The blatant corruption... I feel it in my liver. And I am starting to sweat, already, how the next DOJ handles it. I'm not fully naive. I know a deal worth $2 billion isn't getting unwound, no matter how many felonies it's built out of. But I do worry that there will be something relatively simple, clear-cut, but big, a crime committed by Jared or Eric or any one of the cabinet or the guy himself -- and the next DOJ will not pursue it.
We have slam-dunk evidence, that DOJ might believe, but we also foresee 50 million Americans and half the Congress furiously declaring the prosecution proves we are "weaponized." Fox News whipping up hysteria, calling the whole government illegitimate. Militias arranging riots to free the guy who definitely, definitely did the crime and ordinary voters signing on. So maybe the prosecutorial decision is... put the era behind us. Let these grifters get away with it. Fold on the principle that we have laws, not kings, because somehow there's a pro-king mob out there.
I feel that in my liver and crawling all over my skin.
In a way that's what happened in the first term, though the crimes seemed a lot less spectacular--he wasn't making that much money off them anyhow--and now could be the terminal decadence that comes after. I saw a term for it on Bluesky: "hypernormalization".
Good term. We are skipping past the normalization of “maybe skimming a hundred grand can be overlooked” and jumping straight to “well of course a president uses foreign policy to get his family a $2 billion deal with Saudi Arabia—who wouldn’t!” (At least if the president is a Republican; expect President Newsom to get impeached if it turns out he accepted free tickets to see The Eagles in 2002.)
When I was traveling Eastern Europe last year, I got told by a cab driver and a bartender and a passenger on a train how lucky I was to be from a country where the governmental norm is not big-money corruption. That was an eye-opener, and basically true; at least Garland launched a slow-motion pursuit of Trump that might have worked had there been a Harris term. Or had Aileen Canon possessed an ounce of integrity.
The blatant corruption... I feel it in my liver. And I am starting to sweat, already, how the next DOJ handles it. I'm not fully naive. I know a deal worth $2 billion isn't getting unwound, no matter how many felonies it's built out of. But I do worry that there will be something relatively simple, clear-cut, but big, a crime committed by Jared or Eric or any one of the cabinet or the guy himself -- and the next DOJ will not pursue it.
We have slam-dunk evidence, that DOJ might believe, but we also foresee 50 million Americans and half the Congress furiously declaring the prosecution proves we are "weaponized." Fox News whipping up hysteria, calling the whole government illegitimate. Militias arranging riots to free the guy who definitely, definitely did the crime and ordinary voters signing on. So maybe the prosecutorial decision is... put the era behind us. Let these grifters get away with it. Fold on the principle that we have laws, not kings, because somehow there's a pro-king mob out there.
I feel that in my liver and crawling all over my skin.
In a way that's what happened in the first term, though the crimes seemed a lot less spectacular--he wasn't making that much money off them anyhow--and now could be the terminal decadence that comes after. I saw a term for it on Bluesky: "hypernormalization".
Good term. We are skipping past the normalization of “maybe skimming a hundred grand can be overlooked” and jumping straight to “well of course a president uses foreign policy to get his family a $2 billion deal with Saudi Arabia—who wouldn’t!” (At least if the president is a Republican; expect President Newsom to get impeached if it turns out he accepted free tickets to see The Eagles in 2002.)
When I was traveling Eastern Europe last year, I got told by a cab driver and a bartender and a passenger on a train how lucky I was to be from a country where the governmental norm is not big-money corruption. That was an eye-opener, and basically true; at least Garland launched a slow-motion pursuit of Trump that might have worked had there been a Harris term. Or had Aileen Canon possessed an ounce of integrity.
That last paragraph gets you over the 2 marker.
Wonder if the guy who shot him (had he lived) mighta got a pardon for turning Trump into godamighty.