How Serious Is The Case For "Corruption" Against President Trump?

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A major theme of President Trump’s critics is that he is corrupt. As a couple of examples, here is Elizabeth Warren on July 26 calling Trump “the most corrupt president of the United States any time in American history”; and here is a piece from the Guardian on August 11 calling Trump’s second term “the most openly corrupt” presidency ever. There are hundreds more where those came from.

But is there anything to this? As long time readers here are aware, my view is that politics is inherently corrupt. In this way, politics differs from business, because in business it is completely legitimate to seek to maximize one’s own profit. By contrast, in politics, the officeholder has a duty to exercise policy in the public good, and not for his own benefit or for the benefit of his friends and supporters.

But government policy affects everybody, and it is inevitable that some policies will benefit the officeholder and his friends, or will disadvantage the officeholder’s adversaries. Did the officeholder implement some particular policies entirely for the public good, or in whole or part to enrich himself and his friends? It is impossible to know. And in the real world, every political officeholder will implement policies that can be justified as being in the public good, but in reality also benefit the officeholder himself, or his friends and supporters, disproportionately. Is it corrupt? How would you know?

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What Will The Future Look Like After Louisiana v. Callais?

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What Will The Future Look Like After Louisiana v. Callais?

  • On April 29, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais. That’s the case where the Court held that the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create a second “majority-minority” Congressional district because “[t]he Constitution almost never permits a State to discriminate on the basis of race, and such discrimination triggers strict scrutiny.”

  • A “majority-minority” district is one that has been gerrymandered to include sufficient numbers of the designated minority group as to make it nearly certain that a member of that group will be elected to represent the district.

  • The case arose out of the redistricting process following the 2020 census. Louisiana initially came up with a map containing only a single such “majority-minority” district. Plaintiffs who claimed that their voting rights were being infringed challenged the map, and a District Court judge in Louisiana entered a preliminary injunction requiring Louisiana to create a second such district.

  • After the case went into what Justice Alito’s opinion describes as a “legal limbo,” Louisiana then adopted a new map with a second “majority-minority” district; but that map was then promptly challenged by another group of plaintiffs who claimed that their voting rights were being infringed. This second challenge then became the Callais case.

  • The left-wing press has gone into apoplexy over the Callais decision.

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Welfare Fraud In Blue Cities: How Pervasive Is The Kleptocracy?

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  • If you keep up with current events at all, it is unlikely that you have missed in the past week the explosion of the Minnesota Somali welfare fraud scandal into the national, and even international, news.

  • Not that the enormous Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota is something new. The bloggers at Powerline, who are based in Minnesota, have been covering the subject since at least 2018. Here is a May 2018 City Journal piece by Scott Johnson (of Powerline), reporting on an investigation of Somali-owned daycare centers in Minneapolis suspected of stealing millions by billing the government for inflated number of enrollees.

  • But things really got going when the pandemic hit in 2020-21. Minnesota became ground zero for Somali fraudsters setting up sites supposedly to feed hungry children, and collecting millions for meals that were never prepared or served. Federal indictments for this fraud — including 47 people charged in the first indictment — began to issue in 2022. Dozens of articles at Powerline have traced the scandal since that time, as the revealed scope of the fraud has gradually gone from the millions to the hundreds of millions, and most recently into the billions of dollars.

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The Humiliation Of Letitia James -- And Of The New York Legal Establishment

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The Humiliation Of Letitia James -- And Of The New York Legal Establishment

  • You have probably seen that last week an appellate court in New York (Appellate Division, First Department) reversed the civil judgment against President Trump where he had been ordered to pay a fine in excess of $450 million to the state of New York.

  • This case originated during Trump’s first term, as part of then newly-elected New York Attorney General Letitia James’s campaign promise to take down the President.

  • Today, six plus years later, everything about the case has become an embarrassment and a humiliation for AG James, as well as for other parts of the New York political and legal establishment.

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Comments On The Latest Revelations About The Russia!! Hoax

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  • It all began a couple of months before the 2016 presidential election. That’s when candidate Hillary Clinton began accusing Russia of interfering in the upcoming contest, and simultaneously accusing her opponent Donald Trump of “urging” the Russians to engage in some unspecified form of “hack” as the means of interference.

  • From the New York Times, September 5, 2016:

  • Hillary Clinton accused Russian intelligence of interfering with the American election, implying that President Vladimir V. Putin viewed a victory by Donald J. Trump as a destabilizing event that would weaken the United States and buttress Russian interests. . . . “We’ve never had the nominee of one of our major parties urging the Russians to hack,” Mrs. Clinton said in a news conference. “I want everyone — Democrat, Republican, Independent — to understand the real threat that this represents.”

  • The accusations of Russian interference in the election accelerated from there, and then really took off after the election, in December 2016 and January 2017.

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Corruption In Politics: The Case Of Trump And Cryptocurrency

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  • In the New York Times from this past Thursday (May 1), the lead story was a scathing exposé of alleged corruption of our current President. The headline and sub-headline (print version) were “Trump Shapes the Policy On Crypto, and Cashes In. Hushed Deals and Foreign Investors Propel President’s Digital Money Start-Up.” The sub-headline in the online version was even more scathing: “World Liberty Financial has eviscerated the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in ways without precedent in modern American history.” The story fills the entire upper right-hand quadrant of the front page, plus another full page and a half in the interior of the paper.

  • So according to the Times, this is not just some ordinary, every day, run-of-the-mill political corruption. Rather, it is corruption that has “eviscerated” boundaries between business and government, and is “without precedented in modern American history.”

  • Is there any substance to these charges?

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