into Gilead. "Trump is racist and sexist" always comes first, and if his corruption, dishonesty and authoritarian tendencies are mentioned at all, it's as a footnote.
"But you admit that we have to criticise Trump! What does it matter what form those criticisms take?" Because when you attack Trump using baseless criticisms that have no merit, it means people will ignore you when you make criticisms that actually do have merit. The Boy who Cried Wolf is a classic fable for a reason.
Totally agree. Liberals/progs are far too obsessed with Trump being "racist" (or sexist) when he is no more racist/sexist than your average Republican. This is because the libs/progs are so lazily accustomed to be able to sling the charge of racism or sexism and then watch the recipient squirm. Trump brushes it off easily.
We should always be talking about his actual crimes - of which there are many!
It is ridiculous to downplay Trump's racism by comparing him to an average Joe. He is the President of the United States! An average Republican does not have power.
His racism has allowed Groypers and fascistic tech oligarchs into government. His immigration policy is the catastrophic outcome of putting such a racist person into power.
There are consequences to Trump's racism and sexism. But of course, it's no big deal, because he's like someone who has less influence.
Wasting your time arguing about Trump's supposed "racism" means you are not talking about his crimes. This is a big part of how we got to where we are now - you know, with him being President again with 2 houses of Congress and SCOTUS behind him.
But maybe I'm wrong! Let's talk about White Privilege some more! I'm sure that will help us win in 2028!
Supposed? Strategy for Democrats is one question. Denying reality and consequences are another. I don't think Kamala lost because she talked about white privilege. Analysis seems about 10 years out of touch!
Kamala lost because (1) she had a vagina, (2) she didn't repudiate Biden's unpopular policies.
Denying reality? Trump isn't really a big racist at all. He's an Archie Bunker-type racist I suppose, but that's no more than most conservatives. If he were an actual full-on racist he'd be more like "skull size" types. He literally hangs out with rappers. He's literally about to pardon the Diddler.
What kind of fucking racist pardons a rich black guy accused of raping white teenaged girls?
You’re mischaracterising Trump and the Republican party by calling them racist. What they are is xenophobic and highly nationalistic, they will accept black people into their cause but that’s because they’re “our black people”, they don’t offer the same hand to immigrants from Africa for example. Hell some of them will even accept that slavery and the suffering of African Americans was integral into building America but that’s because they African AMERICANS, not AFRICANS.
There’s a nuanced difference there that has to be accounted for, the same applies to Hispanics. If people on the left never understand this, then they’ll continue to be befuddled by the fact that most ethnic minorities shifted TOWARDS Trump despite your accusation of the republicans being racist.
It’s really telling that the people who were told that they should be mad about Trump these last 3 elections, have only shifted towards him.
I think by "average Republican", Will meant "average Republican politician", not "average Republican voter". If that's not what he meant, it's certainly what I believe. I've yet to see any persuasive evidence that Trump is more racist than e.g. John McCain.
McCain once famously rebuked an audience member calling Obama a Muslim, Trump was one of the biggest figures for birtherism. McCain lead the 2005 immigration reform efforts and opposed ending DACA.
In fairness to the late McCain (who I voted for in 2008), if I had been tortured like he had by the Vietnamese, I could imagine having some harsh feelings toward them as well.
Obviously, I am not excusing racism. But context matters.
I feel like I should also add that I have no animus towards Vietnamese people, in fact I have known several Vietnamese Americans over the course of my life (including one close work friend) and found them to be kind and decent people.
So McCain's use of slurs makes him as racist as Donald Trump, the man who actively promoted the racist birther conspiracy, and whose administration is filled with racist Groypers and is currently carrying out mass deportations?
Can we list examples of this supposed liberal-media's fascination/obsession with levying charges of "racism". This sounds more like a caricature from 2016 than reality. Hopefully the basis for this isn't just viral videos of cringey college kids.
Here are several examples of mainstream figures and media outlets claiming that Trump is plotting genocide or ethnic cleansing and/or explicitly comparing him to Adolf Hitler, all taken from his first term.
I mean I can't 100% say that Trump won't lead America to committing genocide against some internal or external group. He may do this. I'm just saying that wiping out ________ group is not his primary motivation. It would be more like a bi-product of something else he is doing.
Racism is actually for losers and as Trump reminds us constantly, he is a winner, not a loser.
I call BS. As a certified Trump hater who consumes "left-media" daily there's no shot that if you cataloged all Trump coverage since 2015 that you'd end up with more coverage on "dogwhistles" or "racism" simply due to the simple fact that he's corrupt and lies more often than he does or say racist things. I'd like an actual media analysis before accepting OP's feelings here about how the "left" covers trump
I don't understand this comment. My complaint was that, as far as I can tell, left-leaning media expends far too much energy attacking Trump for being supposedly racist and sexist than for being dishonest and corrupt. You're saying there's no way this can be true, because Trump is dishonest and corrupt far more often than he is racist and sexist.
Well, yeah. I agree that he is dishonest and corrupt more often than he is racist or sexist - that's exactly what I was complaining about. If you think there's no way the left-leaning media could ever report on people in an inaccurate or misleading fashion, then frankly, I have a bridge to sell you. When people complain about media bias, that's exactly what we're referring to: that the media talks about people or events in a manner which is usually technically true, and yet misleading.
One day I'd like to a deep dive into this to demonstrate that my subjective recollections of how the media talked about Trump (especially during his first term) really reflect the underlying reality and aren't cherry-picked. As an experiment, I suggest you see how many search results you get for "trump Hitler", "trump genocide", "trump Nazi", "trump misogynist" and so on when compared to "trump corrupt", "trump lying" etc., when limiting the search range to 2016 and later. I strongly suspect the combined search results for the former search terms will be an order of magnitude higher than the latter.
You're the one who said that it's imbalanced. Can you do these searches and tell us what you find?
How about this. Memeorandum.com keeps archives of amalgamated MSM online reporting. Pick four dates over the last 8 years, and tell me the top headline
It suggests that people (not just MSM) are roughly as likely to talk about how racist, sexist, bigoted etc. Trump is as they are to talk about how corrupt and dishonest he is.
I would like to do a closer analysis looking at how the liberal/left-leaning media specifically talk about him, and the link you provided might be a good starting point.
I agree though it's not clear to me that it's a supply-side problem or a demand-side problem.
In my corner of the internet, there was a lot of furor over the DOGE baby-killers. Many people on the center-right were upset about a Bloomberg article that was mildly critical (eg, see https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1950285693676376328) but AFAICT it was very mild compared to how harmful their actions actually were. Ie it included interviews from his high school classmates about how he was mean or something, and almost entirely neglected to mention the hundreds of thousands of people he killed through illegal denying of medicine access! They interviewed random classmates and teachers of him over in Nebraska, rather than the parents of dead babies.
This is a good point! Basically the impression one gets is that not only Trump voters do not care about corruption, liberals don't care about that much about it either, they much rather like to pull rather baseless Hitler cards.
Practically no Trump supporter I talk to says “yes he is way way way more corrupt and dishonest than his opponents, and nothing liberals ever did justifies how bad my side behaves, but I support him because X.”
Actually, Ann Coulter said exactly that in Triggernometry a couple months ago. I was shocked. She said “this is the most corrupt administration ever and I don’t care because I like the policy agenda”. The moral bankruptcy was shocking. Even the Trump adjacent hosts were flummoxed. Don’t care about corruption? Corruption destroys economic prosperity. It’s the main reason many places around the world remain mired in poverty. To simply shrug it off is baffling, but I guess that is just who MAGA are
What if left wing media companies were to pick her up? Free Press sort of tried to do that in some ways (not sure now w the CBS merger but we’ll see). Lord knows CNN nor NBC would do it given how cowardly they are.
I didn’t mean it to invalidate him, I like Konstantin and am a regular listener. He acts in good faith and I respect his perspective. But it’s just a realistic description of where he is politically. I mean look at this recent tweet:
“it’s time for people with Trump derangement syndrome to admit they were wrong”
“it’s time for people with Trump derangement syndrome to admit they were wrong”
That's the kind of tweet that will not age well. Because Trump is so corrupt and lies so much, its nearly impossible to critique him on those terms and land a meaningful blow. But the soft underbelly are his failures, of which there are many. MAGA gets very very prickly when you point these out. Comically, the most common response is usually a demand for a participation trophy of sorts "well at least he's trying" - as if we should give him an "E" for effort.
You don’t think that is an apt description of Konstantin Kisin? He is part of the podcast crowd that is too honest and independent to be considered MAGA, nevertheless became sympathetic to Trump in 2024 for various reasons
No it isn’t. First of all, Trump doesn’t have fixed beliefs while someone more honest like KK does and can be placed on a spectrum. (I would place him at a classical liberal point, which doesn’t even exist in US politics). Second, i know very well calling someone ‘Trump adjacent’ is derogatory and meant to invalidate what someone believes as he’s so close to Trump (i.e. adjacent).
I didn’t mean it to invalidate him, I like Konstantin and am a regular listener. He acts in good faith and I respect his perspective. But it’s just a realistic description of where he is politically. I mean look at this recent tweet:
“it’s time for people with Trump derangement syndrome to admit they were wrong”
Not everyone to the right of Bernie is ‘Trump adjacent’.
That tweet, without further context for me, doesn’t seem inaccurate. There are things trump’s opponents have been wrong about and he’s been right about. Doesn’t seem controversial or trumpy to me.
It isn’t Trumpy, it’s Trump adjacent, which is what I’ve been saying all along. Good god. Trump adjacent doesn’t mean MAGA sycophant nutcase. It means sane person whose beliefs and political goals intersect with SOME of those of MAGA. It’s someone who can think independently but are sympathetic to Trump due to valid concerns with elites and Democratic establishment. Konstantin is a perfect example of this
Trump attempted to overthrow the US government in a coup d'etat, culminating in the insurrection of January 6, 2021. That happened over four years ago. Unless it turns out that he was mind controlled by a Yeerk the whole time, it will never be time for "TDS" people to admit they were wrong. If you believe otherwise, "Trump adjacent" is in fact a fair description of you.
Your shitlib arc is nearly complete.... But seriously, you're correct about two points here: that the scale of Trump's corruption is much bigger than that of his predecessors and that our media isn't set up to handle it. But concluding the media is thus pro-Trump doesn't ring true. In fact, it cheapens the real issue here, which is how the institutions of democracy and civil society grapple with someone as corrupt yet as popular as Trump.
Your comment to me when we met about the importance of demonstrating empathy for the loss of relative status for many on the MAGA side is really hitting home for me. I have MAGA friends and I have become more aware of the resentment than ever before. “Better a corrupt Trump than a smug Harvard grad who hates me!” is the animating force. On the other hand, there are legitimate grievances sometimes, e.g., one friend described how he was passed over for jobs due to DEI and I believe him. But it’s not just the right that is full of resentment. Rob Henderson argues that those on the left with unfulfilled expectations are warring against the moderate left. We’re in a bad way.
As a member of the moderate left I can certainly attest to the animus between us and the "dirtbag" populists. Then there are the cultural taskmasters, the obnoxiously woke whose influence many would argue has dissipated, despite how much time and effort many in the "heterodox" center-left to center-right still spend complaining about them. And of course, the "heterodox" crowd played a big role in marginalizing the threat of a second Trump term, so there's a lot of resentment in that direction as well.
As for the whole "loss of status" justification for MAGA, I have always been skeptical of this. Not because there isn't a degree of truth to it. But because in the first place, this has always been a feature of societies stratified by wealth (i.e. all of them). When has it not been the case that the poor and the working class assumed that the wealthy or the relatively affluent looked down upon them? And secondly, in many respects this has become a self-justifying rationale—I honestly didn't feel like I "looked down" on working class white people before they started supporting people like Trump.
I think that this really has more to do with cultural differences than issues of economic status. I seriously doubt there was ever a time when working class whites perceived themselves as having a great deal of status in the first place—aside from the superiority they may have perceived toward minorities whom *they* looked down upon. Similarly, I think Hollywood and mass media have long been much further along the path of civil rights than the average person, so there has long been something of a tension between the everyday Joe and the more cosmopolitan segments of society.
But because of modern communication and the Internet, people now come into contact more often with others who have very different social values, and those who are more conservative often feel like they're being judged. Also, one party has attempted to exploit this for years to gain support among a demographic who generally doesn't benefit from their economic policies.
The net result is that instead of the general trend of people feeling somewhat chastened and eventually inclined to be more accepting and open minded (to the extent that certain "conservative" social values can fairly be characterized as intolerance, prejudice, or bigotry), people are more apt to find solidarity with others of their mindset and maintain a more bullish and unapologetic mindset.
I think the whole DEI thing resonates for that reason—we've been hearing about the "angry white man" since the 1980s, since influential figures on the right began beating the drum. And while it is probably true that there have been times where minorities have been given jobs over more qualified individuals, I think that we've long since evolved beyond simple affirmative action quota systems and generally view diversity as a matter of expanding your recruiting pool rather than lowering standards to get the numbers you want.
Therefore, by default, I tend to *not* believe people who claim to have lost out on jobs in this manner because it's simply too convenient and self-serving of a narrative. And just look at how it's being applied by Trump and his supporters, generally assuming people are DEI hires simply *because* they're minorities.
Sorry this went on so long; I guess you just happened to touch on several items I have strong opinions on. 😅
Hypothesis: a faction of Trump supporters do so because they think "the system" is much, much, much more corrupt than it is... and Trump validates that suspicion.
"Everyone is like this," goes the thought, "but the media & 'deep state' only care when Trump does these things. They're in on the corruption too."
I can remember a 2016 justification for wanting Trump to win. He would be a “grenade” thrown at Washington, basically a punishment for both Democrats and Republicans who failed to take the concerns of the Trump base seriously.
I think the idea was that grenade Trump would eventually lead to something g better, despite his personally being awful. It would change future Democrats and Republicans for the better. They would want to make sure something like this didn’t happen again.
I guess we can say this didn’t work? Maybe the jury is still out.
This is the reason to be pro-Trump, the idea that he can be a force for positive change despite being personally horrible and corrupt. It seems unlikely to me that this will turn out to be true, however. I think we probably would have all been better off had Jeb Bush won.
I struggle to understand why people thought this. Like I am used to the far left believing civilization is easily built and communist utopias can just rise from the ashes if you just tear everything down. But how did so many right-wingers, who called themselves conservatives, also come to think that we should just start destroying everything and good things will just somehow emerge?
I think this post actually understates how much the media is pro-Trump. Trump is great at getting attention (earned media) and the media is happy to give him this attention, often at the expense of substance. See CBS CEO Les Moonves saying "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS".
I am not sure that supporting some form of social security makes me an economic collectivist. I am quite pro-market and I want to tax the winners to provide a social safety net and public goods because I don't want people to sour on the general effectiveness of markets. Proportionality always is going to matter to people - it isn't resentment but deep and logical human behavior. People are going to cry foul when a "free" system becomes winner take all and the only argument you can make is "your wealth went up by 1% so you should be happier even if my wealth went up by 20% and that is 20% of a much bigger starting number than your 1%". But what I don't want to do is eliminate the hierarchy of success and economic status, but just progressively tax so rich people stay rich and they can have their motivating and productive pissing contexts about who is richer the way they always have. That is the winning formula. At the top of the distribution, people care about positional, not absolute gains.
As RH is transitioning into becoming a liberal he has to hold on to a few hard core conservative ideas so he doesn't feel like he's losing his mind. This is what I went through as I went from conservative to liberal in the 2010's. Though I've bounced back to centrist since then.
I've voted Democrat since 1992 but mostly agree with RH's takes on economic matters. The issue is that the GOP has never once practiced what they preach on economic matters, and they bundle it with noxious culture war stuff. So I choose Democrats. I did not like Biden's choices on a lot of things, but Obama and Clinton were fine.
People especially underrate how important Clinton & Gore were to the growth of the Internet. Gore was working on that in the eighties, and Clinton did several changes to regulations that made commercialization much more viable.
I think both parties often mistake vibes signaling for empirical claims about policy. I am guilt of this myself when I find myself slipping into New Atheist style indignation about religious claims, which sound for the life of me to be empirical propositional claims when I know from epistemology of belief research evidence really in most cases aren't. There really is no constituency for state ownership of the means of production. Just like there is no constituency for like re-enslaving black people no matter how much based ritual nonsense we hear.
I've always been for Nordic-style social democracy, but I've come to a conclusion lately that this idea is just simply not palatable to the American people. We are just too culturally individualistic. Even Democrats I knew in the Biden years griped about the poor getting too many benefits.
So I've gone over to the idea of creating vast economic plenty for the people through the Abundance Agenda and Sustainable Capitalism.
If high status becomes impossible to reach, people will just give up. You need enough hope that some rando can actually climb to the top of the heap if you want people to keep buying in.
First, I don't think you help your case by minimizing the misdeeds of the Clintons and Bidens, which were much more substantial than you allow here.
That said, it is true that Trump's crypto scheme is nakedly corrupt, and not defensible.
But it also true that he lost hundreds of millions of dollars to lawfare, and that is important context. The NYS Democrats changed the law specifically to allow him to be drained of tens of million dollars just based on the say-so of a Trump hater making unfalsifiable allegations about 30 years ago. That should send a shiver down the spine of every man in America. You had Trish James running for office promising to prosecute him somehow, then cooking up a case so ridiculous she had to privately reassure the business community it was a special one-off political prosecution. The Bragg case was, if anything, even more preposterous.
Aside from all of the damage done to his finances, they were pretty clear that the objective was to make it impossible for him to run for president again by bogging him down in lawfare - which is a bigger assault on democracy than anything that happened on Jan 6.
I read the NY Times every day. The home page invariable is mostly populated with Orange Man Bad stories. They find a way to be negative about even his clear successes. The idea that they are "pro-Trump" is level of trolling that is beneath you, or should be.
Curious if you think trying (and failing, thanks supreme court!) to prosecute him for taking plans for attacking Iran and storing them in his bathroom was also lawfare.
What he did was certainly was not worse than running the State Department from a homebrew unsecure server to avoid public scrutiny, then deleting everything after an investigation commences. Totally unprosecuted, of course.
What he did was much worse. You’ve exaggerated nearly every part of the email scandal here.
“Running the State Department from an unsecure server” - most official operarions did run through secure government systems, and there wasn’t any evidence the private servers were compromised.
“Deleting everything after an investigation commences” - the deletions were of personal emails and were performed before the private servers story broke or the FBI investigation started (although after the Benghazi subpeona).
I’m being a bit pedantic, but I think the differences really matter. The evidence of malintent in the Trump case is vast, and in the Hillary case is circumstantial at best.
She ran Top Secret classified information through that server in violation of the law. We simply don't know what was intercepted and by whom. The deletions were of what *she claimed* were personal emails. That is essentially meaningless as a point of fact. And yes, the congressional subpeona is what I was referring to. By "malintent" you mean what - a desire to harm the United States? That was not necessary to establish gross negligence. And Trump was not accused of that either.
My main point is that in her case you’re saying “gross negligence”, of which she was never charged.
In the Trump case he was willfully retaining the documents and trying to obstruct attempts to retrieve them. He was charged, and if he wasn’t elected I’d say there’s a 70%+ chance that he would have been convicted.
She wasn't charged because Comey decided not to charge her. She certainly could have been. You could just as easily say she willfully retained the correspondence and obstructed efforts to retreive it It's true that she was not as openly defiant as he was, and made a pretense of cooperating. But that is the only notable difference.
Resist Libs have come to hate their own media for this very reason. NYT reporters make this exact complaint: to convey the scale of Trump’s sins, they wouldn’t have room for any other news.
But that’s simply making excuses for coverage they implicitly acknowledge is unfair. They need to drop their ethical standards to the same degree for Democrats, which essentially means that they will have no coverage of Democratic “scandals,” since none will come close to meeting Trump’s.
Biden was one of the cleanest pols in Washington, cleaner than Obama. But Republicans sincerely believe he was worse than Trump. Even in 2016, Trump was perceived as less corrupt than Clinton.
I’m often reminded of the question of how high a piece of paper would stack if you folded it in half 40 times (assume it’s wide and floppy enough to do this). Most people guess it would be about as thick as a phone book. In fact, it would reach from the Earth to the moon. Ten more folds and it reaches the sun.
Nah it's worse, we think logarithmically. It's the way all our sensory inputs work, all values past some cutoff get flattened into "a lot". It's why people can conceive of a million, but lack the appreciation of a billion being one thousand times more than that. This of course being the approximate ratio of Trump's corruption to everyone else's put together.
While I agree with virtually every word, I think we have a deeper existential problem beyond party or politics. The same people rightly criticizing Trump--I didn't vote for him--are the same who are now trying to lecture us on why it's okay to normalize political assassinations or defend 7th century barbarism as resistance. Everyone wants to have their falafel and eat it.
I think you misunderstand what a strawman argument actually is. In either case, I said I agree with every word (not enough for many leftists these days). I was making a basic observation about the erosion of ethical standards--mostly at the extremes and across the board. But now that you mention it, I may have also pointed out the equal erosion in the media. The BBC, NPR and other outlets are now serving as mouthpieces for Jihadists. And once respected scientific journals and magazines (e.g. Scientific American) are now publishing pseudoscience on transgenderism, gender affirmation, racial bias, and what is essentially modern Fanonism. As a liberal centrist for decades, I would love to see the left and the democratic party (I once belonged to) return to what Hamilton called "the prudent mean." But if they wish to further isolate themselves and look down at mainstream voters, people of color, etc, that's their choice.
The strawman is you thinking that 'agreeing with every word isn't enough for lefties' followed by calling the centrist press mouthpieces for jihadis. Both of those things are supported only by your personal assertion.
It’s too bad that every person on each half of the political spectrum is jointly and severally liable for any and all statements made by another person on that half of the spectrum. I myself have been extremely hypocritical, I once said something completely irreconcilable with a position held by Andrew L. Finnegan of Dubuque.
If you ratchet up corruption, the value of justified violence by the side you are attacking becomes more and more viable. The fixed value that “violence is never acceptable” is not true.
One Trump supporter I know points to Nancy Pelosi’s insider trading as his go-to example for equating Trump’s corruption with Democratic corruption. It’s a bit harder to refute, especially because I am also disgusted by her blatant insider trading.
On how Democrats lying is worse because Trump is expected to lie, which I think says so much about the current political environment, I am reminded of the evergreen 2016 essay “A Letter To Our American Cousins”:
> Politics is essentially the art of manipulating appearances, of subterfuge, stratagems, the game of alliance and betrayal, of the permanent coup d’état, of bad faith and domination — in short, it is the art of effective lies. What could be more logical than electing a patented liar as president? Those who regard this election as the triumph of a “post-truth politics” simply because the current winner doesn’t “respect the facts” only obscure the obvious, which is that if Donald Trump was elected it was precisely because he embodies the truth of politics, the truth of its lie. The reason why the left is so roundly detested is that it lies about the lie by attempting to do politics in good faith. Each time that the left attacks Trump’s obscenities it only further exposes the smarmy character of its own moralism. The polite restraint of which the left boasts keeps it at an equally polite distance from the truth, which only prolongs the reign of lies. This helps explain why some regard Trump as the end of the lie. All that’s missing is for them to read their Gracián, who once wrote of the man of the court that, “when his artifice is seen, his dissimulation reaches a higher pitch, and he tries to deceive by means of truth itself. He changes both his game and his weapons, in order to change his ruse. His artifice is to no longer have one.”
TLDR. But what Trump does is to demand that the scumbags that lawfared his ass, are scrutinized for any possible wrongdoing and crimes, in retaliation for the lawfare that he suffered. At the least, they will feel the emotional and financial pain of enduring the very shit they imposed upon him. Trump doesn't demand an outcome, and he couldn't get his desired outcome if he wanted. What he can get, and what he deserves to get, is to impose the same threats and financial costs to those who wronged him. That sounds fair to me.
This sounds like woke logic whereby white people have to suffer because black people suffered. This is the very logic. "I am the real victim" is hardly a retort to victimhood politics.
I agree with you: by this logic white people should be black people's slaves for a certain time period. Germans should also agree to report to concentration camps.
if we ever get out of this, we're gonna need a new rule as a society that you need a JD to claim something is lawfare. Harsh but fair. We can't keep having people with less legal knowledge than a moderately consistent Law&Order viewer throwing that stupid word around.
if i did not want to be "wronged" by being prosecuted for crimes that i committed i would simply not have committed crimes for which i could be prosecuted
2) Odd that Trump’s base wasn’t claiming this when he was being prosecuted for the Stormy Daniels thing.
3) The point is: US regulations are so numerous and comprehensive that practically everyone in the US who owns property, runs a business, has complicated tax returns, produces anything, etc., has innocently committed felonies. That gives them carte blanche to go after whomever they want.
do you think he was innocently committing a felony when he showed a journalist a document detailing war plans while saying "this was done by the military and given to me... this is secret information... as president, I could have declassified, but now I can’t"
Well, I don’t think Trump was innocent when he instigated the J6 attack on the Capitol—and that’s what he should have been charged with. And now his weaponization of the Justice Department against all his enemies has pushed the country into a quasi-autocracy. (We may not disagree by much here.)
To be very honest, I suspect we wouldn't like each other. I don't trust you, and I don't agree with MANY of your takes. But it's time to get past the differences we can, and give credit where due.
So, Thank you for this! It is something worth passing along to other people; as a summary of our circumstances and of Trumps malignantly narcissistic destruction. This is indeed how civilizations fall, and he is an extremely effective wrecking ball.
What frustrates me so much is that, for the reasons you've outlined above, there are lots of good reasons to dislike Trump and think he's unfit for the office of President. He's greedy, he's corrupt, he's dishonest, he's unprincipled, he has no respect for the rule of law, he's a scam artist and so on.
And yet it feels like whenever the left-leaning media criticises him, they tend to lead off by talking about his latest "racist dog-whistle", conspiratorial nonsense about how all the letters in his latest tweet add up to 1488, or absurd fantasies that he has concrete plans to transform the USA into Gilead. "Trump is racist and sexist" always comes first, and if his corruption, dishonesty and authoritarian tendencies are mentioned at all, it's as a footnote.
"But you admit that we have to criticise Trump! What does it matter what form those criticisms take?" Because when you attack Trump using baseless criticisms that have no merit, it means people will ignore you when you make criticisms that actually do have merit. The Boy who Cried Wolf is a classic fable for a reason.
Totally agree. Liberals/progs are far too obsessed with Trump being "racist" (or sexist) when he is no more racist/sexist than your average Republican. This is because the libs/progs are so lazily accustomed to be able to sling the charge of racism or sexism and then watch the recipient squirm. Trump brushes it off easily.
We should always be talking about his actual crimes - of which there are many!
It is ridiculous to downplay Trump's racism by comparing him to an average Joe. He is the President of the United States! An average Republican does not have power.
His racism has allowed Groypers and fascistic tech oligarchs into government. His immigration policy is the catastrophic outcome of putting such a racist person into power.
There are consequences to Trump's racism and sexism. But of course, it's no big deal, because he's like someone who has less influence.
Wasting your time arguing about Trump's supposed "racism" means you are not talking about his crimes. This is a big part of how we got to where we are now - you know, with him being President again with 2 houses of Congress and SCOTUS behind him.
But maybe I'm wrong! Let's talk about White Privilege some more! I'm sure that will help us win in 2028!
Supposed? Strategy for Democrats is one question. Denying reality and consequences are another. I don't think Kamala lost because she talked about white privilege. Analysis seems about 10 years out of touch!
Kamala lost because (1) she had a vagina, (2) she didn't repudiate Biden's unpopular policies.
Denying reality? Trump isn't really a big racist at all. He's an Archie Bunker-type racist I suppose, but that's no more than most conservatives. If he were an actual full-on racist he'd be more like "skull size" types. He literally hangs out with rappers. He's literally about to pardon the Diddler.
What kind of fucking racist pardons a rich black guy accused of raping white teenaged girls?
Glad we agree the white privilege point doesn't hold up.
"Trump isn't racist because he hangs out with rappers and might pardon Diddy"
Lol
You’re mischaracterising Trump and the Republican party by calling them racist. What they are is xenophobic and highly nationalistic, they will accept black people into their cause but that’s because they’re “our black people”, they don’t offer the same hand to immigrants from Africa for example. Hell some of them will even accept that slavery and the suffering of African Americans was integral into building America but that’s because they African AMERICANS, not AFRICANS.
There’s a nuanced difference there that has to be accounted for, the same applies to Hispanics. If people on the left never understand this, then they’ll continue to be befuddled by the fact that most ethnic minorities shifted TOWARDS Trump despite your accusation of the republicans being racist.
It’s really telling that the people who were told that they should be mad about Trump these last 3 elections, have only shifted towards him.
I think by "average Republican", Will meant "average Republican politician", not "average Republican voter". If that's not what he meant, it's certainly what I believe. I've yet to see any persuasive evidence that Trump is more racist than e.g. John McCain.
McCain once famously rebuked an audience member calling Obama a Muslim, Trump was one of the biggest figures for birtherism. McCain lead the 2005 immigration reform efforts and opposed ending DACA.
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/john-mccain-legacy-immigration/
The point is vapid anyhow. It is equivalent to downplaying Mao Zedong because he is just as left wing as any college communist.
McCain once said "I hate the gooks" and "I will hate them as long as I live", and continued using the slur "gook" as recently as 2000.
In fairness to the late McCain (who I voted for in 2008), if I had been tortured like he had by the Vietnamese, I could imagine having some harsh feelings toward them as well.
Obviously, I am not excusing racism. But context matters.
I feel like I should also add that I have no animus towards Vietnamese people, in fact I have known several Vietnamese Americans over the course of my life (including one close work friend) and found them to be kind and decent people.
So McCain's use of slurs makes him as racist as Donald Trump, the man who actively promoted the racist birther conspiracy, and whose administration is filled with racist Groypers and is currently carrying out mass deportations?
I meant both voters and politicians. Not sure there is much difference.
Can we list examples of this supposed liberal-media's fascination/obsession with levying charges of "racism". This sounds more like a caricature from 2016 than reality. Hopefully the basis for this isn't just viral videos of cringey college kids.
Here are several examples of mainstream figures and media outlets claiming that Trump is plotting genocide or ethnic cleansing and/or explicitly comparing him to Adolf Hitler, all taken from his first term.
• Washington Post: "Donald Trump just threatened to commit genocide" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/26/donald-trump-just-threatened-to-commit-genocide/
• Foreign Policy: "This Is How Every Genocide Begins" https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/11/30/this-is-how-every-genocide-begins-trump-retweets-muslim-hate/
• Foreign Policy: "U.N. Genocide Watchdog Suggests Trump, American Hardliners Fueling Hatred of Muslims" https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/17/u-n-genocide-watchdog-suggests-trump-other-american-hardliners-fueling-hatred-of-muslims/
• Sky News: "Donald Trump warned of 'genocide' over threat to 'obliterate' Iran" https://news.sky.com/story/donald-trump-warned-of-genocide-over-threat-to-obliterate-iran-11750079
• Channel 4: "Trump’s foreign policy may be seen as ‘open invitation to commit genocide’, warns Turkish Kurd" https://www.channel4.com/news/people-see-this-as-an-open-invitation-to-commit-genocide-and-ethnic-cleansing-dr-janroj-yilmaz-keles-on-usas-withdrawal-of-troops-from-syria
• Al-Jazeera: "The Muslim ban and the ethnic cleansing of America" https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2017/3/16/the-muslim-ban-and-the-ethnic-cleansing-of-america
• Truthout: "When Trump Calls People “Filth,” He’s Laying Groundwork for Genocide" https://truthout.org/articles/when-trump-calls-people-filth-hes-laying-groundwork-for-genocide/
• KCRW: "Is Trump Building a White Ethnostate?" https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/scheer-intelligence/is-trump-building-a-white-ethnostate
• The Guardian: "How white supremacy went mainstream in the US" https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/11/el-paso-shooting-white-supremacy-8chan-voter-suppression
• Vanity Fair: "How Trump Became an Accidental Totalitarian" https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/how-trump-became-an-accidental-totalitarian?
• Reuters: "Michael Moore compares Trump to Hitler in new documentary" https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/michael-moore-compares-trump-to-hitler-in-new-documentary-idUSKCN1LM318/
• Daily Commercial: "Yes, there are parallels between Trump and Hilter [sic]" https://eu.dailycommercial.com/story/news/local/2019/09/08/from-left-yes-there-are-parallels-between-trump-and-hilter/3457765007/
• Vox: "A leading Holocaust historian just seriously compared the US to Nazi Germany" https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/5/17940610/trump-hitler-history-historian
•MSNBC: "MSNBC’s Deutsch equates Trump voters to Nazi guards: ‘If you vote for Trump, you’re the bad guy’" https://thehill.com/homenews/media/393618-msnbcs-deutsch-equates-trump-voters-to-nazi-guards-if-you-vote-for-trump-youre/
• The Independent: "Donald Trump using Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' playbook, says world expert on Nazi leader" https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/adolf-hitler-donald-trump-mein-kampf-bluffed-way-to-power-nazi-leader-germany-fuhrer-us-president-election-ron-rosenbaum-a7568506.html
• Salon: "If Trump wins, say goodbye to your black friends: A modest proposal" https://www.salon.com/2016/11/08/if-trump-wins-say-goodbye-to-your-black-friends-a-modest-proposal/
• Time: "The Billionaire and the Bigots" https://time.com/4293564/the-billionaire-and-the-bigots/
You've already done the "that isn't happening" — I eagerly await the "and it's good that it is" pivot.
I mean I can't 100% say that Trump won't lead America to committing genocide against some internal or external group. He may do this. I'm just saying that wiping out ________ group is not his primary motivation. It would be more like a bi-product of something else he is doing.
Racism is actually for losers and as Trump reminds us constantly, he is a winner, not a loser.
I call BS. As a certified Trump hater who consumes "left-media" daily there's no shot that if you cataloged all Trump coverage since 2015 that you'd end up with more coverage on "dogwhistles" or "racism" simply due to the simple fact that he's corrupt and lies more often than he does or say racist things. I'd like an actual media analysis before accepting OP's feelings here about how the "left" covers trump
I don't understand this comment. My complaint was that, as far as I can tell, left-leaning media expends far too much energy attacking Trump for being supposedly racist and sexist than for being dishonest and corrupt. You're saying there's no way this can be true, because Trump is dishonest and corrupt far more often than he is racist and sexist.
Well, yeah. I agree that he is dishonest and corrupt more often than he is racist or sexist - that's exactly what I was complaining about. If you think there's no way the left-leaning media could ever report on people in an inaccurate or misleading fashion, then frankly, I have a bridge to sell you. When people complain about media bias, that's exactly what we're referring to: that the media talks about people or events in a manner which is usually technically true, and yet misleading.
One day I'd like to a deep dive into this to demonstrate that my subjective recollections of how the media talked about Trump (especially during his first term) really reflect the underlying reality and aren't cherry-picked. As an experiment, I suggest you see how many search results you get for "trump Hitler", "trump genocide", "trump Nazi", "trump misogynist" and so on when compared to "trump corrupt", "trump lying" etc., when limiting the search range to 2016 and later. I strongly suspect the combined search results for the former search terms will be an order of magnitude higher than the latter.
You're the one who said that it's imbalanced. Can you do these searches and tell us what you find?
How about this. Memeorandum.com keeps archives of amalgamated MSM online reporting. Pick four dates over the last 8 years, and tell me the top headline
I did a quick and dirty analysis based on Google search results during Trump’s first campaign and first term: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-the-media-is-pro-trump-yes-you/comment/169672161
It suggests that people (not just MSM) are roughly as likely to talk about how racist, sexist, bigoted etc. Trump is as they are to talk about how corrupt and dishonest he is.
I would like to do a closer analysis looking at how the liberal/left-leaning media specifically talk about him, and the link you provided might be a good starting point.
Also, kudos for putting in that work
I agree though it's not clear to me that it's a supply-side problem or a demand-side problem.
In my corner of the internet, there was a lot of furor over the DOGE baby-killers. Many people on the center-right were upset about a Bloomberg article that was mildly critical (eg, see https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1950285693676376328) but AFAICT it was very mild compared to how harmful their actions actually were. Ie it included interviews from his high school classmates about how he was mean or something, and almost entirely neglected to mention the hundreds of thousands of people he killed through illegal denying of medicine access! They interviewed random classmates and teachers of him over in Nebraska, rather than the parents of dead babies.
I tried to satirize them here (https://linch.substack.com/p/a-tribute-to-luke-farritor-american) but it's really hard to overemphasize how evil they are. In a just world, every picture in that article should've been a gravestone.
This is a good point! Basically the impression one gets is that not only Trump voters do not care about corruption, liberals don't care about that much about it either, they much rather like to pull rather baseless Hitler cards.
Is 1488 just an example of conspiracy number obsession or is 1488 a "real" thing?
14/88 is a well-known slogan/catchphrase/whatever among white supremacists and neo-Nazis. During Trump's first term, there were a few instances in which people claimed that innocuous uses of the number "88" were neo-Nazi dog-whistles (https://www.wbur.org/news/2018/08/02/worcester-nazi-tattoo-allegation), or that government press releases contained coded allusions to it (https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/homeland-security-statement-theory).
Fox also tried and failed to stop the MAGA King
Practically no Trump supporter I talk to says “yes he is way way way more corrupt and dishonest than his opponents, and nothing liberals ever did justifies how bad my side behaves, but I support him because X.”
Actually, Ann Coulter said exactly that in Triggernometry a couple months ago. I was shocked. She said “this is the most corrupt administration ever and I don’t care because I like the policy agenda”. The moral bankruptcy was shocking. Even the Trump adjacent hosts were flummoxed. Don’t care about corruption? Corruption destroys economic prosperity. It’s the main reason many places around the world remain mired in poverty. To simply shrug it off is baffling, but I guess that is just who MAGA are
“She said ‘this is the most corrupt administration ever and I don’t care because I like the policy agenda’”
Interesting. I guess that’s why you don’t hear much about Ann Coulter anymore.
What if left wing media companies were to pick her up? Free Press sort of tried to do that in some ways (not sure now w the CBS merger but we’ll see). Lord knows CNN nor NBC would do it given how cowardly they are.
What left wing media? Even MSNBC is fronted by an republican ex-congressman and W Bush's speechwriter.
I didn’t mean it to invalidate him, I like Konstantin and am a regular listener. He acts in good faith and I respect his perspective. But it’s just a realistic description of where he is politically. I mean look at this recent tweet:
“it’s time for people with Trump derangement syndrome to admit they were wrong”
Lol why now Because it’s the last chance to avoid being sent to a concentration camp in guatemala?
“it’s time for people with Trump derangement syndrome to admit they were wrong”
That's the kind of tweet that will not age well. Because Trump is so corrupt and lies so much, its nearly impossible to critique him on those terms and land a meaningful blow. But the soft underbelly are his failures, of which there are many. MAGA gets very very prickly when you point these out. Comically, the most common response is usually a demand for a participation trophy of sorts "well at least he's trying" - as if we should give him an "E" for effort.
“Trump adjacent hosts”… you were making a good point but just couldn’t help yourself.
You don’t think that is an apt description of Konstantin Kisin? He is part of the podcast crowd that is too honest and independent to be considered MAGA, nevertheless became sympathetic to Trump in 2024 for various reasons
No it isn’t. First of all, Trump doesn’t have fixed beliefs while someone more honest like KK does and can be placed on a spectrum. (I would place him at a classical liberal point, which doesn’t even exist in US politics). Second, i know very well calling someone ‘Trump adjacent’ is derogatory and meant to invalidate what someone believes as he’s so close to Trump (i.e. adjacent).
I didn’t mean it to invalidate him, I like Konstantin and am a regular listener. He acts in good faith and I respect his perspective. But it’s just a realistic description of where he is politically. I mean look at this recent tweet:
“it’s time for people with Trump derangement syndrome to admit they were wrong”
Not everyone to the right of Bernie is ‘Trump adjacent’.
That tweet, without further context for me, doesn’t seem inaccurate. There are things trump’s opponents have been wrong about and he’s been right about. Doesn’t seem controversial or trumpy to me.
It isn’t Trumpy, it’s Trump adjacent, which is what I’ve been saying all along. Good god. Trump adjacent doesn’t mean MAGA sycophant nutcase. It means sane person whose beliefs and political goals intersect with SOME of those of MAGA. It’s someone who can think independently but are sympathetic to Trump due to valid concerns with elites and Democratic establishment. Konstantin is a perfect example of this
Trump attempted to overthrow the US government in a coup d'etat, culminating in the insurrection of January 6, 2021. That happened over four years ago. Unless it turns out that he was mind controlled by a Yeerk the whole time, it will never be time for "TDS" people to admit they were wrong. If you believe otherwise, "Trump adjacent" is in fact a fair description of you.
Your shitlib arc is nearly complete.... But seriously, you're correct about two points here: that the scale of Trump's corruption is much bigger than that of his predecessors and that our media isn't set up to handle it. But concluding the media is thus pro-Trump doesn't ring true. In fact, it cheapens the real issue here, which is how the institutions of democracy and civil society grapple with someone as corrupt yet as popular as Trump.
Your comment to me when we met about the importance of demonstrating empathy for the loss of relative status for many on the MAGA side is really hitting home for me. I have MAGA friends and I have become more aware of the resentment than ever before. “Better a corrupt Trump than a smug Harvard grad who hates me!” is the animating force. On the other hand, there are legitimate grievances sometimes, e.g., one friend described how he was passed over for jobs due to DEI and I believe him. But it’s not just the right that is full of resentment. Rob Henderson argues that those on the left with unfulfilled expectations are warring against the moderate left. We’re in a bad way.
As a member of the moderate left I can certainly attest to the animus between us and the "dirtbag" populists. Then there are the cultural taskmasters, the obnoxiously woke whose influence many would argue has dissipated, despite how much time and effort many in the "heterodox" center-left to center-right still spend complaining about them. And of course, the "heterodox" crowd played a big role in marginalizing the threat of a second Trump term, so there's a lot of resentment in that direction as well.
As for the whole "loss of status" justification for MAGA, I have always been skeptical of this. Not because there isn't a degree of truth to it. But because in the first place, this has always been a feature of societies stratified by wealth (i.e. all of them). When has it not been the case that the poor and the working class assumed that the wealthy or the relatively affluent looked down upon them? And secondly, in many respects this has become a self-justifying rationale—I honestly didn't feel like I "looked down" on working class white people before they started supporting people like Trump.
I think that this really has more to do with cultural differences than issues of economic status. I seriously doubt there was ever a time when working class whites perceived themselves as having a great deal of status in the first place—aside from the superiority they may have perceived toward minorities whom *they* looked down upon. Similarly, I think Hollywood and mass media have long been much further along the path of civil rights than the average person, so there has long been something of a tension between the everyday Joe and the more cosmopolitan segments of society.
But because of modern communication and the Internet, people now come into contact more often with others who have very different social values, and those who are more conservative often feel like they're being judged. Also, one party has attempted to exploit this for years to gain support among a demographic who generally doesn't benefit from their economic policies.
The net result is that instead of the general trend of people feeling somewhat chastened and eventually inclined to be more accepting and open minded (to the extent that certain "conservative" social values can fairly be characterized as intolerance, prejudice, or bigotry), people are more apt to find solidarity with others of their mindset and maintain a more bullish and unapologetic mindset.
I think the whole DEI thing resonates for that reason—we've been hearing about the "angry white man" since the 1980s, since influential figures on the right began beating the drum. And while it is probably true that there have been times where minorities have been given jobs over more qualified individuals, I think that we've long since evolved beyond simple affirmative action quota systems and generally view diversity as a matter of expanding your recruiting pool rather than lowering standards to get the numbers you want.
Therefore, by default, I tend to *not* believe people who claim to have lost out on jobs in this manner because it's simply too convenient and self-serving of a narrative. And just look at how it's being applied by Trump and his supporters, generally assuming people are DEI hires simply *because* they're minorities.
Sorry this went on so long; I guess you just happened to touch on several items I have strong opinions on. 😅
Hypothesis: a faction of Trump supporters do so because they think "the system" is much, much, much more corrupt than it is... and Trump validates that suspicion.
"Everyone is like this," goes the thought, "but the media & 'deep state' only care when Trump does these things. They're in on the corruption too."
Yes, people across the political spectrum have this view. It’s why low trust conspiracy theorist people love Trump.
I can remember a 2016 justification for wanting Trump to win. He would be a “grenade” thrown at Washington, basically a punishment for both Democrats and Republicans who failed to take the concerns of the Trump base seriously.
I think the idea was that grenade Trump would eventually lead to something g better, despite his personally being awful. It would change future Democrats and Republicans for the better. They would want to make sure something like this didn’t happen again.
I guess we can say this didn’t work? Maybe the jury is still out.
This is the reason to be pro-Trump, the idea that he can be a force for positive change despite being personally horrible and corrupt. It seems unlikely to me that this will turn out to be true, however. I think we probably would have all been better off had Jeb Bush won.
I always thought one term with Trump would actually do some good whereas the second term would probably not be good.
I struggle to understand why people thought this. Like I am used to the far left believing civilization is easily built and communist utopias can just rise from the ashes if you just tear everything down. But how did so many right-wingers, who called themselves conservatives, also come to think that we should just start destroying everything and good things will just somehow emerge?
Please clap!
I think this post actually understates how much the media is pro-Trump. Trump is great at getting attention (earned media) and the media is happy to give him this attention, often at the expense of substance. See CBS CEO Les Moonves saying "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS".
I am not sure that supporting some form of social security makes me an economic collectivist. I am quite pro-market and I want to tax the winners to provide a social safety net and public goods because I don't want people to sour on the general effectiveness of markets. Proportionality always is going to matter to people - it isn't resentment but deep and logical human behavior. People are going to cry foul when a "free" system becomes winner take all and the only argument you can make is "your wealth went up by 1% so you should be happier even if my wealth went up by 20% and that is 20% of a much bigger starting number than your 1%". But what I don't want to do is eliminate the hierarchy of success and economic status, but just progressively tax so rich people stay rich and they can have their motivating and productive pissing contexts about who is richer the way they always have. That is the winning formula. At the top of the distribution, people care about positional, not absolute gains.
As RH is transitioning into becoming a liberal he has to hold on to a few hard core conservative ideas so he doesn't feel like he's losing his mind. This is what I went through as I went from conservative to liberal in the 2010's. Though I've bounced back to centrist since then.
I've voted Democrat since 1992 but mostly agree with RH's takes on economic matters. The issue is that the GOP has never once practiced what they preach on economic matters, and they bundle it with noxious culture war stuff. So I choose Democrats. I did not like Biden's choices on a lot of things, but Obama and Clinton were fine.
People especially underrate how important Clinton & Gore were to the growth of the Internet. Gore was working on that in the eighties, and Clinton did several changes to regulations that made commercialization much more viable.
I think both parties often mistake vibes signaling for empirical claims about policy. I am guilt of this myself when I find myself slipping into New Atheist style indignation about religious claims, which sound for the life of me to be empirical propositional claims when I know from epistemology of belief research evidence really in most cases aren't. There really is no constituency for state ownership of the means of production. Just like there is no constituency for like re-enslaving black people no matter how much based ritual nonsense we hear.
I've always been for Nordic-style social democracy, but I've come to a conclusion lately that this idea is just simply not palatable to the American people. We are just too culturally individualistic. Even Democrats I knew in the Biden years griped about the poor getting too many benefits.
So I've gone over to the idea of creating vast economic plenty for the people through the Abundance Agenda and Sustainable Capitalism.
If high status becomes impossible to reach, people will just give up. You need enough hope that some rando can actually climb to the top of the heap if you want people to keep buying in.
First, I don't think you help your case by minimizing the misdeeds of the Clintons and Bidens, which were much more substantial than you allow here.
That said, it is true that Trump's crypto scheme is nakedly corrupt, and not defensible.
But it also true that he lost hundreds of millions of dollars to lawfare, and that is important context. The NYS Democrats changed the law specifically to allow him to be drained of tens of million dollars just based on the say-so of a Trump hater making unfalsifiable allegations about 30 years ago. That should send a shiver down the spine of every man in America. You had Trish James running for office promising to prosecute him somehow, then cooking up a case so ridiculous she had to privately reassure the business community it was a special one-off political prosecution. The Bragg case was, if anything, even more preposterous.
Aside from all of the damage done to his finances, they were pretty clear that the objective was to make it impossible for him to run for president again by bogging him down in lawfare - which is a bigger assault on democracy than anything that happened on Jan 6.
I read the NY Times every day. The home page invariable is mostly populated with Orange Man Bad stories. They find a way to be negative about even his clear successes. The idea that they are "pro-Trump" is level of trolling that is beneath you, or should be.
What are your sources?
Sources for what?
Curious if you think trying (and failing, thanks supreme court!) to prosecute him for taking plans for attacking Iran and storing them in his bathroom was also lawfare.
What he did was certainly was not worse than running the State Department from a homebrew unsecure server to avoid public scrutiny, then deleting everything after an investigation commences. Totally unprosecuted, of course.
What he did was much worse. You’ve exaggerated nearly every part of the email scandal here.
“Running the State Department from an unsecure server” - most official operarions did run through secure government systems, and there wasn’t any evidence the private servers were compromised.
“Deleting everything after an investigation commences” - the deletions were of personal emails and were performed before the private servers story broke or the FBI investigation started (although after the Benghazi subpeona).
I’m being a bit pedantic, but I think the differences really matter. The evidence of malintent in the Trump case is vast, and in the Hillary case is circumstantial at best.
She ran Top Secret classified information through that server in violation of the law. We simply don't know what was intercepted and by whom. The deletions were of what *she claimed* were personal emails. That is essentially meaningless as a point of fact. And yes, the congressional subpeona is what I was referring to. By "malintent" you mean what - a desire to harm the United States? That was not necessary to establish gross negligence. And Trump was not accused of that either.
My main point is that in her case you’re saying “gross negligence”, of which she was never charged.
In the Trump case he was willfully retaining the documents and trying to obstruct attempts to retrieve them. He was charged, and if he wasn’t elected I’d say there’s a 70%+ chance that he would have been convicted.
She wasn't charged because Comey decided not to charge her. She certainly could have been. You could just as easily say she willfully retained the correspondence and obstructed efforts to retreive it It's true that she was not as openly defiant as he was, and made a pretense of cooperating. But that is the only notable difference.
What law did NY change? Statute of limitations or something?
The Adult Survivors Act (ASA), enacted in 2022, created a one-year abolition of any and all statute of limitations for civil sexual assault claims
And that, paired with Letitia James’ actions, was a bigger assault on democracy than January 6th?
The totality of the lawfare that I mentioned was, yes.
Hmm, I see. No
Resist Libs have come to hate their own media for this very reason. NYT reporters make this exact complaint: to convey the scale of Trump’s sins, they wouldn’t have room for any other news.
But that’s simply making excuses for coverage they implicitly acknowledge is unfair. They need to drop their ethical standards to the same degree for Democrats, which essentially means that they will have no coverage of Democratic “scandals,” since none will come close to meeting Trump’s.
Biden was one of the cleanest pols in Washington, cleaner than Obama. But Republicans sincerely believe he was worse than Trump. Even in 2016, Trump was perceived as less corrupt than Clinton.
I’m often reminded of the question of how high a piece of paper would stack if you folded it in half 40 times (assume it’s wide and floppy enough to do this). Most people guess it would be about as thick as a phone book. In fact, it would reach from the Earth to the moon. Ten more folds and it reaches the sun.
People think linearly. Trump is exponential.
Nah it's worse, we think logarithmically. It's the way all our sensory inputs work, all values past some cutoff get flattened into "a lot". It's why people can conceive of a million, but lack the appreciation of a billion being one thousand times more than that. This of course being the approximate ratio of Trump's corruption to everyone else's put together.
One death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic.
While I agree with virtually every word, I think we have a deeper existential problem beyond party or politics. The same people rightly criticizing Trump--I didn't vote for him--are the same who are now trying to lecture us on why it's okay to normalize political assassinations or defend 7th century barbarism as resistance. Everyone wants to have their falafel and eat it.
Massive strawman.
I think you misunderstand what a strawman argument actually is. In either case, I said I agree with every word (not enough for many leftists these days). I was making a basic observation about the erosion of ethical standards--mostly at the extremes and across the board. But now that you mention it, I may have also pointed out the equal erosion in the media. The BBC, NPR and other outlets are now serving as mouthpieces for Jihadists. And once respected scientific journals and magazines (e.g. Scientific American) are now publishing pseudoscience on transgenderism, gender affirmation, racial bias, and what is essentially modern Fanonism. As a liberal centrist for decades, I would love to see the left and the democratic party (I once belonged to) return to what Hamilton called "the prudent mean." But if they wish to further isolate themselves and look down at mainstream voters, people of color, etc, that's their choice.
The strawman is you thinking that 'agreeing with every word isn't enough for lefties' followed by calling the centrist press mouthpieces for jihadis. Both of those things are supported only by your personal assertion.
What fraction of science is pseudoscience of the leftist variety? %5? %1?
“Modern Fanonism” that’s brilliant.
to which people are you referring, specifically?
It’s too bad that every person on each half of the political spectrum is jointly and severally liable for any and all statements made by another person on that half of the spectrum. I myself have been extremely hypocritical, I once said something completely irreconcilable with a position held by Andrew L. Finnegan of Dubuque.
No, this only applies to Democrats. Republicans are not even liable for things they themselves personally say.
If you ratchet up corruption, the value of justified violence by the side you are attacking becomes more and more viable. The fixed value that “violence is never acceptable” is not true.
One Trump supporter I know points to Nancy Pelosi’s insider trading as his go-to example for equating Trump’s corruption with Democratic corruption. It’s a bit harder to refute, especially because I am also disgusted by her blatant insider trading.
On how Democrats lying is worse because Trump is expected to lie, which I think says so much about the current political environment, I am reminded of the evergreen 2016 essay “A Letter To Our American Cousins”:
> Politics is essentially the art of manipulating appearances, of subterfuge, stratagems, the game of alliance and betrayal, of the permanent coup d’état, of bad faith and domination — in short, it is the art of effective lies. What could be more logical than electing a patented liar as president? Those who regard this election as the triumph of a “post-truth politics” simply because the current winner doesn’t “respect the facts” only obscure the obvious, which is that if Donald Trump was elected it was precisely because he embodies the truth of politics, the truth of its lie. The reason why the left is so roundly detested is that it lies about the lie by attempting to do politics in good faith. Each time that the left attacks Trump’s obscenities it only further exposes the smarmy character of its own moralism. The polite restraint of which the left boasts keeps it at an equally polite distance from the truth, which only prolongs the reign of lies. This helps explain why some regard Trump as the end of the lie. All that’s missing is for them to read their Gracián, who once wrote of the man of the court that, “when his artifice is seen, his dissimulation reaches a higher pitch, and he tries to deceive by means of truth itself. He changes both his game and his weapons, in order to change his ruse. His artifice is to no longer have one.”
https://illwill.com/a-letter-to-our-american-cousins
Thank you for putting into words what I've been noticing these last 9 years or so.
I appreciate your brutal honesty and self awareness—thanks.
TLDR. But what Trump does is to demand that the scumbags that lawfared his ass, are scrutinized for any possible wrongdoing and crimes, in retaliation for the lawfare that he suffered. At the least, they will feel the emotional and financial pain of enduring the very shit they imposed upon him. Trump doesn't demand an outcome, and he couldn't get his desired outcome if he wanted. What he can get, and what he deserves to get, is to impose the same threats and financial costs to those who wronged him. That sounds fair to me.
This sounds like woke logic whereby white people have to suffer because black people suffered. This is the very logic. "I am the real victim" is hardly a retort to victimhood politics.
I agree with you: by this logic white people should be black people's slaves for a certain time period. Germans should also agree to report to concentration camps.
The strangeness of all these arguments is in part who the "they" are. The circle of who constitutes "they" gets bigger and bigger.
I've always been skeptical of the concept of "they."
That was the position of the 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery.
Comey, Brennan, Bolton, Krebs, etc, had nothing to do with charging Trump with crimes. He hates them for other reasons:
if we ever get out of this, we're gonna need a new rule as a society that you need a JD to claim something is lawfare. Harsh but fair. We can't keep having people with less legal knowledge than a moderately consistent Law&Order viewer throwing that stupid word around.
setting aside how ridiculous the premise is for a second, do tell me what lawfare Lisa Cook conducted please
if i did not want to be "wronged" by being prosecuted for crimes that i committed i would simply not have committed crimes for which i could be prosecuted
1) You’re paraphrasing Lavrentiy Beria.
2) Odd that Trump’s base wasn’t claiming this when he was being prosecuted for the Stormy Daniels thing.
3) The point is: US regulations are so numerous and comprehensive that practically everyone in the US who owns property, runs a business, has complicated tax returns, produces anything, etc., has innocently committed felonies. That gives them carte blanche to go after whomever they want.
do you think he was innocently committing a felony when he showed a journalist a document detailing war plans while saying "this was done by the military and given to me... this is secret information... as president, I could have declassified, but now I can’t"
Well, I don’t think Trump was innocent when he instigated the J6 attack on the Capitol—and that’s what he should have been charged with. And now his weaponization of the Justice Department against all his enemies has pushed the country into a quasi-autocracy. (We may not disagree by much here.)
oh it sounds like i'm arguing against a version of you i made up in my head and not the version that exists in real life
Smiling. We’ve all done that