Hacker News Reader

Comment by ot | Hacker News Reader

> Trump works transactionally

Why can't we just call this corruption? Is there any other, more charitable, interpretation of "transactional"?

Transactional at best. Not sly mob-leader transactional, but toddler transactional.

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.

An article on HN yesterday calculated that he has made $2 billion on these various deals. Sounds like it's working great for him.

Yeah, good for him. Bad for the country. But he’s hardly a patriot.

He's meeting with Komprat holder daddy to give an palm up handshake to discuss Ukraine's surrender of land without Ukraine.

It has become so normal, nobody is even calling it corruption any more. See also: “regulatory capture”.

Centimillionaires and billionaires, rather than creators of value, are varying degrees of exploitative extractive from consumers and capturing of value rather than paying workers fairly. 60 years ago, companies offered workers stability and defined benefits retirement plan, less political influence, and reasonable CEO:worker pay ratios. This isn't sustainable because the country club Tea Party WASPs are running the asylum by turning a former superpower into a third-world country pariah.

I suppose the charitable interpretation is that Trump favors transactions that offer short-term benefits to the country, rather than America’s traditional investments into long-term goals that tend to be more nebulous (“soft power” etc.)

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 baffling that anyone would assume that’s how any of this works.

It's because the president said it on TV.

Is that a recursive loop? The president thinks that’s how it works because the president said so 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}.”

>Is that a recursive loop? The president thinks that’s how it works because the president said so on TV.

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.

When malignant narcissist psychopathic pedophile criminals take power, they don't have a constructive plan for maximum long term benefit to society because they don't know anything and DGAF except that which benefits them personally.

When every politician is a TV show, the genre-savvy one wins.

*Trump favors transactions that offer short-term benefits to himself (via maintaining or expanding power or money).

FTFY.

Which is exactly what I wrote…?

Sort of. I was still too quick. In the first paragraph you didn't but that's because you were trying to be charitable. Your final sentence brings it full circle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com