PURE CORRUPTION

 

There is a truism about bullies: if you don't stand up to them, they'll just keep going, pushing their victims even further.  We are learning that day after day in Donald Trump's second term, as our Bully in Chief continues to reach new levels of corruption.  Anyone paying attention would have seen this coming; in his first term, the Trump family business continued to run the Trump Hotel in Washington DC even as he was in the White House.  According to Forbes magazine, over the four years of his first term his business made 3.75 million dollars from foreign dignitaries staying at the hotel, a flagrant violation of the emoluments clause of the constitution.  No move was ever made by congress to limit or punish this obvious unconstitutional profiting  by the president, even when the Democrats took the House and the Senate.  I suppose the argument was that Trump was engaged in so much other corruption that this obvious attempt to line his own pockets had to be ignored.  

Sadly and inevitably, Trump saw the lack of restraint by congress in his first term as free hand to go crazy in his second one.  So this time his family business started a crypto coin company just before he took office that has made over a billion and a half dollars in just one year, with, once again, much of that money coming from foreign countries looking to win favor with him. Recently it was also discovered that his investment portfolio has made over 3600 trades in just the first three months of this year(!), with Trump publicly praising some companies just before his portfolio invested in them. His son Eric has countered this by saying that the investments are in a blind trust, but, as the New York Times recently pointed out, there is no proof that such a trust exists.

And then there's the president's slush fund.  Back in his first term, Trump refused to release his tax returns.  IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn started releasing them illegally, and was caught and sentenced to five years in jail. This year Trump  sued the federal government for not doing enough to stop his returns from being released, asking for ten billion dollars in damages.  Yes, he essentially was suing the same government that he himself ran, freely admitting that “I am supposed to work out a settlement with myself.”  

Well, now we know the details of that settlement: in agreement for dropping the suit, Trump's former personal attorney (and now acting Attorney General) Todd Blanche will pick five people to distribute almost two billion dollars to compensate the president’s allies and others investigated by the Justice Department under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.  When Blanche testified in congress about this slush fund, he refused to say whether some of that money would go to people who violently protested during the January 6th riot of 2020.  Or to put it another way, the Trump administration wants to use US tax dollars to benefit people who beat law officers during a failed insurgency.  

Another part of the settlement may also be just as jaw dropping: Trump and family are now exempt from any IRS audit into their business.  This not only erases a previous tax fee that Trump owed to the amount of one hundred million dollars, but it clearly opens the door for Trump and his family to cheat as much as they want on their taxes in the future without any fear of punishment.  Who knows how much this could cost as generation after generation of Trumps cheat and get away with it. 

One good thing about all of this is that congressional Republicans may finally have found a level of corruption that makes even them balk.  Yes, the same party that didn't impeach Trump after January 6th and shrugged off his starting a war with Iran without any kind of congressional input, may actually be standing up to Trump's imperial presidency desires.  Last Thursday Blanche visited with congressional Republicans who vented their anger over the slush fund, understandably outraged at the prospect of giving money to violent protestors that some of those congress people actually had to flee from back in 2020.

While it may be a little too little and a little too late, it is good to see that the GOP, clearly knowing what a terrible message Trump's slush fund sends to the voters right before the mid terms, are actually standing up to him about something.  In fact, they're so angry that have decided delay voting on an immigration crack down bill that Trump is pushing for.  So it's possible that Trump will have to forego giving government money to violent protestors like he so clearly wants to.

With the Trump era drawing to a close soon, and Republicans already looking ahead to 2028, it's obvious that Trump is obsessed with his legacy, doing big things like  starting a poorly thought out war with Iran, a country we've been in conflict with since 1979, and smaller things, like building his silly ball room.  He's also using his office to make as much money as humanly possible for him and his family with even less restraint than he showed in his first term.  The damage his corruption has done to the world, this country, and the office of the president, will probably takes years to set right.

THE COURTS BECOME PARTISAN

 

In this deeply politically divided country, it's interesting to consider how the office of the presidency has shaken out in this century: in 26 years, we've have 14 years of Republican rule(8 years of George W Bush, 6 years of Donald Trump so far) and 12 years of Democratic rule (8 years of Barack Obama, 4 of Joe Biden).  It's important to note that the two Republican presidents have one thing in common, they both lost the popular vote in their first elections, but won because of our country's continued use of the absurd electoral college system.  

The fact that both Bush and Trump strolled into office claiming a huge mandate they didn't have reveals one of the big differences between the progressive and the conservative mindset; imagine how the Republican party would react to two Democratic presidents in a row losing the popular vote but winning the electoral college.  I've always felt that conservatives in the US have an air of entitlement, a sense that, of course they should be in charge, even if they don't get a majority of the vote (remember, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 by millions).  

The nature of our divided country can always be seen in our midterms elections, when the party of the president almost always loses seats in congress.  The 2026 midterms certainly seemed to be shaping up that way, with Trump's approval rating sinking to as low as 34% in some polls and his unpopular war on Iran dragging on, it seemed like the Democrats were about to win big in congress.

But then in just the last ten days, two court rulings have made a deep change in how congressional districts for the House of Representatives are drawn.  First, and most strikingly, the 6 conservatives on the Supreme Court voted to essentially gut the decades old Voting Rights Act,  allowing conservative states to draw legislative maps that hurt the influence of black voters who vote heavily for Democrats.  The response to this was swift, with Southern states redrawing maps right away, with Louisiana even  pausing an election outright after ballots had been mailed out. Even though the Supreme Court likes to pretend that it's above politics, this was a blatant hand out to the GOP.  And then things got worse, with a court in the state of Virginia throwing out redrawn legislative maps that the voters had just approved.  

The sum total of these two rulings is that Republicans will effectively now have 10 more seats in the House than they did before.  The fact that they were able to do this without actually winning over any new voters showed how rigged our system is.  Putting it bluntly, some unelected judges just gave one political  party an advantage that has nothing to do with any gains in popularity with the voters. (Some democracy we got here!) Just like Bush and Trump having less people vote for them while still winning, conservatives in this country just want to win any way they possibly can.

So what can the Democrats do?  Not a lot other than hope that Trump's low approval rating will continue until November, giving them the chance to still take the House despite these rulings helping Republicans.  In the long run, I think its time for Democrats to fight fire with fire; the next time they hold congress and the White House, its time for them to grant statehood to Washington DC and Puerto Rico, which would not only help the party but also be the right thing to do. (The American citizens of Washington DC do not have any representation in congress.)  I also think that the Democrats  should pack the Supreme Court with more judges; if Republicans in the senate could deny Barack Obama a Supreme Court pick for ten months back in 2015, and then rush through a pick for Trump in 2019 in less than a month, the Democrats should respond by remaking the court.  It's the only way to prevent further partisan rulings like this. These moves would be bold, but I feel that this is the only way for Democrats to fight back against a radical Republican party that wants to win at any cost.

THE IRAN WAR AT TWO MONTHS

 In 1973 the US congress passed the War Powers Resolution Act.  It's passage came from congressional frustration over the way that the Nixon administration was handling the war in Viet Nam and Cambodia.  Overriding Nixon's veto, congress meant to regain control over the military and the right to declare war.  Among the resolutions new rules was that military forces must be withdrawn within 60 days of a presidential attack unless congress authorizes a longer period or has declared war.  Donald Trump's current war with Iran has now passed that 60 day mark with no attempt from the president to get congressional authorization.  A few days ago, Defense Department Chief Pete Hegseth, while testifying about the war in front of the the Senate Armed Services Committee, claimed that “We are in a cease-fire right now, which our understanding means the 60-day clock pauses, or stops, in a cease-fire.”  There is, of course, no pauses allowed for a cease fire in the War Powers Resolution Act, but, as always, the Trump administration continues to believe that there are effectively no limits on the president's power.  And, as they have done so many times since Trump began his second term, most congressional Republicans seem perfectly happy to let Trump have his way, laws be damned. 

The war has now reached an odd moment in which there is a cease fire of sorts with both sides claiming some kind of upper hand.  Trump has even boasted about an outright victory.  But while he can boast all he wants, the Straits of Hormuz are still not open to all shipping, and Iran appears to unwilling to release its grip on the straits as long as the US demands that they give up all their enriched uranium, which could eventually be used for nuclear weapons.  Iran is even considering charging a toll for safe passage through the straits, something that could seriously upend global shipping because, as most of the world is now painfully aware of, twenty percent of the world's oil supply travels through the straits.

This current impasse becomes even more frustrating when you consider how we all got here: when then President Barack Obama signed a nuclear deal with Iran back in 2015, it was the result of two years of negotiations, and Iran held up its end of the deal by not pursuing nuclear weapons, that is, until Donald Trump in his first term, threw out the deal in 2018.  Iran inevitably saw this as an opportunity to restart their  weapons program, which they did, which eventually lead to Trump bombing them  last June and then starting an all out war two months ago.  So if Trump, who operated on the principle that everything Obama did was bad, hadn't thrown out the deal in the first place, we wouldn't be in this mess.

And this war is a mess.  Trump, who ran in 2024 on a platform of avoiding "stupid" foreign wars and lowering prices, made both of those promises meaningless when he started this war last February 28th.  Not only have gas prices gone up, but food prices will also rise as fertilizer, another product that passes through the Straits of Hormuz, has also gotten more expensive for our nation's farmers.  And unlike previous wars, this war has never been popular, with clear majorities of Americans opposing it and Trump's overall approval rating plummeting to the mid thirties in every poll. 

One of the real tragedies of this war was the accidental American bombing of an Iranian elementary school, which resulted in the death of 175 children.  A point could be made that the entire rational for the war was lost the moment that bomb hit that building, not only because of the terrible loss of innocent life, but also because every family and friend of one of those children now has a reason to hate America.  And images of that bombed out school have been seen all over the Middle East, spreading anger and resentment towards our country.

So how will this all end?  The tricky thing here is that the negotiations to end the war are taking place while the stand off is still going on, and the question is, how far can both sides go?  Iran shutting down the straits is hurting America's economy, but the US of course still has the military ability to strike against Iran powerfully.   It's a Mexican standoff with no easy answer, but it seem inevitably that the two sides will come to some kind of arrangement involving Iran's nuclear ambitions that will look a lot like the same plan that Trump so foolishly tossed out in 2018.  But Trump will lie, say that his agreement is better than Obama's, and claim victory while saying it was the greatest victory in the history of the American military.  Because in his mind everything he does is perfect, no matter how far from the truth that is.