White House loyalty rating for companies
axios.com
axios.com
Most Americans love this idea of being powerful, which is why he won the popular vote. The rapes probably even helped him in some quarters. This idea also appeals strongly to a lot of HN - Warren Buffet openly talks about the importance of getting a "moat".
It's anti-competitive. In reality a more distributed power structure is much better for overall progress, and even for the monopolist in the long run (Example: Intel, Russia).
The moat Buffet talks about is not the moat you appear to think it is. It does not belong in the same category as the other things you mention. Moats are a defensive structure, in Buffet terms, its about being a sustainable business "it’s the low-cost producer in some area, it can be because it has a natural franchise because of surface capabilities, it could be because of its position in the consumers’ mind, it can be because of a technological advantage, or any kind of reason at all, that it has this moat around it." -- the moat is "protecting a terrific economic castle with an honest lord in charge of the castle" [0]
A moat is about a business having an "it" factor that sustains it, it's not offensive (attack) feature like the power grabs you talk about are.
The important part, that is missed here of Buffet talking about it, is having an honest person in charge: "And then if we feel good about the moat, then we try to figure out whether, you know, the lord is going to try to take it all for himself, whether he’s likely to do something stupid with the proceeds, et cetera. But that’s the way we look at businesses."
[0] https://buffett.cnbc.com/video/1995/05/01/morning-session---...
Those are all anti-competitive things. The article even links to "natural monopoly" and "barriers to entry".
It doesn't matter if they're used defensively or offensively, honestly or otherwise, the eventual distribution of power is what matters: a monopoly. At the end of the day you have very few vendors, with all the power to set prices at will, and get Buffet his massive return.
a "natural monopoly" is "often the first supplier in a market" [0] How is being the first, thus more time to grow a market, anti-competitive in itself?
Or other things on that list (I am referring to Buffets moat, which is not entirely wikipedias moat):
Network effect: "value of a good or service grows" as it's used by existing and new customers
Intangible assets: Brand Identity
Cost advantage: Companies that can keep their prices low
Doing shady, power grabby things to drain the moat of another business into your own moat is anti-competitive. That's not what Buffet talks about though. Which I highlighted and why Buffets moat is misplaced in your list.
A Trumpian "moat" would probably fit nicely, thou currently he's more concerned with draining others moats to flood the villages around them and then take the land that's left to build a personal use golf course
> A "natural monopoly" is "often the first supplier in a market" [0] How is being the first, thus more time to grow a market, anti-competitive in itself?
These are great questions, and you should ask your favorite frontier LLM. It's systems-level thinking, the ability to see the bigger picture, which takes a while to develop and a lot of reading.
You're thinking: Great! I'm making the right decisions and winning and making money hand over fist. That's good business.
I'm thinking: If your moat is super effective (shady or not doesn't matter), it limits competition (anti-competitive) => therefore eventually higher prices, lower quality, reduced innovation, potential for abuse, because there's less pressure to improve and more shareholder pressure for enshittification.
If you identify with the monopoly you can't see that bigger picture. A healthy market has tons of options for customers to choose from and be served by. Again, talk to the frontier LLMs, they're pretty good at this level. Also fact check them, eg read or watch videos about antitrust enforcement under FDR, that was a crazy bit of drama.
I don't need to run comments through llm's to create reply's for me, but you do you. Clearly you need a better one because it went completely off the rails from my post. Good luck with that, take care.
American civic understanding has gone through the floor. People already think that corporate quid pro quo is the default, so for some, this is actually an improvement because it's more transparent now. It can't be that corporations achieve wins through research and coalition building because that would imply that people aren't not doing enough themselves. The irony has made lobbying stigmatized in grass-roots organizations [1], which only gives corporate lobbyists more power.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/nonprofits-lobbying-less-survey-1...
We collectively give the wealthy extra protection, status, and influence. Basically every definition or subcategory of power.
When you do this, it creates a disgusting race to the bottom from those trying to reach the top. We are seeing the ultimate result of that: a mafia kingdom. A feudal clown show.
You will see a weirdly large amount of people supporting that here because a large number of people have conditioned morality out of their ideology. Or reduced it to a very superficial level, completely subservient to the almighty dollar. "Greed is good", "the ECONOMY", "my peers do it so it's okay". And in and on and on.
In short, many would be doing the same thing in the same position and they can't see just how amoral that is. And how it reflects the utter rot that is our culture.
I agree with your fear, but one of the key problems Dems have faced in their messaging is a false perception that the modern Republican party believes in truth, democracy, or the rule of law. A lot of effort went into negotiating bipartisan immigration reform in 2024, because the negotiators falsely believed that Republicans wanted immigration to be reformed. It would have been a great reason to vote for them if it had worked! But once the negotiators announced a breakthrough, Trump issued new instructions that Republicans who want to stay in good standing must not support it and his appointed Speaker of the House must never let the bill come up for a vote, ensuring that it could never pass.
So it's not enough to come up with a reason to make people want to vote for you. You have to come up with a reason that Trump can't tell plausible lies about, and that Trump's anti-democratic conduct can't defeat. That's a much harder problem.
I agree with all your criticisms of Republicans. But Dems have major faults. they're bad communicators. They won't push symbolic votes (where they don't have the numbers but do it anyway to appease their base). They don't put out aggressive policy agendas because they don't want the Republicans to criticize them, instead they run like middle managers trying to ace the interview. Half of them can't articulate what they stand for besides being seen as decent and competent.
Their biggest problem is that they are fundamentally conflict averse. Great in normal times when negotiation and compromise and mutuality are in vogue, utterly useless in this political moment. Only 10-15% of them in Congress have the will and skill to fight, most of them are just like panic-stricken bystanders shouting 'keep calm, keep calm!' and 'we're having a problem, we need to do something!'
Democracy was on the ballot, at least the second time. People voted against democracy, and now there isn't democracy. The regime is invading its own cities to purge them of dissidents.
But everyone thought this was alarmist and voted against the guys who said it would happen. They have no charisma.
Many people don't know is that the Nazi party was voted democratically into the government. They didn't win the majority but got most votes. They were majority in the Reichstag (Congress). One of the selling point was that Weimar Republic had lost World War I and the reparations paid to the Allied powers was a slap in the face and the country has fallen (aka country was no longer great, people were laughing at them etc ). Hilter wasn't even elected, he was appointed by the Nazi Party.
The Nazi Party then went on a spree - twisting arms, illegal detention etc to get what they want. Lot of people were complicit in their rise. As Martin Niemöller wrote:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
At this point there is no dearth of fools who think because they are above the "left" because their party is in power. If they continue to align or voraciously defend these intimidation tactics and tariffs etc they are going to be better off.
If there is a big learning to had here - History repeats itself. Mostly because people think they are better than people who came before them. People believe that the can get along with a person who cares nothing but for power. At this point, there is nothing which can be said or done to help them because they believe their enemies being better off is the win.
No, they weren't, they formed a coalition government with another far right party and still that was a minority coalition that was put into place by the (elected with a majority) President (who was not a Nazi) because there was no majority coalition formed.
Even in the first (and only multiparty) election after the Hitler-led minority coalition was installed, (which was very much not a free and fair election) the Nazis themselves still didn't win a majority, though the Nazi/DVNP coalition did secure a majority.
The Nazis did get an “elected” majority in the 1936 election, where only Nazi party members and Nazi-invited guests (one per seat) were on the ballot, in a single “approve/reject” slate in each constituency, but...
> Hilter wasn't even elected he was appointed by the Nazi Party.
This is true in the same sense that it is true that the PM of the UK is appointed by their party, not elected. Hitler was the leader of the Nazi Party, he and his coalition government were appointed by the President (who wasn't part of the Nazi Party)
That's optimistic that you think anyone is going to prison in 2029.
I mean billionaires don't even go to prison for engaging in pedophilia. Which is just about the worst crime you can commit. If anyone thinks liberals or conservatives will put them in prison for bribery, they're being a little naive.
This nation is owned by the billionaires. In all honesty, they don't even need to be in alignment with the government. There's next to nothing the government can do to rein in giant banks. If anything, the government has to be certain to make sure the banks are appeased.
It all seems to entrenched and at the same time escalating, it feels like it's inevitable it'll all fall apart. I'm surprised we're not seeing more moneyed interests colluding to establish equilibrium which is sustainable.
There are the purges. But it's normally not the corporate or moneyed puppetmasters getting purged, rather it's the political allies of the fascists that get purged. Military and law enforcement leaders who start off as allies have a particularly dismal survival record in these kinds of governments, since they don't have even the ephemeral protection of democratic legitimacy.
Cook kissing ass and giving the President a meaningless trinket, doesn’t quite arise to that level.
For comparison, in AZ we had legislators caught in a sting operation that were selling individual votes for gambling legislation for between $660 to $60,000 in the 1990s.
We should not normalize this. That was a outright bribe even if it wasn't as big as what others gave. I wouldn't get off the hook for murder just because I argued that Ted Bundy killed waaaaaaay more people than me.
https://x.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1849951974944313590?lang...
This has been true in every industry and every company for the last 100 years. It's not even illegal, unless you're out there offering quid pro quo bribes.
I don't understand how anyone could disagree with this assessment. This is the most transparent bribe ever,
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Getty... ("Donald Trump speaks behind an engraved glass disc gifted to him by Apple CEO Tim Cook during an event in the Oval Office of the White House")
Nope, King of America is a lifetime position.
It's just that the conservatives are so much further along the authoritarianism scale that the liberals appear to be freedom loving democracy activists by comparison. But I guarantee you, if you were to drop the average US Democratic party politician into Germany, Australia, or Canada, they'd be considered to be so far right of center that people would question whether or not that politician even believes in democracy.
???
They tried, but it was blocked by Republicans.
As is, there's this veneer of plausible deniability that, shucks, they really want to help but those other guys don't let them. The practical reality of their policy making is to increase authoritarianism under the guise of "some progress is better than no progress", disregarding that what Democratic leaders call progress their voters (and other democratic societies) call regress.
(Don't get me wrong, I hold no illusion that the red party is at all less authoritarian; my point is that the blue party demonstrates through their actual policy that they are also authoritarian.)
Why can't we just call this corruption? Is there any other, more charitable, interpretation of "transactional"?
Of course, one look at Trump’s actual transactions in office should dissuade of that notion. After he made the preliminary trade deal with the EU, he bragged on TV that Europeans are investing $600 billion and Trump himself gets to decide where the money goes. It’s baffling that anyone would assume that’s how any of this works, but he clearly thinks the point of these transactions is to get more power and wealth for himself.
It's because the president said it on TV.
I can believe that kind of reinforcement happens. Trump watches Fox News, sees himself saying X, and thinks “yes, it’s very good that {X}.”
He's probably exactly this stupid, but in regards to the sentence
>It’s baffling that anyone would assume that’s how any of this works.
I was referring to the rest of the anyone.
FTFY.
Edit: to his own detriment. Why bother with "deals" when you know it can change at any moment. Just put on a golden dog and pony show for the King and hope for the best.
why has no CEO of any, even medium sized, company come out and just said "fuck this, fuck you, fuck 33% of voters, we'll continue to try to operate like a normal country in our little corner"? I'm sure some absolutely fucking vile sociopaths will buy one share and then launch a shareholder lawsuit demanding the CEO be as pathetic as the rest of them and that Not Bribing The President is a new form of securities fraud, but you need at least one person to loudly say no to this nightmare if you want any hope of it ending.
I think a lot of it comes down to motivations. The people running these companies have very little to gain from acting ethically and a lot to lose.
The only way out that I see is for the executive branch to eventually overplay its hand and anger enough MAGA voters to risk losing the House and perhaps the Senate, thus opening the door for the opposition to have the numbers to block legislation and even threaten impeachment over egregious violations of the Constitution.
Meanwhile SCOTUS has shown zero interest in taking action so if a CEO spoke up and Trump & Co. destroyed his business ... I would not blame them for thinking that the judicial branch will not save him.
In many ways SCOTUS's inaction has made all this possible, taken the usual path to resolving it away.
I've seen plenty of small businesses show signs of protest (in select cities of course), but they're not part of the American elite
the thing is that not only does the executive branch have a considerable amount of power, we are now finding out just how much power it has if it's 1) willing to go against norms and morals; 2) violate, twist or misapply the law figuring it'll take a while to make its way through the courts and it has a shot at winning; 3) bring the legislative branch into subservience with the threat of unleashing the full might of presidential power directly against their re-election campaigns; 4) go after companies (law firms, universities, media, businesses) with everything it can (law suits, withdrawing access/permits, etc.), and using whatever excuse (i.e., anti-semitism) as (thin) legal cover; and 5) staffs the bureaucracy with loyal cronies who will execute regardless of whether it's right or wrong, and purge everyone else.
The above could easily be describing Russia or China -- that's how bad it is now in the US. But Trump has exposed the weakness of the US "checks and balances" system that it prides itself on -- it only works if the president is someone who is willing to abide by its constraints. Look how easy it has been for a demagogue to upend it? And the only hope is that he'll be gone in 3.5 years, but that's if he doesn't find a way to stay in power longer or run things through Vance the way Putin did with Medvedev.
By and large, Silicon Valley and its kingmakers are fully in support of this, many vocally so.
Someone should start a boycott list. I for one will not doing business with these companies any longer.
So are you getting a HAM licence then?
To them I ask to explain how many points Tim ̶A̶p̶p̶l̶e̶ Cook and Apple got for his gold bar:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/07/tim-...
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TotalitarianismI'd say it's the nature of power, politics and the existence of government. They start out small and then grow and attract corruption. You can only slow it down by having things like democracy (especially direct democracy) and separation of power.
Just this time it's the government tracking which companies are pro-government currently.
It's not nice, but this government is transactional at best.
While I choose not to play games; it's hard not to play when the other side is the government.
This does explain all the random gifts the government is getting.
for starter, lobby groups cannot issue executive orders just start and stop tariffs and government grant willy nilly
Is it? Will it remain so? Things sometimes are until they aren't and the difference is sometimes impossible to distinguish. Better not to give fascism the benefit of the doubt it doesn't deserve.
Electoral power is not commutative
It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left".
Corruption definitely crosses the aisle.
The left isn't immune to feeling bitter disgust at titans of industry that openly pay bribes and tributes and lie on camera in service of political objectives in exchange for political and economic favors.
My point is that there is open levels of collusion with the Biden admin (and Obama earlier) and media corps which have given the Trump admin cover to openly talk about their "favored companies"
Relax guy, politicians are not your friends.
What do you mean?
To them the Twitter files proves that Democrats and Twitter collaborated to suppress conservative voices and boost liberals despite showing nothing to that effect.
To them the Mueller Report fully exonerates Trump and proves it was nothing but a Democratic smear campaign. Despite it showing the opposite.
Reality doesn't matter anymore. These are "facts" to roughly 1/3rd of the US population.
This case just doesnt sit right with me.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/26/biden-admin-cant-be...
This is especially true when such content is already against the policy of those services.
No Government should regulate the internet.
I don't think I'm living in lala land if i say the US Gov't has any stake in avoiding blame.
IMO, the solution is to demand constitutional and law-following behavior from both/all teams, but to be particularly careful to do that with your preferred side, as you might be prone to overlook those excesses.
We also need to be honest with ourselves as a nation that Trumpism pushes far further into unconstitutional and law-disregarding behavior than what has come before. Pretending it is equivalent, as the starting comment does, is dangerous.
This is only a solution if you can reasonably anticipate the demands being obeyed. If instead you anticipate that they won't be obeyed (by one or both parties), then it only puts your team at a disadvantage. The other team knows this, so they tend to ignore or ridicule any such demands and to whip their team into ignoring and ridiculing those demands. At which point, your team suffers.
Cooperation strategies in an adversarial system only work in a limited set of highly unusual circumstances, and those circumstances aren't currently extant.
lolwhat? “I don’t like what I imagined the left is doing so I’m going to turn our cities into police states?” In what world is that a reasonable justification? Might as well say it’s a bitter reaction to the tooth fairy.
> Corruption definitely crosses the aisle.
And all that aside -- in what world is the appropriate response to perceived misdeeds by a political opponent to crank the dial up to 11 on running the government as your combination personal slush fund, army, and all-encompassing bureaucratic warfare organization?
A world in the throes of absolute war against an entirely dehumanized opponent. If the enemy is definitionally maximally evil, then absolutely any action is permissible as long as it hurts the Other.
https://gigafact.org/fact-briefs/have-there-been-significant...
There’s an entire (successful) ETF exploiting it. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NANC/
I’m not a conservative, I’m pretty left-leaning by (American standards at least), but I am not going to act like my side is categorically better in this regard.
We can argue that the American democrats aren’t very left-leaning and I would probably agree with you, but I reject the idea that I cannot use their own labels to describe them without being described as conservative.
You're wrong on both the history and modern usage.
It does seem like a pretty easy mistake to make regardless and I don’t think it’s reasonable to call me “extremely conservative” for making it. It’s still pretty common to call these politicians “democrats”, so someone who isn’t terminally tuned into semantic games might not realize it.
Yes, this was the Republicans being successful in their efforts.
I appreciate you acknowledging the term has baggage.
Calling people “extremely conservative” because I used a term that is very commonly used pretty much everywhere but leftist circles is needlessly pedantic and very annoying. I think it’s reasonable to give people the benefit of the doubt.
Also I’m not fucking conservative. I think Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder and Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk and pretty much anyone on the internet who has ever challenged anyone to a debate is a fucking moron.
If you've ever disregarded or downplayed the power and reach of right wing media and propaganda, think on this conversation and how a derogatory term for members of the Democratic party entered common usage.
You don't have to actually watch or like right wing propaganda to be influenced by it because it is pervasive in the United States and has been for decades.
For example, the term “grandfather clause” originates due to racist laws designed to prevent black people from voting, but I don’t go around calling people who say they were “grandfathered in” are huge supporters of slavery because that would be fucking stupid. They clearly are just using a colloquialism and pretending you are offended by something that you’re actually not offended by as some kind of bizarre justification of your terminally online persona is weird.
But that’s just my opinion; apparently I’m extremely conservative, which is news to me. Maybe I should hang out in leftist circle jerk discord servers.
You appeared misinformed about the origin of the term and how it came to common usage, so I filled you in.
The fact that the ETF is outperforming the regular market demonstrates that there’s some shiftiness going on. I am pretty sure that was the point.
I didn’t say it was comparable to the Trump admins misconduct, read my comment again. I said that democrats aren’t immune from shittiness.
Pretending to not understand what I was saying is extremely irritating.
ETA:
I reread my comment and I realize that I said “not categorically better”, which can easily be interpreted as an equivalence.
That wasn’t what I was trying to say. I was just trying to say like we shouldn’t act like there isn’t some level on shittiness on the democratic side.
I guess I do read The Onion so I am not divorced from politics, but I try to mostly avoid consuming much political shit.
Yeah yeah I know everything is political, I promise you that you don’t need to lecture me on that fact. I am just saying that most of the shit I consume now largely boils down to videos about how video games work or “documentaries” about lolcows on YouTube. I have tried to unplug from everything that gravitates around the political news sphere. The only place I get any “news” is HN nowadays, and I mostly try and read the tech shit.
Like the other person said, this usage is extremely common and not just on extremist conservative spaces, unless your definition of “extremist” includes 80% of the USA’s overton window
I think a lot of people spend all day on leftist YouTube and live in leftist Discord servers and hang out with self-proclaimed Marxist friends, and that’s all completely fine, but as a result of people not being tuned into their specific vernacular they act like this shit is a dog whistle instead of the fact that i just don’t know (or care much about) this specific vocabulary.
I suppose I could be a useful idiot for this, but I don’t feel like saying “democrat” is really that bad as far as these things go.
To be fair, republicans are far worse with regards to “pretending to be offended”. You cannot convince me that anyone is actually offended by the term “happy holidays”, but every year I get to hear about a “war on Christmas”
I could be wrong, it’s likely even, but it’s just not something I am going to be convinced of. I think they’re pretending to be offended, because if they act offended then it’s easier for them to “both-sides” stuff, or they think it shows how good of Christians they are.
You're letting past gov'ts away with a lot apparently but overall i agree.
The Overton window shifted too far and now an egomaniac is in charge of its reset.
I also would like the left's version of pardoning people who they directly do business with.
Those legitimately parrot the "both sides" stuff are terribly naive. No one who actually pays attention to what's happening thinks these parties are remotely similar right now.
taking bribes (planes) from foreign countries: I offer in exchange, a former President who dared to use Dijon mustard instead of plain yellow mustard, the monster.
"Perceived" is a very important word in that sentence. The "misdeeds" don't actually exist, they are only "perceived" as part of right wing manufactured victimhood.
it isn't possible for you to be so poorly informed that you think "Joe Biden's son told people who his dad was so they'd let him do a business deal" is in the same scale as:
- taking direct bribes from Qatar - the president and his family launching multiple cryptocurrency firms to do infinite fraud and money laundering - demanding and accepting direct bribes from universities and using taxpayer money as the cudgel - directly taking cash from randoms for pardons
etc etc etc
Because your experience with the government in a democracy shouldn't be dependent on whether the person in power decides you have shown sufficient fealty.
> unless you assume it will be used for punishing poorly cooperative companies.
Like they have so far?
You don't have to assume that. The US government has already made that policy quite clear.
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/ev-tax-credit-2024-tesla-model-3-ex...
Also, comparing the actions of Trump to anything any previous President (including Trump 1!) almost feels like you’re being disingenuous.
Believing the anonymous source about (rather believing that Axios hires credible journalists who will investigate sources) is not a stretch based on what we’ve seen. The implications are not imaginary at all. These are things the president has done.
The previous administration changing some guidance that impacts a massive industry and for vague reasons _may_ be targeting a political adversary, is a much shakier case.
Frankly, this massive difference in scope is why I think comparisons are often disingenuous.
Afterwards when it came to implementing them the administration implemented them as loosely as it could to try to minimize the number of EVs that would lose the tax credit. In particular it did not apply them to leases, which greatly upset Manchin who said that they were supposed to apply there too.
[1]: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1146322069923...
It is fascist, though, only in the context of other actions by the administration.
If you look at various definitions of what facism means, you may see something like: "characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition" (from M-W).
A "loyalty rating" implements both economic regimentation (the insinuation that higher scoring companies have better favor) and suppression of opposition (that companies actively avoid being seen as opposition).
So this is text-book fascist behavior.
It's not hyperbole to envision the justice department looking the other way for high-scoring companies, and actively persecuting low-scoring companies. You're right in that this is already happening (like with e.g. Harvard), but implementing a score in the open makes it shockingly easy to carry out fascist directives across the government bureaucracy.