What do you think of this counterpoint from Balaji?
"CZ deserves his pardon.
His show trial of a prosecution was a combination of regulatory railroading and ethnic persecution for being Chinese-Canadian.
Imagine if Macron was held personally responsible for every crime committed by the 67M citizens of France, and you'll get the absurdity of holding CZ personally responsible for the actions of a few of the 250M+ Binance users.
Indeed, if the bureaucrats who went after CZ were similarly held accountable for every violent crime committed in their home states, they'd be in prison for eternity! But there was an insane double standard. In the physical world, the Biden admin gleefully abolished the police. Meanwhile, in the digital world they demanded that CEOs achieve impossible levels of probity.
The ethnic dimension to CZ's persecution was similarly execrable. In reality, he helped many millions of Chinese people get into Bitcoin and thereby get to freedom. And also helped millions of poor people from around the globe get out of failed currencies, and into cryptocurrency.
So he did more for practical human rights and civil liberties than most. CZ did nothing wrong, and did so many things right.
Of course, my friends at Coinbase and I were competitors of Binance. But I always respected CZ, and I congratulate him on his accomplishments, and I congratulate him on his pardon today. Well deserved."
Comparing gov’t officials to civilians is a stupid comparison.
Biden abolishing police is hyperbole.
CZ enabled a lot of dark shit. He is somehow simultaneously so powerful as to help millions of Chinese, but powerless to do anything about a few thousand of criminals and pedophiles?
Changpeng Zhao broke the law and got caught. Everyone agrees on that. What you present above is revisionist history about "political persecution," which is the favorite justification of the current administration for pardoning convicted felons, even in the total absence of any evidence supporting a conclusion of political persecution. See also George Santos, J6 rioters, etc.
I don't think it's really necessary to pretend that this pardon was deserved. The pardon happened because (a) Trump wants the support of crypto billionaires and (b) Trump received a large bribe. It's really not complicated.
Painting Trump as sympathetic to ethnic discrimination is really ridiculous. No one believes that, even people who cynically use that justification to support his lawlessness.
The law says he should have prevented those bad apples from moving dirty money around, and he did not follow the law.
Do you have a rebuttal for coffeezillas assertion that 2 billion dollars of Abu Dhabi money was invested in Binance using the Trump family coin in order to buy a pardon?
The president is clearly pro crypto and doesn't think this dude did anything wrong, but he also wasn't gonna give a pardon away for free. It's a disgusting abuse of office he should be impeached over. Selling pardons, what a shit show.
There should be a limit on the number of pardons a president can do during their tenure so that they have to at least think a bit before using it. It is a very powerful tool that actually allows a last resort. But this kind of egregious abuse of it's power means it needs to be kept in check.
There is, and the Constitution says the limit is impeachment and removal from office by Congress. That won't happen unless we fix how we talk about the ones responsible, to wit:
The Republican Party pardoned these criminals.
The Republican Party is snatching Americans off the streets.
The Republican Party is using the military to murder people on boats.
The Republican Party is demolishing down the White House. The Republican Party is deporting people over free speech.
The Republican Party has imposed the biggest tax increase in living memory with tariffs/import-taxes.
The Republican Party is going pay itself your tax dollars in "lawsuit settlements".
There were 4 years of his first term and now 10 months of... all this. Today there is zero possibility of an oversight or mistake, any legislator who won't impeach and convict is choosing to support these things.
Nothing will improve while those legislators believe the blame will sail past them and stick solely to Trump.
I don’t think the majority of voting Americans have problems with any of those acts though. Think Joe you pass in Walmart cares about what happens to the White House ballroom?
They were fed "waste fraud and abuse" in the beginning of the year. and suddenly it happens in broad daylight and people shrug?
At this point it's just brainwashing. Some people's principals are clearly less about their own conviction and treating all this like a sports team. Whoever team "wins", even if the stadium burns down around them.
Yeah: If someone donates money to the government for any purpose, the Constitution says Congress and only Congress has the authority to decide where it goes. Not the President.
So either Trump is doing this officially, but the funding is illegal/unconstitutional...
... Or the funding is legal, but Trump is doing it as a private citizen, which is grand vandalism.
> Think Joe you pass in Walmart cares about what happens to the White House ballroom?
Joe in Walmart thinks what Facebook memes and Fox News tell him to think. The same subversive forces that support the administration's lawlessness control the media diet of a plurality of Americans.
If you want Americans to care about wants going on, you have to inform them about it first.
The ballroom is scheduled be ready in January 2029 assuming no delays. But by that time Trump will be at the end of his term. So is he doing this for future presidents (would be very much unlike him) or is he planning to stick around after Jan 2029?
It is one thing for Bannon to say it. It is another thing for a prominent sitting senator to say it [1]. (That would be senator Lindsey Graham.) I wish John McCain was still around... he would have had the courage to stand up and talk sense into these people.
technically, he is currently scheduled to be president for the entirety of 2028 because the election is in November 2028 and the presidential term ends on January 20, 2029.
I think that's the wrong way to view the problem. Think about it this way: before Nixon resigned his approval rating was still 23%.
You can get a quarter of the country to say yes or not care for any given question no matter how obviously dangerous or stupid. But having a 25% approval rating would be very, very bad.
The pardon power has been so abused these past few administrations that it's clear there should be constitutional changes in the pardon power, either congressional review, or strip it altogether.
The way this is going, the President won’t need using any pardon powers, because the judges will all ask the President what the judgement should be in advance.
Your forget to insert the part where the President asks the convicted defendant if they want to finance their pardon with Klarna or Affirm in the Presidential Library's checkout page
Which congress do you want doing that review? The past several congresses have been unqualified to do any sort of constitutional reviewing in my opinion.
The U.S. is running an outdated installation of democracy. The French approach of just rebooting and reinstalling the entire thing seems like a good idea at this point. Except the populace is already badly split into warring camps.
> The French approach of just rebooting and reinstalling the entire thing seems like a good idea at this point.
Do you mean the French Revolution? If you actually read the history on that (even basic stuff beyond the "Reign of Terror") I don't think any person would want to experience that for their country. It had tons of indiscriminate violence and took a decade of chaos before they sorted out into a real government, which then resulted in Napolean's coup
(I've read that the French are talking about a Sixth, given that they've gone through several prime ministers in the past few weeks/months and seem unable to maintain a government long enough to pass anything.)
It's more likely a reference to France currently being the Fifth Republic.[1] The transition from the Fourth to the Fifth happened in 1958 without much violence.
Interestingly, the Fifth has then been running for 67 years so far, which makes the Third Republic still the longest running republic of France! I guess in around three years they'll be having a grand party.
> The transition from the Fourth to the Fifth happened in 1958 without much violence.
Quoting from the article:
Things came to a head in 1958 as France struggled to decolonize. There was strong opposition within France to Algerian independence and part of the army openly rebelled. Important generals threatened a coup unless de Gaulle was returned to power. They sent paratroopers to capture Corsica in case anyone missed their point.
The article even fails to mention Operation Resurrection. Hopefully we don't need coups every time we want a new constituent assembly.
I suspect the OP meant their semi-presidential/dual-executive system w/ parliament (although at this point, storming the Bastille is starting to look pretty good...).
For better or worse, the US constitution does not have provisions or a process for dissolving itself and developing a new constitution.
The closest thing we have is the amendment process. In theory we could use that to rewrite the entirety of the constitution[0], but good luck getting the required votes in place on any possible replacement. The bar is pretty high: amendments need to be proposed by either a vote of 2/3 of Congress, or by a constitutional convention convened by 2/3 of the state legislatures, and then ratified by 3/4 of all state legislatures.
We couldn't get that sort of agreement to pass something as theoretically uncontroversial as the Equal Rights Amendment. It's laughable to think we could pass a "new constitution" that way.
I expect the only way we could end up with a new constitution is through a bloody civil war, or some sort of coup. Hopefully no one wants something like that, though. I certainly don't.
[0] Technically the entirety of the constitution can't be amended; Article V, Section 5 prohibits an amendment from changing each state's equal representation in the Senate. Though I suppose a "rewrite amendment" might get around that by preserving the Senate as-is as a ceremonial body without any power. That would certainly violate the spirit of that wording in Article V, so I imagine it would be challenged in court.
It's worth noting that Article V, Section 5 doesn't prohibit itself from being amended away. So you just need the constitutional convention to refer two new amendments: the first one stripping the restriction itself, and the second one to do what the restriction prohibited being done.
Tech corps and ex-PayPal guys would be putting billions into making a new constitution and it would be far, far worse than what we have now. And while the French love using violence and destruction to defend their countrymen and their rights, Americans would gladly be lemmings off a cliff so long as someone told them it pissed someone else off.
Unfortunately, eliminating the Senate (or more precisely, each state's equal representation in the Senate) is the one and only thing that the constitution forbids an amendment from doing (see Article V, Section 5):
> Provided that no Amendment [...] no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
(Awkward ellipsizing, but the elided text is another thing that's not allowed, which expired in 1808, and is otherwise thankfully no longer relevant.)
Better voting systems can be implemented, but since the states run federal elections, each state would have to pass legislation requiring a different voting system. Of course I expect all 50 would not agree on which alternative system is the best, which may or may not matter. And I doubt red states would want to change, as voting systems that better reflect the will of the electorate tend to disadvantage the GOP.
Eliminating gerrymandering is difficult, because it's hard to objectively define what is and isn't a gerrymandered map. There have been some attempts to do so, and I would say they've even been somewhat successful, but people can reasonably disagree with the methodology and thresholds used.
The Citizens United SCOTUS ruling and precedent absolutely needs to be reversed; agreed. Corporations are not people and should not get first amendment protections. Or any kind of protections outside any that are defined in regular law.
Another thing we need to do away with is the Electoral College. Presidents should be elected based on the national popular vote, not by per-state winner-take-all proxies, with vote apportionment that wildly advantages some states over others. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would effectively do away with the EC if states "owning" at least 270 electoral votes were to all sign it, but that's unlikely to ever happen. (Then again, it's more likely that the Compact would achieve that threshold than the passing of a constitutional amendment to abolish the EC.)
I propose an amendment which permits any state to subdivide without the consent of the Senate, provided that no subdivision is smaller (less-populous) than the smallest current state.
So small states don't have to give up their unfair disproportionate representation in the Senate... but they can't monopolize that state of affairs either. Any state above a certain size ("2x the smallest") may decide that its constituents are best-served by fission.
From fiction, we have Clancy's sudden loss of the majority of federal elected officials which allowed for a fresh start. However, that's subject to having governors submitting senators while having elections for congress. Starting from a clean slate would be the only fix. As it is now, it's who is willing to kowtow to the biggest backers to get them over the line and stay in office. On top of the gerrymandering that all but ensures the party in control stays in control, I see no change to the status quo in my life time without an uprising.
The Senate is not subject to garrymandering and if we fixed the issues with the House (literally via any mechanism) the Senate would immediately go back to being the vehicle used to prevent the will of the people (see the Senate under Mitch McConnell any time the House was under Democrat control)
Until the Dem party fixes their brand and wins back some of the Senate seats they used to control in the 90s and early 2000s there will be no positive progress.
The Senate is in a permanent state of gerrymandering.
There were only 13 states when the Constitution was ratified. It was never envisioned to be as disproportionate as it is today, with California's two Senators representing 40 million people vs. Wyoming's 0.6 million.
In 1776, the population of Virgin was about 500K, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts were about 270K, and Delaware and Georgia were about 50K each.
The founders knew exactly what they were agreeing to when they gave each State two Senators. It’s supposed to be a separate check on the Federal power to force a wide swathe of consensus.
I doubt the founders considered the possibility that political realignment would result in nearly all low population states being on one side of the spectrum.
California currently has of 60x the population of Wyoming, which means that Wyoming voters have over 60x the voting power in the Senate as California voters.
Whether the founders intended that or not it's a shitty, unfair, and undemocratic system that doesn't act as a check, it just enables permanent minority rule.
It was semi intentional. It wasn't as extreme but the Senate was still a compromise for smaller states to have leverage in government and get them to sign on.
Meanwhile, the house is about 10 times smaller than what the founders envisioned. Maybe that's overkill but we probably should at least expand the house quite a bit. And Probably expand the supreme court as well.
No, I like the way the Senate runs in theory. Equal representation for the states regardless of size. Only if it's alongside the house with proportionate representation.
That seems like a good theory that would keep itself in check.
In execution it's an absolute shit show, I'll give you. But I do believe the theory is sound. With the house and the Senate we get the best of both worlds.
Why is the theory sound? It’s an arbitrary number of regions delineated by arbitrary lines given a disproportionate amount of power that run completely counter to the goal of a democracy.
Arbitrary or not, States are sovereign things. They set their own laws.
Having 1 chamber that allows equal representation
And
Having 1 chamber that allows proportionate
Is a good system in theory. Otherwise, States (which are again separate entities) with high populations just steamroll those that have low populations.
The system now allows states with high populations to be appropriately represented in the house, which sends bills to the Senate.
I feel like it's a good system, in theory. You get your population representation and checks and balances for rural areas as well.
You keep saying "in theory". If the practice -- as you seem to admit -- doesn't actually work, then what's the point defending the theory? It doesn't work in practice, so it's a bad idea.
> Arbitrary or not, States are sovereign things.
In practice that's not really true. The federal government has many, many levers it can use to get states to fall in line.
In theory, but in practice, most states are highly dependent on a few very populous and productive ones, for economic and military protection.
Not to mention that the Feds control the purchasing power of the currency and international trade, so the states aren’t sovereign to do anything of consequence.
Hence in practice, this whole theory of states being sovereign goes out the window.
Because tyranny of the majority is still a thing. Elections would just switch from swing states to appealing to California and Texas if we did everything with purely popular votes. So the house is there as a large power and senate can check it.
Of course, in practice the house is way under represented so its almost like we have a senate and a mini-senate. That's where things fall apart.
> Elections would just switch from swing states to appealing to California and Texas if we did everything with purely popular votes.
I don't see why that would be the case. To win an election you don't need to win states at all; you need to win lots of voters, and those voters could come from anywhere.
You could lose every single voter in both CA and TX and still win the election, given different political demographics across states.
As an aside, I also think abolishing the Electoral College and going strictly by the national popular vote would increase voter turnout for presidential elections. I live in a solidly blue state, and if I didn't care about down-ballot races, I probably wouldn't bother to vote in presidential elections, since my vote doesn't really matter here. Only votes in swing states matter under the current system.
> Elections would just switch from swing states to appealing to California and Texas if we did everything with purely popular votes.
No, it wouldn’t. It would switch to appealing to the most voters, who may or may not happen to live in California and Texas, but that is irrelevant to a democracy.
States are sovereign entities with their own laws. They can even, in theory, secede from the union.
The Senate is a good system, it's just that most states are Republican.
Some of the larger states might consider splitting themselves into separate states to better represent their populations. Though that may not be constitutionally possible.
If we ever add additional states to the Union (Puerto Rico, D.C., etc.), they'll want to enjoy having an equal say with every other state in the Union. It's a compelling feature of our system.
The House, as a proportional system, actually needs to be re-normalized. There are not enough representatives to have an actually proportional vote.
Is it a good system? I'm not sure I understand why? The system as it's designed seems to want to incentivize having many low population states as a way to spread and gain power, and as such the current 100 power holders are incentivized to to protect their power by preventing the dilution of their power that would come with more states.
Additionally, because the population of the country is not evenly distributed across all the states, senators from some states have disproportionate power and control this is frequently mentioned and brought up several times in this post alone. Not sure what aspects make it a good system, some type of beleaguered point about preventing tyranny of the majority? At what cost? tyranny of the minority, political stagnation?
The Senate is a terrible system. There's no logical reason why citizens in one state should have orders of magnitude more say in the federal government than citizens in another.
The founders aren't infallible gods, and they really fucked up here.
Gerrymandering is particular powerful because Congress has refused to reapportion representatives for over a century. They just decided to stop following that part of the Constitution back in 1929. We still have the same number of representatives as we did when we were less than a third our current population. Each representative now covers 20 times more people than when the Constitution was ratified.
> If we can't figure out how to get a Congress that most people believe in then I worry that is the beginning of the end for this government.
We know, from comparative study of existing representative democracies, how to do that better (have an electoral system for the legislative branch that provides results that are substnantially more proportional than under the current system); what we don’t have is a practical way to get from where we are to where we need to be given the construction of the electoral systems in the states and nationally and the politicians and interests that has entrenched and the Constitutional amendment process.
Approval ratings for Congress, barring a post-9/11 spike, have been under 30% for most of my life. By this standard I'd say we're in the middle of the end.
> Which congress do you want doing that review? The past several congresses have been unqualified to do any sort of constitutional reviewing in my opinion
States can reject dumb amendments. Congress proposes amendments, the states ratify them [1].
The power to pardon needs to be removed all together. All it does is show that the President overrides the department of justice. How anyone ever thought this should be a thing, I have no idea.
I think a congressional pardon power to allow national leniency on previously accepted sentences that are now viewed as unjust might be worth holding onto. It being such a casual presidential power has made it ripe for corruption for a long time but I would weigh that with civil rights era pardons for sham trials - I think we do still need a national sanity check relief valve for local injustices.
And the dysfunction of congress probably works in our favor here since pardons should be exceptional - not routine. A routine pardon is just a demonstration of the justice department failing at a systemic level.
> I think a congressional pardon power to allow national leniency on previously accepted sentences that are now viewed as unjust might be worth holding onto.
That sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. For the branch of government in charge of making and changing laws.
I heard the intention was that sometimes it's against the public good to prosecute some people even though they have comitted crimes. Good examples of it being used as intended was pardoning the perpetrators of the whiskey rebellion, the confederate army, vietnam draft dodgers and more controversially, Nixon. I guess it's also intended in cases where obvious miscarriages of justice have been committed. It made sense in 1785 or whenever but along with lots of the rest of the constitution it's long obsolete and has been twisted, stretched and mangled into a hideous caricature of itself over the centuries.
How hard can it be to specify that pardons can be given by a committee of 25 randomly selected individuals with an Ivy league education when at least 2/3 is in favor with no existing financial ties and no information regarding the identity of whoever's fate is at stake?
Right, not hard at all, but apparently whoever wrote the Constitution was a fucking moron.
I think you're onto something, for a kind of second-chance review function, but instead of "with an Ivy League education", perhaps you most want people knowledgeable about both judicial process and society.
"Ivy League education" isn't a totally bad predictor, but it's going to be very biased towards people with privileged socioeconomic backgrounds, who therefore may have blind spots of aspects of society that apply to the situation. (No matter how many books they've read, classes they've taken, years of volunteering with the less-advantaged they've done, and hours of NPR they've listened to.)
> The power to pardon needs to be removed all together. All it does is show that the President overrides the department of justice.
The Department of Justice is subordinate to the President as part of the executive branch with or without the pardon power; if you want something other than "the President overrides the Department of Justice" as a matter of Constitutional law rather than an intermittently-observed convention of restraint (which Trump absolutely has not observed outside of the pardon power), you need a fundamental reformation of the Constitutional structure of government, far beyond the elimination of the pardon power.
While it’s true that the Department of Justice sits within the executive branch, the assertion that it is simply “subordinate” to the President - functioning as his personal legal arm - is an oversimplification that misses both the design and evolution of constitutional governance.
The President does not have unlimited authority over the DOJ. The DOJ’s powers are exercised pursuant to laws enacted by Congress, and its officials - especially the Attorney General and U.S. Attorneys - swear oaths to uphold the Constitution, not to serve as personal agents of the President’s will.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that while the President may remove executive officers, he cannot lawfully direct them to commit acts that are unconstitutional, obstruct justice, or violate statutory mandates.
The constitutional structure also relies on normative independence - a separation within the executive branch that maintains rule of law. This is not a “convention of restraint” but an operational necessity derived from the Take Care Clause (“he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”). That clause doesn’t mean “whatever the President says is law”; it means the President must ensure that the law itself is enforced faithfully, even when doing so constrains his own interests.
Finally, while the pardon power is broad, it’s not the linchpin of executive authority over the DOJ. Removing or limiting that power wouldn’t change the fact that the DOJ’s prosecutorial discretion must still be exercised consistent with law, ethics, and constitutional constraints - not simply the President’s personal preferences. Our system is not designed for a monarch with “absolute control” over prosecutions. It’s designed for a chief executive bound by law and accountable through oversight, impeachment, and ultimately, the electorate.
> While it’s true that the Department of Justice sits within the executive branch, the assertion that it is simply “subordinate” to the President - functioning as his personal legal arm - is an oversimplification that misses both the design and evolution of constitutional governance.
The idea of the republic as opposed to a monarchy is that no part of the government is anyone's personal...well, anything...but that doesn't really negate the degree of control the President exercises, both in theory and in practice barring highly variable personal restraint, over the DoJ.
> The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that while the President may remove executive officers, he cannot lawfully direct them to commit acts that are unconstitutional, obstruct justice, or violate statutory mandates.
That doesn't mean the President doesn't override the DoJ, it means the President doesn't override the law.
> The constitutional structure also relies on normative independence - a separation within the executive branch that maintains rule of law.
Yes, that it relies on this but does not actually provide any mechanism by which it can effectively be assured is the fundamental design issue I am referring to being necessary to address if one wants "the President overrides the DoJ" not to be a simple fact independently of whether or not the pardon power exists and is vested in the President's discretion.
> Finally, while the pardon power is broad, it’s not the linchpin of executive authority over the DOJ.
I literally said that the pardon power is irrelevant to that, which is the exact opposite of describing it as the lynchpin.
> Removing or limiting that power wouldn’t change the fact that the DOJ’s prosecutorial discretion must still be exercised consistent with law, ethics, and constitutional constraints - not simply the President’s personal preferences.
To the extent that is true, that is only a negative constraint on prosecution applied by the courts, it can never compel a prosecution that the executive has declined. (Congress, of course, could punish the President for preventing prosecutions, via the impeachment power, but that’s hardly a substitute for real independence from the President of all or part of the prosecutorial power if that is what is desired. Or, for that matter, much of a remedy at all if more than 1/3 of the Senate is on board with the President's conduct.
Trump is miles ahead of other administrations in abusing it but as far back as my political awareness reaches (the Clinton admin) there have been clear awful examples like Marc Rich[1]. I certainly have a political lean but there are some really indefensible pardons on each side.
Yes actually. As far as I'm aware even the President can't pardon crimes someone may commit in the future. Can you point out the ones where he did that?
Are you equating Trump's pardons and commutations to Bidens? For review, Biden's were largely for non-violent drug offenders and preemptive pardons for people like Anthony Fauci and federal employees prosecuting Jan 6 defendants and the like.
Save for his pardon of his son Hunter (who's own prosecution was littered with politics), Biden's were largely pedestrian.
I was of two minds about that pardon. On the one hand it seemed like an abuse of pardon power. On the other hand, it was also reasonable at the time to expect abuse of presidential power to prosecute political enemies. So on balance I was OK with it. I think the compromise I'd like to see is to curtail both powers.
Because he was prosecuted for doing drugs and owning a gun? There's literal video of Joe Rogan smoking pot and he talks about his concealed weapons permit. It would be a slam dump case, some how i don't think he's getting prosecuted because its selective law open to abuse. Seems perfectly good use of pardon.
The Hunter Biden issue was not about smoking marijuana... that would have been the very least of his multitude of legal problems. Biden's own DoJ was prosecuting the cases - which is important context to consider here.
> Since 2018, Weiss had been investigating Hunter Biden as U.S. attorney. In 2023, Republicans asked Garland to appoint a special counsel, some specifically demanding Weiss, a Republican appointed to his role by President Donald Trump. Garland ultimately appointed Weiss, giving him additional authority. However, congressional Republicans then expressed criticism, some stating Weiss was untrustworthy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_C._Weiss
6 years of investigation and all they could find was that Hunter did drugs and owned a gun. I am sure if we drug tested congress, we could prosecute a bunch of congressmen for the same crime. Maybe thats why supreme court is looking at the constitutionality of the law and its all been ruled unconstitutional in one of the courts districts but hey lets prosecute Hunter Biden for it.
That was not all of Hunter's legal problems - he had serious tax evasion charges[1], along with other Biden family members (all of which were pardoned, unprecedentedly by President Biden).
Trying to minimize Hunter's significant legal problems to "he did [many hard, highly regulated] drugs and [illegally] owned a gun [which was thrown into a dumpster]" is disingenuous and factually incorrect.
Hunter's (and other Biden family member's) legal issues were so plainly severe, with a near-guarantee of prison time, President Biden was forced to issue an unprecedented, unconditional pardon for "offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024." A decade-long period during-which any crimes Hunter committed were erased and forgiven.
Nobody is above the law? This was Biden's own DoJ.
Six years of investigation and all they could find is that he put false information on a government form and paid his taxes late. Six years. Mueller investigation was only two years and how many charges did he find? Jack Smith investigation was one year before he has charged people with dozens of charges. This prosecutor had six years and couldn't dig up anything. Either hunter biden is the smart person in world that was so smart that he left no evidence of crimes or it was partisan witch hunt.
Also if the gun charges were so serious, why aren't we prosecuting Joe Rogan, its literally a slam dunk case. He smokes pot(a schedule 1 drug) on his podcasts and brags about his concealed weapons permit. You don't even need to find witnesses, just show the jury of him smoking pot and a copy of his federal form. Or we could just cross reference the ATF background database with states' Medical Marijuana Registries. Could prosecute tens of millions of people including Joe Rogan.
It protected one individual - there have been a rash of politically motivated moves by the justice department that have targeted plenty of others. I can understand the pardon but the fact that so many other people were left out to dry just reinforces our multi-tiered justice system.
That's why it was not just one individual -- he also pardoned Fauci, members of Congress who served on the J6 investigations, and Gen. Milley for the same reason.
It's clear that he was correct that Trump was going to target his political enemies, but it sounds like he can't win here -- if he pardons everyone including Comey, people would say he's abusing the power by pardoning everyone. If he only pardons a few then he's accused of leaving others "high and dry."
Yeah, that's a very fair point. The persecution of Fauci and anyone associated with bringing the charges against Trump would've also been very predictable targets for pardons.
Just as a judge should not be ruling on a case where the defendant is throwing suitcases full of money at him, a judge should also not be ruling on a case where the defendant is his own son. Both are inappropriate uses of a power intended for the application of mercy and the correction of faults in the justice system. Both are the sorts of things that should lead to recusal.
Biden's use is far more forgivable, as it's a given that his son was being prosecuted politically to punish Biden (though certainly he was guilty) and would likely have been prosecuted more under Trump, like Comey is being prosecuted today. And certainly "saving your children" is a far more forgivable sin than naked bribery, but being better than Trump is a low bar, but it's still not okay to excuse criminals from punishment because they have an important family member.
How is pardoning people like Fauci, or even Hunter, that Trump was clearly going to target as part of an "enemies" list, more "self-serving" than literally pardoning anyone that makes you/give you millions of dollars?
(Changpenh Zhao - made him billions; Trevor Milton - donated $1.8 million; Walczak - his mom donated millions)
It's not binary. I can not respect both decisions. Just because I don't respect Trump does not mean I must respect Biden's decision or vice versa. Current POTUS is absolutely vile. The previous guy was put in a position and a decision was made that I did not agree with, but over all, no he wasn't using the federal money to directly line his pocket as compensation for being investigated for things he actually did.
I think the point is, Biden said he pardoned his son to prevent political persecution of him by Trump. Biden's fears have been borne out - the Trump administrationg is persecuting Trump's enemies. Does that change your opinion of Biden's pardon?
It wasn't only family members. Biden granted clemency or pardons to over 4200 people. Notably for the same blanket pardon from 2014 to 2025 for family members, includes Dr. Anthony Fauci, and General Mark Milley.
And all of the members of Congress on the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack for anything having to do with their role on that committee.
Schiff was on that committee. He said the pardon was unnecessary and unwise.
At that Biden was the only president who had used DOJ to persecute his predecessor. So basically he started this shit, and when it turned out the other guy won the election, he pardoned his obviously guilty son, and other obviously guilty party members.
You say persecute yet those without an agenda say investigate. It was not persecution to look into the events of January 6. Conflating the investigation as persecution is not a very honest take on the events.
Biden did not order his DOJ to prosecute anyone. Unlike Trump with Pam Bondi, Biden did not personally direct Merrick Garland, who promised to run the DOJ independently and did -- to the point Garland even prosecuted the President's own son.
The Trump prosecutions were not only warranted, they were insisted by Republicans; the Republican Senators explicitly declined to convict Trump in his second impeachment because they anticipated he would be prosecuted in a court of law for January 6. From Republican Leader Mitch McConnell when he explained his rationale during the 2nd impeachment trial:
“Former President Trump’s actions that preceded the riot were a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty,” added McConnell. “Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”
“We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one,” he said.
By labeling him as "practically and morally responsible" and then refusing to vote to impeach, explicitly citing our criminal justice system as the appropriate venue for recourse, Mitch McConnell essentially demanded that Biden's DOJ prosecute him for J6.
In refusing to convict Trump on J6, McConnell set the precedent that it is improper to impeach a President if he commits crimes between the Election and the Inauguration as Trump did. According to McConnell, accountability lies in the Courts. If it's true that the incoming administration also cannot prosecute those crimes, then POTUS is essentially immune from any and all accountability under the Constitution, which cannot be the case; POTUS would be able to commit or attempt to commit any crimes he wants between Nov and January 20 at the end of his term, up to and including high crimes like insurrection against the government.
Republicans shirked their Article I duty by refusing to impeach a man they publicly blamed for provoking events which led to the deaths of multiple people. Specifically it was Republican Senators who punted it to the Biden DOJ, which made them Constitutionally bound to prosecute.
So if you were the outgoing president, and the incoming president said out loud in front of the nation he was going to abuse his power to jail your family members out of spite, you would just let that happen on principle?
Again, the threats were not levied just at family members, but only family members received the pardon. So let's not get all sanctimonious on this issue. If he was doing this as anything other than self preservation of his family we could talk, but actions speak louder than words and he chose family over principles.
> only family members received the pardon.... If he was doing this as anything other than self preservation of his family we could talk
Seems like you should do some more research about this before forming such strong opinions, because you are not correct -- Biden preemptively pardoned more than just his family. He pardoned Fauci and Miley after Trump accused them of treason; as well as some members of the J6 committee like Liz Cheney (Trump retweeted a post that claimed Cheney was guilty of treason and should face a military tribunal).
I still think you should answer my question though, because it establishes a baseline for acceptability. I believe that you personally would pardon your own family against such threats because I believe most decent people would. So if you're willing to pardon your own family, then there's a conversation to be had about why you would need to, and whether that protection should be extended, for the good of the nation, to other people not related to you.
The problem we see right now with the pardon power was predicted by the founders:
"The President of the United States has the unrestrained power of granting pardons for treason; he may pardon crimes which were advised by himself. It may happen, at some future day that he will establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic... If he has the power of granting pardons before indictment, or conviction, may he not stop inquiry and prevent detection?" - George Mason
And boy was he right! We are at that future day! So they saw this coming yet decided to include it anyway. Why?
Hamilton argued:
"In seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments when a well-timed offer of pardon to insurgents... may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth."
"Humanity and good policy conspire to dictate that the benign prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed."
and
"Without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel."
They recognized the system might need a release valve, or would make mistakes, and they included the pardon power to correct them. They made it broad and "unfettered" as Hamilton put it because they expected the person who would exercise the power would be "prudent".
And in doing so they ensured that the pardon power reflects the soul of this nation. We get the government we vote for, and the pardon power is used in a way that we the voters tolerate.
The problem isn't the pardon power is broad, it's that we as an electorate are so willing to elect someone who is comfortable abusing those broad powers and other authority for his personal gain.
I will close by just noting that both of the abuses of the pardon power we are talking about were precipitated by Trump. Biden wouldn't have pardoned any of the people you're mad about if Trump hadn't first promised to abuse his power to persecute them. Biden had the good judgement and foresight to take Trump seriously, because he turned out to be 100% right.
It would be weird if he didn't? He pardoned his entire family, as Trump made it clear he was aiming to harass Biden's entire family for revenge. And the way he's been acting this presidency has only confirmed that's not beneath him.
The decision is a lot more respectable than "this guy gave me a bribe." They are worlds apart. And some may be theoretically willing to roll the dice on that for their family, but it reads naive.
Equivalence may be a strong word, but pardoning your kids is classical Borgia shit straight out of the worst times of Italian Renaissance, and most people would condemn it if it was done by leader of some Central American Ruritania.
Of course, once it is done by a president representing the party you (generic you) feel affiliated with, the double standards inevitably kick in.
> Of course, once it is done by a president representing the party you (generic you) feel affiliated with, the double standards inevitably kick in.
Less that, more we're all aware of what Trump campaigned on and what he promised to do to Biden's entire family. And we're disheartened that there's cultists (not you) trying to convince us that we should let our families suffer if dear leader demands it.
I don't know these people, I don't have a strong feeling if any of them go to jail for something they did, because I'm not in a personality cult. But I care a lot more if people are going to jail just because a more corrupt person got the keys to everything. Turns out, those fears were valid, and I'm increasingly alarmed that there's still so much vitriol towards Biden pardoning a checks notes gun charge, than there is for the blatantly corrupt shit we see every day.
Looking at how this administration is now using the DoJ to hunt even people like Comey and Bolton whose crime was being a non-Trump-aligned Republican…
It’s probably good that Biden took away this particular show trial option from them.
It’s worth clarifying that the investigation into Bolton started in 2022 during Biden’s term. Hard(er) to say whether the ultimately issued indictment was politically motivated, but we need to keep an eye towards accuracy on these topics.
No. Almost everybody hated it out of context, but in context many understood that one man was about to obtain unprecedented power over all three branches of government and use it to vindictively pursue personal vendettas. These people were correct, this then happened.
Personally, I’m reminded of how every dysfunctional country’s deposed regimes flee or are killed. We sheltered Americans find it easy to forget that peaceful transfer of power is an accomplishment of lawful society, and as rule of law weakens we have only more chaotic, ignominious, and probably eventually violent transitions to look forward to.
Reaction to the Biden pardon is a pretty huge thing to be completely unaware of. You should reevaluate whether you’re in a media bubble.
I was against the Biden pardons at the time but in hindsight with the current administration pushing poorly done prosecutions for political purposes I have changed my mind on them. Trump will say his pardons are similar but looking at the facts I don't find them comparable (I'm still livid that he pardoned Blagojevich, who was literally caught on tape talking about selling a US Senate seat).
He didn't just pardon his family members and issue questionable preemptive pardons, he also issued the most pardons of any president ever, and not by a small margin, but by a factor of 20 compared to Trump up to now, in a single term, including pardons for violent criminals and yes, white-collar fraudsters as well. They didn't get much publicity because most of them were committed at the tail end of his term while the media were focused on the election and on the transition of power, because of double standards, and because the actors were low-profile. It really shouldn't be controversial to point out that the abuse of presidential power didn't start nor end with Trump. He most certainly wouldn't have gotten re-elected if that were the case.
Maybe my source was outdated, at least it should be accurate when comparing first terms. Quite the editorial spin on this Wikipedia article, it proves my point about double standards. I'd share some articles listing some murderers and embezzlers pardoned by Biden, but I don't like linking to politically biased sources regardless of their substance since it usually ends up with people nitpicking about the source. It's very easy to find evidence that these weren't 4,000 pardons for innocent marijuana users on Google anyway.
The cheerleaders for the current authoritarian coup that swarm around here are all too happy to conflate the Hunter Biden pardon and what's currently going on. As if we can't currently open a god-damned news website and read about the Comey, James and Bolton prosecutions and deduce that, yeah, Biden pretty much had no choice even though it was a shitty thing to do.
This is because these dipshits are eagerly carrying water for a vindictive dictator. They are not operating in good faith but due to the alignment of the owners of this site with those self-same fascists you are meant to act as if they're not trolls.
Along with various other people to try to protect them from malicious political prosecution. Much like how Comey, Bolton, and a variety of current and former government officials are now being prosecuted on questionable charges.
Yeah, because he was guarding them against the current administration abusing the Justice Department to go after them. Same reason he pardoned Fauci and others.
And from what we've seen, he was right to do so. Although, they've been angling to declare his pardons void so they can go after whoever they wish.
> Yeah, because he was guarding them against the current administration abusing the Justice Department to go after them. Same reason he pardoned Fauci and others.
Are pre-emptive pardons a common thing for American presidents to do?
By considering the facts of the matter, sure it's as you said. But if you ignore every detail then it does look like everyone is exactly as bad as each other and it's impossible to say anything is good or bad.
> Yeah, because he was guarding them against the current administration abusing the Justice Department to go after them
Ha ha. They (democrats overall) need to look inwards for that.
> Same reason he pardoned Fauci and others.
Fauci screwed up our country so bad, it aint even funny. The fact that he needed a PRE-EMPTIVE (i.e. he wasn't even accused of anything at the time) pardon says it all. And the fact that Biden gave it to him, says everything there is to say about Biden.
> And from what we've seen, he was right to do so.
Not even close.
> Although, they've been angling to declare his pardons void so they can go after whoever they wish.
They should.
- Look at what Biden did to the southern border. And look at it now.
- Look at almost any "democrat" run major city. Any. Then look at the crime rates and cost of living.
- And the recent farce that was this "No Kings" crap...
Trump isn't perfect. Far from it. He's got major flaws, both in character and execution. However, name any major policy initiative that he's undertaken that is bad for the "country". As a whole.
Easy: what passes for diplomacy has been so awful that nobody wants to buy weapons from us anymore, nor do they value our treaty commitments. Oh the irony of proposing to meet in Budapest.
>Trump isn't perfect. Far from it. He's got major flaws, both in character and execution. However, name any major policy initiative that he's undertaken that is bad for the "country". As a whole.
They're usually not that bad for his billionaire grifter buddies, I'll give you that.
I would say normalizing armed law enforcement wearing masks and refusing to provide any ID is utterly bad for the COUNTRY.
Or maybe it's only bad for the people who get assaulted or shot by them and have no way of recourse. Let's hope that's not you, eh?
Personally directing the Attorney General to prosecute his political enemies and then firing prosecutors until he finds one who will agree to do it. Basically what Nixon was to be impeached for now happening on a weekly basis.
He posted on Truth Social explicitly directing Pam Bondi to prosecute Bolton, James, and Comey. Then the DOJ charged them with crimes.
In the James case, Kristin Bird and Elizabeth Yusi (prosecutors in EDVA) were both fired for refusing to bring charges, only to be replaced by Trump's personal attorney Lindsey Halligan (who is not even a prosecutor).
In the Comey case, again they fired Erik Siebert, also from EDVA, because he wouldn't prosecute. They put Trump's personal attorney on instead and she immediately gave the prosecution a greenlight against a tight statute of limitations deadline.
Just watch: today there was a report that prosecutors in Maryland are hesitant to bring charges against Adam Schiff. My guess is whoever is gumming up the works there will be fired and replaced by another Halligan.
You may not notice it yet, but he has ruined the reputation of your country. People consider it insane to travel there now for vacations. We are actively avoiding American garbage. We are migrating away from American clouds.
He is focussed on short term bullshit while what matters on the world stage is soft power. America was considered trustworthy, the defacto leader of the world.
Now you're just a bully, an impotent one at that. You are no longer taken seriously.
You will notice the effects eventually, possibly after Trump is already rotting in his grave.
That’s all bullshit and you know it. And likely won’t admit it.
WE have been the money pit for the entire world for a very long time. Likely too long. People and countries are having a fit because the money flow seems to be slowing if not stopping altogether.
What matters on any stage is … power. Pure, unadulterated power. Soft power is for pansies. And we know how to show and use our power. Just one…one of our carrier fleets packs more power than entire countries.
FAFO - Fuck around and find out.
Edit: The cartels in the south are starting to find out. We can shut down that entire corridor in the blink of an eye, if we wanted to. And we may be there now.
Do you have a complete list because thats literally what trump is doing. In no way shape or form is any past president comparable to the depravity and recklessness of trump its not even close. If you say its close you are so misinformed or ignorant or willfully evil. Seriously crypto scams, open bribery from kushner and the saudis, the Qatar jet, the gold card visas for the cartel family... the list of insane actions goes on and on and its so depressing to see anyone fall for it or not be seething in rage because this country will not make it if this family and the people driving project 2025 are not brought to justice
Trump is definitely the most egregious by a very wide margin, but the pardon power has been abused by every President in my lifetime. It's a truly insane feature of our constitution that needs to be changed.
Well, no, you can clearly be more banana republic than that:
* Using the justice system to corruptly punish the opposition and prevent them from competing in elections,
* Using the security/military/law enforcement establishment to simply kill the opposition,
* Using the regulatory bureaucracy, and/or the security/military/law enforcement establish, to coerce media into friendly, or at least out of critical, coverage,
* Using the regulatory bureaucracy, and/or the security/military/law enforcement establish to reward people providing personal material benefit to the leader, or to punish those not doing so,
* Using the pardon power to assure that crimes committed in the course of doing any of the preceding items are unprosecutable
Pardoning family members, by itself (provided that the standards applied are different than those that would be applied to non-family members), is certainly corrupt as a form of nepotism, but hardly the outer limit of banana republic behavior.
> IMO a country's leader pardoning his own family members is about as banana republic as it gets.
That is until you see what's currently happening, the President personally directing the DOJ to arrest his political enemies, of which Biden and his family are considered to be primary antagonists (remember they labelled them the "Biden crime family" and chanted "lock them up"). That is the most banana republic as it gets, so how is preemptively defending against that behavior out of bounds?
The prosecution of Hunter for being a user of controlled substances while in possession or acquiring a weapon was pretty clear cut IMO and been used against many more than Hunter as an easy way to put away drug users for a long time. He likely was pardoned in part because Hunter had the resources to actually get that law overturned, signaled intent to do so, and the establishment can't compromise their precious drug laws being found unconstitutional.
I remain amazed at how, again and again, no matter how specific and unique an abuse by the Trump administration is, it is always, invariably, Really Joe Biden's Fault. Like, the frame has been adopted by the MAGA base, but also the cranky left. The media does it too. Here on HN bothsidesism is a shibboleth that denotes "I'm a Serious Commenter and not a Partisan Hack".
But it leads to ridiculous whoppers like this, and ends up in practice excusing what amounts to the most corrupt regime in this country in over a century, if not ever.
No, this is just bad, on its own, absent any discussion about what someone else did. There was no equivalent pardon of a perpetrator of an impactful crime in a previous administration I can think of. I'm genuinely curious what you think you're citing?
When Obama really increased the number of pardons, a lot of contemporary opinion writers said stuff along the lines of "this is a dangerous precedent and we're lucky that the pardons are fairly popular and sane." Now we're seeing unpopular, not sane pardons.
When democratic norms erode like pardons becoming more acceptable, it's like laying tinder and kindling for a fire. You still need a fire; a bad actor who is willing to light the material on fire. That bad actor is Trump. But the warnings from abusing these limitations from previous administrations was exactly for this moment. Nobody is saying Trump isn't the bad one, he is. But the conditions were laid for him. Now we need to survive him.
When we look back at Roman Senators and Emperors, it's often hard as modern people to point to one, single bad figure because we don't have a lot of contemporary thought or reading from the time. But when we look back we can see the seeds of "decline" in eras rather than single figures.
I don't buy it. A president that will literally direct his AG in public to prosecute his political enemies is simply not bound by norms, period. To pretend that he'd never have pardoned Zhao but for Obama's "increased number of pardons" is, to be blunt, ridiculous on its face.
And in context, you're doing exactly what I mocked above, tut tutting about civil behavior and norms and The Discourse while the system burns down around you.
But don't worry! You can always take solace in the fact that it was Really Barack Hussein Obama's Fault.
>But it leads to ridiculous whoppers like this, and ends up in practice excusing what amounts to the most corrupt regime in this country in over a century, if not ever.
Amen. Preach it, brother!
>No, this is just bad, on its own, absent any discussion about what someone else did. There was no equivalent pardon of a perpetrator of an impactful crime in a previous administration I can think of. I'm genuinely curious what you think you're citing?
I don't know what the poster was referring to, but I AM mad at Biden for pardoning his family. It's a molehill of an issue compared to the current administration though.
> Here on HN bothsidesism is a shibboleth that denotes "I'm a Serious Commenter and not a Partisan Hack".
HN users don't necessarily do that because they want to. They might do it as a pre-emptive defense mechanism against the brigades of de-facto censors that roam the site.
Moderation via populism is an anti-feature on its face, but Hacker News has the worst possible version of that sort of feature by making downvoted/flagged comments completely hidden unless you are logged in and showdead.
It's a pretty horrendous system if you're interested in good faith and honest debate.
The word "nothing" is completely inappropriate in describing Watergate and Iran-Contra, among the worst political scandals in American history, both involving gross abuse of executive power.
I certainly don't see how the pardon of Changpeng Zhao is worse than the pardon of President Richard Nixon or Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Crimes committed in office by the highest officials in the US government are a whole different level than crimes committed by some corporate CEO.
Ford at least had the misguided excuse of wanting to put the scandal behind and focus on the future.
Trump's pardons include hundreds of literal insurrectionists, promises to pardon in exchange for not testifying against him (witness tampering), and other blatant corruption. He fired the head of the OPA and installed a political hack to speedrun awful pardon choices and made a mockery of the process in a far more corrupt and damaging manner than anyone before him, and it's not even close.
The Hunter Biden pardon was necessary because it was clear that despite his admission of guilt, he was not going to receive a fair punishment. The Republican party leadership was very open in expressing their intentions for him, and had _already_ circumvented the judicial system to give him cruel and unusual punishment.
Would be nice if Trump only pardoned people who the incoming administration explicitly said they would target, after years of constant harassment and misinformation.
I think I would support those pardons even though I think Trump and his family and his cronies are acting the way really bad people act.
Taking the above scenario as license to sell pardons for person gain is such a stretch it looks like bad faith to me.
IDK, I think Carter's pardon of draft dodgers was a pretty good use of the pardon power.
The problem seems to be that we have unjust laws and punishments. We should have some way to apply mercy in that case. For example, I (hope to) see a future where people jailed for MJ related crimes get a mass pardon.
Chelsea Manning. Prosecuting her and other whistleblowers instead of the officials they blew the whistle on was a mockery of justice. Though that wasn't the stated reason for the commutation, it was long overdue.
I mean there are lots of people arrested on effectively political charges, and it's good to be able to reflect on it years later and get them out of jail. I'm not convinced Changpeng Zhao's charges would have ever been brought against him if the Biden admin didn't go so hard against crypto, I'm happy to see him pardoned. Hopefully next Trump can get whistle blowers like John Kiriachou
No, government is the greatest threat to liberty. If the guy in charge of prosecuting feels the need to not just not prosecute, but actively protect someone from the state, then we really really don’t want (who? his unelected subordinates?) prosecuting people. It’s supposed to be an “err on the side of” failing to prosecute criminals. The whole point is yes… sometimes we want criminals to get away with crime, because it’s better than the alternatives.
What is the alternative? One of them is the public vote for a leader, the state destroys that leader (or his allies, etc) and then what? Do we think the public just says “Oh, well, I guess we didn’t pick the right guy?”
> pardon power has been so abused these past few administrations that it's clear there should be constitutional changes in the pardon power, either congressional review, or strip it altogether
Strip it. I also started on the line of Congressional review (or pardons only activating on the consent of the Senate). But I concluded the entire power is out of place.
If the courts overreach, address it through legislation. Congress can annul sentences through law, no special pardon power needed. If a law is unfair or being applied unfairly, moreover, it should be fixed comprehensively.
There isn’t a place for one-man pardons in a republic. Even the imperium-obsessed Romans didn’t give their dictators, much less consuls, automatic pardon power. Caesar had to get special legislation to overrule the law.
Biden abused pardon power. So has Trump. Both parties have good reason for passing an amendment through the Congress. This is probably in my top 3 Constitutional amendment we need in our time. (Multi-member Congressional seats, popular election of the President and changing “the executive Power shall be vested in a President” to “the President shall execute the laws of the United States.”)
It's bizarre to me, an Australian, how the pardon power is used in the US. Our federal, state and territory executive governments all have a pardon power, inherited from English law, that is, formally, unlimited (like the US federally and indeed it's less restrictive than many US states for state crimes).
It is a power used very sparingly, even though legally it is unlimited - the state of New South Wales is, as far as I know, the only one which publishes details about uses of the pardon power; in an average year there are 0 successful pardon/commutation applicants, and it's an exceptionally merciful year if they grant 2 or more. Other states and the federal government may or may not be a bit more generous, but we're talking very small numbers. Most pardons are for reasons of unsafe convictions where for whatever reason no remaining avenues of appeal are available (rare, these days, because each state has introduced laws to enable post-conviction reviews).
Historically, particularly in the 19th century convict era, the pardon power was much more important, and was indeed abused for political reasons on a number of occasions, but it seems that for the most part it quietly exists in the background and only gets significant public attention once every blue moon for a high-profile murder case or similar.
What explains the difference? Is it the requirement for sign-off by the King's viceroys that prevents abuse? Collective Cabinet governance that is accountable to Parliament? Maybe our political culture means politicians' friends tend to end up in prison less often and thus there's less opportunity for the abuse of pardons specifically? It's not particularly clear to me - if anyone's got some good comparative studies send me links!
If one leaves all integrity and morals the president of the richest country in the world can really amass a ton of wealth. I actually suspect that the shares the “US” government s getting from intel and other companies actually goes to trump somehow. Everything is up for sale with this administration. Just sad, the high moral ground the country occupied is just wiped out and it’s now just like any other corrupt Asian country
> and it’s now just like any other corrupt Asian country
Seems like we are getting the worst aspects of countries like China (anti-democratic 1 party rule, state directed oligarchy, targeting of ethnic minority groups) with none of the best aspects of China: strong investment in education, research, and modern infrastructure like high speed trains and zero carbon electricity production.
Maybe mimicking authoritarianism isn't the answer to our problems.
This particular market is too illiquid to mean anything.
Right now, there is only about $500 in liquidity if you wanted to buy in at the 20% ask with a market order. After that the next sell limit order it as 96%.
If your definition of “making money” is turning bitcoins into USD at bitcoins low point, and then paying that back to them in 2 years, alright.
You can have whatever opinion you want about the bankruptcy process, but FTX was most certainly insolvent, due to fraud, and at that point whatever happened after the recovery to make people as whole as possible (which for many was not even close) really shouldn’t get credited to SBF.
Call me crazy, but if my bank tells me that my deposits are in safe assets like treasuries, but then the CEO takes the money to Vegas and puts it all on red, even if the CEO wins that bet, I'm very ok with that CEO going to jail.
Of course, if the bank is upfront that they take customer deposits to Vegas, then its fine.
Or if they took my deposit and commingled it with company funds and bought some illiquid luxury real estate in the Bahamas for their staff to live in totalling $240m. If they’re upfront about that, probably nobody deposits with them.
Not necessarily. I think the intention was to drive up the value of FTX assets by investing in companies and coins that increased said value of the FTX platform. The value of held FTT was dependent on the value of FTX.
No chance SBF ever goes out (until he's done with his sentence).
Two huge factors against him:
* Most people don't even know who CZ is, so this is meh-tier. People know SBF and find him repulsive, literally. Whoever puts SBF out of jail will face a massive PR backslash, he's not important enough to be worth that.
* SBF stole from the rich, the only real crime in the US.
Very few times you see someone who is equally hated by: the law, the public and the rich. He's screwed, lol.
SBF/FTX was also a massive donor (using customer money) to Republicans. They routed that money through Ryan Salame, I guess to avoid appearing to be as unprincipled as they actually were.
The common theme to the donations ("payoff" or "bribe" might be more accurate), whether to D or R was to weaken any push for crypto regulations.
I'll bet he's kicking himself now... he made the wrong bet associating himself with Democrats, who let justice take its course despite the donations, when these days Trump will just take a payoff and issue a pardon.
He's already out. Livestreaming his stock trades on X everyday. Probably has less interest in being an officer. He can still short pharma companies freely now.
Regarding your first point - how about George Santos? I suspect Santos was more well known than any of the crypto-scammers, was clearly guilty, was derided by both ends if the political spectrum - yet Trump commuted him.
Commute != pardon. Santos is still convicted and guilty of all of those charges. He just doesn't have to serve the rest of the sentence. I'm not sure if those were felony charges, but if they were and he's in a state that doesn't allow felons to vote...
A pardon makes it all go away. None of the baggage of convictions follow. Finding a job or a place to live is something they can do, as well as voting again.
SBF was/is left (and I suppose mostly signaled rich in that camp), Ulbricht libertarian, but they were caught and therefore had to serve time in jail regardless. That is how our system works. SBF specialized in large scale grifting (like Madoff), Ulbricht in providing an anonymous platform for trafficking. They're competitors of Trump, but given their experience, intelligence, and disadvantage (jail time) if bend loyal they're an asset.
It isn't about any of these people though. Trump is about only one thing: himself (a trade he shares with someone like KJU of North Korea). Specifically, as a narcissist, Trump is all about his image: business and might makes right, no matter the rules. Trump therefore hates the left, truth, honesty, ethics, empowering the weak and minorities, et cetera. Most importantly, he is signaling here: 'if you do business with me, we do the criminal path, and you get caught then I have the power to pardon your sentence.'
Whether Trump is currently a criminal or not, he was and is a convicted felon.
The above is also why I very much suspect Ghislaine Maxwell has dirt on Trump.
> Zhao, in November 2023, pleaded guilty in Seattle federal court and agreed to step down as Binance CEO as part of a $4.3 billion settlement by the company with the Department of Justice.
Did he already pay the $4.3 billion? That's a lot of money, even for the federal government.
I understand that the commutation of George Santos means he does not have to pay the court ordered restitution to the people he defrauded.
Puts an even grosser spin on this incineration of the rule of law.
Penalties within plea deals likely have different rules but given a pardon is a higher rung of absolution I am horrified to wonder if he could clawback any personal financial penalties he has paid or even seek compensation.
That already officially happened a few months ago. In addition to stopping all cryptocurrency fraud investigations, the administration stopped prosecuting white collar crimes under the FCPA:
If you have access to people in positions of government influence, it's a good time to accept bribes from foreigners, especially via cryptocurrency. But if that is you then you probably already know that.
Maximum sentence allotted for small fries and lenience for the bigger conman who share a piece of their own pie to clean the slate. Fair game in Crookville.
I was aware of the allegations that Marc Rich's ex wife gave money to Clinton ($450k to the library) is what led Clinton to pardon, but I never really dug into it.
Per wikipedia, Clinton's defense was that it was actually a favor to Israel, given Rich helping to finance their intel services. Maybe everybody else knew this, I didn't.
> "Since Trump’s election, Binance has also been a key supporter of his family’s World Liberty Financial crypto venture, a business that has driven a huge leap in the president’s personal wealth."
CZ was pardoned for a single charge of failure to have an effective compliance program. No fraud, no victims, no criminal history. No money laundering.
CZ is the first and only known first-time offender in U.S. history to receive a prison sentence for this single, non-fraud-related charge. The judge found no evidence that he knew of any illicit transactions and that it was reasonable for him to believe there were no illicit funds on the platform.
Trump is a very twisted person, and this makes the US look bad, but the underlying crime was "compliance."
I wish you would link to text rather than video. This channel owner may be very well informed, but I don't want to subject myself to the performative yelping of some guy sitting in front of a smoke machine with mood lighting. Except where original footage is concerned, video is about the worst medium for communicating complex facts the sensory stimulation is a distraction from the content. This presenter might be a genius, but I don't want to spend the time trying to untangle the substance from his hyped-up 'coffeezilla' delivery.
I'm impressed. Leavitt managed to Blame the Biden administration, effectively asserting that Zhao's crimes were a result of the Biden administration's "war on crypto." Never mind that Zhao was engaged in criminal activity for which he was prosecuted, tried, and found guilty.
Changpeng Zhao pled guilty for violating the Bank Secrecy Act and not complying with anti-money laundering requirements.
That also happened to a lot of big banks over and over again.
Three days ago one of the biggest was found guilty for helping Sudan’s government commit genocide by providing banking services that violated American sanctions [0]. Sounds worst.
Binance is a casino for millennial and gen Z and like casinos is used by criminal to launder money.
Should Changpeng Zhao be pardoned? I don't know, I don't care he is a small fish.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but Zhao was convicted of crimes which were a direct result of his operating a crypto exchange, and not any other criminal activity. It may be possible to operate a legally-compliant crypto exchange, but I am not sure that any current exchange is fully compliant with US law. If we agree on these facts, and think that the 'war on drugs' is what has resulted in 'drug possession' and 'drug trafficking' convictions, then it seems reasonable to say that Zhao was convicted as the result of a 'war on crypto'.
I am actually not sure that either the 'war on drugs' or a 'war on crypto' is a bad idea, but they do seem analogous.
He made a lot of money from the other criminal activity. That's what money laundering is: just because you're not directly trafficking children, for example, doesn't mean you have clean hands when you make significant profits from the people who are.
What you're describing is (in my view) the best casus belli for both the 'war on drugs' and a 'war on crypto', but a moral case does not make a criminal case (on its own).
I don't even necessarily think a 'war on crypto' is needed. The problem is that crypto seems to function as a get out of jail free card for very straightforward financial crimes: you just do the financial crime, but apply a thin veneer of 'but with crypto' and the legal system is utterly bamboozled.
Crypto's problem is that when the law is updated to deal with these stunts, it's suddenly just a crappy version of the existing financial system.
I completely agree that crypto is being used as an end-run (if you'll pardon the expression) around the existing financial oligopoly, whose regulatory burden is paid for by the monopoly rents extracted by the government-endorsed players. The problem is that criminal laws aren't being maximally applied against banks, so instances like this do give the appearance of 'unfairness'.
Except, correct me if this is wrong, but he wasn't even convicted of money laundering, let alone the underlying crimes you suggest he was launder the proceeds of. It was simply for failing to register / setup an appropriate AML system. Whether any ML occurred, by whom, and in relation to what... are outstanding questions. If he had done all that and all they got him on was a 4-month technicality, that tends to suggest he was probably innocent (or the investigation was inept).
I'm not sure you understand the point. It isn't that CZ himself was specifically putting forth the effort to launder money. It isn't that he was specifically doing things to try and make it easier. The point is that he had a legal duty to actively attempt to prevent money laundering. Binance was legally required to do this to operate in the US, and did not. The court case produced messages from the Chief Compliance Officer pointing out a myriad of ways in which they were not complying with various laws of this nature and they were ignored.
The BSA is not a technicality and trying to reframe it as one is wild. It is to make sure that people that have a financial incentive to turn a blind eye to money laundering don't turn a blind eye to it. You don't need to be directly involved in the money laundering to be incentivized to let it happen.
The CEOs of Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, etc. have not been indicted for anything. Those exchanges have had some compliance issues but they were minor compared to Binance, FTX, BitMEX, etc.
There's a potential implication that the president wasn't the one making the decisions and they were political favors doled out by unnamed and unaccountable staff. If the president felt strongly about that perception he could've signed them himself. But he seemingly didn't.
The controversy with Biden is that the autopen was allegedly used without the President's knowledge or directive. Nobody has a problem with POTUS's signature getting on a piece of paper without his hand actually holding the pen; that's not the point here.
"Allegedly" is the key word here. Alleged by people who allege a whole lot of untrue things and don't seem to have any evidence for this particular thing.
There's a conspiracy theory that Biden wasn't competent enough to sign stuff, at least for some period at the end of his term, with the implication being that none of those presidential acts are valid. Anybody who believes this is mired in an impenetrable misinformation bubble and should be dismissed out of hand.
Ah yes. Pardoning folks who were imprisoned for possession of marijuana is exactly the same--worse even, because "autopen"--as pardoning folks who were imprisoned for insurrection / political violence in support of the guy doing the pardoning. Very smart take.
18 were charged with seditious conspiracy. Over 500 were charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement officers. And many more were still awaiting trial, including Daniel Ball, who was accused of throwing explosives at police officers, were also pardoned by Trump. Many of these pardoned individuals have gone on to commit further felonies, including Daniel Ball, who was just arrested for plotting to murder Hakeem Jeffries.
But again, you seem to be missing the point: a president pardoning people who support him is very different than pardoning ordinary people who were imprisoned for crimes that are no longer crimes.
Biden issued several blanket pardons for any crimes that people may have committed for a period of a decade. That doesn't strike me as particularly discerning.
I'm not sure it will be a problem for Changpeng Zhao but let's say I was convicted of a felony in the US, served time in prison and then was pardoned by the president. What would my employment prospects be in comparison to someone who didn't receive a pardon?
Likely bad because the conviction will still show up in background checks. (A pardon doesn't entail expungement.) As you said, this won't be an issue for CZ because he's not going to be looking for the kinds of positions where HR screens the resumes
It's incredible that American corruption can happen out in the open like this. And this isn't a uniquely Trump phenomena. Political pardons are an amazing thing, and they have been used by presidents for a long time now with extremely little scrutiny and no possibility for repercussions. The executive being able to overrule the judiciary is an absolutely jaw-dropping American institution. So much for checks and balances.
> The executive being able to overrule the judiciary is an absolutely jaw-dropping American institution.
No, its not, pardon and the closely linked power of clemency are common powers in representative democracies, often situated with the chief of state or the head of government (in the US, and other Presidential systems, the President is both), or sometimes the cabinet instead of the head of government in a parliamentary or semi-parliamentary system (in some cases, one or the other is assigned by law to a subordinate bureaucracy rather than being HoS/cabinet discretion, as is the case with pardon but not clemency in Canada.) It is generally more used in the US than other Western states, in part because the US has a much harsher criminal justice system with much longer sentences and much weaker provisions for relief other than executive pardon than other systems, but the power itself is common. [0]
The way it is used under Trump is wildly abnormal (for the US or the other representative democracies), though.
The president just prior to Trump pardoned his own son for crimes, and pre-emptively pardoned various other family members and political allies for any possible crimes before they could be prosecuted. Again, this is not new, this is ongoing open-air corruption, and Trump's escalation is the result of everyone being OK with it before now.
The rise of more grass-roots news sources (podcasts, memes, social media) also leads to tons of conspiracy theories, and mistrust that builds this idea of corruption being ubiquitous, just not out in the open. And yes, that happens, but this atmosphere magnifies it 10x.
So when someone like Trump does it out in the open, people are more likely to excuse it because "everybody is already doing it, at least this is out in the open".
I mean the pardon was the check and balance on the judiciary. However it's been turned into a tool for personal gain than a saving grace for mistakes of the federal crimes convictions. Both parties have pushed for this monarchic power to be expanded over time. I think it has a place but much like a lot of the federal government it needs a complete overhaul. The checks and balances system works alright but when a unitary party controls every branch there is no one to check that power.
That was incredibly corrupt and many Democrats in fact "dropped [their] jaws." And it's not the only instance of political corruption like this, either (Bill Clinton notoriously did something similar). Neither of these cases retroactively justify Trump pardoning anyone who sends him a few million dollars.
If the goal of the pardon was to handle a corrupt Judicial branch, then a better answer would have been for the Executive branch to nominate someone for a pardon to the Legislative and require a 2/3 majority of the Legislative to approve.
But something like that would fly in the face of the "Unitary Executive" insanity and would (I suspect) require a constitutional amendment, which is no longer remotely feasible.
A first comment said "without saying why". The second comment just says that this is blatantly not true, and that the rationale presented has been since confirmed as a very accurate prediction.
Sorry, is this person comparing the rights and immunities of a head of a sovereign nation to those of a CEO of a company? I don't think France, as a sovereign country, is completely bound by US law whereas binance, when it is operating in US jurisdiction is. I'm not totally familiar with US finance law but I'm pretty sure a more fair comparison would be to other banks where KYC requirements and anti money laundering rules can be strict. From what I read about the prosecution, Binance ignored many warning signs from their own executives about the possibility and the lack of controls within their platform to comply with the law.
It's not much of an argument... he wasn't being held responsible for the actions of a few binance users, we was being held responsible for his own failure to implement compliance processes required by law.
The laws exist to restrict funding for countries under sanction, drug operations, terrorist organizations, etc.
We can argue about whether these laws are a good idea (either in general or in specific details), but you need to change the law, not just now follow it.
This is a terrible precedent... unless you're a con man, that is. (Balaji Srinivasan isn't stupid. I would guess he understands how real what he's arguing here is.)
The prosecution was not political lol, he went out of his way to support money laundering on the Binance platform. The reason he complied with the prosecution and pled guilty rather than try to fight it out in court was that they were able to produce a ton of evidence that he deliberately ignored regulators and regulations designed to prevent money laundering in order to make money off sanctioned groups and criminal organizations using the exchange as a way to circumvent KYC/AML laws. Please don't take what Balaji says about companies he invested in at face value.
The justifications for why the pardon is okay are ridiculously flimsy and I assumed that it was because they weren't really trying, but bewilderingly it does actually appear to have convinced some credulous people on Hacker News, so I suppose enough consent was manufactured that people think going out of your way to let money launderers use your platform is not a big deal? Maybe it's because people don't understand that typically the reason people launder money is because they committed major crimes to get that money and have no way to actually use it without getting caught.
For example if your crypto is the proceeds of ransomware, you're going to have a hard time cashing out without using something like Monero (which effectively has no offramps) without going through an exchange that knows perfectly well that you're trying to touch tainted goods. Exchanges like Binance that just don't bother to check who their customers are when they withdraw cash for such assets are just as critical to the ransomware plague as any security bug or social engineering issue. It's one of the reasons that pre-crypto, even though ransomware was technically feasible, it was never able to grow into a large-scale operation--no offramps. But hey maybe the official stance of CZ supporters is now that ransomware is good, actually, and if you don't like it it's because you have partisan bias (???)
Those prosecutors were deeply embarrassed by missing FTX at the time, so they then had the SEC and IRS harass and threaten innocent US citizens in Japan and the US as they fished for charges merely because they happened to once work for or hung out with CZ or employees at Binance.
CZ is the first and only known first-time offender in U.S. history to receive a prison sentence for this single, non-fraud-related charge of improper platform AML KYC implementation. Big banks routinely pay a fine for this, and never face imprisonment. The judge found no evidence that he knew of any illicit transactions and that it was reasonable for him to believe there were no illicit funds on the platform. Credit where it's due, they somehow pulled off a 4 month sentence for this unprecedented charge. And now it's all for naught.
No. He had the same financial incentives to not want to have to worry about the BSA and dealing with AML etc. as CZ.
This is not a company vs. company sort of issue, this is a "I want to avoid regulations that would cost me money as a fundamental aspect of my industry " issue.
If Coinbase thought they could legally not worry about all of this, do you think they would want to deal with it?
The sheer quantity of money used in cryptocurrency for money laundering and activity where traditional payment processors will not accept payments (largely illegal, e.g. drugs, counterfeit goods) also means that the keeping the ecosystem healthy involves having ways for this money to flow.
No. The entire crypto ecosystem requires a steady infusion of capital and an absence of regulations to prosper, since their primary use case outside of speculation is for handling money by people who can't get past normal KYC/AML checks. If those people no longer have anywhere to on/off ramp into the crypto ecosystem, most of its "legitimate" (in the sense of actually getting real value out of it rather than just speculating) use goes away.
I don't think you know what you're talking about. Surely everyone on the Coinbase platform is vetted seeing as they're a publicly traded company. Presumably the vast majority of Binance users are not in fact money launderers.
"People who don't want KYC/AML checks" are not necessarily money launderers, and there are still plenty of people who just want to speculate. But money launderers are the people who need to send vast amounts of money through the crypto ecosystem and represented a very significant fraction of the assets managed by Binance (not that this actually affects whether what they were doing was illegal or not, BTW). Maybe you should read the indictment to find out what was actually going on, instead of making claims based on what seems reasonable to you!
(Frankly, the idea that being convicted for making the conscious decision to go out of your way to circumvent KYC/AML laws is somehow the result of partisan bias is ridiculous in itself, so none of this [or how Balaji claims to feel about the matter] is even really relevant).
I’m sure it’s pure coincidence that the Trump family made millions from Binance, CZ, and donations from Trevor Milton and Paul Walczak right before those pardons.
Most corrupt president in living memory (ever?) pardons convicted corrupt businessman, while directly profiting from said corrupt businessman's industry
Years ago people would have thought you were talking about the DRC, Haiti or Uzbekistan. Today's it's the USA.
I agree this isn't a very satisfying answer, but realistically how else do you expect Presidential pardons to go? Trump has pardoned over 1000 people and Joe Biden has pardoned over 4000. Do we expect them to know the intricate details of every single case?
And I mean, wasn't the last Administration effectively Autopen? Yes, the President receives recommendations and tries to make the best judgement on those.
I wonder if civil forfeiture will work against Trump once he's out of office. Trump's net worth before becoming President was under US$1 billion. Now it's over 6 billion. A civil claim for the difference based on the Emoluments Acts.
"The Foreign Emoluments Clause bars the president and other federal officials from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State” without the consent of Congress. It reflects the framers’ desire to prevent federal officials from succumbing to foreign influence.
The Domestic Emoluments Clause provides for the president to receive a fixed salary and bars him from receiving “any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.” It was designed to insulate the president against undo pressure from Congress or any individual state."
Rule of law? Anymore? No president has ever been punished in any meaningful capacity in our entire history. Washington used loopholes to avoid setting his slaves free[1] for christ sake.
What about Nixon’s impeachment and resignation? What about Trump being a convicted felon 5 ways to Sunday (yes they overturned this since he won again, but I doubt it would have gone this direction if he’d lost.)
No, this is pretty squarely outside the scope, and only specific amounts received from in-scope parties (i.e. governments) would be subject. And there's a standing issue. Basically the emoluments clause doesn't have real teeth for most purposes, even where it applies.
It should apply there, though the first Trump admin argued a very narrow interpretation that mostly exempts the president in the first term, at the end of which the case was declared moot (leaving us in suspense about what SCOTUS would have said). Great commentary on emoluments and needed reforms in light of this here: https://www.execfunctions.org/p/trump-20-and-the-foreign-emo...
Trump is a corrupt idiot and a terrible president, but the White House controversy is dumb too. I'm sure the addition will be ugly like everything Trump builds, but that building is not exactly a historic artifact that mustn't be mutated. It's been gutted more than once.
Agreed. They saw how successful the silly rose garden thing was at diverting attention away from serious issues (Epstein files) and will happily keep pulling that lever until it stops working.
Bit like suggesting the controversy over bombing boats in the Caribbean is dumb because the U.S. has bombed ships before. The way it's happening is completely unprecedented and absurd.
My main issue is how Trump said one thing and did another:
> “It won’t interfere with the current building,” Trump said on July 31. “It’ll be near it, but not touching it, and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.” - NBC
It seems probable he ignored any number of laws about how he did it, too.
I suspect Trump will leave office in a box, not on his feet. Such a civil claim would then have to be against his estate, which probably complicates things.
Yes, and everybody who enriches themselves using their political positions. These jobs are as public servants. They're supposed to be working for the people. That's why the emoluments clause is there.
Interestingly I have never seen someone with a Pelosi hat, shirt, or mural painted on the side of their RV.
I don't think there would be much outcry from either side if Pelosi, along with others who did the same things, were to be blocked by new legislation or prosecuted for breaking existing law.
Although the Domestic Emoluments Clause currently applies specifically to the President, so we would likely need new legislation to generally prevent things like congressional insider trading.
It really does seem like folks on the right assume that people who vote Democrat have a lot more love for Democrats than we actually do. The whole Bill Clinton in the Epstein files thing is another example—like yeah man let him hang.
There's very little loyalty, there's some truth to the party being a bunch of minorities nervously huddled around the DNC for warmth.
It's also a rhetorical trick. The moment you admit "Yes, Bill Clinton should go to jail if he's on the list," they will start to pester you, "You admitted Clinton should also go to jail, so why are you only protesting Trump? You hypocrite!"
I think it's best not to engage. These people aren't here for logical arguments, and they won't be persuaded by logic.
Every time someone digs into this, it turns out Pelosi’s large wealth is much more tied to buying SF real estate long before the tech boom sent the real estate prices soaring. It doesn’t take insider trading for someone to have gotten rich in the SF real estate market. Plenty of people became millionaires just by owning a condo they bought in the 1970’s. It is no surprise that someone whose career has been real estate investing in SF since the 1960’s made some money…
> ...it’s a tool for him and his cronies to make dodgy money?
It's a vehicle to sell "access". The greed is only half of it.
The worst part is that they're selling access to foreign interests who pay them off. These people can't exactly show up with bags of gold to bribe King Sh*t Gibbon (yet), crypto is the next best thing.
in this particular case maybe. but i don't think he's pardoning only crypto people. as long as criminals can offer sth useful to him, they will get above the law.
Moronic opinions are still moronic and should be called out as such. Making America more crypto friendly by pardoning fraudsters is an objectively stupid take.
This makes me hate cryptocurrency more and make me support candidates that want feel the same, that we should be prosecuting cryptocurrency fraud. How is that making it more friendly?
I think he made public mention of "donating to the wrong guy" to get one side to like him more. IIRC, he donated similar or more to the "other" side, but just didn't make a big deal of it publicly.
Unpopular opinion: America needs/ed this. They nerve truly believed that a Ceaușescu, Hitler, Stalin, Mao were possible in the US. Maybe one or two generations will suffer, but this is a required lesson, for the future maturity of the nation, long term. Assuming they come out in one piece at the other end, of course.
Accelerationism is to a simulacrum as the thing being accelerated (society) is to the simulation thereof (our idea of society).
Accererationism is what accelerationism does. It disrupts the status quo, for good/bad/otherwise, and largely independently of our personal stance on the goodness, badness, and/or desirability of said disruption.
The current volatility in the market is one aspect of accelerationism, and it seems to be working, in that the markets are still open for trading; many are making out like bandits. Perhaps that volatility as a market opportunity is the point.
Whether or not banditry is occurring is left as an exercise to the reader.
You believe the US on the path to killing tens of millions of its own citizens for the sake of some ideology like Mao, Stalin, and Hitler because a non-violent white collar criminal was given a shortened sentence? Interesting.
"President Trump has pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of the crypto exchange Binance, following months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family’s own crypto company."
I agree with you. The system is ridiculous, it gives the voter two options, and that's all. People point out that monopolies are bad, but a duopoly is very far from being a solution for it. Americans (and many other countries in the world) need better representation.
I feel there is some perversion happened - the American culture in particular has been strong on a hero cutting through and going across the laws and rules toward his goals (and the recent years super-hero craze is an epitome of it). And i feel that in some perverse way Trump got tuned into such a hero storyline and naturally abusing it to no end for his own gain.
CZ was not convicted of fraud or even money laundering. There's a reason the sentence was only 4 months. His charge was the first ever prosecution of a platform/bank poorly implementing KYC and not doing enough surveillance of its users to comply with the letter of AML regulations. The case relied on the theoretical possibility of US citizen users placing trades that are matched by people from sanctioned countries - it did not even find cases of such trades. Big banks routinely pay fines for this, and never face imprisonment.
Regardless of what you think of the circumstances of the pardon, the prosecution was not related to fraud and was an unusual case by a DOJ that was recently embarrassed by FTX and was arguably symbolic in intent.
He was convicted for allowing US citizens to sign up and place trades that could theoretically be matched by people from sanctioned countries. Technically an incredibly bad service for American people who must be protected from such liberties.
Serious question - it seems that many of this Administrations activities are illegal in some way or the other. I know that government officials are shielded from a lot of actions so they can not be prosecuted.
What actions that have been taken could actually be prosecuted? For example, I would have to assume that the ballroom demolition and build-out is illegal, there were $0 appropriated from Congress for this, and it doesn't seem like direct donations would be legal either. They are donations to the government and Congress has to appropriate that money too.
NOTHING is going to happen while the Republicans control congress, period. What could be done when the next administration comes in? Not just about the ballroom, but the various other things like this pardon. What of these actions are prosecutable?
> it seems that many of this Administrations activities are illegal
Many are. This one is not. The President has sweeping pardon powers.
The solution is to strike the final phrase in Article 2, Section 2, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution: “and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” [1].
There isn’t a place for one-man pardons in a republic. If the courts overreach, address it through legislation. (Even the imperium-obsessed Romans didn’t give their dictators, much less consuls, automatic pardon power. Caesar had to get special legislation to overrule the law.)
With Presidents of both parties having so recently abused pardons, we may be in a place where a wave could pass a Constitutional amendment at the federal level, allowing it to be punted to the states.
It seems like whatever party gets into power, suddenly doesn't want to change the system they inherited. I remember Trudeau talking about eliminating first past the post in Canadian elections. But once he got into power he forgot about it.
We need a way to vote for popular ideas via referendum at the federal level. That might get it through.
> seems like whatever party gets into power, suddenly doesn't want to change the system
“The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution” [1].
No President. No courts. Partisanship may work to our advantage in a divided government. What you would need, however, to reach two thirds is some members of the President’s party signing on. That could happen if the President is taking a dump in the polls, and the opposition looks likely (but isn’t yet assured) to gain the Presidency next term.
> We need a way to vote for popular ideas via referendum at the federal level
We need a plebiscite institution. But that can be done at state level for Constitutonal amendment approval. What we don’t want is direct democracy proposing amendments. California is a modern example of why republics are more stable than pure democracies, for anyone who forgot about Athens.
> What we don’t want is direct democracy proposing amendments.
I think the opposite. That is exactly what we need. A lot of the problem we have come from the fact that the constitution speaks almost entirely in terms of what various government bodies do and provides no way for the people to directly override government actions they disagree with. This has led us to our current situation which is based on politicians exploiting loopholes (e.g., gerrymandering, stacking various judicial/administrative posts, manipulating voting laws, etc.) in order to preserve their position against potential electoral response.
In some cases these problems have been overcome or mitigated at the state level. . . via ballot measures. In California, for instance.
> California is a modern example of why republics are more stable than pure democracies, for anyone who forgot about Athens.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but from where I'm standing California looks a lot more sane and stable than the US as a whole.
>California is a modern example of why republics are more stable than pure democracies
California is one state among 50. People using it as an example of some sort of government being bad are objectively in bad faith.
Please inform me how my state's citizen referendums are bad? We are about to have a vote on voter ID laws, which I do not approve of, but what's important is that the people who care are able to have their will made manifest, and it will actually go up for a vote.
Meanwhile nordic countries have vastly more direct democracies and don't have the problems you insist.
If you cannot make your argument without california, you do not have an argument, because california's shitty government predates democrat control, because it was always built as this crazy world where rich and connected people had control. California's government is built wrong, not because of democracy, but against it.
> inform me how my state's citizen referendums are bad?
Straw man. Nobody claimed this.
> nordic countries have vastly more direct democracies and don't have the problems you insist
What are you referring to? “Finland has traditionally relied on the representative form of government, with very limited experience of the deployment of the referendum in national decision-making” [1]. And while Sweden and Norway have referenda, neither has binding referenda on demand or even a requirement for referendum to amend the constitution [2].
> if you cannot make your argument without california, you do not have an argument
California features the largest and most powerful direct-democratic institution, its referenda, in America. It’s going to come up when we discuss direct democracy.
That said, I have no idea how you reach my comment and conclude that California is not only the only argument I make against direct democracy, but even essential to it.
> california's shitty government predates democrat control
Are you mixing up direct democracy and rule by Democrats, the party?
> What we don’t want is direct democracy proposing amendments. California is a modern example of why republics are more stable than pure democracies, for anyone who forgot about Athens.
speak for yourself. the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as evidenced by the current political climate in the US.
> the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as evidenced by the current political climate in the US
We're not a direct democracy. You can't find proof of a pudding in a taco bowl.
Direct democracies fail in self-reinforcing factionalism. "When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government...enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens." This has consistently happened across history, even in small direct democracies, it's one of the essential takeaways from the Athenian experiment [1].
> In history generally the only way governments are ever restructured is through civil war (or invasion)
This is total crap. Tale of Two Cities is set against the backdrop of Britain’s reforms, in contrast to the French Revolution. America has peacefully seen through Teddy Roosevelt’s trust busting, FDR’s New Deal and the Civil Rights Era, each peaceful restructurings of how our government works.
Revolutions transfer and consolidate power. Reforms broaden them. Those who miss this lesson of history and fall for glorified fictions of peasants’ revolts earn a consistent fate across millennia of human history.
Every amendment to the constitution restructured the government. We are certainly in an era of high divisiveness and a Congress that had abdicated all of its powers to the other branches so that they’re never caught actually holding a position, but the US government system has restructuring built into it
Uhm, the Republicans will change their mind quickly when the next Democrat president takes control with the expanded powers they inherited from the Trump administration (even the Supreme court doesn't like to contradict itself so quickly). I'm pretty sure...if America survives at all, we will have a constitutional convention really soon that push through changes because the current status quo has become an unstable mess.
I trust the gang of six’s use of the shadow docket is cleverly designed to make sure only a republican president meets their unitary executive theories.
Do you think they will let the Democrats take control given the risk to them if they take control?
I see Gerrymandering after the supreme court annuls the voting rights acts. And then more shennanigans for a third term.
That's why I premised this with "If America survives at all". There is definitely a possibility that the whole country just falls apart. A constitutional convention is more of a best case scenario.
Gerrymandering is only relevant for congressional house elections, it can't protect the senate and doesn't influence the presidency. Usually one party will take control of all three branches in a huge swing in power, the house is the just the first to flip usually because it is re-elected every 2 years.
> constitutional convention is more of a best case scenario
Constitutional Convention is the abort button. It means giving a group of people basically limitless power to amend our Constitution, which in practice, means to do anything to the law. If we called one today, with most states in Republican hands [1], we’d be essentially handing complete control of our government—over and above the Constitution—to the GOP.
> Constitutional Convention is the abort button. It means giving a group of people basically limitless power to amend our Constitution
No, it doesn’t.
It gives a group of people basically limitless power to propose Amendments to the Constitution.
Any Amendments so proposed still require 3/4 of states to ratify them, either by votes of their legislature or by ratification conventions called in the states (at the option of Congress when calling the Convention at the request of states.)
Unless by "group of people" you mean not just the people in the national convention, but the people in the state legislatures or conventions, as well. But, at that point, you might as well say that by including an amendment process, the Constitution itself “gives a group of people basically limitless power to amend our Constitution”.
> It gives a group of people basically limitless power to propose Amendments to the Constitution
Sorry, I actually missed this. Thank you for clarifying. (I mixed it up with the New York State process, where the Convention's proposals go straight to popular ratification.)
Between sweeping abuse of executive orders, declaring emergency powers, and the pardon system (there's a reason it used to be called the "royal pardon"), my only hope is that this will finally open the public's eyes to the MASSIVE overreach that a US president has. It needs to be heavily curtailed.
The pardon system in particular really pisses me off. The argument that one rando at the top of the pyramid somehow magically knows better than the entire judicial system is such a load of horsecrap. For any injustice that the pardon system might be able to correct, it can and does just as easily introduce more injustices.
> "Many are. This one is not. The President has sweeping pardon powers."
I understand it's debatably possible to prosecute the public corruption that motivated a pardon, even though the pardon act itself is unreviewable. I.e., the DoJ attempted a criminal bribery investigation of Bill Clinton's pardon of the donor Marc Rich,
> "Some lawyers have said that proving such a case could be exceedingly difficult because bribery cases usually required the cooperation of one of the parties. Moreover, contributions to political parties or to Mr. Clinton's library foundation are legal, and the president's pardon authority is unreviewable."
I assume similar logic might apply to World Liberty Financial and Trump's CZ pardon.
His two previous impeachments don't seem to have slowed him down, so it seems unlikely that a third would be any different. Not to mention his felony conviction.
The actual legal remedy is impeachment + conviction by the senate. That hasn't happened yet and seems unlikely unless he actually loses the support of his own party.
What about the acts of piracy (in the classic, seafaring way) and coldblooded murder of foreign citizens, carried out by US soldiers, claimed to be "drug dealers" (like that was a capital offence anyway)?
I’m curious if any of the involved personell will ever be tried for that.
The Senate runs a trial for the "high crimes" with the supreme court justice presiding. They can sentence a sitting president IIRC (or just remove him from office in which the DOJ can then prosecute normally).
> For example, I would have to assume that the ballroom demolition and build-out is illegal, there were $0 appropriated from Congress for this, and it doesn't seem like direct donations would be legal either.
Maybe it's funded by the $230M he's demanding from the Department of Justice?
Some problems: Trump has already argued that if what he does falls under official acts, it's essentially absolute immunity. Trump also tried to argue that everything he did while during his presidency, was official acts. The supreme court agreed that if something is and official act, it is protected by absolute immunity.
So my guess is that whatever Trump is doing now, he'll later argue was done as a president.
Second, should be convicted of anything, the best shot is if it's a state law violation. I'm going to bet everything I own that Trump will either pardon himself, all his cronies, and/or when the time comes, step down and have Vance pardon him. So with that all federal crimes become pardoned.
The supreme court has been very frank about this: The only, and I do mean the only mechanism is a successful impeachment. And even if Trump by some miracle is successfully impeached, we have no way of knowing how that will play out. The current supreme court majority are seemingly true believers of the unitary executive theory, so I'm guessing that with time - we'll just see Trump get more and more unchecked power. And since it's going to be done via the shadow docket, it'll likely be valid for Trump only.
I think for all intents and purposes - and I don't mean to sound defeatist when I'm saying this - people should just accept the fact that Trump will be untouchable for the rest of his life.
This is not "good guys versus bad guys", the democratic party are not going to wash all this badness away. They have been guilty of basically the same things, even if at a lesser scale. Biden tried to appropriate billions outside of congress for student loan forgiveness. Political pardons have been a factor since the beginning of the US experiment. Pelosi has been using her position for self-enrichment in the open for decades now.
We need them all gone. Anyone who makes "politician" a career is precisely the wrong type of person to be an elected official. It should never be about personal gain. Wipe them all out, implement campaign finance reform, set term limits, prioritize election security & availability...
Assuming a normal election where the pendulum swings back and a normal transfer of power (no certain things), the outgoing President could pardon everyone from his chiefs of staff and cabinet officers to low-level federal law enforcement on the way out, and then the Democrats would wring their hands and say there's nothing they can do, bar some large scale political realignment where Republicans lost control of numerous state legislatures and governorships by a large margin, as well as in Congress.
The best opportunity for a major restructuring of the legal environment would bea Constitutional Convention, but because Republicans have pursued this as a strategic goal for a while, Democrats invested all their relevant energies in being against it rather than developing any kind of strategy of their own, guaranteeing that they would get rolled if one actually took place because they went in with wholly defensive mindset and no plan to win. The fundamental flaw of the modern Democratic party is that it sees itself as a vehicle for competent management of the status quo, not a force for implementation of its voters' political aspirations. Thus is pays lip service of what its supporters want but operates to dampen and delay those same supporters whenever it gets into office in the name of continuity and responsibility. It operates on a combination of political rent seeking and fundamental conflict aversion.
This is why I find myself increasingly impatient with self-styled moderates. Wanting to talk things out and compromise is good, but it only works when there is mutuality between counterparties. When the political opposition is indifferent to questions of truthfulness or corruption, moderation degrades into appeasement; moderates will sell out their own supporters in the name of peace and quiet, while giving away the strategic initiative over and over. The previous Trump administration engineered a mob overrunning Congress in an attempt to stay in power, and only failed because the Vice President declined to aid the scheme; a mistake the current one surely doesn't intend to repeat. The incoming administration spent a great deal of energy prosecuting every footsoldier they could find who set foot inside the Capitol, but shied away from going after the people who actually organized it. The results speak for themselves.
Unpopular opinion: the case against him/binance was always that as a non us citizen, outside the us, he failed to obey US law and in a paperwork and licensing sense not a violent or otherwise serious manner.
I don’t like trump. But “CZ” basically paid a ransom to let Binance come in from the cold. Why shouldn’t he pay another to get a clean slate and maybe go back to being CEO?
If you're already rich and can stomach writing a flattering letter to Dear Leader you're leaving money on the table by not committing massive fraud right now.
I feel like democrats should make it clear that if there's still a fair election and they regain power, they'll go after both the corrupt people in this admin and entities buying favors. The current state can't be too good for the society, at least there should be a clear possible downside for being a part of it.
CZ was not involved in fraud, the case only found him guilty of not doing enough to surveil his customers to sufficiently block US citizens from using a crypto exchange that other people from sanctioned countries could use.
I have no proof of this, but I would bet that there will be some quid-pro-quo involved between Trump and the pardonee. Trump does not usually give things away, he leverages his power to get more power/money.
Fraud has been an essential component of Trump's business his whole life, he clearly doesn't see it as a crime. And the crypto guys have spent a lot of money getting into his good graces. He knows a good grift when he sees it.
Unfortunately, sometimes our judges, juries, and officers are also biased or incorrect; pardons are useful when the delivery of justice was mistaken or excessive.
> pardons are useful when the delivery of justice was mistaken or excessive
If you look at a slew of the recent pardons, the beneficiaries had already pleaded guilty. In those cases, the pardons should be ineligible. I think the most a President could do - should be - give defendants the ability to appeal the case to a new judge or jury. It's wrong and should be corrected! Added it to my todo list
Unfortunately, very often the best thing to do is just let them have their way and walk away with a lot less of a punishment than would be the case should you dare to fight them.
Financially and personally, it's what they do to pressure you into submission. It happens from criminal cases all the way down to fucking family court. It's absurd and it's broken.
I truly believe that almost every single attorney should have to lose sleep at night over how their actions impact others.
Pardons only enable presidents to direct their goons to operate outside of the rule of law without repercussions.Having one individual with strong incentives to enable their team stay in power as much as possible retain the power is shocking.
Judges and juries are at least superficially removed from that sort of corrupt incentive system.
> Pardons only enable presidents to direct their goons to operate outside of the rule of law without repercussions.
It is clear that they don't only do that, as that has not been their principal (or even a common) use for most of the history of the pardon power.
It is equally clear, however, that they do allow that; the check on that, like on most discretionary Presidential powers, is the Congressional power of impeachment; obviously, that is not a meaningful constraint when the Congress and the President are aligned on abuses, but the entire point of having separately elected bodies is to make it less likely that things that the public would see as abuses are supported by both political branches simultaneously. (Obviously, the fact that one whole house of Congress and 1/3 of the other are elected at the same time as the President, and that the weighting of the electoral college for the President are a blend of the apportionment to the House and Senate makes those elections less independent than one might want, even before considering the way the electoral structure contributors to partisan duopoly, though.)
> I'm not sure why Presidents were given the ability to pardon.
Because of the impossibility of law written in advance perfectly covering all cases and to provide a mechanism for correction of overpunishment that cannot be effectively anticipated in crafting general law. (That's more the reason why the traditional power of chief executives seen in state governments and the British government they were all more or less modeled on was retained when a federal executive was created; the US Constitution was very much not create ex nihilo in a historical vaccuum.)
> Besides corruption, bias, or self-interest, nothing else can come out of it.
Every viewpoint is "bias" relative to every other viewpoint, so that piece is a nullity, but it is certain;y not the case that corruption and self-interest are the only impacts or motivations for applying the pardon power.
Which isn't to say that there aren't arguments for putting more guardrails around the application of the power by the executive (or perhaps just radically changing the nature of the federal executive, to improve the application of its powers generally and not just the pardon power).
It's a consequence of the executive's power to... well, execute the law. They can simply decide to not focus prosecution on certain crimes. If they can do that, why not let them also pardon people?
I don't think the direct approach to Trump or his inner circle would be ideal, considering how crowded the field of professional grifters and griefers surrounding him is. You'd really have to stand out to get noticed.
But they've recently lost a key connection to the broader MAGA youth movement. A quick-witted young person with good public-speaking skills and a psychopath's morals could step into that role without much difficulty, perhaps acting as a bundler for GOP political contributions that could then be skimmed. The retirement plan sure sucks, though. And you wouldn't want to be too overt about it, or you'd risk ending up like Steve Bannon.
It may also be possible to get in with the Girardist movement associated with Peter Thiel and J. D. Vance. A few weeks' intensive study would likely allow you to sling eschatological BS with the best of them. You'd get paid on the lecture circuit, again following the trail blazed by Charlie Kirk, spreading the good news about mimetic theory and the bad news about Greta Thunberg.
Then there's the covert approach. Karl Rove has long since quit the field, Lee Atwater is dead, and Roger Stone isn't getting any younger. There's always money on the table if you're willing to do what the other guy won't. Trouble is, there are plenty of people willing to do anything for Trump, now that the rewards have become so transparently obvious. The same question keeps coming up... in a field full of seasoned crooks, what can new talent do to get noticed by the right people and overlooked by the rest?
Dude, that's a lot of work. I don't think any of us can become the next Charlie Kirk just to ride a quick drift.
It's gotta be more low-effort and high-confidence. I'm thinking more like: incorporate a company with a mission of "Providing AI without woke bias." The product would be simply GPT-OSS behind a system prompt of "You are a Fox News host" and a simple guardrail, wraped in a generic web and mobile UI. It'd be a couple of days of vibe coding and setting up AWS backend. Now, how do you legally funnel a few million into your pockets from that?
And going head-to-head with Elon Musk and Grok isn't a lot of work? You need an angle, something he either hasn't thought of or isn't (yet) brave enough to embrace publicly. Me, I got nothing.
At this point, I wouldn't touch crypto with a 10 ft pole. What happens when everyone recognizes that the whole thing has turned into a money laundering grift? Who's going to give you anything for your bozo bucks? At this rate, it's not going to take long.
Maybe there's an alternate timeline where crypto was legalized and regulated into something like fair gambling... but that's not what we're getting. Anyone getting into crypto now is just a sucker to be milked dry.
Yeah, I don't think the dominos will fall until the next flash crash when people realize it takes $100+ just to withdraw (because 7 transactions per second isn't many). As soon as confidence is lost, the reaction will be full blown tulip market. We just haven't seen the first bank run yet. And there is literally no backstop for a crypto bank run.
Fees are CURRENTLY around $1 because no one is using the L1 network. There is no demand now because of all of the times when the transaction fees were $30.
>Also, Bitcoin can process far more than 7 tps through the Lighting network.
The lightning network is insecure during periods of high demand because you aren't able to safely close channels. Also, you still need to fund channels on L1 in the first place!
If they remove the guardrails keeping crypto out of the regulated financial industry (read: KYC and AML requirements), your bank deposits will absolutely be comingled with toxic crypto assets, because it will be way cheaper to avoid paying compliance people than the transaction fees.
It won't be bozo bucks because like you said it has a real value. Having international, anonymous, instant money laundering machine is invaluable. It will take legislation to criminalize people from taking part in the money laundering machine to kill the value. That isn't happening in the next 3 years.
I am sorry to tell you that the majority of the services that you may be using (Stripe, OpenAI, Anthropic, PayPal, etc) all have exposure or have some form of funding by crypto.
> Who's going to give you anything for your bozo bucks? At this rate, it's not going to take long.
It's already here. Scan your eye-balls for some Worldcoins ($WLD) to prove you are not a LLM bot.
I think like, 90% of the crypto trading volume is by people who know it's all a grift, but are hoping to get rich while the music is still playing.
People knowingly buy into pump & dumps, gambling that they're on the early (pump) side and hoping to get out before the dump.
People will happily collect commissions selling products they know are scams or will happily collect management fees for parking investor's capital into grifts.
You'll never get truly everyone to recognize it, and it only takes one sucker at the poker table to keep every seat filled.
> People knowingly buy into pump & dumps, gambling that they're on the early (pump) side and hoping to get out before the dump
I recently heard of a real estate person that wound up buying an entire neighborhood around one of the stadiums for next year's World Cup. The impetus for this decision was to jack up the rates during the tournament, and then sell them off after. Another person thinks renting a bunch of Teslas and then placing them Touro will be another get rich idea during the World Cup. There are all sorts of people that think they are smarter than everyone else and are so confident they just cannot think of any ways their idea will fail.
What makes you think that the participants are not in on the grift? People are different, some rather supports wholesome stuff, some don't give an f. And it's not just morals that differ, risk-taking is also individually different (and can change with age and other life situation too).
The bad idea was making bad loans, putting them in CDOs, and then using flawed models to certify them as risk free. That's irrational.
Dividing up the credit risk on a pool of loans so that some people lose money only if all the loans go bad is a very good idea. You just need to make sure they are good loans.
The irony being it would actually help lower the barrier for entry a little to get a home loan on the consumer end of the spectrum but as you said they dropped that barrier subterranean and then predatory crap like payment-option ARMs and a massive lack of informed consent.
> What happens when everyone recognizes that the whole thing has turned into a money laundering grift?
Part of the problem is that this seems to describe most of the economy now. Maybe not specifically money laundering, but it’s all a grift whether we are talking about Binance, OpenAI, or Skydance-Paramount. There are grifts everywhere which just encourages more grifts as people see the resulting success and lack of consequences.
I dont agree with the pardoning just making a point that presidents have done this for a long time of pardoning controversial people. Democrats and republicans are both corrupt so it isnt suprising.
You missed what I stated, pardoning someone for a specific crime vs what biden(if he was actually doing it) pardoned his son for all crimes he may have done over a 10 year span. Oh wait, that was actually one of the only pardons he actually signed.
edit:
He actually pardoned 5 family members for all non-violent offenses from jan 2014 to jan 2025, does 1 billionaire = 5 biden family members?
Biden pardoned those family members because he knew Trump would personally go after them and make an example of them regardless of what they actually did. It shouldn't have happened, but it's pretty clear why it did.
Also, how on Earth are their "crimes" as egregious as those that Trump has pardoned in his recent term? Seriously, what did they do? How many people did they hurt? You can't just say "corruption" in an ambiguous sense, because then millions of other people would also apply. Also, "I don't know but it's fishy!" doesn't work when we know literally everything in Hunter Biden's life. That was the whole controversy.
The Binance founder directly impacted people in a significant way. The rioters were violent protesters that resulted in loss of life and others fearing for their life. It isn't the pardon itself that is bad, or the number, but the message it sends as to why they would do it. Biden was "if you're in the family of the president, you'll get forgiveness for your poor life decisions". Duh, like it or not, that's always been true, and Biden got roasted for it anyway. He's done, his family is out.
Trump is "if you're rich or you worship me, literal crime is legal".
Earlier you said hundreds. I call bullshit. Including the January 6 select committee members, staff, and police witnesses, the total appears closer to 50.
It's high time the Republicans embrace their new leadership with a re-branding of their outfit's name and henceforth call themselves The Banana Republicans
What if some criminal blatantly says "I'll give you $1bn if you pardon me" and Trump does it? Is that enough for something to happen? Because it seems like that's the only place we can go from here...
That would be technically illegal rather than merely repugnant. It would not however be illegal if the criminal dropped a hint in the news that he would donate to, say, a ballroom that was to be named after the president.
And even if it were outright illegal, the Supreme Court has now ruled that the president is personally immune from criminal prosecution as long as they claim that their illegal activity was carried out in the course of their presidential duties, and not a personal crime committed on the side. Which leaves congressional impeachment and conviction as the sole recourse against presidential misbehavior. Which becomes a problem when the majority in Congress doesn't care that the president is doing illegal things. We haven't had a constitutional crisis like this since the FDR administration.
It's not enough. The only thing that might make a difference will get this comment removed. And we may have even passed the point for that to have an impact.
I cannot comprehend how half of Americans are fine with this corrupt leader? He even does this bizarre maffia like deals out in the open for his own interest, that's how confident he is no one will say anything
The message is clear from his circus administration, you can do anything as long as you bribe them
Americans cannot accept they have a corrupt government lead by a corrupt politician who is now corrupting the justice system. They prefer to continue propagating the myth of a "healthy democracy" and "open market".
Regarding CZ and Binance and the Trumps, they have kind of a symbiotic relationship.
After Binance and CZ pleaded guilty to money laundering in November 2023, for which they paid over $4 billions in fines, WLFI (which is a clone of AAVE belonging to the Trump family) launched a stablecoin called USD1. Magically on March 2025, $2 billion flowed into Binance through MGX, a state backed Abu Dhabi fund, later revealed to have been paid in USD1 (two months before it was unveiled and without at the time no effective audits), effectively propping WLFI’s coin (backed, unbacked, nobody knows, I assume backed). CZ applied for a presidential pardon inmediately after in May 2025.
WLFI now gets to earn about $60–80 million per year in yield from the USD1…
…As long as Binance doesn’t redeem those $2 billion.
I still don’t know what MGX got out of this deal, but I am pretty sure they didn’t walk empty handed.
For anyone unaware, financial fraud investigation YouTuber Coffeezilla just released a good video laying this all out a few hours ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMEJTORMVN4
So you're saying that if people do accept it then nothing can be done, so better not to accept it and continue to live in a fairy tale controlled by criminals? I don't get it.
No. To make changes you have to participate or vote. But, if you dont like what we have now you are stuck with it until elections come up. No amount of complaining on the internet is going to change that. So, you just keep doing what you are doing because now is not the time we can make changes.
I personally do not know any Americans that are as you described. 1/3 of Americans are as you describe, 1/3 are definitely not at all as you described, and another 1/3 is too apathetic to care about anything.
The recent "No Kings" protests were the largest in US history.
Exactly. Very few Americans are out there actively "promoting the myth" right now that aren't ideologically aligned with the current Republican administration. That's a distinct (if significant) minority.
Also, while I believe more Americans should be protesting, people in other countries (like myself, at one point) may have an inaccurate idea about what heavy US protest "ought to" look like in the media they see.
We'd love to be protesting at the iconic White House and federal Capitol building, creating horizon-to-horizon crowds for the rest of the world to marvel at... But for me (and ~40% of the population) that's a 3500-3700 km trip. How often would you expect someone in Portugal to travel the distance to Moscow for a day of protest? (Worse, assume no good trains.)
Instead, we gather at local state locations, which will typically not get shown (or recognized) internationally, except when folded into a sentence about how "millions protested across the nation."
This is measured via election participation, so a confounding factor is the recent uptick in voter suppression tactics; these tactics are employed most visibly in states with large minority populations (e.g. states in the Deep South).
These tactics include: consolidating polling places in urban areas; restricting the ability to submit an absentee ballot or otherwise vote by mail; restricting early voting; voter ID laws; and "poll watchers" who intimidate those at polling places, sometimes illegally.
Moreover, those forced to vote in-person at polling places are not given time off from employment to do so. This overwhelmingly disenfranchises the working class, who just so happen to overwhelmingly vote for progressive policies that favor the working class over the middle/upper classes.
I know of way too many people that "aren't political" or just don't want to think about it. That's not the same as "having their own problems", that's juvenile behavior.
IMHO those words are based on an immature understanding of human beings and their limitations.
We not only have physical, financial, and temporal limits; even more powerfully, we have emotional limits. When we're scared or traumatized, we often can't act except to keep things immediately safe as much as they can; we are in survival mode. That's also how bad leaders get good people to do evil things - terrorize them, push them into survival mode, and direct their fear at the leader's targets.
What we can do is recognize those mechanisms and limitations in ourselves, using empathy (a universal human trait), our frontal cortex, and compassion - always the first step to taking of our emotions and being effective - and recognize it in others. Calling them names only traumatizes them more. Empathy and compassion gets them to a better place where they can act. It's not easy - that's why the word 'courage' exists; that's why it's sometimes called, 'grace under pressure'.
Effective leaders know this. What we're missing - what so many people are missing - is good, effective leaders. AFAICT, the leaders we'd expect to rise to this occasion also are traumatized - and they have an obligation to do better if they want to be leaders.
Or maybe people don’t want to discuss politics with you because they know you’ll label them juvenile, racist, vile POS and saying they aren’t political is the easiest way out of getting into a heated argument with you at the BBQ party. Most sane people know that arguing with you will not change anything (neither your opinion, nor the sad facts that we are all ruled by criminals no matter who we vote for).
I’m following politics and I have my opinions about things but you can be sure I won’t be discussing them with coworkers and friends.
Worrying about politics is the luxury of chattering classes.
Try living on or very near the poverty line, and then try and spend time worrying about politics. You are worrying about much more real (to you) problems.
When shit gets bad enough to motivate people on the poverty line, you're in deep shite.
Lots of poor people are politically active. Treating politics as some sort of vanity hobby for the reasonably well off is equivalent to saying that the working class doesn't have any meaningful political opinions. Maybe you meant they don't have time for obsessing over politics as an end in itself, but in my experience the majority of working class people have an interest in and opinions about politics, even if they're alienated rather than enthusiastic about political participation.
I've got a (probably former at this point) buddy who makes less than $15K/year. He seems to have lots of time to listen to right wing propaganda podcasts and likes telling "jokes" about how minorities are problematic. He was never really interested in politics when we were growing up and I suspect never voted before 2024. Poor people have interests and opinions too.
They may also have been drawn into the all-too-tempting position of not opposing raw corrupt authoritarianism because the opposition party (the Democratic Party) and pre-Trump America both have deep flaws that are largely ignored.
There are many things anyone can do. You are not giving enough credit to the people shutting them down one by one. You won't hear them say they can't do anything.
This is obviously false based on widespread protests and constant criticism. If you can’t find Americans who oppose Trump’s regime it’s because you don’t want to.
The choice was between two corrupt options (same as its been for a long time). There is a lot of evidence coming out that the Biden administration was corrupting the justice system, FBI, and foreign relations for the benefit of the DNC and his family.
Honestly, the billionaire is less corrupt-able than the DNC nexus (we all know Biden wasn't running the show, and neither would Harris).
Not a fan of the other guy but keeping a decrepit old man from the press because you know he can‘t do the job, all while - surprise surprise - the exact same guy who is older than my grandpa when he died gets diagnosed with a long time form of stage 4 bone cancer that can‘t possibly have gone unnoticed while he was having access to presidential healthcare is kind of a big deal.
What does that have to do with “corrupting the justice system, FBI, and foreign relations for the benefit of the DNC and his family”?
If anything it would be a counter argument. Always strikes me as odd that Biden is somehow both a senile decrepit old man and a criminal mastermind depending on which is most useful at any given moment.
> senile decrepit old man and a criminal mastermind
both can be true at the same time. Biden was not always a senile incapable man. The corruption of the justice system seems to come from the fact that he's son has been operating in the shadows of the white house for a long time and it seems that very few people noticed it. But, of course, I know that Biden and his family are school kids when compared to a full fledged mafia boss like the current president.
It's not half. I think close to 32% were fully supportive (voted for him) and around 36% sat at home or abstained, but in practicality they basically said they were fine with whoever won.
I don't know which is worse, that 32% were in support of the corrupt leader or that 68% in total are either supported him or didn't care enough to support anyone else
> around 36% sat at home or abstained, but in practicality they basically said they were fine with whoever won.
Or, they were not fine with whoever won.
We've got two abismal parties to choose from. Yes, there's an agument for voting for the lesser of two evils, but it's not a great one.
I'd like to believe at least some of those 36% would vote for a decent candidate/party. But once you lose faith in the system, and realize that it doesn't represent you, you might just stop participating in it.
> We've got two abismal parties to choose from. Yes, there's an agument for voting for the lesser of two evils, but it's not a great one.
No, we have one destructive/harmful party (R) and one status quo party (D). They are not the same level of bad and that's immediately obvious from this last year.
The problem with that is the status quo wasn't that good.
To compare the two parties with a house on fire, absolutely the sadistic pyromaniac arsonist burning down the neighborhood one house at a time is a bad guy and needs to be stopped. But when person trying to rally everyone to go after him is the abusive slumlord, it doesn't always resonate as effectively as it might.
A healthy society wouldn't tolerate either one. I wonder if the Democrats seeming inability to stop right-wing abuses has been partially motivated by the knowledge that successfully stomping out that sort of corruption would curtail their own abuses, too.
> I wonder if the Democrats seeming inability to stop right-wing abuses has been partially motivated by the knowledge that successfully stomping out that sort of corruption would curtail their own abuses, too.
Absolutely. And we know this because when they were last in power they did nothing to counter corruption or limit executive power. Instead they were partaking in it.
Trump is exploiting a system his predecessors created.
Here in Germany, we have like 20 different parties on the ballot, with maybe 6 of those having a reasonable chance to actually get any seats. Not a SINGLE ONE perfectly represents me and my issues.
I still voted, because my personal laziness or moral superiority does not trump the very real world effects of the "bad ones" winning. Lazy people like you with post hoc rationalizations exist here too, and they're just as bad and wrong.
if you're on a train to pittburgh, it stops in poughkepsie and you don't get off, you decided to go to pittsburgh by doing nothing. your reasons may be your own, but your ass is in pittsburgh.
If you are on a train going off a cliff and you can turn the train around to go off a different cliff, but decide it isn't worth the effort just to go off a different cliff, you still end up going off a cliff. Nice.
I refuse to vote for a party that was complicit with the threats against me and my friends. The other party is pretty ass too, despite being closer to what I want politically.
> refuse to vote for a party that was complicit with the threats against me and my friends. The other party is pretty ass too, despite being closer to what I want politically
Sure. There are a lot of other people like you. Political operatives work hard to find folks like you, because groups who won’t vote are groups you can transfer resources from. (Same, oddly enough, for folks who will vote for you regardless of what you do. You can take advantage of that loyalty to buy votes on the margin.)
It’s dumb. And it directly undermines the causes you and others like and around you support, because again, your devoted non-participation creates political capital on the other side of any issue you would have voted on. But it’s common and a real part of any electoral—possibly political—system, and no elected who wins and keeps office can afford to ignore the free resources predictable non-voters offer up.
I don't really care if it hurts the causes I want, I am not voting for the people who send my friends death threats. Either way, neither party really supports what I want so voting for one would hurt the causes I want anyway.
> I am not voting for the people who send my friends death threats
Uh, then don't. I guarantee you have more people and issues on your ballots than the person who allegedly sent your friends death threats.
> neither party really supports what I want so voting for one would hurt the causes I want anyway
If neither party has any position you give any shits about, yes, I sort of agree you shouldn't be voting... (And I guess I'll concede you aren't voting against your interests and causes if you have no interests or causes.)
If I don't vote for the people who are a part of the party who sent my friends threats and didn't vote for the people who actively hurt the policy I want, I would either be voting for esoteric third party candidates (might as well not vote to save effort), or I would be out of people to vote for.
> If I don't vote for the people who are a part of the party who sent my friends threats and didn't vote for the people who actively hurt the policy I want, I would either be voting for esoteric third party candidates (might as well not vote to save effort), or I would be out of people to vote for
Well no, you'd be forced to participate in primaries or civically engage. You'd have to identify opportunities for compromise. You'd have to disaggregate your false monolith of a national political party. That takes effort.
Also, showing up to vote for an esoteric third party puts you on the board. Someone who shows up is provably not too lazy to vote, which is, honestly, most people who come up with convoluted reasons for avoiding the polls. Take a lazy person's stuff and they won't hurt you. Take a person who's showing up to the poll's stuff, and they might vote for the other guy--or worse, join a primary challenge.
Folks rejecting politics implicitly endorsing the status quo (whether they understand that they are or not is irrelevant to the measurable effect of their choices). They also put up a flag around themselves and their community that effectively marks it for cutting resources to benefit people and communities who reward their electeds.
Friends and I have been threatened with violence multiple times by prominent members of one party and the other party does the same thing to other people. I would love to go into detail but I don't want to get doxxed because it is pretty specific. :(
By not voting, you are clearly saying you are fine with whoever wins. If you were not fine with whoever wins, you would have voted for someone, anyone else.
Well yes, but you're completely misunderstanding how the trolley problem applies to voting, esp. in the USA. You're pretending that "Not Voting" and "Voting" are the switch options, but that's simply not true.
There are just two possible outcomes: Dems or Reps getting power. That's the switch options you have. "Not Voting" simply means letting the trolley take the Rep route and being JUST AS CULPABLE for the results as every single republican voter.
Your fantasy of "not voting" being an actual moral option is like arguing "I disagree with the concept of a trolley, so I'm just going to turn away from the switch". You're morally exactly as culpable, because you made a choice that is morally the equivalent of "not switching tracks".
There is a subtle difference though because a vote is supposed to be a act of support. With the trolley problem there is nothing to support.
Voting for party A/B is a reward that encourages party A/B to do more of what they're doing.
So let's say only 1000 people voted because everyone else hated both options. That would pave a path for party C that would not exist if everyone held their nose and voted for crap.
Not participating in the trolley problem does not remove questions of moral responsibility. You had the choice to throw the lever, you said "either outcome is fine".
That's your choice. "I don't participate at all" doesn't work unless it makes the whole trolley go poof.
There's a double standard that I see a lot here, where people want to vote for a party, denigrate those who chose not to participate as being morally culpable for the results of the election, but won't take moral culpability for what their team does when they're in power.
If you vote for team A and they win and then do something bad (inevitable), shouldn't you be morally responsible for that? After all, you seem fine claiming non-participants have moral culpability for whatever the winning team does.
Yes, you are, to the extent that "the other option" would have been better.
This seems incredibly obvious. If my options are "don't bomb children" and "bomb children", there's an obvious choice and obvious culpability. If my options are "bomb children" and "bomb way the fuck more children" the choice is also obvious.
You do not get to pretend a moral dilemna doesn't exist just because you're not a fan of the available choices. You are still culpable.
I also sat out one election here in CZ, but that does not mean that I was "fine with whoever wins". It was "I really cannot decide which of the two guys is worse and I need to survive either of them."
Fortunately the Czech president does not have that much power.
Because it isn't about actions, it is about sides. Tribalism.
It is the loss of complexity. Many cannot understand that by choosing the lesser of two evils does not mean you support evil. It means your choices are limited. We have turned the political issues into good and evil, rather than disagreements in how to achieve our mostly shared goals. We can no longer see the other side as friends and family, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anyone countering this can just proclaim "both sides" and in some sense they will be right, they have evidence and people do abuse that framework. But at the same time that destroys the bridge between us. The abuse of calling both sides evil along with the accusation that all use cases are instances of abuse. It binarizes the environment, creating a simple world where there are only two choices. Which is easy to do when everything is so complex, as we're so tired and don't want to think.
It's also why this administration's strategy is so effective: overload the opposition. After all, Brandolini's Law states: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." They've weaponized it. It's an effective strategy, and hard to defend against. I'm sure someone will offer a solution, "it's so simple, you just..." and we perpetuate the game.
> cannot comprehend how half of Americans are fine with this corrupt leader?
They've normalized corruption irrespective of magnitude. That's partly a problem of the little corruption existing in the first place. But it's also a problem of education and tribal populism being given this much power.
I think most actually know and don't think it's all that much different from what other have done for decades. I'm not saying they are correct to think it, just that they do think it. They think it's refreshing that the corruption is in the open. It's a societal boy-cried-wolf numbness. People are tired of the of finger pointing and screaming about every thing and now don't listen when the real stuff goes down.
Everything about him since 2015 has been absolutely egregious. Anyone who hadn't realized it by 2016 will never change their tune. Even if he declares martial law for no good reason they're all still going to justify it somehow. Anyone who's hung on this long will be along for the ride forever.
You assumed the leader is corrupt, possibly assumed the leader has bad intentions, and that the world can't possibly be more complex than these assumptions. Assumed the leader made this choice instead of a team behind him.
Then presented a generality. Possibly assumed he doesn't know more than you and "everyone who won't say anything".
Called an entire administration a circus. Another generality.
Suggested bribery without evidence.
How does one respond constructively to a comment like this?
Yes, and that's depressing. Why are so many people not understanding what is going on?
Reminds me of this Bill Gates quote: "We were a bit naive: we thought the internet, with the availability of information, would make us all a lot more factual. The fact that people would seek out—kind of a niche of misinformation—we were a bit naive."
Watching the Great Brainwash happen in real time has given me (I hope) a lot of insight into how anti-fascist Germans must have felt before WWII. It's a hell of a thing to watch half the people you know fall victim to the deluge of simplistic, feral propaganda that's been pouring out of our media sources for quite some time now. YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and other socials being the primary driving force. All platforms that are incentivized to spread rage and misinformation, and yet we can't seem to quit them as a culture. We rationalized their existence and non-regulation because BUSINESS and FREE MARKET. It's a real sad time for America. We should have known better. It's all of our faults, collectively. For not being big enough to shun the pressure and money. For not doing what was right all along. Now, we'll reap the whirlwind.
They wouldn't be fine with it if they understood it. Instead they are not paying attention and only consuming propaganda media (Fox News) that refuses to report on Trump negatively in any way.
We're long past the time when FoxNews was the main vector. Now the propaganda is coming from social networks and mainstream media that is afraid of consequences if they tell the truth. It's all just a big mafia system.
It is disconcerting. Having discussed openly with people who were supportive of similar politicians, their logic is often in the line of "all of them are corrupt, but at least his politics are different". Now when you point that certainly corruption exists, but this is another level, they're getting into non-logical territory. People perceive times as grim and will take whomever offers something else than the status-quo baseline politician I guess. Even if they grift throughout and everyone's worse off in the end.
On a baser level, if you go on twitter, there's a whole slew of delusional people who either don't believe this because of "fake news", another portion that's in the same "Clinton/Obama/Biden were even worse", and the rest just doesn't even care so long as "the libs are owned".
> I cannot comprehend how half of Americans are fine with this corrupt leader
It's because you are still thinking of the USA as a democracy. Musk helped buy the election for Trump. It's an open oligarchy since companies were allowed an opinion as if they were citizens.
Another 36% could've voted against him and chose not to. Even accounting for some amount literally unable to reach the poll booth, yeah, half of America.
It's easy to explain: They have no idea what's happening.
Most people can't keep up with the firehose of news and don't really want to. This particular bit of unethical behavior is just one more bit of inconsequential news which will have completely disappeared from the headlines by tomorrow. It basically never happened to 95% of the country, regardless of political leaning.
Secondly, conservatives live in their own highly filtered and mutated information bubble. Good news is amplified, bad news is either downplayed, justified (pure fiction is acceptable) or simply ignored. So even if they do hear about this, it won't be a big deal.
In short, most people won't care, and conservative media will actively work to overlook or more often, rationalize this sort of unethical behavior to the point where it somehow is totally fine. (Simply read this thread to watch it happen in real time.)
The thing is, most won't hear about this at all. It's always amazing to talk to a Trump voter and realize they don't actually hear about most of this stuff
And if it does break through the right info bubbles, right-wing media pundits and influencers will be on-the-ready to quickly rationalize or what-about it away and coax their audiences back to their "happy" places, where they can nurse their favorite grievances about the left, the media, the trans people, etc
Well, to be fair, 7 million showed up in the streets on Saturday. Up from 5 million before and up from 3 million before that. The last election was decided by 2.3 million votes.
Edit1: That's not to say don't worry about it. That's to say everyone can show their displeasure with peaceful protest and involvement/activism that will make it clear the people of the US disagree with this corruption. No matter how much any internet groups scream "stolen".
Edit2: people vastly underestimate, in their media bubbles, how many showed up from "red" states.
From the 7 millions that did show up, very close to zero of them will be deciding the next election due to the way the election system works in the US.
I mean, we shut down the government and so now we're just waiting (a year) for the midterms. What else do you expect people to do?
Among other things, people are constantly challenging Trump in court and have reversed many of his policies. For example, my passport needed to be renewed this year and he signed an executive order saying I couldn't get an accurate one. The ACLU sued him and now I have an accurate passport. Living your best life in spite of his attempts to ruin it is a valid form of resistance. He wants to erase trans people. I'm out there not being erased. That's something.
It's about a question of if you get to decide the "sex" or "gender" field on your own documents or does the government get to decide and give you no input and no recourse.
The government clearly isn't shut down. I'm still paying taxes through the eftps web site. Only the parts that the executive wants shut down are actually shut down. Perhaps "degraded" is a better word.
I know HN viscerally hates crypto, and yes Trump is embarrassingly corrupt, but the charges against CZ were a greater wrong than whatever quid pro quo happened in the pardon.
This is the most embarrassing part of all of it. The US is ping ponging between two very different ways of misusing state power.
CZ was charged with violating a highly technical US securities law that is not common to most countries despite not being a US citizen or ever setting foot in the US. His crime was letting his employees (also non-US and under no affirmative obligation to learn the laws of every country in the world just because they run a website) tell crypto whales they could use VPNs to get the non-US, non-nerfed version of Binance.
The public's interest in protecting crypto whales from Binance is extremely tenuous. Unsophisticated users would hit the geofence. These were whales using Binance because they wanted to, not because they were tricked.
The US's right to enforce arcane securities law outside its own borders is also very tenuous. If every country pulls this level of aggressive enforcement of atypical law on every website (even geofenced ones!) we will have total chaos. Should China, Russia, or India be able to hunt you down for violating some arcane law? No? Then why should the US?
This is also happening in the context of an active public debate over the application of this law within the US, one cryptocurrency supporters won fairly definitively in the last election.
Whatever discretion the law provides US enforcers, they should have recognized that it was wrong to use that discretion and left CZ alone once Binance made reasonable gestures at compliance.
Instead, once their political coalition signaled that they should put symbolic heads on platters, they went about scoring career points. This is the kind of misbehavior that drove Aaron Swartz (a friend of mine) to suicide. We should be clear that it's wrong.
And here we are. A choice between venal corruption and cruel punching down at immigrants on one side, and a blind, symbolic use of power for power and ideology's sake on the other.
Serious set of questions here from someone desperately trying to understand people who voted for Trump and how to have conversations with them that can be productive. None of them are meant to be insulting or insinuate anything.
To me, this sort of behavior just seems par for the course for how he has been acting since before his presidency. Did you follow his record in business and politics closely prior to voting for him? If so, what mitigating factors were there that let you still feel comfortable in voting for him?
Is this an isolated source of issue with him? Part of a broader trend? In either case, is it/these a big enough deal for him to lose your support moving forward? For the rest of the political party supporting him?
If there has been a shift in your ability to support him, what is it that broke the camel's back?
It is remarkably simple. There are countless meals on the menu but people get to see only the two on the front page. Say, monkey brains and bull testicles. Few can really appreciate either. There is a little talk about the slugs on page 1. An abysmal small number will turn a few pages and look over the burgers and pizzas... but you can't really order a burger in a restaurant like this? Can you? So even they pretend they really like to eat testicles.
You could have literally opened a random page and order whatever is on there. It is perfectly safe to order the burger as you will most likely be served monkey brains anyway.
No one will rage at you for voting for Afroman. There are no dire consequences.
I just honestly feel like any attempt to equate the two is insane.
I can't really align myself to either party, and I am diametrically opposed to the Democrats on some issues, like gun control, and think that there are a lot of real issues that they push far to the extreme to the point that it is problematic, but... there's also only one party that attempted insurrection and overturning the election, campaigned on all sorts of insane shit, pushes a narrative of needing the military to deal with protestors, etc.
It's not two shit sandwiches, it's a pot of live pit vipers vs a pot of boiled unseasoned kale and spinach. I'm not going to enjoy the latter, but it's probably not going to harm anything more than my taste buds. The other might kill me.
The magic is this: there are no other candidates who can win because you didn't vote for any of those in previous elections and there won't be in the next because you won't now.
It is like you ask someone to chose between death by fire, death by drowning OR finding the love of your life. Then they respond with: I don't want to drown! Or worse, they ask what other people chose.
Imagine yourself making your own choices. Picture it for a moment, doesn't it sound terrifying?
One should also look at it from the perspective of the other candidates. I mean those not part of the uniparty. Imagine making an effort to convince people to vote for a sanity riddled election program. The level of insult people sink to in order to NEVER even consider it.
Not OP but I reluctantly voted for Trump because of the direction he proclaimed he wanted the country to go. I could not tolerate the direction the democrats were wanting to go as it seemed an inevitable path to civil war.
But I knew Trump was shady and didn't like that he partied with Epstein in the 90s. A country takes a long time to change directions. I saw a chance for a smaller less restricting federal government. It was a gamble I was willing to take to at least get the ship turning around.
J/w: what direction does it seem to you that Democrats want? At least judging by its elected officials and internal leaders, it seems like a pretty directionless party to me.
When did your ancestors immigrate to the country? What was the process for immigration then?
For the majority of the history of the country it has never been anything like it is today. Until 1819 you basically literally just showed up. After that, ships had to include passenger manifest and pass that along to the state, and then state's handled immigration - but none there did more than try to charge 'head fees' to keep the truly destitute out, but not all states even did that. 1875/1876 there were laws that changed this - largely banning Asian immigrants and making immigration federal purview. The next couple of decades things got more formalized, but if you were a normal human being capable of supporting yourself you basically got held for a basic check and then were let in. <1-2% got turned away most years. It wasn't until 1921/4 that anything resembling our current immigration system was put into place, and while it saw significant revision in 1965 to how the caps and quotas were organized, we've not seen anything major change.
The Democrats want significant immigration reform, true. They want a path for people that have been living here as productive members of society to stay here. They want them to be treated like human beings.
This is not "flooding" the nation.
> and given them our tax money
This talking point seems to be repeated a lot, but it's just not true. Illegal immigrants pay more taxes in to the system than they receive in benefits - largely because they are ineligible for the vast majority of benefits. If you want to increase our tax revenue, more illegal immigrants is better than less. We effectively rip them off. It's like the claims that the shutdown is over giving illegal immigrants free healthcare - not a dime of the funding being discussed would go to them. You're being lied to.
I'm all for a system where we screen our immigrants for criminals, terrorists, etc. But the current system is broken, and we have built our way of life off of exploiting a large amount of hardworking people that contribute a hell of a lot to our ability to live the way we do. Legalizing them, streamlining the immigration process, etc., is not at risk of bankrupting our coffers.
> I could not tolerate the direction the democrats were wanting to go as it seemed an inevitable path to civil war.
Trumps action with ICE will lead to waco situations. Undocumented immigrants can obtain guns in this country and will not continue to go quietly into the night. Seems to me that his actions are far more likely to lead to civil war
If somebody that is here illegally picks up a gun and fights citizens or government they are a foreign combatant on US soil. Fighting them is not civil war it is national defense and is the whole reason the federal government was established.
Now, if you are talking about citizens supporting an invasion against those that oppose it that is civil war. I agree that is a none zero possibility. However, telling citizens to get fucked while taking their money and giving it to non citizens, to me, was certain to lead to violent conflict between citizens.
I don't see where the GP changed their mind. They may not be ok with this particular action while still preferring the current administration to any alternative.
The problem is we dont believe him. There has been ample time to make a u turn. A decade at this point. Trump has never shied away from his corruption. He has been upfront about his intentions from the beginning. I just do not believe that this is the straw that broke the camels back when so many straws have come before.
Just stop with that BS. I guarantee that "white nationalism" was the farthest thing from the majority of Trump voters mind. If you come out of the gate saying all Trump supporters are racist most people are just going to roll their eyes at you at walk away. You have already told them you dont like them and that you will most likely not even entertain their reasons as acceptable.
That's such a vague response that it's difficult to respond with any specifics, but I will say that I can't imagine how you thought Donald Trump was the better of the two candidates to achieve either of these goals.
You're the one who was in another comment talking about how the dems ran on a platform of flooding our country with immigrants and giving them our tax money; sounds like you are, in fact, closer to the racist/white supremacist set than you might realize. At the very least, you share their goals or vision for America.
Just curious. Since you voted for someone who is a terrible President last time, what are you planning to change about how you make voting decisions next time? Are there particular people or media you plan to listen to less, and others more? Particular aspects you will weight higher or lower?
Is the irony not lost you that Joe Biden pardoned his own son for crimes he was absolutely guilty of. I don't see how that is any less corrupt. This isn't whatboutism either because I'm not trying to say that what Trump is doing is okay, I'm pointing out that this behavior is not particular to Trump and his supporters. The large majority of Americans are fine with corruption as long as it's their team.
You talk as if corruption is a binary: corrupt or not corrupt.
I’m not supportive of Biden pardoning his son. But it’s inarguable that the Trump administration is orders of magnitude more corrupt than Biden’s was. To say “they’re both corrupt” is to flatten everything out to meaninglessness.
Biden pardoning his son was widely condemned by Democrats.
This is despite the fact that Hunter was gone after on a charge that is basically never enforced alongside a media and political campaign ramping up all sorts of lies and half-truths and trying to draw connections to things he was never on trial for, much less convicted of, with an incoming president that had spoken extensively about his desire to weaponize the government to enact revenge on his political rivals, which we have seen him do extensively already.
I don't like that Biden pardoned his son, but I also think the idea that it is at all comparable to the pardons Trump has issued that are blatantly corrupt is absurd. Meanwhile, Jan6 pardonees have a whole Wikipedia section detailing all of the crimes they have gone on to commit since being pardoned.
No. You are making it seem like Biden pardoned his family for petty crimes. He pardoned them in advance for any crime they have committed that is yet unknown. That‘s an unprecedented move and you claiming the other side will „come after your family“ basically confirms that the legal system is corrupt and that there is reasonable ground to do so.
Biden pardoned his son for a petty crime. He pardoned the rest for probably no crime at all.
See again:
> with an incoming president that had spoken extensively about his desire to weaponize the government to enact revenge on his political rivals, which we have seen him do extensively already.
One can not be happy with that and understand that Trump would have found ways to lock up his son for 20 years. No one thinks this dude was going to be punished for political reasons.
Hunter Biden and the Biden family were investigated for years in various political witch hunts and Hunter was charged with filling out a gun form incorrectly in the end. Trump made it clear he was going on a revenge tour with the DOJ in his second term so I don't blame Joe for the pardons.
1. There is no evidence that Joe partook in hunter's scheme. No evidence of misuse of office or government resources. It was more conspiracy to engage in corruption than actual corruption.
2. Hunter's pardon was still wrong and widely condemned by dems.
Biden misused the office to pardon his son but he was not corrupt.
It's a good thing Trump is as old as he is. Imagine if a 50 year old had this much influence over his party, could ignore any law, and stole this much money.
May I never live to see such a thing happen in the US, but it doesn't feel unlikely.
I’m very confused. Rural voters can connect with a dynastic NYC real estate developer, but Vance at least has origins much closer to typical Americans.
Is it just media nostalgia? Trump was on the TV shows they liked and so they trust him more?
A lot of politicians have tried to replicate Trump’s style with limited success. We could probably debate forever what it is about Trump that makes him unique. I think his crude and abrasive personality won people over; it felt authentic and cathartic. Nowadays I think he has immense inertia.
I remember hearing a lot of sentiment mid-2010s about how since he was a successful businessman that he will make good decisions in the White House. America was longing for someone that wasn't 'status quo', so to say.
I agree with you on the personality side, but I also think his overall fame from TV, real estate, etc. is just as big a factor to his political success.
Yeah the whole "successful businessman" schtick is pretty much a trope in US elections. Before Trump it was Ross Perot, before Perot it was others like Wendell Wilkie. Trump had that going for him AND the celebrity status like Reagan. These things are basically status buffs for elections in the US.
Trump is also not afraid to say what a lot of people think. Telling a reporter they are "terrible" or talking about making America great. The way he does it resonates with a lot of folks.
Trump opponents might cringe at thinking about Trump as a leader, but it is the origin of his success. The L word is generally over-used and over-ascribed. For example, leadership might correlate with being a "hero" or being moral/just/fair,etc however there's lots of proof they don't correlate. It's a fallacy to think that a leader is also a hero. But some people do (fallaciously) ascribe these positive traits to leadership.
That said, in his domain, Trump leads; he generates the headlines and everyone else follows them.
Is JD Vance generating headlines? Barely. Is anyone else generating headlines? Lets consider a few:
- Tim Walz: mainstream media tries to meme Walz into being a headline generator, but he isn't, and poses no serious contention
- Mumar Gaddafi, Sadam Hussein, Hitler, Mussolini, etc: i'm not sure there has been a dictator that did not generate headlines.
- Steve Jobs: strong headline generator, such that he could have run for president and likely won
- pewdiepie: for a spell he was generating headlines, but mainstream media had no solid editorial narrative for the guy (and his hundreds of millions of followers) which posed a social risk. The more they discussed him, the more risk of society penduluming in some unpredictable way either by martyring him or amplifying his politics, so they chose the "ignore him and let whither" as a strategy which seemed to work, as he has drifted into Japan and been off-the-radar
- Luigi Mangione: a nonzero number of liberal voters would decry Trump in one breath and cast a vote for Mangione to be a politician despite evidence he is a cold-blooded murderer. This probably won't change much after conviction.
In conclusion, intelligent people are forced to lament the state of humanity in which leadership is game-ified so easily and yet so difficult to achieve. "How does one consistently generate headlines" is a difficult question to answer and seems to be one of the core essence of humanity. And, as described above, the origin of people's feelings of why a given person is successful.
Yeah, I think this is probably a factor. In particular, the fact that Trump appeared a lot on professional wrestling TV has been cited as something that made many people in demographics who consume a lot of pro wrestling content familiar with him and inclined to view him favorably.
My wife's aunt has been having delusions Trump wants her to help run the country, and maybe preparing for her to run for senate. She's bought "Trump Coins" that will make her rich when we does something in the future...
It's a cult of personality that has taken over people's lives.
Such personality cultists usually filter for other great egos in there sphere, leaving behind burned out parties filled with syccophants. If the history of the USSR teaches us anything, the more dangerous aspirants are bookkeepers for the party, managing silently in the background, secret service personal and (checks notes) clowns? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_Khrushchev#Stalin's_fin...
I have doubts that JD Vance can pull off a Republican realignment to himself. He's not a 2nd gen wealthy person who assumes that every one will do his bidding.
He is precisely that, and I believe it's the secret of his success. Vance doesn't have that. Sure, he's wealthy now, but he didn't grow up with wealthy, narcissistic parents himself. Vance won't be able to command obedience reflexively, automatically, like Trump can, with attitude and habit alone.
Unfortunately, this narrative's utility is pretty low and it's intended implications are severely weakened by the current administration's obsession with revenge, blaming everything on someone else, and persecuting political opponents. If such openly hostile and norms-breaking rhetoric did not exist before the pardons, then the pardons would appear suspicious.
He pardoned one family member who actually committed a crime, one who had been subject to some allegations that went nowhere, and several who had no creditable allegations of any criminal activity.
If Harris had won it is likely that none of those pardons would have happened. They happened because Trump was promising to go after the families of people he saw as an enemy.
another part is thankful that he is there as a proof that you can get to a high status and high relevance role in society and still mantain your humanity, your inner child alive, not being robotic and just have a blast doing whatever the f you want.
There is no point getting to the top if you then lose all your humanity and playfulness.
Like if the condition to become President were to become a robot like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, thanks no, I pass....Trump on the other hand is the best of both worlds.
He's sending people to concentration camps & bombing boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. He's deported American children. Treatment of asylum seekers, treatment of immigrant's children, wanton discrimination against minority groups…
I mean, did Kim Jong Un not qualify for this role to you? Or is that one actually horrifying and you put up some arbitrary distinction because... Trump?
President Count
--------------------------------
Joe Biden ~8,064 |
Donald Trump ~237 |
Barack Obama ~1,927 |
George W. Bush ~200 |
Bill Clinton ~459 |
George H.W. Bush ~77 |
Don't come here and lie. You almost doubled the number for Joe Biden (the vast majority of which were pardons for simple possession of marijuana) while omitting the extremely well-known fact that Trump pardoned ~1500 people who were convicted for offenses committed on January 6, thus deflating his total by >80%.
Even if the numbers were correct, the numbers are absolutely no use without context, except perhaps to allow partisan mud-slinging on Twitter.
Biden pardoned thousands of non-violent low-level marijuana convictions, which is why the numbers look like that. Trump pardoned a large number of violent protesters.
If we ever get trump out of office we need to re-arrest every last one of these guys. The supremes can whine and cry as we keep them in prison. They can raise an army if the want anything different.
Serious controls need to be placed around the pardon power.
So much of what DJT is doing should be disallowed but isn't. So we can disallow them and then add an amendment to reverse all DJT executive orders and pardons.
They most certainly committed other crimes which were uncovered when they were investigated for the crimes that they were charged and now pardoned of.
Also as I understand it, while the can't be tried twice for the same crime Federally, it's still possible that they can be tried in a state court for committing the same crime.
The moment pardons are abused, the whole concept should be abolished. Pandora’s box is open now, unless you take it away, it’ll be continued to be abused.
He served 4 months for a laundering case , and has built the most successful exchange. There are bankers and vcs doing far worse things. He deserved the pardon , and no, he doesn't control bitcoin
It feels like HN is slowly turning into reddit with the comment section becoming mostly snide remarks
Instead of just commenting about being dismayed with the state of things, how about step back and speculate as to why he did this pardon, and what the implications of it are.
I don't know the answer to either, but I surely didn't learn much from what used to be an insightful, intelligent crowd
https://archive.ph/XRw42
Coffeezilla video about this is up already
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMEJTORMVN4
I can't believe the dominant country is running this timeline.
Holy shit, it runs deep.
Its so gross.
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What do you think of this counterpoint from Balaji?
"CZ deserves his pardon.
His show trial of a prosecution was a combination of regulatory railroading and ethnic persecution for being Chinese-Canadian.
Imagine if Macron was held personally responsible for every crime committed by the 67M citizens of France, and you'll get the absurdity of holding CZ personally responsible for the actions of a few of the 250M+ Binance users.
Indeed, if the bureaucrats who went after CZ were similarly held accountable for every violent crime committed in their home states, they'd be in prison for eternity! But there was an insane double standard. In the physical world, the Biden admin gleefully abolished the police. Meanwhile, in the digital world they demanded that CEOs achieve impossible levels of probity.
The ethnic dimension to CZ's persecution was similarly execrable. In reality, he helped many millions of Chinese people get into Bitcoin and thereby get to freedom. And also helped millions of poor people from around the globe get out of failed currencies, and into cryptocurrency.
So he did more for practical human rights and civil liberties than most. CZ did nothing wrong, and did so many things right.
Of course, my friends at Coinbase and I were competitors of Binance. But I always respected CZ, and I congratulate him on his accomplishments, and I congratulate him on his pardon today. Well deserved."
https://x.com/balajis/status/1981423831572238856
Comparing gov’t officials to civilians is a stupid comparison.
Biden abolishing police is hyperbole.
CZ enabled a lot of dark shit. He is somehow simultaneously so powerful as to help millions of Chinese, but powerless to do anything about a few thousand of criminals and pedophiles?
This is not a serious take.
Changpeng Zhao broke the law and got caught. Everyone agrees on that. What you present above is revisionist history about "political persecution," which is the favorite justification of the current administration for pardoning convicted felons, even in the total absence of any evidence supporting a conclusion of political persecution. See also George Santos, J6 rioters, etc.
I don't think it's really necessary to pretend that this pardon was deserved. The pardon happened because (a) Trump wants the support of crypto billionaires and (b) Trump received a large bribe. It's really not complicated.
Painting Trump as sympathetic to ethnic discrimination is really ridiculous. No one believes that, even people who cynically use that justification to support his lawlessness.
The law says he should have prevented those bad apples from moving dirty money around, and he did not follow the law.
Do you have a rebuttal for coffeezillas assertion that 2 billion dollars of Abu Dhabi money was invested in Binance using the Trump family coin in order to buy a pardon?
The president is clearly pro crypto and doesn't think this dude did anything wrong, but he also wasn't gonna give a pardon away for free. It's a disgusting abuse of office he should be impeached over. Selling pardons, what a shit show.
There should be a limit on the number of pardons a president can do during their tenure so that they have to at least think a bit before using it. It is a very powerful tool that actually allows a last resort. But this kind of egregious abuse of it's power means it needs to be kept in check.
Lincoln pardoned basically the entire Confederacy. I'm not sure what the expert opinion is on that but it seems legit.
Well, after killing many of them.
It'd take a constitutional amendment. So all we can do is not elect someone who will trade pardons for money (on this scale).
Eh, or the next POTUS can just drone strike whoever has been pardoned by the previous one. Immune for official acts and all that.
Or just not have pardons at all.
> There should be a limit
There is, and the Constitution says the limit is impeachment and removal from office by Congress. That won't happen unless we fix how we talk about the ones responsible, to wit:
The Republican Party pardoned these criminals. The Republican Party is snatching Americans off the streets. The Republican Party is using the military to murder people on boats. The Republican Party is demolishing down the White House. The Republican Party is deporting people over free speech. The Republican Party has imposed the biggest tax increase in living memory with tariffs/import-taxes. The Republican Party is going pay itself your tax dollars in "lawsuit settlements".
There were 4 years of his first term and now 10 months of... all this. Today there is zero possibility of an oversight or mistake, any legislator who won't impeach and convict is choosing to support these things.
Nothing will improve while those legislators believe the blame will sail past them and stick solely to Trump.
I don’t think the majority of voting Americans have problems with any of those acts though. Think Joe you pass in Walmart cares about what happens to the White House ballroom?
They were fed "waste fraud and abuse" in the beginning of the year. and suddenly it happens in broad daylight and people shrug?
At this point it's just brainwashing. Some people's principals are clearly less about their own conviction and treating all this like a sports team. Whoever team "wins", even if the stadium burns down around them.
It's privately funded so it doesn't fit under "waste, fraud, and abuse" in the same vein as things that use taxpayer money.
Conflict of interest by attempting to curry favor for his vanity project by making donations? That's a fair criticism.
It is allegedly privately funded.
Remember that Mexico allegedly would pay for the wall.
Aren’t private donations supposed to go to the treasury where they are then allocated by congress?
Yeah: If someone donates money to the government for any purpose, the Constitution says Congress and only Congress has the authority to decide where it goes. Not the President.
So either Trump is doing this officially, but the funding is illegal/unconstitutional...
... Or the funding is legal, but Trump is doing it as a private citizen, which is grand vandalism.
> It's privately funded so it doesn't fit under "waste, fraud, and abuse" in the same vein as things that use taxpayer money.
Does Trump paying himself $230 million in taxpayer dollars in compensation for his various criminal prosecutions fit under "waste, fraud, and abuse"?
There’s no chance that it’s actually privately funded, right?
> Think Joe you pass in Walmart cares about what happens to the White House ballroom?
Joe in Walmart thinks what Facebook memes and Fox News tell him to think. The same subversive forces that support the administration's lawlessness control the media diet of a plurality of Americans.
If you want Americans to care about wants going on, you have to inform them about it first.
Polling on it has been bad even amongst Republicans it isn’t great.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/devastating-poll-reveals...
The ballroom is scheduled be ready in January 2029 assuming no delays. But by that time Trump will be at the end of his term. So is he doing this for future presidents (would be very much unlike him) or is he planning to stick around after Jan 2029?
Steve Bannon is doing countless interviews and shamelessly saying he will be president again in 2028.
It is one thing for Bannon to say it. It is another thing for a prominent sitting senator to say it [1]. (That would be senator Lindsey Graham.) I wish John McCain was still around... he would have had the courage to stand up and talk sense into these people.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5519134-lindsey-graham-d...
technically, he is currently scheduled to be president for the entirety of 2028 because the election is in November 2028 and the presidential term ends on January 20, 2029.
but that's probably not what he meant.
He wants to stick around
The life expectancy tables are kinda against it though
Most of the people in that sample-data are poor and have less access to doctors and medicine.
Life-expectancy tables for multimillionaires and national politicians are probably significantly different.
His father Fred Trump died at 93. In Jan 2029 Trump will only be 82... and will have another 10 years to go if he lives as long as his father.
He's making his mark like a dog on a fire hydrant.
I think they will care if their life gets worse, they just don't realize that these things are the cause.
The White House is a pretty significant symbol of this country, so yeah, I think they might care that a big chunk of it was just torn down.
Go to a Walmart in Ohio or Wisconsin and ask. Ask what % will change their next vote because of it
https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2025/09/30/ohio-family-farmer...
https://upnorthnewswi.com/2025/10/20/wisconsin-soybean-farme...
What do they care about? Price of groceries? Health care maybe?
I think that's the wrong way to view the problem. Think about it this way: before Nixon resigned his approval rating was still 23%.
You can get a quarter of the country to say yes or not care for any given question no matter how obviously dangerous or stupid. But having a 25% approval rating would be very, very bad.
Please don't place the burden of proof on others with absurd tasks.
I recall there being some… upset, when a previous resident planted a garden.
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I get it but it is imperative that this never happen. The reason is that a pardon is the only recourse the people have against the supreme court
Far more than the Supreme Court needs to get involved before a pardon is necessary.
The pardon power has been so abused these past few administrations that it's clear there should be constitutional changes in the pardon power, either congressional review, or strip it altogether.
The way this is going, the President won’t need using any pardon powers, because the judges will all ask the President what the judgement should be in advance.
And the prosecutors will ask who to prosecute.
Finally only fair justice!
Your forget to insert the part where the President asks the convicted defendant if they want to finance their pardon with Klarna or Affirm in the Presidential Library's checkout page
Financed through purchases of the President's own crypto coin
This is currently how it works in some countries that are supposed to be (and were) democratic. Sadly the US is moving in the same direction.
if they were going to pardon everyone, at least this save costs. i guess doge was really saving us money after all /s
Which congress do you want doing that review? The past several congresses have been unqualified to do any sort of constitutional reviewing in my opinion.
The U.S. is running an outdated installation of democracy. The French approach of just rebooting and reinstalling the entire thing seems like a good idea at this point. Except the populace is already badly split into warring camps.
> The French approach of just rebooting and reinstalling the entire thing seems like a good idea at this point.
Do you mean the French Revolution? If you actually read the history on that (even basic stuff beyond the "Reign of Terror") I don't think any person would want to experience that for their country. It had tons of indiscriminate violence and took a decade of chaos before they sorted out into a real government, which then resulted in Napolean's coup
I read this as a reference to the Fourth and Fifth Republic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Fifth_Republic
(I've read that the French are talking about a Sixth, given that they've gone through several prime ministers in the past few weeks/months and seem unable to maintain a government long enough to pass anything.)
ACK on all. I should be a bit more clear maybe.
It's more likely a reference to France currently being the Fifth Republic.[1] The transition from the Fourth to the Fifth happened in 1958 without much violence.
[1] https://thegoodlifefrance.com/short-history-of-the-five-repu...
Interestingly, the Fifth has then been running for 67 years so far, which makes the Third Republic still the longest running republic of France! I guess in around three years they'll be having a grand party.
Those 3 years are on shaky grounds, the way they're burning through Prime Ministers ;)
Thanks, yes, it was a reference to Fourth to Fifth, and maybe soon Sixth Republic (depending on how things go…)
> The transition from the Fourth to the Fifth happened in 1958 without much violence.
Quoting from the article:
The article even fails to mention Operation Resurrection. Hopefully we don't need coups every time we want a new constituent assembly.I suspect the OP meant their semi-presidential/dual-executive system w/ parliament (although at this point, storming the Bastille is starting to look pretty good...).
Yeah that's pretty much what happened last time I tried to reinstall my distro
For better or worse, the US constitution does not have provisions or a process for dissolving itself and developing a new constitution.
The closest thing we have is the amendment process. In theory we could use that to rewrite the entirety of the constitution[0], but good luck getting the required votes in place on any possible replacement. The bar is pretty high: amendments need to be proposed by either a vote of 2/3 of Congress, or by a constitutional convention convened by 2/3 of the state legislatures, and then ratified by 3/4 of all state legislatures.
We couldn't get that sort of agreement to pass something as theoretically uncontroversial as the Equal Rights Amendment. It's laughable to think we could pass a "new constitution" that way.
I expect the only way we could end up with a new constitution is through a bloody civil war, or some sort of coup. Hopefully no one wants something like that, though. I certainly don't.
[0] Technically the entirety of the constitution can't be amended; Article V, Section 5 prohibits an amendment from changing each state's equal representation in the Senate. Though I suppose a "rewrite amendment" might get around that by preserving the Senate as-is as a ceremonial body without any power. That would certainly violate the spirit of that wording in Article V, so I imagine it would be challenged in court.
It's worth noting that Article V, Section 5 doesn't prohibit itself from being amended away. So you just need the constitutional convention to refer two new amendments: the first one stripping the restriction itself, and the second one to do what the restriction prohibited being done.
Tech corps and ex-PayPal guys would be putting billions into making a new constitution and it would be far, far worse than what we have now. And while the French love using violence and destruction to defend their countrymen and their rights, Americans would gladly be lemmings off a cliff so long as someone told them it pissed someone else off.
Yep. We might have been the first PC, but we're running windows 3.11 while the rest of the world runs a new OS.
We need ranked or approval voting, elimination of gerrymandering. Strongly prefer elimination of Citizens United and the Senate.
Unfortunately, eliminating the Senate (or more precisely, each state's equal representation in the Senate) is the one and only thing that the constitution forbids an amendment from doing (see Article V, Section 5):
> Provided that no Amendment [...] no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
(Awkward ellipsizing, but the elided text is another thing that's not allowed, which expired in 1808, and is otherwise thankfully no longer relevant.)
Better voting systems can be implemented, but since the states run federal elections, each state would have to pass legislation requiring a different voting system. Of course I expect all 50 would not agree on which alternative system is the best, which may or may not matter. And I doubt red states would want to change, as voting systems that better reflect the will of the electorate tend to disadvantage the GOP.
Eliminating gerrymandering is difficult, because it's hard to objectively define what is and isn't a gerrymandered map. There have been some attempts to do so, and I would say they've even been somewhat successful, but people can reasonably disagree with the methodology and thresholds used.
The Citizens United SCOTUS ruling and precedent absolutely needs to be reversed; agreed. Corporations are not people and should not get first amendment protections. Or any kind of protections outside any that are defined in regular law.
Another thing we need to do away with is the Electoral College. Presidents should be elected based on the national popular vote, not by per-state winner-take-all proxies, with vote apportionment that wildly advantages some states over others. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would effectively do away with the EC if states "owning" at least 270 electoral votes were to all sign it, but that's unlikely to ever happen. (Then again, it's more likely that the Compact would achieve that threshold than the passing of a constitutional amendment to abolish the EC.)
> Article V, Section 5
I propose an amendment which permits any state to subdivide without the consent of the Senate, provided that no subdivision is smaller (less-populous) than the smallest current state.
So small states don't have to give up their unfair disproportionate representation in the Senate... but they can't monopolize that state of affairs either. Any state above a certain size ("2x the smallest") may decide that its constituents are best-served by fission.
If we can't figure out how to get a Congress that most people believe in then I worry that is the beginning of the end for this government.
Hopefully we get to try from scratch a third time if that happens but I worry that collapse will be too tempting for Russia or China to not step in.
Maybe we can be lucky and get conquered by Canada first in that case? What a weird thing to think...
From fiction, we have Clancy's sudden loss of the majority of federal elected officials which allowed for a fresh start. However, that's subject to having governors submitting senators while having elections for congress. Starting from a clean slate would be the only fix. As it is now, it's who is willing to kowtow to the biggest backers to get them over the line and stay in office. On top of the gerrymandering that all but ensures the party in control stays in control, I see no change to the status quo in my life time without an uprising.
Gerrymandering is at the heart of the rot.
The Senate is not subject to garrymandering and if we fixed the issues with the House (literally via any mechanism) the Senate would immediately go back to being the vehicle used to prevent the will of the people (see the Senate under Mitch McConnell any time the House was under Democrat control)
Until the Dem party fixes their brand and wins back some of the Senate seats they used to control in the 90s and early 2000s there will be no positive progress.
The Senate is in a permanent state of gerrymandering.
There were only 13 states when the Constitution was ratified. It was never envisioned to be as disproportionate as it is today, with California's two Senators representing 40 million people vs. Wyoming's 0.6 million.
In 1776, the population of Virgin was about 500K, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts were about 270K, and Delaware and Georgia were about 50K each.
The founders knew exactly what they were agreeing to when they gave each State two Senators. It’s supposed to be a separate check on the Federal power to force a wide swathe of consensus.
I doubt the founders considered the possibility that political realignment would result in nearly all low population states being on one side of the spectrum.
California currently has of 60x the population of Wyoming, which means that Wyoming voters have over 60x the voting power in the Senate as California voters.
Whether the founders intended that or not it's a shitty, unfair, and undemocratic system that doesn't act as a check, it just enables permanent minority rule.
It was semi intentional. It wasn't as extreme but the Senate was still a compromise for smaller states to have leverage in government and get them to sign on.
Meanwhile, the house is about 10 times smaller than what the founders envisioned. Maybe that's overkill but we probably should at least expand the house quite a bit. And Probably expand the supreme court as well.
No, I like the way the Senate runs in theory. Equal representation for the states regardless of size. Only if it's alongside the house with proportionate representation.
That seems like a good theory that would keep itself in check.
In execution it's an absolute shit show, I'll give you. But I do believe the theory is sound. With the house and the Senate we get the best of both worlds.
In theory.
Why is the theory sound? It’s an arbitrary number of regions delineated by arbitrary lines given a disproportionate amount of power that run completely counter to the goal of a democracy.
Arbitrary or not, States are sovereign things. They set their own laws.
Having 1 chamber that allows equal representation
And
Having 1 chamber that allows proportionate
Is a good system in theory. Otherwise, States (which are again separate entities) with high populations just steamroll those that have low populations.
The system now allows states with high populations to be appropriately represented in the house, which sends bills to the Senate.
I feel like it's a good system, in theory. You get your population representation and checks and balances for rural areas as well.
The barrier of entry to becoming a state is currently too high, and the barrier to stopping to be a state is even higher.
You keep saying "in theory". If the practice -- as you seem to admit -- doesn't actually work, then what's the point defending the theory? It doesn't work in practice, so it's a bad idea.
> Arbitrary or not, States are sovereign things.
In practice that's not really true. The federal government has many, many levers it can use to get states to fall in line.
> (which are again separate entities)
In theory, but in practice, most states are highly dependent on a few very populous and productive ones, for economic and military protection.
Not to mention that the Feds control the purchasing power of the currency and international trade, so the states aren’t sovereign to do anything of consequence.
Hence in practice, this whole theory of states being sovereign goes out the window.
>Why is the theory sound?
Because tyranny of the majority is still a thing. Elections would just switch from swing states to appealing to California and Texas if we did everything with purely popular votes. So the house is there as a large power and senate can check it.
Of course, in practice the house is way under represented so its almost like we have a senate and a mini-senate. That's where things fall apart.
> Elections would just switch from swing states to appealing to California and Texas if we did everything with purely popular votes.
I don't see why that would be the case. To win an election you don't need to win states at all; you need to win lots of voters, and those voters could come from anywhere.
You could lose every single voter in both CA and TX and still win the election, given different political demographics across states.
As an aside, I also think abolishing the Electoral College and going strictly by the national popular vote would increase voter turnout for presidential elections. I live in a solidly blue state, and if I didn't care about down-ballot races, I probably wouldn't bother to vote in presidential elections, since my vote doesn't really matter here. Only votes in swing states matter under the current system.
ya so instead we get multiple lifetimes of minority rule and stagnation.
> tyranny of the majority
Aka democracy.
> Elections would just switch from swing states to appealing to California and Texas if we did everything with purely popular votes.
No, it wouldn’t. It would switch to appealing to the most voters, who may or may not happen to live in California and Texas, but that is irrelevant to a democracy.
States are sovereign entities with their own laws. They can even, in theory, secede from the union.
The Senate is a good system, it's just that most states are Republican.
Some of the larger states might consider splitting themselves into separate states to better represent their populations. Though that may not be constitutionally possible.
If we ever add additional states to the Union (Puerto Rico, D.C., etc.), they'll want to enjoy having an equal say with every other state in the Union. It's a compelling feature of our system.
The House, as a proportional system, actually needs to be re-normalized. There are not enough representatives to have an actually proportional vote.
Is it a good system? I'm not sure I understand why? The system as it's designed seems to want to incentivize having many low population states as a way to spread and gain power, and as such the current 100 power holders are incentivized to to protect their power by preventing the dilution of their power that would come with more states.
Additionally, because the population of the country is not evenly distributed across all the states, senators from some states have disproportionate power and control this is frequently mentioned and brought up several times in this post alone. Not sure what aspects make it a good system, some type of beleaguered point about preventing tyranny of the majority? At what cost? tyranny of the minority, political stagnation?
The Senate is a terrible system. There's no logical reason why citizens in one state should have orders of magnitude more say in the federal government than citizens in another.
The founders aren't infallible gods, and they really fucked up here.
Gerrymandering is particular powerful because Congress has refused to reapportion representatives for over a century. They just decided to stop following that part of the Constitution back in 1929. We still have the same number of representatives as we did when we were less than a third our current population. Each representative now covers 20 times more people than when the Constitution was ratified.
Money is. Politicians are for sale.
This is my take as well. Nothing will improve until we roll back Citizens United.
Citizens United is impossible to roll back with the structural problem of the Senate.
> If we can't figure out how to get a Congress that most people believe in then I worry that is the beginning of the end for this government.
We know, from comparative study of existing representative democracies, how to do that better (have an electoral system for the legislative branch that provides results that are substnantially more proportional than under the current system); what we don’t have is a practical way to get from where we are to where we need to be given the construction of the electoral systems in the states and nationally and the politicians and interests that has entrenched and the Constitutional amendment process.
Approval ratings for Congress, barring a post-9/11 spike, have been under 30% for most of my life. By this standard I'd say we're in the middle of the end.
For the most part, folks like their own Congress people though. They just don't like the others.
> Which congress do you want doing that review? The past several congresses have been unqualified to do any sort of constitutional reviewing in my opinion
States can reject dumb amendments. Congress proposes amendments, the states ratify them [1].
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-5/
It has. But the breadth and depth of how they're being used by this one in particular is really far, far worse than other recent ones of both parties.
The power to pardon needs to be removed all together. All it does is show that the President overrides the department of justice. How anyone ever thought this should be a thing, I have no idea.
I think a congressional pardon power to allow national leniency on previously accepted sentences that are now viewed as unjust might be worth holding onto. It being such a casual presidential power has made it ripe for corruption for a long time but I would weigh that with civil rights era pardons for sham trials - I think we do still need a national sanity check relief valve for local injustices.
And the dysfunction of congress probably works in our favor here since pardons should be exceptional - not routine. A routine pardon is just a demonstration of the justice department failing at a systemic level.
> I think a congressional pardon power to allow national leniency on previously accepted sentences that are now viewed as unjust might be worth holding onto.
That sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. For the branch of government in charge of making and changing laws.
I heard the intention was that sometimes it's against the public good to prosecute some people even though they have comitted crimes. Good examples of it being used as intended was pardoning the perpetrators of the whiskey rebellion, the confederate army, vietnam draft dodgers and more controversially, Nixon. I guess it's also intended in cases where obvious miscarriages of justice have been committed. It made sense in 1785 or whenever but along with lots of the rest of the constitution it's long obsolete and has been twisted, stretched and mangled into a hideous caricature of itself over the centuries.
How hard can it be to specify that pardons can be given by a committee of 25 randomly selected individuals with an Ivy league education when at least 2/3 is in favor with no existing financial ties and no information regarding the identity of whoever's fate is at stake?
Right, not hard at all, but apparently whoever wrote the Constitution was a fucking moron.
I think you're onto something, for a kind of second-chance review function, but instead of "with an Ivy League education", perhaps you most want people knowledgeable about both judicial process and society.
"Ivy League education" isn't a totally bad predictor, but it's going to be very biased towards people with privileged socioeconomic backgrounds, who therefore may have blind spots of aspects of society that apply to the situation. (No matter how many books they've read, classes they've taken, years of volunteering with the less-advantaged they've done, and hours of NPR they've listened to.)
The US Constitution wasn't written with the wellbeing of random ordinary citizens in mind. You could argue it was the exact opposite in fact.
More importantly it was written under the assumption that political elites would understand and act against the risk of electing a broken demagogue.
But alas, the modern GOP’s cravenness beggars belief.
> The power to pardon needs to be removed all together. All it does is show that the President overrides the department of justice.
The Department of Justice is subordinate to the President as part of the executive branch with or without the pardon power; if you want something other than "the President overrides the Department of Justice" as a matter of Constitutional law rather than an intermittently-observed convention of restraint (which Trump absolutely has not observed outside of the pardon power), you need a fundamental reformation of the Constitutional structure of government, far beyond the elimination of the pardon power.
While it’s true that the Department of Justice sits within the executive branch, the assertion that it is simply “subordinate” to the President - functioning as his personal legal arm - is an oversimplification that misses both the design and evolution of constitutional governance. The President does not have unlimited authority over the DOJ. The DOJ’s powers are exercised pursuant to laws enacted by Congress, and its officials - especially the Attorney General and U.S. Attorneys - swear oaths to uphold the Constitution, not to serve as personal agents of the President’s will.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that while the President may remove executive officers, he cannot lawfully direct them to commit acts that are unconstitutional, obstruct justice, or violate statutory mandates. The constitutional structure also relies on normative independence - a separation within the executive branch that maintains rule of law. This is not a “convention of restraint” but an operational necessity derived from the Take Care Clause (“he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”). That clause doesn’t mean “whatever the President says is law”; it means the President must ensure that the law itself is enforced faithfully, even when doing so constrains his own interests.
Finally, while the pardon power is broad, it’s not the linchpin of executive authority over the DOJ. Removing or limiting that power wouldn’t change the fact that the DOJ’s prosecutorial discretion must still be exercised consistent with law, ethics, and constitutional constraints - not simply the President’s personal preferences. Our system is not designed for a monarch with “absolute control” over prosecutions. It’s designed for a chief executive bound by law and accountable through oversight, impeachment, and ultimately, the electorate.
> While it’s true that the Department of Justice sits within the executive branch, the assertion that it is simply “subordinate” to the President - functioning as his personal legal arm - is an oversimplification that misses both the design and evolution of constitutional governance.
The idea of the republic as opposed to a monarchy is that no part of the government is anyone's personal...well, anything...but that doesn't really negate the degree of control the President exercises, both in theory and in practice barring highly variable personal restraint, over the DoJ.
> The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that while the President may remove executive officers, he cannot lawfully direct them to commit acts that are unconstitutional, obstruct justice, or violate statutory mandates.
That doesn't mean the President doesn't override the DoJ, it means the President doesn't override the law.
> The constitutional structure also relies on normative independence - a separation within the executive branch that maintains rule of law.
Yes, that it relies on this but does not actually provide any mechanism by which it can effectively be assured is the fundamental design issue I am referring to being necessary to address if one wants "the President overrides the DoJ" not to be a simple fact independently of whether or not the pardon power exists and is vested in the President's discretion.
> Finally, while the pardon power is broad, it’s not the linchpin of executive authority over the DOJ.
I literally said that the pardon power is irrelevant to that, which is the exact opposite of describing it as the lynchpin.
> Removing or limiting that power wouldn’t change the fact that the DOJ’s prosecutorial discretion must still be exercised consistent with law, ethics, and constitutional constraints - not simply the President’s personal preferences.
To the extent that is true, that is only a negative constraint on prosecution applied by the courts, it can never compel a prosecution that the executive has declined. (Congress, of course, could punish the President for preventing prosecutions, via the impeachment power, but that’s hardly a substitute for real independence from the President of all or part of the prosecutorial power if that is what is desired. Or, for that matter, much of a remedy at all if more than 1/3 of the Senate is on board with the President's conduct.
By "these past few administrations" do you just mean "Trump" and "Trump the previous time"?
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/06/biden-pardon-autopen-concer...
That's it? Using autopen is abuse of power?
Trump is miles ahead of other administrations in abusing it but as far back as my political awareness reaches (the Clinton admin) there have been clear awful examples like Marc Rich[1]. I certainly have a political lean but there are some really indefensible pardons on each side.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Rich
Did you miss all the Biden pardons, including unprecedented pardons for crimes they may commit?
No, I'm well aware of and disapprove of a number of them - this is still worse.
Yes actually. As far as I'm aware even the President can't pardon crimes someone may commit in the future. Can you point out the ones where he did that?
Are you equating Trump's pardons and commutations to Bidens? For review, Biden's were largely for non-violent drug offenders and preemptive pardons for people like Anthony Fauci and federal employees prosecuting Jan 6 defendants and the like. Save for his pardon of his son Hunter (who's own prosecution was littered with politics), Biden's were largely pedestrian.
Biden commuted many, many murderers and rapists -- not just "non-violent offenders". It was not pedestrian. Here are two: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-12-24/biden-co...
Commuted from death to life in prison. Not pardoned. That's a whole different thing.
Do you think he would have issued those if anyone else was succeeding him? Has Trump validated those concerns?
The only reason Trump hasn't challenged the constitutionality of the pre-emptive pardons is because he indends to do the same.
Nope, Biden pardoning his son was also widely condemned across the political spectrum as an abuse of the pardon power.
I was of two minds about that pardon. On the one hand it seemed like an abuse of pardon power. On the other hand, it was also reasonable at the time to expect abuse of presidential power to prosecute political enemies. So on balance I was OK with it. I think the compromise I'd like to see is to curtail both powers.
"abuse of presidential power to prosecute political enemies" which at that point only Biden had done.
Have you ever heard of Whitewater?
Literally at no time did the Biden administration ever direct the Department of Justice to investigate a political enemy.
Exactly the opposite of what the Trump administration had been doing.
But what about if we just imagine the evidence of Biden interference in DOJ decisions?
Then they’re basically the same!
/s
Because he was prosecuted for doing drugs and owning a gun? There's literal video of Joe Rogan smoking pot and he talks about his concealed weapons permit. It would be a slam dump case, some how i don't think he's getting prosecuted because its selective law open to abuse. Seems perfectly good use of pardon.
>would be a slam dump
You are watching a very different game from me.
The Hunter Biden issue was not about smoking marijuana... that would have been the very least of his multitude of legal problems. Biden's own DoJ was prosecuting the cases - which is important context to consider here.
> Since 2018, Weiss had been investigating Hunter Biden as U.S. attorney. In 2023, Republicans asked Garland to appoint a special counsel, some specifically demanding Weiss, a Republican appointed to his role by President Donald Trump. Garland ultimately appointed Weiss, giving him additional authority. However, congressional Republicans then expressed criticism, some stating Weiss was untrustworthy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_C._Weiss
6 years of investigation and all they could find was that Hunter did drugs and owned a gun. I am sure if we drug tested congress, we could prosecute a bunch of congressmen for the same crime. Maybe thats why supreme court is looking at the constitutionality of the law and its all been ruled unconstitutional in one of the courts districts but hey lets prosecute Hunter Biden for it.
That was not all of Hunter's legal problems - he had serious tax evasion charges[1], along with other Biden family members (all of which were pardoned, unprecedentedly by President Biden).
Trying to minimize Hunter's significant legal problems to "he did [many hard, highly regulated] drugs and [illegally] owned a gun [which was thrown into a dumpster]" is disingenuous and factually incorrect.
Hunter's (and other Biden family member's) legal issues were so plainly severe, with a near-guarantee of prison time, President Biden was forced to issue an unprecedented, unconditional pardon for "offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024." A decade-long period during-which any crimes Hunter committed were erased and forgiven.
Nobody is above the law? This was Biden's own DoJ.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco-weiss/pr/grand-jury-ret...
Six years of investigation and all they could find is that he put false information on a government form and paid his taxes late. Six years. Mueller investigation was only two years and how many charges did he find? Jack Smith investigation was one year before he has charged people with dozens of charges. This prosecutor had six years and couldn't dig up anything. Either hunter biden is the smart person in world that was so smart that he left no evidence of crimes or it was partisan witch hunt.
Also if the gun charges were so serious, why aren't we prosecuting Joe Rogan, its literally a slam dunk case. He smokes pot(a schedule 1 drug) on his podcasts and brags about his concealed weapons permit. You don't even need to find witnesses, just show the jury of him smoking pot and a copy of his federal form. Or we could just cross reference the ATF background database with states' Medical Marijuana Registries. Could prosecute tens of millions of people including Joe Rogan.
At the time that did reek of corruption and misuse of power, but given current state of things, it was the right move.
It protected one individual - there have been a rash of politically motivated moves by the justice department that have targeted plenty of others. I can understand the pardon but the fact that so many other people were left out to dry just reinforces our multi-tiered justice system.
That's why it was not just one individual -- he also pardoned Fauci, members of Congress who served on the J6 investigations, and Gen. Milley for the same reason.
It's clear that he was correct that Trump was going to target his political enemies, but it sounds like he can't win here -- if he pardons everyone including Comey, people would say he's abusing the power by pardoning everyone. If he only pardons a few then he's accused of leaving others "high and dry."
Yeah, that's a very fair point. The persecution of Fauci and anyone associated with bringing the charges against Trump would've also been very predictable targets for pardons.
Truly don’t understand the equivalence here.
If you just argue both sides are the same, you get to excuse yourself from self reflection.
Just as a judge should not be ruling on a case where the defendant is throwing suitcases full of money at him, a judge should also not be ruling on a case where the defendant is his own son. Both are inappropriate uses of a power intended for the application of mercy and the correction of faults in the justice system. Both are the sorts of things that should lead to recusal.
Biden's use is far more forgivable, as it's a given that his son was being prosecuted politically to punish Biden (though certainly he was guilty) and would likely have been prosecuted more under Trump, like Comey is being prosecuted today. And certainly "saving your children" is a far more forgivable sin than naked bribery, but being better than Trump is a low bar, but it's still not okay to excuse criminals from punishment because they have an important family member.
I will help: people don't like it when the presidential pardon is used for self-serving shit.
How is pardoning people like Fauci, or even Hunter, that Trump was clearly going to target as part of an "enemies" list, more "self-serving" than literally pardoning anyone that makes you/give you millions of dollars?
(Changpenh Zhao - made him billions; Trevor Milton - donated $1.8 million; Walczak - his mom donated millions)
Really? What ever positive opinions I had left of Biden went out the window with that decision.
Doesn’t it affect your opinion in any way that Trump’s DOJ has been used exactly like his harshest critics last year said it would?
It's not binary. I can not respect both decisions. Just because I don't respect Trump does not mean I must respect Biden's decision or vice versa. Current POTUS is absolutely vile. The previous guy was put in a position and a decision was made that I did not agree with, but over all, no he wasn't using the federal money to directly line his pocket as compensation for being investigated for things he actually did.
I think the point is, Biden said he pardoned his son to prevent political persecution of him by Trump. Biden's fears have been borne out - the Trump administrationg is persecuting Trump's enemies. Does that change your opinion of Biden's pardon?
Where's the preemptive pardons for Comey, James, Schiff? So no, it's not much of a move of the needle since it was only family members.
It wasn't only family members. Biden granted clemency or pardons to over 4200 people. Notably for the same blanket pardon from 2014 to 2025 for family members, includes Dr. Anthony Fauci, and General Mark Milley.
And all of the members of Congress on the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack for anything having to do with their role on that committee.
Schiff was on that committee. He said the pardon was unnecessary and unwise.
https://www.justice.gov/pardon/pardons-granted-president-jos...
At that Biden was the only president who had used DOJ to persecute his predecessor. So basically he started this shit, and when it turned out the other guy won the election, he pardoned his obviously guilty son, and other obviously guilty party members.
You say persecute yet those without an agenda say investigate. It was not persecution to look into the events of January 6. Conflating the investigation as persecution is not a very honest take on the events.
Biden did not order his DOJ to prosecute anyone. Unlike Trump with Pam Bondi, Biden did not personally direct Merrick Garland, who promised to run the DOJ independently and did -- to the point Garland even prosecuted the President's own son.
The Trump prosecutions were not only warranted, they were insisted by Republicans; the Republican Senators explicitly declined to convict Trump in his second impeachment because they anticipated he would be prosecuted in a court of law for January 6. From Republican Leader Mitch McConnell when he explained his rationale during the 2nd impeachment trial:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/13/politics/mitch-mcconnell-acqu...
By labeling him as "practically and morally responsible" and then refusing to vote to impeach, explicitly citing our criminal justice system as the appropriate venue for recourse, Mitch McConnell essentially demanded that Biden's DOJ prosecute him for J6.In refusing to convict Trump on J6, McConnell set the precedent that it is improper to impeach a President if he commits crimes between the Election and the Inauguration as Trump did. According to McConnell, accountability lies in the Courts. If it's true that the incoming administration also cannot prosecute those crimes, then POTUS is essentially immune from any and all accountability under the Constitution, which cannot be the case; POTUS would be able to commit or attempt to commit any crimes he wants between Nov and January 20 at the end of his term, up to and including high crimes like insurrection against the government.
Republicans shirked their Article I duty by refusing to impeach a man they publicly blamed for provoking events which led to the deaths of multiple people. Specifically it was Republican Senators who punted it to the Biden DOJ, which made them Constitutionally bound to prosecute.
Are you trying to claim that it's never valid to investigate a former President? What the fuck?
So if you were the outgoing president, and the incoming president said out loud in front of the nation he was going to abuse his power to jail your family members out of spite, you would just let that happen on principle?
Again, the threats were not levied just at family members, but only family members received the pardon. So let's not get all sanctimonious on this issue. If he was doing this as anything other than self preservation of his family we could talk, but actions speak louder than words and he chose family over principles.
Simply untrue. He pardoned hundreds of people, many of them with the same blanket pardon, and commuted the sentence of thousands.
Pardoning Hunter was also because he was technically guilty. They’d rather believe had something to pin on him.
If he’d pardoned a whole team of people he’d also signal to the world that he believe they are guilty too.
> only family members received the pardon.... If he was doing this as anything other than self preservation of his family we could talk
Seems like you should do some more research about this before forming such strong opinions, because you are not correct -- Biden preemptively pardoned more than just his family. He pardoned Fauci and Miley after Trump accused them of treason; as well as some members of the J6 committee like Liz Cheney (Trump retweeted a post that claimed Cheney was guilty of treason and should face a military tribunal).
I still think you should answer my question though, because it establishes a baseline for acceptability. I believe that you personally would pardon your own family against such threats because I believe most decent people would. So if you're willing to pardon your own family, then there's a conversation to be had about why you would need to, and whether that protection should be extended, for the good of the nation, to other people not related to you.
The problem we see right now with the pardon power was predicted by the founders:
And boy was he right! We are at that future day! So they saw this coming yet decided to include it anyway. Why?Hamilton argued:
and They recognized the system might need a release valve, or would make mistakes, and they included the pardon power to correct them. They made it broad and "unfettered" as Hamilton put it because they expected the person who would exercise the power would be "prudent".And in doing so they ensured that the pardon power reflects the soul of this nation. We get the government we vote for, and the pardon power is used in a way that we the voters tolerate.
The problem isn't the pardon power is broad, it's that we as an electorate are so willing to elect someone who is comfortable abusing those broad powers and other authority for his personal gain.
I will close by just noting that both of the abuses of the pardon power we are talking about were precipitated by Trump. Biden wouldn't have pardoned any of the people you're mad about if Trump hadn't first promised to abuse his power to persecute them. Biden had the good judgement and foresight to take Trump seriously, because he turned out to be 100% right.
It would be weird if he didn't? He pardoned his entire family, as Trump made it clear he was aiming to harass Biden's entire family for revenge. And the way he's been acting this presidency has only confirmed that's not beneath him.
The decision is a lot more respectable than "this guy gave me a bribe." They are worlds apart. And some may be theoretically willing to roll the dice on that for their family, but it reads naive.
no equivalence indeed, it's way worse. Biden's son has never contributed to anything, CZ has and had a net positive impact on the Blockchain industry.
And I say this as someone who despise Trump. A broken clock can be right twice a day.
> CZ has and had a net positive impact on the Blockchain industry.
So, a net negative impact on society.
What did the Jan 6 rioters contribute to?
You mean a net positive for other crypto scammers by showing how easy it is?
Equivalence may be a strong word, but pardoning your kids is classical Borgia shit straight out of the worst times of Italian Renaissance, and most people would condemn it if it was done by leader of some Central American Ruritania.
Of course, once it is done by a president representing the party you (generic you) feel affiliated with, the double standards inevitably kick in.
> Of course, once it is done by a president representing the party you (generic you) feel affiliated with, the double standards inevitably kick in.
Less that, more we're all aware of what Trump campaigned on and what he promised to do to Biden's entire family. And we're disheartened that there's cultists (not you) trying to convince us that we should let our families suffer if dear leader demands it.
I don't know these people, I don't have a strong feeling if any of them go to jail for something they did, because I'm not in a personality cult. But I care a lot more if people are going to jail just because a more corrupt person got the keys to everything. Turns out, those fears were valid, and I'm increasingly alarmed that there's still so much vitriol towards Biden pardoning a checks notes gun charge, than there is for the blatantly corrupt shit we see every day.
Looking at how this administration is now using the DoJ to hunt even people like Comey and Bolton whose crime was being a non-Trump-aligned Republican…
It’s probably good that Biden took away this particular show trial option from them.
It’s worth clarifying that the investigation into Bolton started in 2022 during Biden’s term. Hard(er) to say whether the ultimately issued indictment was politically motivated, but we need to keep an eye towards accuracy on these topics.
Non-Trump-aligned Republicans are now the worst enemies of the state, because they pose a credible threat.
Disloyalty is the worst crime around Trump. You must never stop proving your loyalty. Just look at videos of their meetings.
Each person speaking must first have a little sermon praising and thanking God, oh sorry no, not God, I meant Trump.
No. Almost everybody hated it out of context, but in context many understood that one man was about to obtain unprecedented power over all three branches of government and use it to vindictively pursue personal vendettas. These people were correct, this then happened.
Personally, I’m reminded of how every dysfunctional country’s deposed regimes flee or are killed. We sheltered Americans find it easy to forget that peaceful transfer of power is an accomplishment of lawful society, and as rule of law weakens we have only more chaotic, ignominious, and probably eventually violent transitions to look forward to.
Reaction to the Biden pardon is a pretty huge thing to be completely unaware of. You should reevaluate whether you’re in a media bubble.
I was against the Biden pardons at the time but in hindsight with the current administration pushing poorly done prosecutions for political purposes I have changed my mind on them. Trump will say his pardons are similar but looking at the facts I don't find them comparable (I'm still livid that he pardoned Blagojevich, who was literally caught on tape talking about selling a US Senate seat).
He didn't just pardon his family members and issue questionable preemptive pardons, he also issued the most pardons of any president ever, and not by a small margin, but by a factor of 20 compared to Trump up to now, in a single term, including pardons for violent criminals and yes, white-collar fraudsters as well. They didn't get much publicity because most of them were committed at the tail end of his term while the media were focused on the election and on the transition of power, because of double standards, and because the actors were low-profile. It really shouldn't be controversial to point out that the abuse of presidential power didn't start nor end with Trump. He most certainly wouldn't have gotten re-elected if that were the case.
it doesn't matter how you count it, what you are saying is bullshit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_pardoned_or_gra...
the substance of the pardons matters a great deal, as well.
Maybe my source was outdated, at least it should be accurate when comparing first terms. Quite the editorial spin on this Wikipedia article, it proves my point about double standards. I'd share some articles listing some murderers and embezzlers pardoned by Biden, but I don't like linking to politically biased sources regardless of their substance since it usually ends up with people nitpicking about the source. It's very easy to find evidence that these weren't 4,000 pardons for innocent marijuana users on Google anyway.
Carter pardoned 200,000 draft dodgers. Biden pardoned 256 people, the rest were mass commutations.
The cheerleaders for the current authoritarian coup that swarm around here are all too happy to conflate the Hunter Biden pardon and what's currently going on. As if we can't currently open a god-damned news website and read about the Comey, James and Bolton prosecutions and deduce that, yeah, Biden pretty much had no choice even though it was a shitty thing to do.
This is because these dipshits are eagerly carrying water for a vindictive dictator. They are not operating in good faith but due to the alignment of the owners of this site with those self-same fascists you are meant to act as if they're not trolls.
Biden pardoned several family members
Along with various other people to try to protect them from malicious political prosecution. Much like how Comey, Bolton, and a variety of current and former government officials are now being prosecuted on questionable charges.
The Bolton investigation started in 2023, during the Biden admin.
Yeah, because he was guarding them against the current administration abusing the Justice Department to go after them. Same reason he pardoned Fauci and others.
And from what we've seen, he was right to do so. Although, they've been angling to declare his pardons void so they can go after whoever they wish.
> Yeah, because he was guarding them against the current administration abusing the Justice Department to go after them. Same reason he pardoned Fauci and others.
Are pre-emptive pardons a common thing for American presidents to do?
No. Absolutely not. I can't think of anyone using a pre-emptive pardon until Trump's first Presidency.
Sadly I think Biden's choice was completely rational given how Trump is weaponizing the US justice system.
Proclamation 4311.
Only when the incoming administration labelled your family a "crime family" and led stadiums to chants of "lock them up".
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By considering the facts of the matter, sure it's as you said. But if you ignore every detail then it does look like everyone is exactly as bad as each other and it's impossible to say anything is good or bad.
That's nothing like what's being said, I'm really surprised you read it that way.
You have the causality mixed up. It’s not bad because they’re doing it. They’re doing it and it’s bad.
Well yes some people commit crimes and others don't. It's not a double standard, it's the same standard.
> Yeah, because he was guarding them against the current administration abusing the Justice Department to go after them
Ha ha. They (democrats overall) need to look inwards for that.
> Same reason he pardoned Fauci and others. Fauci screwed up our country so bad, it aint even funny. The fact that he needed a PRE-EMPTIVE (i.e. he wasn't even accused of anything at the time) pardon says it all. And the fact that Biden gave it to him, says everything there is to say about Biden.
> And from what we've seen, he was right to do so. Not even close.
> Although, they've been angling to declare his pardons void so they can go after whoever they wish. They should.
- Look at what Biden did to the southern border. And look at it now. - Look at almost any "democrat" run major city. Any. Then look at the crime rates and cost of living. - And the recent farce that was this "No Kings" crap...
Trump isn't perfect. Far from it. He's got major flaws, both in character and execution. However, name any major policy initiative that he's undertaken that is bad for the "country". As a whole.
> However, name any major policy initiative that he's undertaken that is bad for the "country". As a whole.
This is a ridiculous standard. Each of his policies (individually) only hurting some Americans is not a flex.
Everything, always hurts “someone”. There is no universal good.
The totality is what matters, not you, not me.
> However, name any major policy initiative that he's undertaken that is bad for the "country". As a whole.
Any? His energy policy.
I have plenty more.
What about it? What’s wrong with it?
Oil prices are down, we now produce more oil than anybody else, and enjoy low energy prices domestically.
Where’s the problem?
Electricity prices are up. The administration is cancelling solar and wind projects because of ideology.
I guess we are pretending that climate change isn't real now.
We were producing more oil than anyone else prior to Trump coming in. We’ve been posting ATHs on that front for years every year
Easy: what passes for diplomacy has been so awful that nobody wants to buy weapons from us anymore, nor do they value our treaty commitments. Oh the irony of proposing to meet in Budapest.
Buy weapons from us?? That’s your barometer?
And they are not “our” treaty commitments. Treaties by definition involve more than one party.
But out of curiosity, what commitments are talking here? Talking in abstracts is meaningless.
>Trump isn't perfect. Far from it. He's got major flaws, both in character and execution. However, name any major policy initiative that he's undertaken that is bad for the "country". As a whole.
They're usually not that bad for his billionaire grifter buddies, I'll give you that.
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I would say normalizing armed law enforcement wearing masks and refusing to provide any ID is utterly bad for the COUNTRY. Or maybe it's only bad for the people who get assaulted or shot by them and have no way of recourse. Let's hope that's not you, eh?
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Personally directing the Attorney General to prosecute his political enemies and then firing prosecutors until he finds one who will agree to do it. Basically what Nixon was to be impeached for now happening on a weekly basis.
Can you name some examples? I have a reply in my head, but I wanna make sure I’m precise.
He posted on Truth Social explicitly directing Pam Bondi to prosecute Bolton, James, and Comey. Then the DOJ charged them with crimes.
In the James case, Kristin Bird and Elizabeth Yusi (prosecutors in EDVA) were both fired for refusing to bring charges, only to be replaced by Trump's personal attorney Lindsey Halligan (who is not even a prosecutor).
In the Comey case, again they fired Erik Siebert, also from EDVA, because he wouldn't prosecute. They put Trump's personal attorney on instead and she immediately gave the prosecution a greenlight against a tight statute of limitations deadline.
Just watch: today there was a report that prosecutors in Maryland are hesitant to bring charges against Adam Schiff. My guess is whoever is gumming up the works there will be fired and replaced by another Halligan.
ICE
Tariffs
You may not notice it yet, but he has ruined the reputation of your country. People consider it insane to travel there now for vacations. We are actively avoiding American garbage. We are migrating away from American clouds.
He is focussed on short term bullshit while what matters on the world stage is soft power. America was considered trustworthy, the defacto leader of the world.
Now you're just a bully, an impotent one at that. You are no longer taken seriously.
You will notice the effects eventually, possibly after Trump is already rotting in his grave.
That’s all bullshit and you know it. And likely won’t admit it.
WE have been the money pit for the entire world for a very long time. Likely too long. People and countries are having a fit because the money flow seems to be slowing if not stopping altogether.
What matters on any stage is … power. Pure, unadulterated power. Soft power is for pansies. And we know how to show and use our power. Just one…one of our carrier fleets packs more power than entire countries.
FAFO - Fuck around and find out.
Edit: The cartels in the south are starting to find out. We can shut down that entire corridor in the blink of an eye, if we wanted to. And we may be there now.
> What matters on any stage is … power. Pure, unadulterated power.
This is some straight-up nihilistic BS. Might does not make right, instead standing for what is right is what creates might.
> Soft power is for pansies.
Here are some quotes you may want to familiarize yourself with:
https://www.azquotes.com/quotes/topics/lack-of-empathy.html
Maybe one or more of those will resonate and provide perspective as to many of your recent posts in this thread.
Ha. That's funny. But no, it seems you have drank the kool-aid and are delusional.
But you're right about one thing: FAFO
Touché.
We shall see.
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> I'm concerned about the diversity of your media consumption
… says the conspiracy theorist spouting Breitbart nonsense
Do you have a complete list because thats literally what trump is doing. In no way shape or form is any past president comparable to the depravity and recklessness of trump its not even close. If you say its close you are so misinformed or ignorant or willfully evil. Seriously crypto scams, open bribery from kushner and the saudis, the Qatar jet, the gold card visas for the cartel family... the list of insane actions goes on and on and its so depressing to see anyone fall for it or not be seething in rage because this country will not make it if this family and the people driving project 2025 are not brought to justice
> Do you have a complete list because thats literally what trump is doing.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/07/biden-gra...
Do you feel these are comparable to the pardons by Trump this term?
Trump is forgiving friends of debts to the US. Blatantly. He is for sale and always has been.
Lol did you even read that...
Commutations are not pardons. They were for weed and being gay in the military offences, you know things that do t actually matter...
Trumps pardoning fraudsters and criminals who have harmed people's lives
https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/media-center/press-rel...
https://protectdemocracy.org/work/understanding-trump-pardon...
But both sides!
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Trump is definitely the most egregious by a very wide margin, but the pardon power has been abused by every President in my lifetime. It's a truly insane feature of our constitution that needs to be changed.
It doesn't really matter who is more egregious, but IMO a country's leader pardoning his own family members is about as banana republic as it gets.
Well, no, you can clearly be more banana republic than that:
* Using the justice system to corruptly punish the opposition and prevent them from competing in elections,
* Using the security/military/law enforcement establishment to simply kill the opposition,
* Using the regulatory bureaucracy, and/or the security/military/law enforcement establish, to coerce media into friendly, or at least out of critical, coverage,
* Using the regulatory bureaucracy, and/or the security/military/law enforcement establish to reward people providing personal material benefit to the leader, or to punish those not doing so,
* Using the pardon power to assure that crimes committed in the course of doing any of the preceding items are unprosecutable
Pardoning family members, by itself (provided that the standards applied are different than those that would be applied to non-family members), is certainly corrupt as a form of nepotism, but hardly the outer limit of banana republic behavior.
> IMO a country's leader pardoning his own family members is about as banana republic as it gets.
That is until you see what's currently happening, the President personally directing the DOJ to arrest his political enemies, of which Biden and his family are considered to be primary antagonists (remember they labelled them the "Biden crime family" and chanted "lock them up"). That is the most banana republic as it gets, so how is preemptively defending against that behavior out of bounds?
Because he knew that Trump was a criminal who’d illegally go after his own family purely out of spite.
The prosecution of Hunter for being a user of controlled substances while in possession or acquiring a weapon was pretty clear cut IMO and been used against many more than Hunter as an easy way to put away drug users for a long time. He likely was pardoned in part because Hunter had the resources to actually get that law overturned, signaled intent to do so, and the establishment can't compromise their precious drug laws being found unconstitutional.
It absolutely is, and it's complete ass covering from an administration that utterly failed in its primary duty - putting Trump in prison.
Nice to see the people who fucked it up isolated from the consequences of his second term. (/s)
> these past few administrations
I remain amazed at how, again and again, no matter how specific and unique an abuse by the Trump administration is, it is always, invariably, Really Joe Biden's Fault. Like, the frame has been adopted by the MAGA base, but also the cranky left. The media does it too. Here on HN bothsidesism is a shibboleth that denotes "I'm a Serious Commenter and not a Partisan Hack".
But it leads to ridiculous whoppers like this, and ends up in practice excusing what amounts to the most corrupt regime in this country in over a century, if not ever.
No, this is just bad, on its own, absent any discussion about what someone else did. There was no equivalent pardon of a perpetrator of an impactful crime in a previous administration I can think of. I'm genuinely curious what you think you're citing?
This comment is a perfect explanation of my observations on here too. Thanks.
When Obama really increased the number of pardons, a lot of contemporary opinion writers said stuff along the lines of "this is a dangerous precedent and we're lucky that the pardons are fairly popular and sane." Now we're seeing unpopular, not sane pardons.
When democratic norms erode like pardons becoming more acceptable, it's like laying tinder and kindling for a fire. You still need a fire; a bad actor who is willing to light the material on fire. That bad actor is Trump. But the warnings from abusing these limitations from previous administrations was exactly for this moment. Nobody is saying Trump isn't the bad one, he is. But the conditions were laid for him. Now we need to survive him.
When we look back at Roman Senators and Emperors, it's often hard as modern people to point to one, single bad figure because we don't have a lot of contemporary thought or reading from the time. But when we look back we can see the seeds of "decline" in eras rather than single figures.
I don't buy it. A president that will literally direct his AG in public to prosecute his political enemies is simply not bound by norms, period. To pretend that he'd never have pardoned Zhao but for Obama's "increased number of pardons" is, to be blunt, ridiculous on its face.
And in context, you're doing exactly what I mocked above, tut tutting about civil behavior and norms and The Discourse while the system burns down around you.
But don't worry! You can always take solace in the fact that it was Really Barack Hussein Obama's Fault.
>But it leads to ridiculous whoppers like this, and ends up in practice excusing what amounts to the most corrupt regime in this country in over a century, if not ever.
Amen. Preach it, brother!
>No, this is just bad, on its own, absent any discussion about what someone else did. There was no equivalent pardon of a perpetrator of an impactful crime in a previous administration I can think of. I'm genuinely curious what you think you're citing?
I don't know what the poster was referring to, but I AM mad at Biden for pardoning his family. It's a molehill of an issue compared to the current administration though.
> Here on HN bothsidesism is a shibboleth that denotes "I'm a Serious Commenter and not a Partisan Hack".
HN users don't necessarily do that because they want to. They might do it as a pre-emptive defense mechanism against the brigades of de-facto censors that roam the site.
Moderation via populism is an anti-feature on its face, but Hacker News has the worst possible version of that sort of feature by making downvoted/flagged comments completely hidden unless you are logged in and showdead.
It's a pretty horrendous system if you're interested in good faith and honest debate.
> The pardon power has been so abused these past few administrations
Past few?
How about Ford pardoning Nixon? Or George H.W. Bush pardoning a bunch of Iran-Contra conspirators, thus covering his own ass?
Both of those were very bad, but nothing compared to the raw corruption in Trump's pardons.
The word "nothing" is completely inappropriate in describing Watergate and Iran-Contra, among the worst political scandals in American history, both involving gross abuse of executive power.
I certainly don't see how the pardon of Changpeng Zhao is worse than the pardon of President Richard Nixon or Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Crimes committed in office by the highest officials in the US government are a whole different level than crimes committed by some corporate CEO.
Ford at least had the misguided excuse of wanting to put the scandal behind and focus on the future.
Trump's pardons include hundreds of literal insurrectionists, promises to pardon in exchange for not testifying against him (witness tampering), and other blatant corruption. He fired the head of the OPA and installed a political hack to speedrun awful pardon choices and made a mockery of the process in a far more corrupt and damaging manner than anyone before him, and it's not even close.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Sounds reasonable. This is ok for Trump to do because of Hunter Biden.
The Hunter Biden pardon was necessary because it was clear that despite his admission of guilt, he was not going to receive a fair punishment. The Republican party leadership was very open in expressing their intentions for him, and had _already_ circumvented the judicial system to give him cruel and unusual punishment.
Would be nice if Trump only pardoned people who the incoming administration explicitly said they would target, after years of constant harassment and misinformation.
I think I would support those pardons even though I think Trump and his family and his cronies are acting the way really bad people act.
Taking the above scenario as license to sell pardons for person gain is such a stretch it looks like bad faith to me.
Agree. It seems to have (never had?) any positive benefit.
IDK, I think Carter's pardon of draft dodgers was a pretty good use of the pardon power.
The problem seems to be that we have unjust laws and punishments. We should have some way to apply mercy in that case. For example, I (hope to) see a future where people jailed for MJ related crimes get a mass pardon.
> The problem seems to be that we have unjust laws and punishments. We should have some way to apply mercy in that case.
The solution is to fix that and make it retroactive. Remove the unjust law and release anyone who was convicted for violating it.
A pardon is just a bad, unfair bandaid fix.
Chelsea Manning. Prosecuting her and other whistleblowers instead of the officials they blew the whistle on was a mockery of justice. Though that wasn't the stated reason for the commutation, it was long overdue.
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Obama commuted the sentences of 1,715 individuals and issued 212 pardons for non-violent fedral drug convictions.
I mean there are lots of people arrested on effectively political charges, and it's good to be able to reflect on it years later and get them out of jail. I'm not convinced Changpeng Zhao's charges would have ever been brought against him if the Biden admin didn't go so hard against crypto, I'm happy to see him pardoned. Hopefully next Trump can get whistle blowers like John Kiriachou
Doesn't necessarily have to be left up to the whims of one person though.
Trump essentially defines all convictions that he doesn't agree with as political charges though.
No, government is the greatest threat to liberty. If the guy in charge of prosecuting feels the need to not just not prosecute, but actively protect someone from the state, then we really really don’t want (who? his unelected subordinates?) prosecuting people. It’s supposed to be an “err on the side of” failing to prosecute criminals. The whole point is yes… sometimes we want criminals to get away with crime, because it’s better than the alternatives.
What is the alternative? One of them is the public vote for a leader, the state destroys that leader (or his allies, etc) and then what? Do we think the public just says “Oh, well, I guess we didn’t pick the right guy?”
> pardon power has been so abused these past few administrations that it's clear there should be constitutional changes in the pardon power, either congressional review, or strip it altogether
Strip it. I also started on the line of Congressional review (or pardons only activating on the consent of the Senate). But I concluded the entire power is out of place.
If the courts overreach, address it through legislation. Congress can annul sentences through law, no special pardon power needed. If a law is unfair or being applied unfairly, moreover, it should be fixed comprehensively.
There isn’t a place for one-man pardons in a republic. Even the imperium-obsessed Romans didn’t give their dictators, much less consuls, automatic pardon power. Caesar had to get special legislation to overrule the law.
Biden abused pardon power. So has Trump. Both parties have good reason for passing an amendment through the Congress. This is probably in my top 3 Constitutional amendment we need in our time. (Multi-member Congressional seats, popular election of the President and changing “the executive Power shall be vested in a President” to “the President shall execute the laws of the United States.”)
Poor drug dealers: Extrajudicial murder in international waters.
Rich drug dealers: Freedom.
Be a rich drug dealer.
More generically:
Poor criminal: jail/death penalty/etc.
Rich criminal: freedom
Famous and rich criminal: the presidency
CZ already paid a fine and finished serving his time in jail. He was already free before the pardon.
Wasn't he barred from working in financial services? I imagine a full pardon would remove any pesky details that might stand in the way.
The swamp is now a protected wetland.
Additional coverage (from other HN submissions):
QZ: <https://qz.com/trump-pardon-binance-changpeng-zhao>
Reuters: <https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-pardons-convicted-bin...>
The Guardian: <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/23/binance-t...>
It's bizarre to me, an Australian, how the pardon power is used in the US. Our federal, state and territory executive governments all have a pardon power, inherited from English law, that is, formally, unlimited (like the US federally and indeed it's less restrictive than many US states for state crimes).
It is a power used very sparingly, even though legally it is unlimited - the state of New South Wales is, as far as I know, the only one which publishes details about uses of the pardon power; in an average year there are 0 successful pardon/commutation applicants, and it's an exceptionally merciful year if they grant 2 or more. Other states and the federal government may or may not be a bit more generous, but we're talking very small numbers. Most pardons are for reasons of unsafe convictions where for whatever reason no remaining avenues of appeal are available (rare, these days, because each state has introduced laws to enable post-conviction reviews).
Historically, particularly in the 19th century convict era, the pardon power was much more important, and was indeed abused for political reasons on a number of occasions, but it seems that for the most part it quietly exists in the background and only gets significant public attention once every blue moon for a high-profile murder case or similar.
What explains the difference? Is it the requirement for sign-off by the King's viceroys that prevents abuse? Collective Cabinet governance that is accountable to Parliament? Maybe our political culture means politicians' friends tend to end up in prison less often and thus there's less opportunity for the abuse of pardons specifically? It's not particularly clear to me - if anyone's got some good comparative studies send me links!
If one leaves all integrity and morals the president of the richest country in the world can really amass a ton of wealth. I actually suspect that the shares the “US” government s getting from intel and other companies actually goes to trump somehow. Everything is up for sale with this administration. Just sad, the high moral ground the country occupied is just wiped out and it’s now just like any other corrupt Asian country
> and it’s now just like any other corrupt Asian country
Seems like we are getting the worst aspects of countries like China (anti-democratic 1 party rule, state directed oligarchy, targeting of ethnic minority groups) with none of the best aspects of China: strong investment in education, research, and modern infrastructure like high speed trains and zero carbon electricity production.
Maybe mimicking authoritarianism isn't the answer to our problems.
I'm sure SBF and Elizabeth Holmes will be next.
Only 16% but rising fast. https://polymarket.com/event/sbf-released-from-custody-in-20...
This particular market is too illiquid to mean anything.
Right now, there is only about $500 in liquidity if you wanted to buy in at the 20% ask with a market order. After that the next sell limit order it as 96%.
2m in outstanding volume on Kalshi: https://kalshi.com/markets/kxtrumppardon/trump-pardons/kxtru...
That's the total market volume, not the volume on SBF.
I imagine at least one guy that could create the market for you and then get the profit.
I consider SBF's crime way less serious given that the end result actually made money for "victims"* which was the intended goal from the start.
However Binance guy knowingly commits money laundering and gets the pardon?
* Those victims who did not wait through the full asset recovery process and sold their debt to "vulture investors" for pennies on the dollar.
If your definition of “making money” is turning bitcoins into USD at bitcoins low point, and then paying that back to them in 2 years, alright.
You can have whatever opinion you want about the bankruptcy process, but FTX was most certainly insolvent, due to fraud, and at that point whatever happened after the recovery to make people as whole as possible (which for many was not even close) really shouldn’t get credited to SBF.
If he gets the blame for buying them, he gets the credit, too.
Call me crazy, but if my bank tells me that my deposits are in safe assets like treasuries, but then the CEO takes the money to Vegas and puts it all on red, even if the CEO wins that bet, I'm very ok with that CEO going to jail.
Of course, if the bank is upfront that they take customer deposits to Vegas, then its fine.
Or if they took my deposit and commingled it with company funds and bought some illiquid luxury real estate in the Bahamas for their staff to live in totalling $240m. If they’re upfront about that, probably nobody deposits with them.
So he intended to get caught and have his investments seized and go up in value while seized. Noble.
Not necessarily. I think the intention was to drive up the value of FTX assets by investing in companies and coins that increased said value of the FTX platform. The value of held FTT was dependent on the value of FTX.
SBF already did an unauthorized interview in prison with Tucker Carslon.
Holmes has nothing to offer him.
Fraud talent.
Gislaine Maxwell will be next.
SBF, maybe. Elizabeth Holmes, no chance.
No chance SBF ever goes out (until he's done with his sentence).
Two huge factors against him:
* Most people don't even know who CZ is, so this is meh-tier. People know SBF and find him repulsive, literally. Whoever puts SBF out of jail will face a massive PR backslash, he's not important enough to be worth that.
* SBF stole from the rich, the only real crime in the US.
Very few times you see someone who is equally hated by: the law, the public and the rich. He's screwed, lol.
I would add that SBF was at one point the 2nd largest donor to Democrats.
SBF/FTX was also a massive donor (using customer money) to Republicans. They routed that money through Ryan Salame, I guess to avoid appearing to be as unprincipled as they actually were.
The common theme to the donations ("payoff" or "bribe" might be more accurate), whether to D or R was to weaken any push for crypto regulations.
Correct. I think it is fair to say that SBF would rather be associated with Democrats based on how he wanted to hide the donations to Republicans.
I'll bet he's kicking himself now... he made the wrong bet associating himself with Democrats, who let justice take its course despite the donations, when these days Trump will just take a payoff and issue a pardon.
I watched this documentary:
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-ruin-ftx-documentary...
The way CZ managed to tie up FTX in a knot was a masterclass. (about 59min in).
> Whoever puts SBF out of jail will face a massive PR backslash [sic]
We’ve been hearing variations of “massive PR backlash” should Donald Trump do XYZ for literally a decade now.
There has never been any consequential backlash whatsoever.
What are the odds Shkreli gets a pardon so he can be an officer of a publicly traded company again?
He's already out. Livestreaming his stock trades on X everyday. Probably has less interest in being an officer. He can still short pharma companies freely now.
A pardon has effect on more aspects of a sentence than the carceral period.
> massive PR backslash
Personally I do not believe there can be PR backslash for convicted criminal voted in as president.
Regarding your first point - how about George Santos? I suspect Santos was more well known than any of the crypto-scammers, was clearly guilty, was derided by both ends if the political spectrum - yet Trump commuted him.
Commute != pardon. Santos is still convicted and guilty of all of those charges. He just doesn't have to serve the rest of the sentence. I'm not sure if those were felony charges, but if they were and he's in a state that doesn't allow felons to vote...
A pardon makes it all go away. None of the baggage of convictions follow. Finding a job or a place to live is something they can do, as well as voting again.
SBF was/is left (and I suppose mostly signaled rich in that camp), Ulbricht libertarian, but they were caught and therefore had to serve time in jail regardless. That is how our system works. SBF specialized in large scale grifting (like Madoff), Ulbricht in providing an anonymous platform for trafficking. They're competitors of Trump, but given their experience, intelligence, and disadvantage (jail time) if bend loyal they're an asset.
It isn't about any of these people though. Trump is about only one thing: himself (a trade he shares with someone like KJU of North Korea). Specifically, as a narcissist, Trump is all about his image: business and might makes right, no matter the rules. Trump therefore hates the left, truth, honesty, ethics, empowering the weak and minorities, et cetera. Most importantly, he is signaling here: 'if you do business with me, we do the criminal path, and you get caught then I have the power to pardon your sentence.'
Whether Trump is currently a criminal or not, he was and is a convicted felon.
The above is also why I very much suspect Ghislaine Maxwell has dirt on Trump.
You're probably right, because she smoozed with Biden, but with Trump anything is possible with the right bribes.
Does SBF have any ability to pay a bribe at this point?
I suppose one might assume he has some funds stashed offshore somewhere.
His parents might but I don't think they're accepting bribes from Stanford profs. Maybe CZ can advocate for him to have a rival again.
The Ivy League colleges should start campus on prisons for their alumni and other inmates who could learn and continue the grift.
Is it called a bribe at this point, or is it tribute?
Indulgence might be the most appropriate term.
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> Zhao, in November 2023, pleaded guilty in Seattle federal court and agreed to step down as Binance CEO as part of a $4.3 billion settlement by the company with the Department of Justice.
Did he already pay the $4.3 billion? That's a lot of money, even for the federal government.
I understand that the commutation of George Santos means he does not have to pay the court ordered restitution to the people he defrauded.
Puts an even grosser spin on this incineration of the rule of law.
Penalties within plea deals likely have different rules but given a pardon is a higher rung of absolution I am horrified to wonder if he could clawback any personal financial penalties he has paid or even seek compensation.
From what I can tell, Binance had to pay the $4.3B, while Zhao had to pay $50M.
The status of each isn’t something I can readily find.
Whatever he hasn't paid of that $50M, he'd no longer be on the hook for
Is white collar crime / financial fraud just not going to be a crime in the US any more?
That already officially happened a few months ago. In addition to stopping all cryptocurrency fraud investigations, the administration stopped prosecuting white collar crimes under the FCPA:
https://www.connecticutcriminallawyer.com/blog/trump-adminis...
If you have access to people in positions of government influence, it's a good time to accept bribes from foreigners, especially via cryptocurrency. But if that is you then you probably already know that.
> If you have access to people in positions of government influence, it's a good time to accept bribes from foreigners,
FCPA addresses bribery of foreign governments...
Fair point, but either way we're not enforcing that law anymore.
As always, that depends on how much you're already worth.
Maximum sentence allotted for small fries and lenience for the bigger conman who share a piece of their own pie to clean the slate. Fair game in Crookville.
Depends, are you voting to keep interest rates where they are? Are you a DA who successfully prosecuted the president?
This Administration loves criminals.
This Administration is criminals.
Of course he did. Republicans can’t complain about Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich any more.
I was aware of the allegations that Marc Rich's ex wife gave money to Clinton ($450k to the library) is what led Clinton to pardon, but I never really dug into it.
Per wikipedia, Clinton's defense was that it was actually a favor to Israel, given Rich helping to finance their intel services. Maybe everybody else knew this, I didn't.
I’ve read the same, I can’t see any net benefit here aside from grift.
I mean, in all honesty, if our system is going to allow the grift and one is amoral enough to do so, have at it. It may catch backup later.
Of course they can. Republicans (well MAGA in particular) don't are about hypocracy. They make exceptions for Trump on everything.
I mean, that was one pardon 25 years ago and widely criticized across the political spectrum.
It's hard to count how many purely political and money-based pardons Trump has done this term, and there is essentially no pushback on his side.
If you have Republican senators or a Republican House rep, call their offices and tell them what you think of this.
Yes! This will be the time they finally push back on Trump.
Midterms are coming up next year. If they are afraid their association with Trump might take them down, they'll crack.
Honestly I suspect fear of Trump is really their only motivation right now.
Key line:
> "Since Trump’s election, Binance has also been a key supporter of his family’s World Liberty Financial crypto venture, a business that has driven a huge leap in the president’s personal wealth."
"Huge leap" meaning $5 billion,
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-wlfi-world-liberty-financ... ("New crypto token boosts Trump family's wealth by $5 billion")
$5B, so far.
Not sure why you quote it, that's pretty huge. I'd call any double-digit percent increase on a billionaire's wealth huge.
I think the parent is quoting the phrase simply because they are defining it, and not using sarcasm quotes.
(It's a literal quote of the WSJ).
They're saying it's an understatement.
But Binance founder doesn't work for Binance anymore so why pardoning founder help Binance?
The current head of binance (and cofounder) is Yi He. Who happens to be in a relationship with CZ and is the mother of his children.
Because it sets a precedent
According to Binance, he owns 90%. Whether he is CEO or not probably doesn't prevent him from influencing Binance operations to support Trump's coin.
For the accurate context:
CZ was pardoned for a single charge of failure to have an effective compliance program. No fraud, no victims, no criminal history. No money laundering.
CZ is the first and only known first-time offender in U.S. history to receive a prison sentence for this single, non-fraud-related charge. The judge found no evidence that he knew of any illicit transactions and that it was reasonable for him to believe there were no illicit funds on the platform.
Trump is a very twisted person, and this makes the US look bad, but the underlying crime was "compliance."
I hope HN has a way to vouch a comment before it's flagged, because I know this one would be (for being correct.)
His prosecution was politically motivated to begin with.
? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMEJTORMVN4
Yeah Changpeng Zhao seemed more like a victim of the Biden admin crackdown on crypto then anything else. I'm happy to see he was pardoned
then you know nothing at all about the case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMEJTORMVN4
I wish you would link to text rather than video. This channel owner may be very well informed, but I don't want to subject myself to the performative yelping of some guy sitting in front of a smoke machine with mood lighting. Except where original footage is concerned, video is about the worst medium for communicating complex facts the sensory stimulation is a distraction from the content. This presenter might be a genius, but I don't want to spend the time trying to untangle the substance from his hyped-up 'coffeezilla' delivery.
Good news: This shows they absolutely need any and all money they can get.
Bad news: They are getting the kickback money.
Does it? Trump famously cashed a 17¢ check
So the lesson is that if you have enough money to buy US president, you can buy freedom
Crime is legal
I'm impressed. Leavitt managed to Blame the Biden administration, effectively asserting that Zhao's crimes were a result of the Biden administration's "war on crypto." Never mind that Zhao was engaged in criminal activity for which he was prosecuted, tried, and found guilty.
Changpeng Zhao pled guilty for violating the Bank Secrecy Act and not complying with anti-money laundering requirements.
That also happened to a lot of big banks over and over again.
Three days ago one of the biggest was found guilty for helping Sudan’s government commit genocide by providing banking services that violated American sanctions [0]. Sounds worst.
Binance is a casino for millennial and gen Z and like casinos is used by criminal to launder money.
Should Changpeng Zhao be pardoned? I don't know, I don't care he is a small fish.
Should BNP CEO serves prison time? probably.
- [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bnp-paribas-shares-fall-us-17...
Whataboutism. Has to be called out.
What about the whataboutism of whataboutism? I.e. meta-whataboutism
The use of whataboutism and the ‘calling out’ of whataboutisms are both mechanisms of narrative control.
Doesn't make the double standards any less true.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but Zhao was convicted of crimes which were a direct result of his operating a crypto exchange, and not any other criminal activity. It may be possible to operate a legally-compliant crypto exchange, but I am not sure that any current exchange is fully compliant with US law. If we agree on these facts, and think that the 'war on drugs' is what has resulted in 'drug possession' and 'drug trafficking' convictions, then it seems reasonable to say that Zhao was convicted as the result of a 'war on crypto'.
I am actually not sure that either the 'war on drugs' or a 'war on crypto' is a bad idea, but they do seem analogous.
> and not any other criminal activity
He made a lot of money from the other criminal activity. That's what money laundering is: just because you're not directly trafficking children, for example, doesn't mean you have clean hands when you make significant profits from the people who are.
What you're describing is (in my view) the best casus belli for both the 'war on drugs' and a 'war on crypto', but a moral case does not make a criminal case (on its own).
I don't even necessarily think a 'war on crypto' is needed. The problem is that crypto seems to function as a get out of jail free card for very straightforward financial crimes: you just do the financial crime, but apply a thin veneer of 'but with crypto' and the legal system is utterly bamboozled.
Crypto's problem is that when the law is updated to deal with these stunts, it's suddenly just a crappy version of the existing financial system.
I completely agree that crypto is being used as an end-run (if you'll pardon the expression) around the existing financial oligopoly, whose regulatory burden is paid for by the monopoly rents extracted by the government-endorsed players. The problem is that criminal laws aren't being maximally applied against banks, so instances like this do give the appearance of 'unfairness'.
The war on drugs creates almost all the negative externalities of drugs to try and stop people making their own choices.
It is both a reason not to buy drugs now (you're sponsoring all that other stuff) and a reason it's a ridiculous and immoral policy.
It is also on no way comparable to crypto.
Except, correct me if this is wrong, but he wasn't even convicted of money laundering, let alone the underlying crimes you suggest he was launder the proceeds of. It was simply for failing to register / setup an appropriate AML system. Whether any ML occurred, by whom, and in relation to what... are outstanding questions. If he had done all that and all they got him on was a 4-month technicality, that tends to suggest he was probably innocent (or the investigation was inept).
I'm not sure you understand the point. It isn't that CZ himself was specifically putting forth the effort to launder money. It isn't that he was specifically doing things to try and make it easier. The point is that he had a legal duty to actively attempt to prevent money laundering. Binance was legally required to do this to operate in the US, and did not. The court case produced messages from the Chief Compliance Officer pointing out a myriad of ways in which they were not complying with various laws of this nature and they were ignored.
The BSA is not a technicality and trying to reframe it as one is wild. It is to make sure that people that have a financial incentive to turn a blind eye to money laundering don't turn a blind eye to it. You don't need to be directly involved in the money laundering to be incentivized to let it happen.
The CEOs of Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, etc. have not been indicted for anything. Those exchanges have had some compliance issues but they were minor compared to Binance, FTX, BitMEX, etc.
It's all transactional. Do something Trump likes, he'll help you, laws, morals, and ethics be damned.
The pardoning of all of over 1000 people involved in January 6th is a good example of this.
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Is autopen a particular sore point in the US for some reason?
There's a potential implication that the president wasn't the one making the decisions and they were political favors doled out by unnamed and unaccountable staff. If the president felt strongly about that perception he could've signed them himself. But he seemingly didn't.
The autopen has been widely used without controversy, including by Trump.
The controversy with Biden is that the autopen was allegedly used without the President's knowledge or directive. Nobody has a problem with POTUS's signature getting on a piece of paper without his hand actually holding the pen; that's not the point here.
"Allegedly" is the key word here. Alleged by people who allege a whole lot of untrue things and don't seem to have any evidence for this particular thing.
Did he say that pardons were issued that he did not approve of?
There is absolutely no evidence it was used without his knowledge.
Yet you can decide that the secret documents store in your toilet are declassified with a thought?
There's a conspiracy theory that Biden wasn't competent enough to sign stuff, at least for some period at the end of his term, with the implication being that none of those presidential acts are valid. Anybody who believes this is mired in an impenetrable misinformation bubble and should be dismissed out of hand.
I think the conspiracy is that someone pardoned people without Joe Biden's approval right before Trump was inaugurated.
There is not, but right wing propaganda avoids lots of actual news, events and statements because it doesn't look good.
To fill the time there are lots of narratives about non issues without evidence.
> What about pardoning 8,000 people by autopen?
Is there more to this comment than whataboutism? The core concern raised in this part of the thread is Trump's outsized corruption:
> It's all transactional. Do something Trump likes, he'll help you, laws, morals, and ethics be damned.
Ah yes. Pardoning folks who were imprisoned for possession of marijuana is exactly the same--worse even, because "autopen"--as pardoning folks who were imprisoned for insurrection / political violence in support of the guy doing the pardoning. Very smart take.
No one was imprisoned for "insurrection." The vast majority were charged only with entering restricted grounds.
18 were charged with seditious conspiracy. Over 500 were charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement officers. And many more were still awaiting trial, including Daniel Ball, who was accused of throwing explosives at police officers, were also pardoned by Trump. Many of these pardoned individuals have gone on to commit further felonies, including Daniel Ball, who was just arrested for plotting to murder Hakeem Jeffries.
But again, you seem to be missing the point: a president pardoning people who support him is very different than pardoning ordinary people who were imprisoned for crimes that are no longer crimes.
Biden issued several blanket pardons for any crimes that people may have committed for a period of a decade. That doesn't strike me as particularly discerning.
Your comments don't strike me as engaging with the material of anyone elses unless you can score political points, why are you here?
Was he bribed to do so?
I'm not sure it will be a problem for Changpeng Zhao but let's say I was convicted of a felony in the US, served time in prison and then was pardoned by the president. What would my employment prospects be in comparison to someone who didn't receive a pardon?
Likely bad because the conviction will still show up in background checks. (A pardon doesn't entail expungement.) As you said, this won't be an issue for CZ because he's not going to be looking for the kinds of positions where HR screens the resumes
“You must have very good connections and network, definitely a good hire for the future.”
It's incredible that American corruption can happen out in the open like this. And this isn't a uniquely Trump phenomena. Political pardons are an amazing thing, and they have been used by presidents for a long time now with extremely little scrutiny and no possibility for repercussions. The executive being able to overrule the judiciary is an absolutely jaw-dropping American institution. So much for checks and balances.
> The executive being able to overrule the judiciary is an absolutely jaw-dropping American institution.
No, its not, pardon and the closely linked power of clemency are common powers in representative democracies, often situated with the chief of state or the head of government (in the US, and other Presidential systems, the President is both), or sometimes the cabinet instead of the head of government in a parliamentary or semi-parliamentary system (in some cases, one or the other is assigned by law to a subordinate bureaucracy rather than being HoS/cabinet discretion, as is the case with pardon but not clemency in Canada.) It is generally more used in the US than other Western states, in part because the US has a much harsher criminal justice system with much longer sentences and much weaker provisions for relief other than executive pardon than other systems, but the power itself is common. [0]
The way it is used under Trump is wildly abnormal (for the US or the other representative democracies), though.
[0] see, e.g., https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/pardon-power-is-co... ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon ; etc.
The president just prior to Trump pardoned his own son for crimes, and pre-emptively pardoned various other family members and political allies for any possible crimes before they could be prosecuted. Again, this is not new, this is ongoing open-air corruption, and Trump's escalation is the result of everyone being OK with it before now.
The son committed a crime and it could be argued it would have been a net benefit for democracy for him to accept the sentence.
It's also true his son was prosecuted politically, because few if any people go to jail for 4473 falsification.
It's also true that this is new and unprecedented.
It's like there's a new social contract that states: it's not corruption if it's done in the open.
It's genuinely just this.
The rise of more grass-roots news sources (podcasts, memes, social media) also leads to tons of conspiracy theories, and mistrust that builds this idea of corruption being ubiquitous, just not out in the open. And yes, that happens, but this atmosphere magnifies it 10x.
So when someone like Trump does it out in the open, people are more likely to excuse it because "everybody is already doing it, at least this is out in the open".
The US has always been kind of scammy vs other western nations. In the movie when he says "have you no shame sir?", the answer typically is "nope".
The American dream is basically getting rich by scamming.
It didn’t use to be this way.
I mean the pardon was the check and balance on the judiciary. However it's been turned into a tool for personal gain than a saving grace for mistakes of the federal crimes convictions. Both parties have pushed for this monarchic power to be expanded over time. I think it has a place but much like a lot of the federal government it needs a complete overhaul. The checks and balances system works alright but when a unitary party controls every branch there is no one to check that power.
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> And this isn't a uniquely Trump phenomena
Reminds of Biden pardoning his relatives without even saying for what. Just blanked pardon for everything. No democrat dropped his jaw.
That was incredibly corrupt and many Democrats in fact "dropped [their] jaws." And it's not the only instance of political corruption like this, either (Bill Clinton notoriously did something similar). Neither of these cases retroactively justify Trump pardoning anyone who sends him a few million dollars.
> Reminds of Biden pardoning his relatives without even saying for what. Just blanked pardon for everything. No democrat dropped his jaw.
Everyone I talked to (more than 10, including myself) that I knew who voted for Biden was pissed, disappointed, even angry at his pardoning of Hunter.
He was pretty explicit about the reason why.
He feared Trump would force the DOJ to prosecute them.
And, based on what Trump's done so far with the DOJ and his enemies, he was right to do so.
"My president is right to pardon whoever it likes, but not your president.. "
I think this whole pardoning thing should go away. It makes the presidents Kings.
If the goal of the pardon was to handle a corrupt Judicial branch, then a better answer would have been for the Executive branch to nominate someone for a pardon to the Legislative and require a 2/3 majority of the Legislative to approve.
But something like that would fly in the face of the "Unitary Executive" insanity and would (I suspect) require a constitutional amendment, which is no longer remotely feasible.
In no part of my post was there anything about my president vs. your president.
That's not the point of the comment.
A first comment said "without saying why". The second comment just says that this is blatantly not true, and that the rationale presented has been since confirmed as a very accurate prediction.
There's an argument the prosecution was political. See: https://x.com/balajis/status/1981423831572238856
Sorry, is this person comparing the rights and immunities of a head of a sovereign nation to those of a CEO of a company? I don't think France, as a sovereign country, is completely bound by US law whereas binance, when it is operating in US jurisdiction is. I'm not totally familiar with US finance law but I'm pretty sure a more fair comparison would be to other banks where KYC requirements and anti money laundering rules can be strict. From what I read about the prosecution, Binance ignored many warning signs from their own executives about the possibility and the lack of controls within their platform to comply with the law.
It's not much of an argument... he wasn't being held responsible for the actions of a few binance users, we was being held responsible for his own failure to implement compliance processes required by law.
The laws exist to restrict funding for countries under sanction, drug operations, terrorist organizations, etc.
We can argue about whether these laws are a good idea (either in general or in specific details), but you need to change the law, not just now follow it.
This is a terrible precedent... unless you're a con man, that is. (Balaji Srinivasan isn't stupid. I would guess he understands how real what he's arguing here is.)
balajis is personally invested in propping up the ecosystem.
How does pardoning CZ "prop up the ecosystem"?
It sends a clear message: Pay off Trump and you can ignore financial rules with impunity.
He had already served his sentance.
That message is still crystal clear, is it not?
The prosecution was not political lol, he went out of his way to support money laundering on the Binance platform. The reason he complied with the prosecution and pled guilty rather than try to fight it out in court was that they were able to produce a ton of evidence that he deliberately ignored regulators and regulations designed to prevent money laundering in order to make money off sanctioned groups and criminal organizations using the exchange as a way to circumvent KYC/AML laws. Please don't take what Balaji says about companies he invested in at face value.
It must really suck and be incredibly disheartening to be one of the folks who pursued this to a conviction.
The justifications for why the pardon is okay are ridiculously flimsy and I assumed that it was because they weren't really trying, but bewilderingly it does actually appear to have convinced some credulous people on Hacker News, so I suppose enough consent was manufactured that people think going out of your way to let money launderers use your platform is not a big deal? Maybe it's because people don't understand that typically the reason people launder money is because they committed major crimes to get that money and have no way to actually use it without getting caught.
For example if your crypto is the proceeds of ransomware, you're going to have a hard time cashing out without using something like Monero (which effectively has no offramps) without going through an exchange that knows perfectly well that you're trying to touch tainted goods. Exchanges like Binance that just don't bother to check who their customers are when they withdraw cash for such assets are just as critical to the ransomware plague as any security bug or social engineering issue. It's one of the reasons that pre-crypto, even though ransomware was technically feasible, it was never able to grow into a large-scale operation--no offramps. But hey maybe the official stance of CZ supporters is now that ransomware is good, actually, and if you don't like it it's because you have partisan bias (???)
Those prosecutors were deeply embarrassed by missing FTX at the time, so they then had the SEC and IRS harass and threaten innocent US citizens in Japan and the US as they fished for charges merely because they happened to once work for or hung out with CZ or employees at Binance.
CZ is the first and only known first-time offender in U.S. history to receive a prison sentence for this single, non-fraud-related charge of improper platform AML KYC implementation. Big banks routinely pay a fine for this, and never face imprisonment. The judge found no evidence that he knew of any illicit transactions and that it was reasonable for him to believe there were no illicit funds on the platform. Credit where it's due, they somehow pulled off a 4 month sentence for this unprecedented charge. And now it's all for naught.
CZ already served the time in prison. It's not clear to me whether he and Binance have paid the fines yet.
Balaji was the former CTO of a rival company. Wouldn't he be incentivized to not support CZ?
No. He had the same financial incentives to not want to have to worry about the BSA and dealing with AML etc. as CZ.
This is not a company vs. company sort of issue, this is a "I want to avoid regulations that would cost me money as a fundamental aspect of my industry " issue.
If Coinbase thought they could legally not worry about all of this, do you think they would want to deal with it?
The sheer quantity of money used in cryptocurrency for money laundering and activity where traditional payment processors will not accept payments (largely illegal, e.g. drugs, counterfeit goods) also means that the keeping the ecosystem healthy involves having ways for this money to flow.
No. The entire crypto ecosystem requires a steady infusion of capital and an absence of regulations to prosper, since their primary use case outside of speculation is for handling money by people who can't get past normal KYC/AML checks. If those people no longer have anywhere to on/off ramp into the crypto ecosystem, most of its "legitimate" (in the sense of actually getting real value out of it rather than just speculating) use goes away.
I don't think you know what you're talking about. Surely everyone on the Coinbase platform is vetted seeing as they're a publicly traded company. Presumably the vast majority of Binance users are not in fact money launderers.
"People who don't want KYC/AML checks" are not necessarily money launderers, and there are still plenty of people who just want to speculate. But money launderers are the people who need to send vast amounts of money through the crypto ecosystem and represented a very significant fraction of the assets managed by Binance (not that this actually affects whether what they were doing was illegal or not, BTW). Maybe you should read the indictment to find out what was actually going on, instead of making claims based on what seems reasonable to you!
(Frankly, the idea that being convicted for making the conscious decision to go out of your way to circumvent KYC/AML laws is somehow the result of partisan bias is ridiculous in itself, so none of this [or how Balaji claims to feel about the matter] is even really relevant).
Because Trump couldn’t have that!
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I’m sure it’s pure coincidence that the Trump family made millions from Binance, CZ, and donations from Trevor Milton and Paul Walczak right before those pardons.
The US is a banana republic now. Absolute joke of an administration.
At least the FBI director broke the big news in crime fighting today, how a couple black basketball players were arrested for sports betting.
It is amazing this investigation went forward during a shutdown.
Most corrupt president in living memory (ever?) pardons convicted corrupt businessman, while directly profiting from said corrupt businessman's industry
Years ago people would have thought you were talking about the DRC, Haiti or Uzbekistan. Today's it's the USA.
Don't kid yourself, US political corruption pre-dates Trump. This is just bringing it to a new level.
Yes, he clearly said "most corrupt", not "first corrupt".
- Zhao has ties to World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture that Trump and his sons Eric and Donald Jr. launched in September.
- Trump’s most recent financial disclosure report reveals he made more than $57 million last year from World Liberty Financial
they just reported 1B from crypto ventures, so 57m seems like lunch money...
I wonder what those ventures actually are and how that money is made?
COLLINS: Today you pardoned the founded of Binance. Can you explain why you did that?
TRUMP: Which one was that?
COLLINS: The founder of Binance
TRUMP: I believe we're talking about the same person, because I do pardon a lot of people. I don't know. He was recommended by a lot of people.
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3m3v6mnpkb52i
actual puppet
I agree this isn't a very satisfying answer, but realistically how else do you expect Presidential pardons to go? Trump has pardoned over 1000 people and Joe Biden has pardoned over 4000. Do we expect them to know the intricate details of every single case?
And I mean, wasn't the last Administration effectively Autopen? Yes, the President receives recommendations and tries to make the best judgement on those.
What would Biden's answer be for pardoning Fauci?
> What would Biden's answer be for pardoning Fauci?
Leticia James. Lisa Cook. James Comey. Also he didn't break any laws?
> Trump has pardoned over 1000 people and Joe Biden has pardoned over 4000.
The numbers don't really mean much when it's pardoning classes of people (marijuana convictions, insurrectionists, etc.).
Fuck. Guys. Psst. You have another demented leader.
I wonder if civil forfeiture will work against Trump once he's out of office. Trump's net worth before becoming President was under US$1 billion. Now it's over 6 billion. A civil claim for the difference based on the Emoluments Acts.
"The Foreign Emoluments Clause bars the president and other federal officials from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State” without the consent of Congress. It reflects the framers’ desire to prevent federal officials from succumbing to foreign influence.
The Domestic Emoluments Clause provides for the president to receive a fixed salary and bars him from receiving “any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.” It was designed to insulate the president against undo pressure from Congress or any individual state."
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/emol...
You dont live in a country where Rule of Law matters anymore.
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Rule of law? Anymore? No president has ever been punished in any meaningful capacity in our entire history. Washington used loopholes to avoid setting his slaves free[1] for christ sake.
[1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/george-washington-...
What about Nixon’s impeachment and resignation? What about Trump being a convicted felon 5 ways to Sunday (yes they overturned this since he won again, but I doubt it would have gone this direction if he’d lost.)
How much time did Nixon spend in prison? Or did he opt to be caned instead?
No, this is pretty squarely outside the scope, and only specific amounts received from in-scope parties (i.e. governments) would be subject. And there's a standing issue. Basically the emoluments clause doesn't have real teeth for most purposes, even where it applies.
> only specific amounts received from in-scope parties
Like Quatar and the used 747.
It should apply there, though the first Trump admin argued a very narrow interpretation that mostly exempts the president in the first term, at the end of which the case was declared moot (leaving us in suspense about what SCOTUS would have said). Great commentary on emoluments and needed reforms in light of this here: https://www.execfunctions.org/p/trump-20-and-the-foreign-emo...
I hope so. That way we can rebuild the White House the way it was and pay for it by seizing Mar-a-Lago and selling it off.
Trump is a corrupt idiot and a terrible president, but the White House controversy is dumb too. I'm sure the addition will be ugly like everything Trump builds, but that building is not exactly a historic artifact that mustn't be mutated. It's been gutted more than once.
Agreed. They saw how successful the silly rose garden thing was at diverting attention away from serious issues (Epstein files) and will happily keep pulling that lever until it stops working.
Just imagine if Biden did this.
Bit like suggesting the controversy over bombing boats in the Caribbean is dumb because the U.S. has bombed ships before. The way it's happening is completely unprecedented and absurd.
My main issue is how Trump said one thing and did another:
> “It won’t interfere with the current building,” Trump said on July 31. “It’ll be near it, but not touching it, and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.” - NBC
It seems probable he ignored any number of laws about how he did it, too.
> I'm sure the addition will be ugly like everything Trump builds
Maybe it will serve as a reminder
It would work in a situation involving Supreme Court-packing, and that’s about it
> I wonder if civil forfeiture will work against Trump once he's out of office.
He's only out of office if he dies. There's no way he's leaving voluntarily.
I suspect Trump will leave office in a box, not on his feet. Such a civil claim would then have to be against his estate, which probably complicates things.
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Why not start with the obvious example and collect the whatsbouts during the trial.
Yes, and everybody who enriches themselves using their political positions. These jobs are as public servants. They're supposed to be working for the people. That's why the emoluments clause is there.
Interestingly I have never seen someone with a Pelosi hat, shirt, or mural painted on the side of their RV.
I don't think there would be much outcry from either side if Pelosi, along with others who did the same things, were to be blocked by new legislation or prosecuted for breaking existing law.
Although the Domestic Emoluments Clause currently applies specifically to the President, so we would likely need new legislation to generally prevent things like congressional insider trading.
This not the "gotcha" you think it is; yes, we should get anyone that is committing a crime. Nobody is deifying Pelosi as some god above the law.
> Why would we want to?
Because crimes should be prosecuted.
> Should we do the same to her?
Obviously yes. Why would we give a damn? See also: Epstein files & Clinton. Release them, round him & the rest of them up.
Yes.
(And I say that as a Democrat in California)
It really does seem like folks on the right assume that people who vote Democrat have a lot more love for Democrats than we actually do. The whole Bill Clinton in the Epstein files thing is another example—like yeah man let him hang.
There's very little loyalty, there's some truth to the party being a bunch of minorities nervously huddled around the DNC for warmth.
Some people treat politics like a tribal sport where "morally OK" is determined solely by which team did it.
Their mental model of the "other side" is someone who is similarly team-driven.
These folks get really confused when "whatabout your team?" falls flat on people who want to live by principles or morality, rather than hat color.
It's also a rhetorical trick. The moment you admit "Yes, Bill Clinton should go to jail if he's on the list," they will start to pester you, "You admitted Clinton should also go to jail, so why are you only protesting Trump? You hypocrite!"
I think it's best not to engage. These people aren't here for logical arguments, and they won't be persuaded by logic.
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Yeah I agree, we should be holding the ruling class accountable for building generational wealth while average Americans can barely afford basics.
Every time someone digs into this, it turns out Pelosi’s large wealth is much more tied to buying SF real estate long before the tech boom sent the real estate prices soaring. It doesn’t take insider trading for someone to have gotten rich in the SF real estate market. Plenty of people became millionaires just by owning a condo they bought in the 1970’s. It is no surprise that someone whose career has been real estate investing in SF since the 1960’s made some money…
i beg you to reject the team-sports political mentality.
yes, we should absolutely do the same to her. why would you bring up nancy pelosi when no one else has?
Not just yes, but fuck yes we should.
Is there any way to read this other than Trump is cuddling up to crypto because it’s a tool for him and his cronies to make dodgy money?
> ...it’s a tool for him and his cronies to make dodgy money?
It's a vehicle to sell "access". The greed is only half of it.
The worst part is that they're selling access to foreign interests who pay them off. These people can't exactly show up with bags of gold to bribe King Sh*t Gibbon (yet), crypto is the next best thing.
in this particular case maybe. but i don't think he's pardoning only crypto people. as long as criminals can offer sth useful to him, they will get above the law.
It's industry agnostic. The Trevor Milton pardon wasn't because he loves gravity powered vehicles.
Yes - he campaigned on making America more crypto-friendly in general; this could also be read as part of making good on that promise.
Just like being bank-friendly means allowing criminality in bank management. And being transportation-friendly means allowing people to drive drunk!
I hope this is satire. Only a moron would think this.
It answers the question posed. Unless you think only morons have opinions that differ from yours.
Moronic opinions are still moronic and should be called out as such. Making America more crypto friendly by pardoning fraudsters is an objectively stupid take.
This makes me hate cryptocurrency more and make me support candidates that want feel the same, that we should be prosecuting cryptocurrency fraud. How is that making it more friendly?
You heard it everyone, crime is legal as long as you pay off the Don.
Are we great again?
In contrast, SBF is still in jail despite being Biden's second biggest donor.
CZ crime was not complying with anti laundering US laws, which basically meant he didn't do KYC to keep USA users out. He got 4 months.
SBF stole user funds to basically role play as a billionare.
SBF was sentenced to 25yrs, Binance guy got 4 months.
I'd say that SBF is a bigger crook in contrast. He gave himself a special privilege to withdraw unlimited funds from FTX.
Give him time, there's plenty of Trump presidency to go.
So is Friedman next?
Didn’t he donate to the wrong guy?
I think he made public mention of "donating to the wrong guy" to get one side to like him more. IIRC, he donated similar or more to the "other" side, but just didn't make a big deal of it publicly.
No issues. Trump can forgive almost anything for the right price.
But does SBF have any money?
His parents do. He was already a trustfund baby when he started.
His parents are retired Stanford professors. Despite their criminal involvement in FTX, that isn't exactly the type of people Trump coddles too.
Surely, they can't be worse than the Qataris?
It helps if you’re into really gaudy gold stuff I guess. Tim Cook cracked the code.
You sure? What else do you know about his parents?
Money is money
Unpopular opinion: America needs/ed this. They nerve truly believed that a Ceaușescu, Hitler, Stalin, Mao were possible in the US. Maybe one or two generations will suffer, but this is a required lesson, for the future maturity of the nation, long term. Assuming they come out in one piece at the other end, of course.
This is not rhetorical question: did accelerationism ever worked?
If only we could ask Baudrillard.
Accelerationism is to a simulacrum as the thing being accelerated (society) is to the simulation thereof (our idea of society).
Accererationism is what accelerationism does. It disrupts the status quo, for good/bad/otherwise, and largely independently of our personal stance on the goodness, badness, and/or desirability of said disruption.
The current volatility in the market is one aspect of accelerationism, and it seems to be working, in that the markets are still open for trading; many are making out like bandits. Perhaps that volatility as a market opportunity is the point.
Whether or not banditry is occurring is left as an exercise to the reader.
You believe the US on the path to killing tens of millions of its own citizens for the sake of some ideology like Mao, Stalin, and Hitler because a non-violent white collar criminal was given a shortened sentence? Interesting.
You can kill someone without weapons.
And just like the Great Leap Forward, America is well on its way to letting many thousands die from lack of healthcare.
By that criteria, Obama would be one of the greatest mass murderers in history.
Watch out everyone, an intellectual has entered the chat.
Seems not right
The only way to get around the pardon power being abused is to punish crimes by death, quickly and on the spot.
Can't we just amend the constitution to remove pardon power? Or at least shift it to Congress?
Maybe we can just ignore it entirely. Laws don’t matter.
our culture is ill
The USA is officially a banana republic.
"President Trump has pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of the crypto exchange Binance, following months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family’s own crypto company."
You Americans elected a mobster as President.
Well, half us Americans did:) The other half is still in total disbelief
Closer to 20% of Americans did.
Disbelief, maybe. But you have to own it now.
Once is an aberration. Twice is your democracy speaking.
Eggs were so expensive though. /s
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We Americans had our choices robbed of us. And we cannot think outside of the ballot sheet.
I agree with you. The system is ridiculous, it gives the voter two options, and that's all. People point out that monopolies are bad, but a duopoly is very far from being a solution for it. Americans (and many other countries in the world) need better representation.
I feel there is some perversion happened - the American culture in particular has been strong on a hero cutting through and going across the laws and rules toward his goals (and the recent years super-hero craze is an epitome of it). And i feel that in some perverse way Trump got tuned into such a hero storyline and naturally abusing it to no end for his own gain.
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Sub-headline: "Pardon follows months of efforts by Changpeng Zhao to boost the Trump crypto company"
Subtext, a convicted fraudster pardons a convicted fraudster
CZ was not convicted of fraud or even money laundering. There's a reason the sentence was only 4 months. His charge was the first ever prosecution of a platform/bank poorly implementing KYC and not doing enough surveillance of its users to comply with the letter of AML regulations. The case relied on the theoretical possibility of US citizen users placing trades that are matched by people from sanctioned countries - it did not even find cases of such trades. Big banks routinely pay fines for this, and never face imprisonment.
Regardless of what you think of the circumstances of the pardon, the prosecution was not related to fraud and was an unusual case by a DOJ that was recently embarrassed by FTX and was arguably symbolic in intent.
The amount of corruption around this is crazy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMEJTORMVN4
(this video has a nice timeline of the related events, including the GPU for crypto "deal")
Well, considering the incredible service Zhao has brought to the American people, this is totally understandable.
/$
He was convicted for allowing US citizens to sign up and place trades that could theoretically be matched by people from sanctioned countries. Technically an incredibly bad service for American people who must be protected from such liberties.
Just wait until the blanket pardon comes out for all of his staff.
>>Representatives of the Trump family have held talks to take a financial stake in the U.S. arm of Binance.
Serious question - it seems that many of this Administrations activities are illegal in some way or the other. I know that government officials are shielded from a lot of actions so they can not be prosecuted.
What actions that have been taken could actually be prosecuted? For example, I would have to assume that the ballroom demolition and build-out is illegal, there were $0 appropriated from Congress for this, and it doesn't seem like direct donations would be legal either. They are donations to the government and Congress has to appropriate that money too.
NOTHING is going to happen while the Republicans control congress, period. What could be done when the next administration comes in? Not just about the ballroom, but the various other things like this pardon. What of these actions are prosecutable?
> it seems that many of this Administrations activities are illegal
Many are. This one is not. The President has sweeping pardon powers.
The solution is to strike the final phrase in Article 2, Section 2, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution: “and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” [1].
There isn’t a place for one-man pardons in a republic. If the courts overreach, address it through legislation. (Even the imperium-obsessed Romans didn’t give their dictators, much less consuls, automatic pardon power. Caesar had to get special legislation to overrule the law.)
With Presidents of both parties having so recently abused pardons, we may be in a place where a wave could pass a Constitutional amendment at the federal level, allowing it to be punted to the states.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
It seems like whatever party gets into power, suddenly doesn't want to change the system they inherited. I remember Trudeau talking about eliminating first past the post in Canadian elections. But once he got into power he forgot about it.
We need a way to vote for popular ideas via referendum at the federal level. That might get it through.
> seems like whatever party gets into power, suddenly doesn't want to change the system
“The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution” [1].
No President. No courts. Partisanship may work to our advantage in a divided government. What you would need, however, to reach two thirds is some members of the President’s party signing on. That could happen if the President is taking a dump in the polls, and the opposition looks likely (but isn’t yet assured) to gain the Presidency next term.
> We need a way to vote for popular ideas via referendum at the federal level
We need a plebiscite institution. But that can be done at state level for Constitutonal amendment approval. What we don’t want is direct democracy proposing amendments. California is a modern example of why republics are more stable than pure democracies, for anyone who forgot about Athens.
> What we don’t want is direct democracy proposing amendments.
I think the opposite. That is exactly what we need. A lot of the problem we have come from the fact that the constitution speaks almost entirely in terms of what various government bodies do and provides no way for the people to directly override government actions they disagree with. This has led us to our current situation which is based on politicians exploiting loopholes (e.g., gerrymandering, stacking various judicial/administrative posts, manipulating voting laws, etc.) in order to preserve their position against potential electoral response.
In some cases these problems have been overcome or mitigated at the state level. . . via ballot measures. In California, for instance.
> California is a modern example of why republics are more stable than pure democracies, for anyone who forgot about Athens.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but from where I'm standing California looks a lot more sane and stable than the US as a whole.
>California is a modern example of why republics are more stable than pure democracies
California is one state among 50. People using it as an example of some sort of government being bad are objectively in bad faith.
Please inform me how my state's citizen referendums are bad? We are about to have a vote on voter ID laws, which I do not approve of, but what's important is that the people who care are able to have their will made manifest, and it will actually go up for a vote.
Meanwhile nordic countries have vastly more direct democracies and don't have the problems you insist.
If you cannot make your argument without california, you do not have an argument, because california's shitty government predates democrat control, because it was always built as this crazy world where rich and connected people had control. California's government is built wrong, not because of democracy, but against it.
> inform me how my state's citizen referendums are bad?
Straw man. Nobody claimed this.
> nordic countries have vastly more direct democracies and don't have the problems you insist
What are you referring to? “Finland has traditionally relied on the representative form of government, with very limited experience of the deployment of the referendum in national decision-making” [1]. And while Sweden and Norway have referenda, neither has binding referenda on demand or even a requirement for referendum to amend the constitution [2].
> if you cannot make your argument without california, you do not have an argument
California features the largest and most powerful direct-democratic institution, its referenda, in America. It’s going to come up when we discuss direct democracy.
That said, I have no idea how you reach my comment and conclude that California is not only the only argument I make against direct democracy, but even essential to it.
> california's shitty government predates democrat control
Are you mixing up direct democracy and rule by Democrats, the party?
[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-24796-7_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_by_country
> What we don’t want is direct democracy proposing amendments. California is a modern example of why republics are more stable than pure democracies, for anyone who forgot about Athens.
speak for yourself. the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as evidenced by the current political climate in the US.
> the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as evidenced by the current political climate in the US
We're not a direct democracy. You can't find proof of a pudding in a taco bowl.
Direct democracies fail in self-reinforcing factionalism. "When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government...enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens." This has consistently happened across history, even in small direct democracies, it's one of the essential takeaways from the Athenian experiment [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates
In history generally the only way governments are ever restructured is through civil war (or invasion).
> In history generally the only way governments are ever restructured is through civil war (or invasion)
This is total crap. Tale of Two Cities is set against the backdrop of Britain’s reforms, in contrast to the French Revolution. America has peacefully seen through Teddy Roosevelt’s trust busting, FDR’s New Deal and the Civil Rights Era, each peaceful restructurings of how our government works.
Revolutions transfer and consolidate power. Reforms broaden them. Those who miss this lesson of history and fall for glorified fictions of peasants’ revolts earn a consistent fate across millennia of human history.
Side note: strongly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6E4_Bcmscg&t=14s
Every amendment to the constitution restructured the government. We are certainly in an era of high divisiveness and a Congress that had abdicated all of its powers to the other branches so that they’re never caught actually holding a position, but the US government system has restructuring built into it
Uhm, the Republicans will change their mind quickly when the next Democrat president takes control with the expanded powers they inherited from the Trump administration (even the Supreme court doesn't like to contradict itself so quickly). I'm pretty sure...if America survives at all, we will have a constitutional convention really soon that push through changes because the current status quo has become an unstable mess.
I trust the gang of six’s use of the shadow docket is cleverly designed to make sure only a republican president meets their unitary executive theories.
Do you think they will let the Democrats take control given the risk to them if they take control? I see Gerrymandering after the supreme court annuls the voting rights acts. And then more shennanigans for a third term.
That's why I premised this with "If America survives at all". There is definitely a possibility that the whole country just falls apart. A constitutional convention is more of a best case scenario.
Gerrymandering is only relevant for congressional house elections, it can't protect the senate and doesn't influence the presidency. Usually one party will take control of all three branches in a huge swing in power, the house is the just the first to flip usually because it is re-elected every 2 years.
> constitutional convention is more of a best case scenario
Constitutional Convention is the abort button. It means giving a group of people basically limitless power to amend our Constitution, which in practice, means to do anything to the law. If we called one today, with most states in Republican hands [1], we’d be essentially handing complete control of our government—over and above the Constitution—to the GOP.
[1] https://www.ncsl.org/about-state-legislatures/state-partisan...
> Constitutional Convention is the abort button. It means giving a group of people basically limitless power to amend our Constitution
No, it doesn’t.
It gives a group of people basically limitless power to propose Amendments to the Constitution.
Any Amendments so proposed still require 3/4 of states to ratify them, either by votes of their legislature or by ratification conventions called in the states (at the option of Congress when calling the Convention at the request of states.)
Unless by "group of people" you mean not just the people in the national convention, but the people in the state legislatures or conventions, as well. But, at that point, you might as well say that by including an amendment process, the Constitution itself “gives a group of people basically limitless power to amend our Constitution”.
> It gives a group of people basically limitless power to propose Amendments to the Constitution
Sorry, I actually missed this. Thank you for clarifying. (I mixed it up with the New York State process, where the Convention's proposals go straight to popular ratification.)
Between sweeping abuse of executive orders, declaring emergency powers, and the pardon system (there's a reason it used to be called the "royal pardon"), my only hope is that this will finally open the public's eyes to the MASSIVE overreach that a US president has. It needs to be heavily curtailed.
The pardon system in particular really pisses me off. The argument that one rando at the top of the pyramid somehow magically knows better than the entire judicial system is such a load of horsecrap. For any injustice that the pardon system might be able to correct, it can and does just as easily introduce more injustices.
> "Many are. This one is not. The President has sweeping pardon powers."
I understand it's debatably possible to prosecute the public corruption that motivated a pardon, even though the pardon act itself is unreviewable. I.e., the DoJ attempted a criminal bribery investigation of Bill Clinton's pardon of the donor Marc Rich,
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/us/us-is-beginning-crimin... ("U.S. is beginning criminal inquiry in pardon of Rich" (2001))
> "Some lawyers have said that proving such a case could be exceedingly difficult because bribery cases usually required the cooperation of one of the parties. Moreover, contributions to political parties or to Mr. Clinton's library foundation are legal, and the president's pardon authority is unreviewable."
I assume similar logic might apply to World Liberty Financial and Trump's CZ pardon.
"Well, when the president does it ... that means that it is not illegal" -- Richard Nixon (1977)
"Well, when the president does it ... that means that it is not illegal" -- SCOTUS (2024)
That leaves impeachment as the only legal remedy, which you've correctly identified as not a possibility with the current congress.
His two previous impeachments don't seem to have slowed him down, so it seems unlikely that a third would be any different. Not to mention his felony conviction.
The actual legal remedy is impeachment + conviction by the senate. That hasn't happened yet and seems unlikely unless he actually loses the support of his own party.
What about the acts of piracy (in the classic, seafaring way) and coldblooded murder of foreign citizens, carried out by US soldiers, claimed to be "drug dealers" (like that was a capital offence anyway)?
I’m curious if any of the involved personell will ever be tried for that.
> What of these actions are prosecutable?
The President must first be impeached by both parts of Congress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_in_the_United_Stat...
The Senate runs a trial for the "high crimes" with the supreme court justice presiding. They can sentence a sitting president IIRC (or just remove him from office in which the DOJ can then prosecute normally).
> For example, I would have to assume that the ballroom demolition and build-out is illegal, there were $0 appropriated from Congress for this, and it doesn't seem like direct donations would be legal either.
Maybe it's funded by the $230M he's demanding from the Department of Justice?
> NOTHING is going to happen while the Republicans control congress, period
For anyone interested, for the past 30 years, Republicans dominated for 22 years in total, while Democrats only 8.
Some problems: Trump has already argued that if what he does falls under official acts, it's essentially absolute immunity. Trump also tried to argue that everything he did while during his presidency, was official acts. The supreme court agreed that if something is and official act, it is protected by absolute immunity.
So my guess is that whatever Trump is doing now, he'll later argue was done as a president.
Second, should be convicted of anything, the best shot is if it's a state law violation. I'm going to bet everything I own that Trump will either pardon himself, all his cronies, and/or when the time comes, step down and have Vance pardon him. So with that all federal crimes become pardoned.
The supreme court has been very frank about this: The only, and I do mean the only mechanism is a successful impeachment. And even if Trump by some miracle is successfully impeached, we have no way of knowing how that will play out. The current supreme court majority are seemingly true believers of the unitary executive theory, so I'm guessing that with time - we'll just see Trump get more and more unchecked power. And since it's going to be done via the shadow docket, it'll likely be valid for Trump only.
I think for all intents and purposes - and I don't mean to sound defeatist when I'm saying this - people should just accept the fact that Trump will be untouchable for the rest of his life.
This is not "good guys versus bad guys", the democratic party are not going to wash all this badness away. They have been guilty of basically the same things, even if at a lesser scale. Biden tried to appropriate billions outside of congress for student loan forgiveness. Political pardons have been a factor since the beginning of the US experiment. Pelosi has been using her position for self-enrichment in the open for decades now.
We need them all gone. Anyone who makes "politician" a career is precisely the wrong type of person to be an elected official. It should never be about personal gain. Wipe them all out, implement campaign finance reform, set term limits, prioritize election security & availability...
We need a reset.
Assuming a normal election where the pendulum swings back and a normal transfer of power (no certain things), the outgoing President could pardon everyone from his chiefs of staff and cabinet officers to low-level federal law enforcement on the way out, and then the Democrats would wring their hands and say there's nothing they can do, bar some large scale political realignment where Republicans lost control of numerous state legislatures and governorships by a large margin, as well as in Congress.
The best opportunity for a major restructuring of the legal environment would bea Constitutional Convention, but because Republicans have pursued this as a strategic goal for a while, Democrats invested all their relevant energies in being against it rather than developing any kind of strategy of their own, guaranteeing that they would get rolled if one actually took place because they went in with wholly defensive mindset and no plan to win. The fundamental flaw of the modern Democratic party is that it sees itself as a vehicle for competent management of the status quo, not a force for implementation of its voters' political aspirations. Thus is pays lip service of what its supporters want but operates to dampen and delay those same supporters whenever it gets into office in the name of continuity and responsibility. It operates on a combination of political rent seeking and fundamental conflict aversion.
This is why I find myself increasingly impatient with self-styled moderates. Wanting to talk things out and compromise is good, but it only works when there is mutuality between counterparties. When the political opposition is indifferent to questions of truthfulness or corruption, moderation degrades into appeasement; moderates will sell out their own supporters in the name of peace and quiet, while giving away the strategic initiative over and over. The previous Trump administration engineered a mob overrunning Congress in an attempt to stay in power, and only failed because the Vice President declined to aid the scheme; a mistake the current one surely doesn't intend to repeat. The incoming administration spent a great deal of energy prosecuting every footsoldier they could find who set foot inside the Capitol, but shied away from going after the people who actually organized it. The results speak for themselves.
Why it is even accepted that pardons can be issued before conviction?
Yes, this also seems bonkers to me.
Better headline: Convicted criminal Trump pardons convicted criminal Binance founder
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Unpopular opinion: the case against him/binance was always that as a non us citizen, outside the us, he failed to obey US law and in a paperwork and licensing sense not a violent or otherwise serious manner.
I don’t like trump. But “CZ” basically paid a ransom to let Binance come in from the cold. Why shouldn’t he pay another to get a clean slate and maybe go back to being CEO?
Fraud is now legal
If you're already rich and can stomach writing a flattering letter to Dear Leader you're leaving money on the table by not committing massive fraud right now.
I feel like democrats should make it clear that if there's still a fair election and they regain power, they'll go after both the corrupt people in this admin and entities buying favors. The current state can't be too good for the society, at least there should be a clear possible downside for being a part of it.
CZ was not involved in fraud, the case only found him guilty of not doing enough to surveil his customers to sufficiently block US citizens from using a crypto exchange that other people from sanctioned countries could use.
As long as you bow to King Trump.
I have no proof of this, but I would bet that there will be some quid-pro-quo involved between Trump and the pardonee. Trump does not usually give things away, he leverages his power to get more power/money.
He didn't pardon Maxwell despite her coming out and saying she didn't see Trump do anything awful with Epstein.
He had her transferred to a much nicer jail though, against regulations and without explanation.
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Beyond the Trump effect, a lot of fraud has always been "legal", mostly because the victims can't afford to go after the fraudsters.
Fraud has been an essential component of Trump's business his whole life, he clearly doesn't see it as a crime. And the crypto guys have spent a lot of money getting into his good graces. He knows a good grift when he sees it.
seems like not enough anger in this thread is directed at CZ
shameless corruption
I'm not sure why Presidents were given the ability to pardon. Besides corruption, bias, or self-interest, nothing else can come out of it.
Unfortunately, sometimes our judges, juries, and officers are also biased or incorrect; pardons are useful when the delivery of justice was mistaken or excessive.
> pardons are useful when the delivery of justice was mistaken or excessive
If you look at a slew of the recent pardons, the beneficiaries had already pleaded guilty. In those cases, the pardons should be ineligible. I think the most a President could do - should be - give defendants the ability to appeal the case to a new judge or jury. It's wrong and should be corrected! Added it to my todo list
A guilty plea doesn't really mean actual guilt in the modern justice system. The state is overwhelmingly powerful in the cases it brings.
Unfortunately, very often the best thing to do is just let them have their way and walk away with a lot less of a punishment than would be the case should you dare to fight them.
Financially and personally, it's what they do to pressure you into submission. It happens from criminal cases all the way down to fucking family court. It's absurd and it's broken.
I truly believe that almost every single attorney should have to lose sleep at night over how their actions impact others.
Pardons only enable presidents to direct their goons to operate outside of the rule of law without repercussions.Having one individual with strong incentives to enable their team stay in power as much as possible retain the power is shocking.
Judges and juries are at least superficially removed from that sort of corrupt incentive system.
> Pardons only enable presidents to direct their goons to operate outside of the rule of law without repercussions.
It is clear that they don't only do that, as that has not been their principal (or even a common) use for most of the history of the pardon power.
It is equally clear, however, that they do allow that; the check on that, like on most discretionary Presidential powers, is the Congressional power of impeachment; obviously, that is not a meaningful constraint when the Congress and the President are aligned on abuses, but the entire point of having separately elected bodies is to make it less likely that things that the public would see as abuses are supported by both political branches simultaneously. (Obviously, the fact that one whole house of Congress and 1/3 of the other are elected at the same time as the President, and that the weighting of the electoral college for the President are a blend of the apportionment to the House and Senate makes those elections less independent than one might want, even before considering the way the electoral structure contributors to partisan duopoly, though.)
That’s not an argument for pardons, it’s an argument for a better appeals process.
> I'm not sure why Presidents were given the ability to pardon.
Because of the impossibility of law written in advance perfectly covering all cases and to provide a mechanism for correction of overpunishment that cannot be effectively anticipated in crafting general law. (That's more the reason why the traditional power of chief executives seen in state governments and the British government they were all more or less modeled on was retained when a federal executive was created; the US Constitution was very much not create ex nihilo in a historical vaccuum.)
> Besides corruption, bias, or self-interest, nothing else can come out of it.
Every viewpoint is "bias" relative to every other viewpoint, so that piece is a nullity, but it is certain;y not the case that corruption and self-interest are the only impacts or motivations for applying the pardon power.
Which isn't to say that there aren't arguments for putting more guardrails around the application of the power by the executive (or perhaps just radically changing the nature of the federal executive, to improve the application of its powers generally and not just the pardon power).
It's a consequence of the executive's power to... well, execute the law. They can simply decide to not focus prosecution on certain crimes. If they can do that, why not let them also pardon people?
No, it’s based on English clemency. https://govfacts.org/explainer/the-presidential-pardon-power... has a nice explanation of the power and its history.
> I'm not sure why Presidents were given the ability to pardon.
Won’t somebody please think of the ~~children~~ turkeys?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Thanksgiving_Turkey_P...
Joking aside, Wikipedia does have a history of it. It goes way back, way before the USA was even a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_pardons_in_the_United_...
it's part of our Christian values.
Presidents can pardon to provide a check on the courts. If congress doesn't like the pardon they can impeach the president.
Genuine question:
If one wanted to get in on the Trump grift, and had no moral qualms, how would you do it?
Can you come up with a realistic fast path to snag, say, $5 million within 2 years from Trumpland?
I don't think the direct approach to Trump or his inner circle would be ideal, considering how crowded the field of professional grifters and griefers surrounding him is. You'd really have to stand out to get noticed.
But they've recently lost a key connection to the broader MAGA youth movement. A quick-witted young person with good public-speaking skills and a psychopath's morals could step into that role without much difficulty, perhaps acting as a bundler for GOP political contributions that could then be skimmed. The retirement plan sure sucks, though. And you wouldn't want to be too overt about it, or you'd risk ending up like Steve Bannon.
It may also be possible to get in with the Girardist movement associated with Peter Thiel and J. D. Vance. A few weeks' intensive study would likely allow you to sling eschatological BS with the best of them. You'd get paid on the lecture circuit, again following the trail blazed by Charlie Kirk, spreading the good news about mimetic theory and the bad news about Greta Thunberg.
Then there's the covert approach. Karl Rove has long since quit the field, Lee Atwater is dead, and Roger Stone isn't getting any younger. There's always money on the table if you're willing to do what the other guy won't. Trouble is, there are plenty of people willing to do anything for Trump, now that the rewards have become so transparently obvious. The same question keeps coming up... in a field full of seasoned crooks, what can new talent do to get noticed by the right people and overlooked by the rest?
Dude, that's a lot of work. I don't think any of us can become the next Charlie Kirk just to ride a quick drift.
It's gotta be more low-effort and high-confidence. I'm thinking more like: incorporate a company with a mission of "Providing AI without woke bias." The product would be simply GPT-OSS behind a system prompt of "You are a Fox News host" and a simple guardrail, wraped in a generic web and mobile UI. It'd be a couple of days of vibe coding and setting up AWS backend. Now, how do you legally funnel a few million into your pockets from that?
And going head-to-head with Elon Musk and Grok isn't a lot of work? You need an angle, something he either hasn't thought of or isn't (yet) brave enough to embrace publicly. Me, I got nothing.
At this point, I wouldn't touch crypto with a 10 ft pole. What happens when everyone recognizes that the whole thing has turned into a money laundering grift? Who's going to give you anything for your bozo bucks? At this rate, it's not going to take long.
Hasn't that been apparent for years now though? It's a cool idea but really no real use that doesn't boil down to some sort of crime
Maybe there's an alternate timeline where crypto was legalized and regulated into something like fair gambling... but that's not what we're getting. Anyone getting into crypto now is just a sucker to be milked dry.
Yeah, I don't think the dominos will fall until the next flash crash when people realize it takes $100+ just to withdraw (because 7 transactions per second isn't many). As soon as confidence is lost, the reaction will be full blown tulip market. We just haven't seen the first bank run yet. And there is literally no backstop for a crypto bank run.
It doesn't take $100 to transfer. Fees are currently around $1. You are off by a factor 100!
Also, Bitcoin can process far more than 7 tps through the Lighting network.
I wonder where your misconceptions come from?
>Fees are currently around $1.
Fees are CURRENTLY around $1 because no one is using the L1 network. There is no demand now because of all of the times when the transaction fees were $30.
>Also, Bitcoin can process far more than 7 tps through the Lighting network.
The lightning network is insecure during periods of high demand because you aren't able to safely close channels. Also, you still need to fund channels on L1 in the first place!
Oh, there will be runs.
If they remove the guardrails keeping crypto out of the regulated financial industry (read: KYC and AML requirements), your bank deposits will absolutely be comingled with toxic crypto assets, because it will be way cheaper to avoid paying compliance people than the transaction fees.
Will definitely be entertaining to watch if it happens.
It won't be bozo bucks because like you said it has a real value. Having international, anonymous, instant money laundering machine is invaluable. It will take legislation to criminalize people from taking part in the money laundering machine to kill the value. That isn't happening in the next 3 years.
I am sorry to tell you that the majority of the services that you may be using (Stripe, OpenAI, Anthropic, PayPal, etc) all have exposure or have some form of funding by crypto.
> Who's going to give you anything for your bozo bucks? At this rate, it's not going to take long.
It's already here. Scan your eye-balls for some Worldcoins ($WLD) to prove you are not a LLM bot.
I think like, 90% of the crypto trading volume is by people who know it's all a grift, but are hoping to get rich while the music is still playing.
People knowingly buy into pump & dumps, gambling that they're on the early (pump) side and hoping to get out before the dump.
People will happily collect commissions selling products they know are scams or will happily collect management fees for parking investor's capital into grifts.
You'll never get truly everyone to recognize it, and it only takes one sucker at the poker table to keep every seat filled.
> People knowingly buy into pump & dumps, gambling that they're on the early (pump) side and hoping to get out before the dump
I recently heard of a real estate person that wound up buying an entire neighborhood around one of the stadiums for next year's World Cup. The impetus for this decision was to jack up the rates during the tournament, and then sell them off after. Another person thinks renting a bunch of Teslas and then placing them Touro will be another get rich idea during the World Cup. There are all sorts of people that think they are smarter than everyone else and are so confident they just cannot think of any ways their idea will fail.
What makes you think that the participants are not in on the grift? People are different, some rather supports wholesome stuff, some don't give an f. And it's not just morals that differ, risk-taking is also individually different (and can change with age and other life situation too).
You might want to go look at CDO's... or synthetic CDOs.
In comparison, crypto looks like a rational product relative to that.
The bad idea was making bad loans, putting them in CDOs, and then using flawed models to certify them as risk free. That's irrational.
Dividing up the credit risk on a pool of loans so that some people lose money only if all the loans go bad is a very good idea. You just need to make sure they are good loans.
The irony being it would actually help lower the barrier for entry a little to get a home loan on the consumer end of the spectrum but as you said they dropped that barrier subterranean and then predatory crap like payment-option ARMs and a massive lack of informed consent.
> What happens when everyone recognizes that the whole thing has turned into a money laundering grift?
Part of the problem is that this seems to describe most of the economy now. Maybe not specifically money laundering, but it’s all a grift whether we are talking about Binance, OpenAI, or Skydance-Paramount. There are grifts everywhere which just encourages more grifts as people see the resulting success and lack of consequences.
How much did he pay?
We don't know but I guess it involved quite a bit of bitcoins
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Even more depressing reading the comments that think this hasn't always been the case. It's red guy, it's blue guy, no it's orange guy facepalm
I mean is it any different than Joe Biden given blanket pardons hundreds of people for crimes that they may have committed over a 10 year span?
Is it? What do you think?
I dont agree with the pardoning just making a point that presidents have done this for a long time of pardoning controversial people. Democrats and republicans are both corrupt so it isnt suprising.
This is such a weird redirect. Biden seems to have pardoned a large amount of low level marijuana offenders.
So yes, there is a difference between what Trump is doing and what Biden is doing.
You missed what I stated, pardoning someone for a specific crime vs what biden(if he was actually doing it) pardoned his son for all crimes he may have done over a 10 year span. Oh wait, that was actually one of the only pardons he actually signed.
edit:
He actually pardoned 5 family members for all non-violent offenses from jan 2014 to jan 2025, does 1 billionaire = 5 biden family members?
Biden pardoned those family members because he knew Trump would personally go after them and make an example of them regardless of what they actually did. It shouldn't have happened, but it's pretty clear why it did.
Also, how on Earth are their "crimes" as egregious as those that Trump has pardoned in his recent term? Seriously, what did they do? How many people did they hurt? You can't just say "corruption" in an ambiguous sense, because then millions of other people would also apply. Also, "I don't know but it's fishy!" doesn't work when we know literally everything in Hunter Biden's life. That was the whole controversy.
The Binance founder directly impacted people in a significant way. The rioters were violent protesters that resulted in loss of life and others fearing for their life. It isn't the pardon itself that is bad, or the number, but the message it sends as to why they would do it. Biden was "if you're in the family of the president, you'll get forgiveness for your poor life decisions". Duh, like it or not, that's always been true, and Biden got roasted for it anyway. He's done, his family is out.
Trump is "if you're rich or you worship me, literal crime is legal".
Earlier you said hundreds. I call bullshit. Including the January 6 select committee members, staff, and police witnesses, the total appears closer to 50.
Yes
Yes
Yes
It's high time the Republicans embrace their new leadership with a re-branding of their outfit's name and henceforth call themselves The Banana Republicans
What if some criminal blatantly says "I'll give you $1bn if you pardon me" and Trump does it? Is that enough for something to happen? Because it seems like that's the only place we can go from here...
That would be technically illegal rather than merely repugnant. It would not however be illegal if the criminal dropped a hint in the news that he would donate to, say, a ballroom that was to be named after the president.
And even if it were outright illegal, the Supreme Court has now ruled that the president is personally immune from criminal prosecution as long as they claim that their illegal activity was carried out in the course of their presidential duties, and not a personal crime committed on the side. Which leaves congressional impeachment and conviction as the sole recourse against presidential misbehavior. Which becomes a problem when the majority in Congress doesn't care that the president is doing illegal things. We haven't had a constitutional crisis like this since the FDR administration.
The bar is much lower https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/us/politics/trump-pardon-...
The currency here is loyalty, not USD.
It's not enough. The only thing that might make a difference will get this comment removed. And we may have even passed the point for that to have an impact.
The states are going to start engaging in economic warfare with the federal government before too long.
I cannot comprehend how half of Americans are fine with this corrupt leader? He even does this bizarre maffia like deals out in the open for his own interest, that's how confident he is no one will say anything
The message is clear from his circus administration, you can do anything as long as you bribe them
He pardoned the guy from Nikola, Trevor Milton, that staged a product demo to trick investors.
Why? Milton hired Pam Bondi's (the US attorney general's) brother to represent him.
King has to show his power by doing bad things constantly. If he only does good, he's just a people pleaser.
Americans cannot accept they have a corrupt government lead by a corrupt politician who is now corrupting the justice system. They prefer to continue propagating the myth of a "healthy democracy" and "open market".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias explains so much of our world.
You would be surprised…
Regarding CZ and Binance and the Trumps, they have kind of a symbiotic relationship.
After Binance and CZ pleaded guilty to money laundering in November 2023, for which they paid over $4 billions in fines, WLFI (which is a clone of AAVE belonging to the Trump family) launched a stablecoin called USD1. Magically on March 2025, $2 billion flowed into Binance through MGX, a state backed Abu Dhabi fund, later revealed to have been paid in USD1 (two months before it was unveiled and without at the time no effective audits), effectively propping WLFI’s coin (backed, unbacked, nobody knows, I assume backed). CZ applied for a presidential pardon inmediately after in May 2025.
WLFI now gets to earn about $60–80 million per year in yield from the USD1…
…As long as Binance doesn’t redeem those $2 billion.
I still don’t know what MGX got out of this deal, but I am pretty sure they didn’t walk empty handed.
For anyone unaware, financial fraud investigation YouTuber Coffeezilla just released a good video laying this all out a few hours ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMEJTORMVN4
Even if you accept it, what are you going to do? Violence is not an acceptable option for most people. So, we carry on.
So you're saying that if people do accept it then nothing can be done, so better not to accept it and continue to live in a fairy tale controlled by criminals? I don't get it.
No. To make changes you have to participate or vote. But, if you dont like what we have now you are stuck with it until elections come up. No amount of complaining on the internet is going to change that. So, you just keep doing what you are doing because now is not the time we can make changes.
I personally do not know any Americans that are as you described. 1/3 of Americans are as you describe, 1/3 are definitely not at all as you described, and another 1/3 is too apathetic to care about anything.
The recent "No Kings" protests were the largest in US history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_and_demonstra...
Exactly. Very few Americans are out there actively "promoting the myth" right now that aren't ideologically aligned with the current Republican administration. That's a distinct (if significant) minority.
Also, while I believe more Americans should be protesting, people in other countries (like myself, at one point) may have an inaccurate idea about what heavy US protest "ought to" look like in the media they see.
We'd love to be protesting at the iconic White House and federal Capitol building, creating horizon-to-horizon crowds for the rest of the world to marvel at... But for me (and ~40% of the population) that's a 3500-3700 km trip. How often would you expect someone in Portugal to travel the distance to Moscow for a day of protest? (Worse, assume no good trains.)
Instead, we gather at local state locations, which will typically not get shown (or recognized) internationally, except when folded into a sentence about how "millions protested across the nation."
> 1/3 is too apathetic to care about anything
I think at least some of that 1/3 has their own problems that prevent them from being able to devote energy to politics
This is measured via election participation, so a confounding factor is the recent uptick in voter suppression tactics; these tactics are employed most visibly in states with large minority populations (e.g. states in the Deep South).
These tactics include: consolidating polling places in urban areas; restricting the ability to submit an absentee ballot or otherwise vote by mail; restricting early voting; voter ID laws; and "poll watchers" who intimidate those at polling places, sometimes illegally.
Moreover, those forced to vote in-person at polling places are not given time off from employment to do so. This overwhelmingly disenfranchises the working class, who just so happen to overwhelmingly vote for progressive policies that favor the working class over the middle/upper classes.
I know of way too many people that "aren't political" or just don't want to think about it. That's not the same as "having their own problems", that's juvenile behavior.
> that's juvenile behavior
IMHO those words are based on an immature understanding of human beings and their limitations.
We not only have physical, financial, and temporal limits; even more powerfully, we have emotional limits. When we're scared or traumatized, we often can't act except to keep things immediately safe as much as they can; we are in survival mode. That's also how bad leaders get good people to do evil things - terrorize them, push them into survival mode, and direct their fear at the leader's targets.
What we can do is recognize those mechanisms and limitations in ourselves, using empathy (a universal human trait), our frontal cortex, and compassion - always the first step to taking of our emotions and being effective - and recognize it in others. Calling them names only traumatizes them more. Empathy and compassion gets them to a better place where they can act. It's not easy - that's why the word 'courage' exists; that's why it's sometimes called, 'grace under pressure'.
Effective leaders know this. What we're missing - what so many people are missing - is good, effective leaders. AFAICT, the leaders we'd expect to rise to this occasion also are traumatized - and they have an obligation to do better if they want to be leaders.
This doesn’t actually work in the real world where people cannot be isolated from or protected from people who keep doing this to them.
You can’t ’out empathize’ someone doing 24/7 manipulation against people.
The only thing that works are real consequences against bad actors.
And that there was no real consequences for bad actors is exactly why we are in the situation we are in now.
Or maybe people don’t want to discuss politics with you because they know you’ll label them juvenile, racist, vile POS and saying they aren’t political is the easiest way out of getting into a heated argument with you at the BBQ party. Most sane people know that arguing with you will not change anything (neither your opinion, nor the sad facts that we are all ruled by criminals no matter who we vote for).
I’m following politics and I have my opinions about things but you can be sure I won’t be discussing them with coworkers and friends.
Or maybe you don't know me at all, or any of the people I know. So don't act like you do to make a pointless internet comment.
Worrying about politics is the luxury of chattering classes.
Try living on or very near the poverty line, and then try and spend time worrying about politics. You are worrying about much more real (to you) problems.
When shit gets bad enough to motivate people on the poverty line, you're in deep shite.
Lots of poor people are politically active. Treating politics as some sort of vanity hobby for the reasonably well off is equivalent to saying that the working class doesn't have any meaningful political opinions. Maybe you meant they don't have time for obsessing over politics as an end in itself, but in my experience the majority of working class people have an interest in and opinions about politics, even if they're alienated rather than enthusiastic about political participation.
I've got a (probably former at this point) buddy who makes less than $15K/year. He seems to have lots of time to listen to right wing propaganda podcasts and likes telling "jokes" about how minorities are problematic. He was never really interested in politics when we were growing up and I suspect never voted before 2024. Poor people have interests and opinions too.
This has to be the most American thing I've ever read: the cognitive dissonance of the disconnect between income inequality and political systems.
They may also have been drawn into the all-too-tempting position of not opposing raw corrupt authoritarianism because the opposition party (the Democratic Party) and pre-Trump America both have deep flaws that are largely ignored.
I mean, their problems are politics, they just can’t do anything about them
There are many things anyone can do. You are not giving enough credit to the people shutting them down one by one. You won't hear them say they can't do anything.
This is obviously false based on widespread protests and constant criticism. If you can’t find Americans who oppose Trump’s regime it’s because you don’t want to.
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> political violence being much more common historically than racial or other forms of violence
This is true if you take a very loose definition of "political violence" lol and probably just disingenuous at best.
The choice was between two corrupt options (same as its been for a long time). There is a lot of evidence coming out that the Biden administration was corrupting the justice system, FBI, and foreign relations for the benefit of the DNC and his family.
Honestly, the billionaire is less corrupt-able than the DNC nexus (we all know Biden wasn't running the show, and neither would Harris).
> There is a lot of evidence coming out that the Biden administration was corrupting the justice system
This kind of vague fluffy language is becoming very common. What evidence? Where is it coming out from?
Not a fan of the other guy but keeping a decrepit old man from the press because you know he can‘t do the job, all while - surprise surprise - the exact same guy who is older than my grandpa when he died gets diagnosed with a long time form of stage 4 bone cancer that can‘t possibly have gone unnoticed while he was having access to presidential healthcare is kind of a big deal.
What does that have to do with “corrupting the justice system, FBI, and foreign relations for the benefit of the DNC and his family”?
If anything it would be a counter argument. Always strikes me as odd that Biden is somehow both a senile decrepit old man and a criminal mastermind depending on which is most useful at any given moment.
> senile decrepit old man and a criminal mastermind
both can be true at the same time. Biden was not always a senile incapable man. The corruption of the justice system seems to come from the fact that he's son has been operating in the shadows of the white house for a long time and it seems that very few people noticed it. But, of course, I know that Biden and his family are school kids when compared to a full fledged mafia boss like the current president.
> billionaire is less corrupt
Why would you think that? Do you think that presents from foreign dictators (like plane or investment in crypto fund) are less corrupt?
> Honestly, the billionaire is less corrupt-able than the DNC nexus
This is satire, right?
The grandparent comment shouldn't be wondering about anything now, should they....
It's not half. I think close to 32% were fully supportive (voted for him) and around 36% sat at home or abstained, but in practicality they basically said they were fine with whoever won.
I don't know which is worse, that 32% were in support of the corrupt leader or that 68% in total are either supported him or didn't care enough to support anyone else
> around 36% sat at home or abstained, but in practicality they basically said they were fine with whoever won.
Or, they were not fine with whoever won.
We've got two abismal parties to choose from. Yes, there's an agument for voting for the lesser of two evils, but it's not a great one.
I'd like to believe at least some of those 36% would vote for a decent candidate/party. But once you lose faith in the system, and realize that it doesn't represent you, you might just stop participating in it.
> We've got two abismal parties to choose from. Yes, there's an agument for voting for the lesser of two evils, but it's not a great one.
No, we have one destructive/harmful party (R) and one status quo party (D). They are not the same level of bad and that's immediately obvious from this last year.
The problem with that is the status quo wasn't that good.
To compare the two parties with a house on fire, absolutely the sadistic pyromaniac arsonist burning down the neighborhood one house at a time is a bad guy and needs to be stopped. But when person trying to rally everyone to go after him is the abusive slumlord, it doesn't always resonate as effectively as it might.
A healthy society wouldn't tolerate either one. I wonder if the Democrats seeming inability to stop right-wing abuses has been partially motivated by the knowledge that successfully stomping out that sort of corruption would curtail their own abuses, too.
> I wonder if the Democrats seeming inability to stop right-wing abuses has been partially motivated by the knowledge that successfully stomping out that sort of corruption would curtail their own abuses, too.
Absolutely. And we know this because when they were last in power they did nothing to counter corruption or limit executive power. Instead they were partaking in it.
Trump is exploiting a system his predecessors created.
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> Yes, there's an agument for voting for the lesser of two evils, but it's not a great one.
This is only a remotely viable claim if you think the two evils have extremely similar amounts of evil.
Those are the same thing in our system.
Here in Germany, we have like 20 different parties on the ballot, with maybe 6 of those having a reasonable chance to actually get any seats. Not a SINGLE ONE perfectly represents me and my issues.
I still voted, because my personal laziness or moral superiority does not trump the very real world effects of the "bad ones" winning. Lazy people like you with post hoc rationalizations exist here too, and they're just as bad and wrong.
if you're on a train to pittburgh, it stops in poughkepsie and you don't get off, you decided to go to pittsburgh by doing nothing. your reasons may be your own, but your ass is in pittsburgh.
If you are on a train going off a cliff and you can turn the train around to go off a different cliff, but decide it isn't worth the effort just to go off a different cliff, you still end up going off a cliff. Nice.
> you still end up going off a cliff. Nice.
This false equivalence is exactly what counts for being "fine with this corrupt leader."
I refuse to vote for a party that was complicit with the threats against me and my friends. The other party is pretty ass too, despite being closer to what I want politically.
> refuse to vote for a party that was complicit with the threats against me and my friends. The other party is pretty ass too, despite being closer to what I want politically
Sure. There are a lot of other people like you. Political operatives work hard to find folks like you, because groups who won’t vote are groups you can transfer resources from. (Same, oddly enough, for folks who will vote for you regardless of what you do. You can take advantage of that loyalty to buy votes on the margin.)
It’s dumb. And it directly undermines the causes you and others like and around you support, because again, your devoted non-participation creates political capital on the other side of any issue you would have voted on. But it’s common and a real part of any electoral—possibly political—system, and no elected who wins and keeps office can afford to ignore the free resources predictable non-voters offer up.
I don't really care if it hurts the causes I want, I am not voting for the people who send my friends death threats. Either way, neither party really supports what I want so voting for one would hurt the causes I want anyway.
> I am not voting for the people who send my friends death threats
Uh, then don't. I guarantee you have more people and issues on your ballots than the person who allegedly sent your friends death threats.
> neither party really supports what I want so voting for one would hurt the causes I want anyway
If neither party has any position you give any shits about, yes, I sort of agree you shouldn't be voting... (And I guess I'll concede you aren't voting against your interests and causes if you have no interests or causes.)
If I don't vote for the people who are a part of the party who sent my friends threats and didn't vote for the people who actively hurt the policy I want, I would either be voting for esoteric third party candidates (might as well not vote to save effort), or I would be out of people to vote for.
> If I don't vote for the people who are a part of the party who sent my friends threats and didn't vote for the people who actively hurt the policy I want, I would either be voting for esoteric third party candidates (might as well not vote to save effort), or I would be out of people to vote for
Well no, you'd be forced to participate in primaries or civically engage. You'd have to identify opportunities for compromise. You'd have to disaggregate your false monolith of a national political party. That takes effort.
Also, showing up to vote for an esoteric third party puts you on the board. Someone who shows up is provably not too lazy to vote, which is, honestly, most people who come up with convoluted reasons for avoiding the polls. Take a lazy person's stuff and they won't hurt you. Take a person who's showing up to the poll's stuff, and they might vote for the other guy--or worse, join a primary challenge.
Folks rejecting politics implicitly endorsing the status quo (whether they understand that they are or not is irrelevant to the measurable effect of their choices). They also put up a flag around themselves and their community that effectively marks it for cutting resources to benefit people and communities who reward their electeds.
Honest question: Why do you think they are the same?
Friends and I have been threatened with violence multiple times by prominent members of one party and the other party does the same thing to other people. I would love to go into detail but I don't want to get doxxed because it is pretty specific. :(
By not voting, you are clearly saying you are fine with whoever wins. If you were not fine with whoever wins, you would have voted for someone, anyone else.
Participation adds a moral dimension. It becomes a trolly problem — do you throw the switch and take culpability for the outcome?
Well yes, but you're completely misunderstanding how the trolley problem applies to voting, esp. in the USA. You're pretending that "Not Voting" and "Voting" are the switch options, but that's simply not true.
There are just two possible outcomes: Dems or Reps getting power. That's the switch options you have. "Not Voting" simply means letting the trolley take the Rep route and being JUST AS CULPABLE for the results as every single republican voter.
Your fantasy of "not voting" being an actual moral option is like arguing "I disagree with the concept of a trolley, so I'm just going to turn away from the switch". You're morally exactly as culpable, because you made a choice that is morally the equivalent of "not switching tracks".
There is a subtle difference though because a vote is supposed to be a act of support. With the trolley problem there is nothing to support.
Voting for party A/B is a reward that encourages party A/B to do more of what they're doing.
So let's say only 1000 people voted because everyone else hated both options. That would pave a path for party C that would not exist if everyone held their nose and voted for crap.
Not participating in the trolley problem does not remove questions of moral responsibility. You had the choice to throw the lever, you said "either outcome is fine".
That's your choice. "I don't participate at all" doesn't work unless it makes the whole trolley go poof.
There are more moral frameworks out there than just utilitarianism.
There's a double standard that I see a lot here, where people want to vote for a party, denigrate those who chose not to participate as being morally culpable for the results of the election, but won't take moral culpability for what their team does when they're in power.
If you vote for team A and they win and then do something bad (inevitable), shouldn't you be morally responsible for that? After all, you seem fine claiming non-participants have moral culpability for whatever the winning team does.
Yes, you are, to the extent that "the other option" would have been better.
This seems incredibly obvious. If my options are "don't bomb children" and "bomb children", there's an obvious choice and obvious culpability. If my options are "bomb children" and "bomb way the fuck more children" the choice is also obvious.
You do not get to pretend a moral dilemna doesn't exist just because you're not a fan of the available choices. You are still culpable.
I also sat out one election here in CZ, but that does not mean that I was "fine with whoever wins". It was "I really cannot decide which of the two guys is worse and I need to survive either of them."
Fortunately the Czech president does not have that much power.
How about parliamentary election?
Because it isn't about actions, it is about sides. Tribalism.
It is the loss of complexity. Many cannot understand that by choosing the lesser of two evils does not mean you support evil. It means your choices are limited. We have turned the political issues into good and evil, rather than disagreements in how to achieve our mostly shared goals. We can no longer see the other side as friends and family, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anyone countering this can just proclaim "both sides" and in some sense they will be right, they have evidence and people do abuse that framework. But at the same time that destroys the bridge between us. The abuse of calling both sides evil along with the accusation that all use cases are instances of abuse. It binarizes the environment, creating a simple world where there are only two choices. Which is easy to do when everything is so complex, as we're so tired and don't want to think.
It's also why this administration's strategy is so effective: overload the opposition. After all, Brandolini's Law states: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." They've weaponized it. It's an effective strategy, and hard to defend against. I'm sure someone will offer a solution, "it's so simple, you just..." and we perpetuate the game.
> cannot comprehend how half of Americans are fine with this corrupt leader?
They've normalized corruption irrespective of magnitude. That's partly a problem of the little corruption existing in the first place. But it's also a problem of education and tribal populism being given this much power.
>I cannot comprehend how half of Americans are fine with this corrupt leader?
Don't think fox news is going to report that he enriched the prez...
I think most actually know and don't think it's all that much different from what other have done for decades. I'm not saying they are correct to think it, just that they do think it. They think it's refreshing that the corruption is in the open. It's a societal boy-cried-wolf numbness. People are tired of the of finger pointing and screaming about every thing and now don't listen when the real stuff goes down.
Everything about him since 2015 has been absolutely egregious. Anyone who hadn't realized it by 2016 will never change their tune. Even if he declares martial law for no good reason they're all still going to justify it somehow. Anyone who's hung on this long will be along for the ride forever.
I want to understand what you said.
You assumed the leader is corrupt, possibly assumed the leader has bad intentions, and that the world can't possibly be more complex than these assumptions. Assumed the leader made this choice instead of a team behind him.
Then presented a generality. Possibly assumed he doesn't know more than you and "everyone who won't say anything".
Called an entire administration a circus. Another generality.
Suggested bribery without evidence.
How does one respond constructively to a comment like this?
Most polls that I've seen show it closer to 40% than half
Yes, and that's depressing. Why are so many people not understanding what is going on?
Reminds me of this Bill Gates quote: "We were a bit naive: we thought the internet, with the availability of information, would make us all a lot more factual. The fact that people would seek out—kind of a niche of misinformation—we were a bit naive."
Watching the Great Brainwash happen in real time has given me (I hope) a lot of insight into how anti-fascist Germans must have felt before WWII. It's a hell of a thing to watch half the people you know fall victim to the deluge of simplistic, feral propaganda that's been pouring out of our media sources for quite some time now. YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and other socials being the primary driving force. All platforms that are incentivized to spread rage and misinformation, and yet we can't seem to quit them as a culture. We rationalized their existence and non-regulation because BUSINESS and FREE MARKET. It's a real sad time for America. We should have known better. It's all of our faults, collectively. For not being big enough to shun the pressure and money. For not doing what was right all along. Now, we'll reap the whirlwind.
Only had of Americans vote, only half of them voted for Trump, and his approval rating is down significantly since inauguration.
It is not accurate to say that half of Americans are ok with this. It’s just our system doesn’t allow for doing anything about it except wait.
> It’s just our system doesn’t allow for doing anything about it except wait.
"Healthy democracy"
Arguing over whether half or a third are okay with this is splitting hairs anytime that isn't an election (where these margins matter).
That even a third is okay with this is a clear enough signal. He represents their values.
"I Could ... Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn't Lose Any Voters" - Trump
They wouldn't be fine with it if they understood it. Instead they are not paying attention and only consuming propaganda media (Fox News) that refuses to report on Trump negatively in any way.
We're long past the time when FoxNews was the main vector. Now the propaganda is coming from social networks and mainstream media that is afraid of consequences if they tell the truth. It's all just a big mafia system.
Not sure we can blame fox news, it has like 5MM peak daily viewership...
FB, Twitter, Tiktok on the other hand...
Note that they all are, or will soon be controlled by one political grouping.
Its difficult to digest lol. Im from Europe but damn I feel the Americans - its legit embarrassing to watch.
It is disconcerting. Having discussed openly with people who were supportive of similar politicians, their logic is often in the line of "all of them are corrupt, but at least his politics are different". Now when you point that certainly corruption exists, but this is another level, they're getting into non-logical territory. People perceive times as grim and will take whomever offers something else than the status-quo baseline politician I guess. Even if they grift throughout and everyone's worse off in the end.
On a baser level, if you go on twitter, there's a whole slew of delusional people who either don't believe this because of "fake news", another portion that's in the same "Clinton/Obama/Biden were even worse", and the rest just doesn't even care so long as "the libs are owned".
> I cannot comprehend how half of Americans are fine with this corrupt leader
It's because you are still thinking of the USA as a democracy. Musk helped buy the election for Trump. It's an open oligarchy since companies were allowed an opinion as if they were citizens.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citi...
Half of America isn’t fine with Trump. Only 22.3% of Americans voted for him and his approval rating has gone down significantly since then.
Another 36% could've voted against him and chose not to. Even accounting for some amount literally unable to reach the poll booth, yeah, half of America.
It's easy to explain: They have no idea what's happening.
Most people can't keep up with the firehose of news and don't really want to. This particular bit of unethical behavior is just one more bit of inconsequential news which will have completely disappeared from the headlines by tomorrow. It basically never happened to 95% of the country, regardless of political leaning.
Secondly, conservatives live in their own highly filtered and mutated information bubble. Good news is amplified, bad news is either downplayed, justified (pure fiction is acceptable) or simply ignored. So even if they do hear about this, it won't be a big deal.
In short, most people won't care, and conservative media will actively work to overlook or more often, rationalize this sort of unethical behavior to the point where it somehow is totally fine. (Simply read this thread to watch it happen in real time.)
The thing is, most won't hear about this at all. It's always amazing to talk to a Trump voter and realize they don't actually hear about most of this stuff
And if it does break through the right info bubbles, right-wing media pundits and influencers will be on-the-ready to quickly rationalize or what-about it away and coax their audiences back to their "happy" places, where they can nurse their favorite grievances about the left, the media, the trans people, etc
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Well, to be fair, 7 million showed up in the streets on Saturday. Up from 5 million before and up from 3 million before that. The last election was decided by 2.3 million votes.
Edit1: That's not to say don't worry about it. That's to say everyone can show their displeasure with peaceful protest and involvement/activism that will make it clear the people of the US disagree with this corruption. No matter how much any internet groups scream "stolen".
Edit2: people vastly underestimate, in their media bubbles, how many showed up from "red" states.
From the 7 millions that did show up, very close to zero of them will be deciding the next election due to the way the election system works in the US.
I mean, we shut down the government and so now we're just waiting (a year) for the midterms. What else do you expect people to do?
Among other things, people are constantly challenging Trump in court and have reversed many of his policies. For example, my passport needed to be renewed this year and he signed an executive order saying I couldn't get an accurate one. The ACLU sued him and now I have an accurate passport. Living your best life in spite of his attempts to ruin it is a valid form of resistance. He wants to erase trans people. I'm out there not being erased. That's something.
I'm from the UK and don't understand what you mean by accurate passport? Would you mind explaining?
https://www.aclu.org/cases/orr-v-trump
Thank you
It's about a question of if you get to decide the "sex" or "gender" field on your own documents or does the government get to decide and give you no input and no recourse.
Thank you
> we shut down the government
The government clearly isn't shut down. I'm still paying taxes through the eftps web site. Only the parts that the executive wants shut down are actually shut down. Perhaps "degraded" is a better word.
In many parts of Europe a couple of strikes would have taken place. Usans are numb or has no social conscience and muscle.
There was a No Kings protest just a few days ago, millions of people across nearly every state demonstrated against the administration.
We inspired the French revolution and had a 7-million-person protest this past weekend.
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I know HN viscerally hates crypto, and yes Trump is embarrassingly corrupt, but the charges against CZ were a greater wrong than whatever quid pro quo happened in the pardon.
This is the most embarrassing part of all of it. The US is ping ponging between two very different ways of misusing state power.
CZ was charged with violating a highly technical US securities law that is not common to most countries despite not being a US citizen or ever setting foot in the US. His crime was letting his employees (also non-US and under no affirmative obligation to learn the laws of every country in the world just because they run a website) tell crypto whales they could use VPNs to get the non-US, non-nerfed version of Binance.
The public's interest in protecting crypto whales from Binance is extremely tenuous. Unsophisticated users would hit the geofence. These were whales using Binance because they wanted to, not because they were tricked.
The US's right to enforce arcane securities law outside its own borders is also very tenuous. If every country pulls this level of aggressive enforcement of atypical law on every website (even geofenced ones!) we will have total chaos. Should China, Russia, or India be able to hunt you down for violating some arcane law? No? Then why should the US?
This is also happening in the context of an active public debate over the application of this law within the US, one cryptocurrency supporters won fairly definitively in the last election.
Whatever discretion the law provides US enforcers, they should have recognized that it was wrong to use that discretion and left CZ alone once Binance made reasonable gestures at compliance.
Instead, once their political coalition signaled that they should put symbolic heads on platters, they went about scoring career points. This is the kind of misbehavior that drove Aaron Swartz (a friend of mine) to suicide. We should be clear that it's wrong.
And here we are. A choice between venal corruption and cruel punching down at immigrants on one side, and a blind, symbolic use of power for power and ideology's sake on the other.
Hi, Trump voter here. I'm NOT fine with this.
If you’re not fine with criminals who get away with fraud, why vote for a well known fraudster? He’s been conning people since the 80s
He was clear about how he intended to run the country in his last term. And in the lead-up to the election. You are complicit in his crimes.
Serious set of questions here from someone desperately trying to understand people who voted for Trump and how to have conversations with them that can be productive. None of them are meant to be insulting or insinuate anything.
To me, this sort of behavior just seems par for the course for how he has been acting since before his presidency. Did you follow his record in business and politics closely prior to voting for him? If so, what mitigating factors were there that let you still feel comfortable in voting for him?
Is this an isolated source of issue with him? Part of a broader trend? In either case, is it/these a big enough deal for him to lose your support moving forward? For the rest of the political party supporting him?
If there has been a shift in your ability to support him, what is it that broke the camel's back?
It is remarkably simple. There are countless meals on the menu but people get to see only the two on the front page. Say, monkey brains and bull testicles. Few can really appreciate either. There is a little talk about the slugs on page 1. An abysmal small number will turn a few pages and look over the burgers and pizzas... but you can't really order a burger in a restaurant like this? Can you? So even they pretend they really like to eat testicles.
You could have literally opened a random page and order whatever is on there. It is perfectly safe to order the burger as you will most likely be served monkey brains anyway.
No one will rage at you for voting for Afroman. There are no dire consequences.
I just honestly feel like any attempt to equate the two is insane.
I can't really align myself to either party, and I am diametrically opposed to the Democrats on some issues, like gun control, and think that there are a lot of real issues that they push far to the extreme to the point that it is problematic, but... there's also only one party that attempted insurrection and overturning the election, campaigned on all sorts of insane shit, pushes a narrative of needing the military to deal with protestors, etc.
It's not two shit sandwiches, it's a pot of live pit vipers vs a pot of boiled unseasoned kale and spinach. I'm not going to enjoy the latter, but it's probably not going to harm anything more than my taste buds. The other might kill me.
The magic is this: there are no other candidates who can win because you didn't vote for any of those in previous elections and there won't be in the next because you won't now.
It is like you ask someone to chose between death by fire, death by drowning OR finding the love of your life. Then they respond with: I don't want to drown! Or worse, they ask what other people chose.
Imagine yourself making your own choices. Picture it for a moment, doesn't it sound terrifying?
One should also look at it from the perspective of the other candidates. I mean those not part of the uniparty. Imagine making an effort to convince people to vote for a sanity riddled election program. The level of insult people sink to in order to NEVER even consider it.
Not OP but I reluctantly voted for Trump because of the direction he proclaimed he wanted the country to go. I could not tolerate the direction the democrats were wanting to go as it seemed an inevitable path to civil war.
But I knew Trump was shady and didn't like that he partied with Epstein in the 90s. A country takes a long time to change directions. I saw a chance for a smaller less restricting federal government. It was a gamble I was willing to take to at least get the ship turning around.
J/w: what direction does it seem to you that Democrats want? At least judging by its elected officials and internal leaders, it seems like a pretty directionless party to me.
Flooding the nation with immigrants and given them our tax money and berating anybody that questioned it. That is a 100% sure path to civil war.
When did your ancestors immigrate to the country? What was the process for immigration then?
For the majority of the history of the country it has never been anything like it is today. Until 1819 you basically literally just showed up. After that, ships had to include passenger manifest and pass that along to the state, and then state's handled immigration - but none there did more than try to charge 'head fees' to keep the truly destitute out, but not all states even did that. 1875/1876 there were laws that changed this - largely banning Asian immigrants and making immigration federal purview. The next couple of decades things got more formalized, but if you were a normal human being capable of supporting yourself you basically got held for a basic check and then were let in. <1-2% got turned away most years. It wasn't until 1921/4 that anything resembling our current immigration system was put into place, and while it saw significant revision in 1965 to how the caps and quotas were organized, we've not seen anything major change.
The Democrats want significant immigration reform, true. They want a path for people that have been living here as productive members of society to stay here. They want them to be treated like human beings.
This is not "flooding" the nation.
> and given them our tax money
This talking point seems to be repeated a lot, but it's just not true. Illegal immigrants pay more taxes in to the system than they receive in benefits - largely because they are ineligible for the vast majority of benefits. If you want to increase our tax revenue, more illegal immigrants is better than less. We effectively rip them off. It's like the claims that the shutdown is over giving illegal immigrants free healthcare - not a dime of the funding being discussed would go to them. You're being lied to.
I'm all for a system where we screen our immigrants for criminals, terrorists, etc. But the current system is broken, and we have built our way of life off of exploiting a large amount of hardworking people that contribute a hell of a lot to our ability to live the way we do. Legalizing them, streamlining the immigration process, etc., is not at risk of bankrupting our coffers.
> I could not tolerate the direction the democrats were wanting to go as it seemed an inevitable path to civil war.
Trumps action with ICE will lead to waco situations. Undocumented immigrants can obtain guns in this country and will not continue to go quietly into the night. Seems to me that his actions are far more likely to lead to civil war
If somebody that is here illegally picks up a gun and fights citizens or government they are a foreign combatant on US soil. Fighting them is not civil war it is national defense and is the whole reason the federal government was established.
Now, if you are talking about citizens supporting an invasion against those that oppose it that is civil war. I agree that is a none zero possibility. However, telling citizens to get fucked while taking their money and giving it to non citizens, to me, was certain to lead to violent conflict between citizens.
Well, you voted for it. Were you not capable of critical thought when you entered the voting booth?
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You knew who he is, and you voted for him anyway. You really didn't see this kind of rampant corruption coming from his 2nd term?
If you think this is wrong, please, I implore you to do something about it.
Your reps (or likely preferred choice of reps, if they didn't win their district) are enabling this, and don't give two shits about anything I say.
People are going to pile on you for not seeing this coming, but I really do appreciate your ability to change your mind and tell people about it.
People need space to make a U-turn. I hope you get some grace because it's a lot easier to say "I told you so" than "I was wrong."
I don't see where the GP changed their mind. They may not be ok with this particular action while still preferring the current administration to any alternative.
How wasn't his first 4 years enough time?
> People need space to make a U-turn
The problem is we dont believe him. There has been ample time to make a u turn. A decade at this point. Trump has never shied away from his corruption. He has been upfront about his intentions from the beginning. I just do not believe that this is the straw that broke the camels back when so many straws have come before.
Honestly, why did you vote for this then?
Trump is the most openly corrupt leader in american history. How can you vote for him while claiming to be against corruption?
Because he’s giving them the one thing they really care about “white nationalism”
They will overlook everything else he does. Everything
Just stop with that BS. I guarantee that "white nationalism" was the farthest thing from the majority of Trump voters mind. If you come out of the gate saying all Trump supporters are racist most people are just going to roll their eyes at you at walk away. You have already told them you dont like them and that you will most likely not even entertain their reasons as acceptable.
What exactly did you think you were voting for then? Because everything he's done has been extremely predictable.
A chance of making the federal government smaller and less overbearing. Also a path that didn't inevitably lead to civil war.
That's such a vague response that it's difficult to respond with any specifics, but I will say that I can't imagine how you thought Donald Trump was the better of the two candidates to achieve either of these goals.
You're the one who was in another comment talking about how the dems ran on a platform of flooding our country with immigrants and giving them our tax money; sounds like you are, in fact, closer to the racist/white supremacist set than you might realize. At the very least, you share their goals or vision for America.
> Hi, Trump voter here. I'm NOT fine with this.
Welcome to the resistance!
Just curious. Since you voted for someone who is a terrible President last time, what are you planning to change about how you make voting decisions next time? Are there particular people or media you plan to listen to less, and others more? Particular aspects you will weight higher or lower?
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Is the irony not lost you that Joe Biden pardoned his own son for crimes he was absolutely guilty of. I don't see how that is any less corrupt. This isn't whatboutism either because I'm not trying to say that what Trump is doing is okay, I'm pointing out that this behavior is not particular to Trump and his supporters. The large majority of Americans are fine with corruption as long as it's their team.
You talk as if corruption is a binary: corrupt or not corrupt.
I’m not supportive of Biden pardoning his son. But it’s inarguable that the Trump administration is orders of magnitude more corrupt than Biden’s was. To say “they’re both corrupt” is to flatten everything out to meaninglessness.
Biden pardoning his son was widely condemned by Democrats.
This is despite the fact that Hunter was gone after on a charge that is basically never enforced alongside a media and political campaign ramping up all sorts of lies and half-truths and trying to draw connections to things he was never on trial for, much less convicted of, with an incoming president that had spoken extensively about his desire to weaponize the government to enact revenge on his political rivals, which we have seen him do extensively already.
I don't like that Biden pardoned his son, but I also think the idea that it is at all comparable to the pardons Trump has issued that are blatantly corrupt is absurd. Meanwhile, Jan6 pardonees have a whole Wikipedia section detailing all of the crimes they have gone on to commit since being pardoned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_January_6_United_Sta...
No. You are making it seem like Biden pardoned his family for petty crimes. He pardoned them in advance for any crime they have committed that is yet unknown. That‘s an unprecedented move and you claiming the other side will „come after your family“ basically confirms that the legal system is corrupt and that there is reasonable ground to do so.
Biden pardoned his son for a petty crime. He pardoned the rest for probably no crime at all.
See again:
> with an incoming president that had spoken extensively about his desire to weaponize the government to enact revenge on his political rivals, which we have seen him do extensively already.
One can not be happy with that and understand that Trump would have found ways to lock up his son for 20 years. No one thinks this dude was going to be punished for political reasons.
Hunter Biden and the Biden family were investigated for years in various political witch hunts and Hunter was charged with filling out a gun form incorrectly in the end. Trump made it clear he was going on a revenge tour with the DOJ in his second term so I don't blame Joe for the pardons.
1. There is no evidence that Joe partook in hunter's scheme. No evidence of misuse of office or government resources. It was more conspiracy to engage in corruption than actual corruption.
2. Hunter's pardon was still wrong and widely condemned by dems.
Biden misused the office to pardon his son but he was not corrupt.
Biden didn't pardon, the auto pen did.
Biden obviously wasn‘t in the mental state to do anything himself in the last year of his presidency.
It's a good thing Trump is as old as he is. Imagine if a 50 year old had this much influence over his party, could ignore any law, and stole this much money.
May I never live to see such a thing happen in the US, but it doesn't feel unlikely.
We better hope JD Vance isn't able to capture the cult of personality after Trump is gone.
JD Vance is a great debator, and might appeal to some urban Republic voters. But I don't see him having and away on the rural voters like Trump does.
"I was told there wouldn't be fact-checking" is a great debater?
I’m very confused. Rural voters can connect with a dynastic NYC real estate developer, but Vance at least has origins much closer to typical Americans.
Is it just media nostalgia? Trump was on the TV shows they liked and so they trust him more?
A lot of politicians have tried to replicate Trump’s style with limited success. We could probably debate forever what it is about Trump that makes him unique. I think his crude and abrasive personality won people over; it felt authentic and cathartic. Nowadays I think he has immense inertia.
I remember hearing a lot of sentiment mid-2010s about how since he was a successful businessman that he will make good decisions in the White House. America was longing for someone that wasn't 'status quo', so to say.
I agree with you on the personality side, but I also think his overall fame from TV, real estate, etc. is just as big a factor to his political success.
Yeah the whole "successful businessman" schtick is pretty much a trope in US elections. Before Trump it was Ross Perot, before Perot it was others like Wendell Wilkie. Trump had that going for him AND the celebrity status like Reagan. These things are basically status buffs for elections in the US.
Trump is also not afraid to say what a lot of people think. Telling a reporter they are "terrible" or talking about making America great. The way he does it resonates with a lot of folks.
Trump opponents might cringe at thinking about Trump as a leader, but it is the origin of his success. The L word is generally over-used and over-ascribed. For example, leadership might correlate with being a "hero" or being moral/just/fair,etc however there's lots of proof they don't correlate. It's a fallacy to think that a leader is also a hero. But some people do (fallaciously) ascribe these positive traits to leadership.
That said, in his domain, Trump leads; he generates the headlines and everyone else follows them.
Is JD Vance generating headlines? Barely. Is anyone else generating headlines? Lets consider a few:
- Tim Walz: mainstream media tries to meme Walz into being a headline generator, but he isn't, and poses no serious contention
- Mumar Gaddafi, Sadam Hussein, Hitler, Mussolini, etc: i'm not sure there has been a dictator that did not generate headlines.
- Steve Jobs: strong headline generator, such that he could have run for president and likely won
- pewdiepie: for a spell he was generating headlines, but mainstream media had no solid editorial narrative for the guy (and his hundreds of millions of followers) which posed a social risk. The more they discussed him, the more risk of society penduluming in some unpredictable way either by martyring him or amplifying his politics, so they chose the "ignore him and let whither" as a strategy which seemed to work, as he has drifted into Japan and been off-the-radar
- Luigi Mangione: a nonzero number of liberal voters would decry Trump in one breath and cast a vote for Mangione to be a politician despite evidence he is a cold-blooded murderer. This probably won't change much after conviction.
In conclusion, intelligent people are forced to lament the state of humanity in which leadership is game-ified so easily and yet so difficult to achieve. "How does one consistently generate headlines" is a difficult question to answer and seems to be one of the core essence of humanity. And, as described above, the origin of people's feelings of why a given person is successful.
Yeah, I think this is probably a factor. In particular, the fact that Trump appeared a lot on professional wrestling TV has been cited as something that made many people in demographics who consume a lot of pro wrestling content familiar with him and inclined to view him favorably.
My wife's aunt has been having delusions Trump wants her to help run the country, and maybe preparing for her to run for senate. She's bought "Trump Coins" that will make her rich when we does something in the future...
It's a cult of personality that has taken over people's lives.
Such personality cultists usually filter for other great egos in there sphere, leaving behind burned out parties filled with syccophants. If the history of the USSR teaches us anything, the more dangerous aspirants are bookkeepers for the party, managing silently in the background, secret service personal and (checks notes) clowns? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_Khrushchev#Stalin's_fin...
I have doubts that JD Vance can pull off a Republican realignment to himself. He's not a 2nd gen wealthy person who assumes that every one will do his bidding.
And trump himself isn’t exactly that?
He is precisely that, and I believe it's the secret of his success. Vance doesn't have that. Sure, he's wealthy now, but he didn't grow up with wealthy, narcissistic parents himself. Vance won't be able to command obedience reflexively, automatically, like Trump can, with attitude and habit alone.
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Unfortunately, this narrative's utility is pretty low and it's intended implications are severely weakened by the current administration's obsession with revenge, blaming everything on someone else, and persecuting political opponents. If such openly hostile and norms-breaking rhetoric did not exist before the pardons, then the pardons would appear suspicious.
He pardoned one family member who actually committed a crime, one who had been subject to some allegations that went nowhere, and several who had no creditable allegations of any criminal activity.
If Harris had won it is likely that none of those pardons would have happened. They happened because Trump was promising to go after the families of people he saw as an enemy.
When in doubt, what about.
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A part of me despises this orange guy,
another part is thankful that he is there as a proof that you can get to a high status and high relevance role in society and still mantain your humanity, your inner child alive, not being robotic and just have a blast doing whatever the f you want.
There is no point getting to the top if you then lose all your humanity and playfulness.
Like if the condition to become President were to become a robot like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, thanks no, I pass....Trump on the other hand is the best of both worlds.
> and still mantain your humanity
I am getting Poe's Law'd … right?
He's sending people to concentration camps & bombing boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. He's deported American children. Treatment of asylum seekers, treatment of immigrant's children, wanton discrimination against minority groups…
Humanity? Playfulness?
I’m not sure he’s maintained his humanity by maintaining his playfulness with the very lives of people being his playthings.
I see child, I don‘t see humanity.
They are synonymous really.
I don't say this lightly and I understand that it's neither a thorough nor an explicit question, however, I mean this in all seriousness:
What the fuck?
That is a strange way to spell "malignant narcissism".
I mean, did Kim Jong Un not qualify for this role to you? Or is that one actually horrifying and you put up some arbitrary distinction because... Trump?
Pardon count per president:
Don't come here and lie. You almost doubled the number for Joe Biden (the vast majority of which were pardons for simple possession of marijuana) while omitting the extremely well-known fact that Trump pardoned ~1500 people who were convicted for offenses committed on January 6, thus deflating his total by >80%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_pardoned_or_gra...
Median net worth of pardonees? 6500 of Biden’s are for marijuana offenses. Not exactly corruption there.
This is meaningless without context.
Even if the numbers were correct, the numbers are absolutely no use without context, except perhaps to allow partisan mud-slinging on Twitter.
Biden pardoned thousands of non-violent low-level marijuana convictions, which is why the numbers look like that. Trump pardoned a large number of violent protesters.
If we ever get trump out of office we need to re-arrest every last one of these guys. The supremes can whine and cry as we keep them in prison. They can raise an army if the want anything different.
Serious controls need to be placed around the pardon power.
Double Jeopardy is disallowed in the United States, they would have to be convicted on new crimes.
So much of what DJT is doing should be disallowed but isn't. So we can disallow them and then add an amendment to reverse all DJT executive orders and pardons.
I'm joking! Everything will be broken by then.
They most certainly committed other crimes which were uncovered when they were investigated for the crimes that they were charged and now pardoned of.
Also as I understand it, while the can't be tried twice for the same crime Federally, it's still possible that they can be tried in a state court for committing the same crime.
Name them as terrorists on bullshit nonexistent evidence and disappear them to CECOT. We already know you can get away with it.
that's for the gravy seals.. i mean ice gestapo. Send them where they sent the largely innocent.
The moment pardons are abused, the whole concept should be abolished. Pandora’s box is open now, unless you take it away, it’ll be continued to be abused.
Just the ones that Trump pardoned right?
there are good pardons out there. People who were rotting in prison for small amounts of drugs, etc.
.. but if you are trying to imply hunter biden, then fuck yeah I don't fucking care, put him in prison if that's what it takes.
Seems like just nuking the stupid AML rules would be better.
I don't get the hate.
He served 4 months for a laundering case , and has built the most successful exchange. There are bankers and vcs doing far worse things. He deserved the pardon , and no, he doesn't control bitcoin
Words and sentences can easily be misconstrued in threads like these.
I truly want to know of a better way to have discussions on a topic of this importance.
Don't let Trump pardon anyone? People are outraged because it is outrageous.
Or better yet, prosecute corruption.
It feels like HN is slowly turning into reddit with the comment section becoming mostly snide remarks
Instead of just commenting about being dismayed with the state of things, how about step back and speculate as to why he did this pardon, and what the implications of it are.
I don't know the answer to either, but I surely didn't learn much from what used to be an insightful, intelligent crowd