Trump Makes Corruption Great Again: Mission Accomplished

Submitted by gjohnsit on Sat, 04/26/2025 - 4:30pm

Screenshot 2025-04-26 104541.png

Back in February I told you about a crypto fraudster who managed to get federal chargers dropped against him because of $75 million in Trump meme coins he bought.
I know that some will always say that Trump is not doing anything different from presidents before, even when that isn't even close to being true, but now he's taken a step beyond any possible logical denial.

Imagine that Joe Biden, just as he was assuming office, had started a new company with Hunter Biden and used his main social media account to recruit financial backers, then promised that the most generous among them would earn an invitation to a private dinner with him. Oh, and imagine that these investors were all kept secret from the public, so that we had no idea what kinds of possible conflicts of interest might arise.
...The media would be able to speak of nothing else for days. Maybe weeks.
Yet this and more is what Donald Trump just did, and unless you follow the news quite closely, it’s possible you’ve not even heard about it. Or if you have, it was probably in passing, one of those second-tier, “this is kind of interesting” headlines. But it’s a lot more than that. As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy noted Wednesday: “This isn’t Trump just being Trump. The Trump coin scam is the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done. Not close.”

Trump announced this week that the top 220 buyers of his $Trump (strump, as in strumpet) meme coin between now and mid-May will be invited to an exclusive dinner on May 22 (“a night to remember”) at his golf club outside Washington, D.C. The Washington Post and other outlets have reported that in the days since the announcement, “buyers have poured tens of millions of dollars” into the coin; further, that the holders of 27 crypto wallets have acquired at least 100,000 coins apiece, “stakes worth about a million dollars each.”

Even this comparison isn't that accurate because a company is a real thing. It employs people. It pays taxes.
A meme coin holds no intrinsic value.
The value of Trump's meme coin had slumped 88% before the President announced this pay-to-play get-together. It then immediately jumped 58% in a single afternoon.

Invitations to the dinner event with Mr. Trump will only be offered to those who own the most $TRUMP meme coins, according to the website. The top 25 holders will get a bonus of "an Exclusive Reception before Dinner with YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT!" the website marketing the dinner said.
"Our leaderboard updates hourly in real time. Your $TRUMP coin count puts you in the running. The competition is fierce. Own $TRUMP — or watch from the sidelines," according to the website marketing the coin.

The leaderboard will be determined by the average holdings of $TRUMP owners from April 23 to May 12, according to the website. "The more $TRUMP you hold — and the longer you hold it — the higher Your Ranking will be," it said.

Democratic Senators are calling for an investigation, but we all know that won't go anywhere.
I'm honestly interested in how someone will justify this.

Tags:

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corruption

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Comments

Submitted by TheOtherMaven on Sat, 04/26/2025 - 8:32pm

In other news, water is wet,

the sky is blue, and shit stinks.

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

Submitted by Cassiodorus on Sun, 04/27/2025 - 1:32am

The cult of personality does not care

The most important thing about Trump Two is that if he is not stopped he will crash the economy.

Poisonous Tariff Uncertainty

Moon of Alabama is vastly underestimating the situation. Tariffs will not make American businesses magically appear from nothing, as Trump wants us to imagine they will. So yeah, sure, it's all corruption. What other motive could there be?

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"The thing that's so striking is this tremendous failure of imagination in the West." -- Douglas MacGregor

Submitted by gjohnsit on Sun, 04/27/2025 - 11:27am

I'm not sure what you are asking

@Cassiodorus What motive? About what?
Corruption is corruption. Trump is also incredibly incompetent.
I'm just happy that no one here is rushing to defend Trump's obvious corruption here.

Submitted by Cassiodorus on Sun, 04/27/2025 - 2:05pm

Trump is corrupt, and so is the political class as a whole.

@gjohnsit Once again, Riley and Brenner:

Under political capitalism, raw political power, rather than productive investment, is the key determinant of the rate of return. This new form of accumulation is associated with a series of novel mechanisms of ‘politically constituted rip-off’.These include an escalating series of tax breaks, the privatization of public assets at bargain-basement prices, quantitative easing plus ultra-low interest rates, to promote stock-market speculation—and, crucially, massive state spending aimed directly at private industry, with trickledown effects for the broader population: Bush’s Prescription Drug legislation, Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Trump’s CARES Act, Biden’s American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure and CHIPS Acts and the Inflation Reduction Act. All these mechanisms of surplus extraction are openly and obviously political. They allow for returns, not on the basis of investment in plant, equipment, labour and inputs to produce use values, but rather on the basis of investments in politics.

Investment in politics? You mean like bribing public officials to get the policies desired by the handers-over of money? Yep. And it's not like this is the first time I've quoted this piece here. Has it sunk in yet?

One might make the argument, of course, that Trump is more corrupt than the rest of the political class -- but this would be a difference of degree and not of kind. Already with Biden the US government had trapped itself in elaborate matrices of lies, fabrications, and mass-market fantasy so as to justify policies borne of the purest corruption. We can go over the most prominent examples if you like.

And, once again: Trump is guiding America home, to the end result of economy based on "investment in politics," the one laid out in Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine book: America as a third world country with an economy in ruins.

Okay? Okay.

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"The thing that's so striking is this tremendous failure of imagination in the West." -- Douglas MacGregor

Submitted by gjohnsit on Sun, 04/27/2025 - 2:49pm

Yes, that is what I'm saying

@Cassiodorus

One might make the argument, of course, that Trump is more corrupt than the rest of the political class -- but this would be a difference of degree and not of kind.

But that is both what it has always been, everywhere, and it is also very important. The current system can only withstand a certain amount of corruption, and that is being tested now.
In addition to this is Trump extreme incompetence. I mean who decides to launch a trade war on the entire world? Especially when your nation is already a huge debtor.
Finally you have his authoritarian tendencies. Mostly I'm thinking about his assertion that some people don't deserve Due Process (something that dates back to the Magna Carta).

When you add all of that up Trump is indeed something new.

Submitted by snoopydawg on Sun, 04/27/2025 - 4:36pm

Pssst…

@gjohnsit

Also too. Obama killed 2 Americans without due process and then went to court to argue why he had the authority to do that.

What Trump is doing today is because of what previous presidents have been allowed to do without congress reining them in and making them follow the constitution and laws of government.

Trump is just all those presidents without the mask.

Both Biden and Obama proclaimed more executive orders during their tenures than Trump did his last one.

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To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

- Kevin Alfred Strom

Submitted by Cassiodorus on Mon, 04/28/2025 - 1:56am

Here are some more "unique" Presidents.

@gjohnsit Snoopydawg has already laid out Obama as a unique President, though we shouldn't forget Bush Junior, whose USA PATRIOT Act was "unique" in establishing a surveillance state and whose "war on terrorism" was probably the end of Congress' power to declare war.

Presidential ignoring of Supreme Court orders goes back at least to Andrew Jackson, who destroyed the native populations of the South and who also crashed the economy by allowing the banks to issue currency. Pretty unique!

James Buchanan's war secretary, John B. Floyd, moved all sorts of ordnance to the South where it was later absorbed into the Confederacy immediately after secession. Uniquely treasonous!

The shadow government in its current form was afaik the product of the Truman administration.

What I am suggesting, here, then, is that it isn't unique to be unique, nor to be corrupt.

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"The thing that's so striking is this tremendous failure of imagination in the West." -- Douglas MacGregor

Submitted by lotlizard on Sun, 04/27/2025 - 1:56am

After Biden’s blanket pardons of all HIS grifting family members

I guess Trump thought he had to scramble to come up with something to top that and retake the top spot in America’s dysfunctional-leadership decathlon.

And dysfunctional it is. While China was building thousands of miles of high speed rail, the city and county of Honolulu barely managed to get 10.8 miles of elevated transit running.

https://www.civilbeat.org/2024/12/another-honolulu-rail-contractor-deman...