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Comment by hunglee2 | Hacker News Reader

A notable characteristic of the Trump 2.0 administration is its near universal disregard for protocol. The use of US government assets - like the White House social accounts - for partisan political messaging is clearly damaging to the long term credibility of those accounts, damage which will last long after this administration is gone. It's a crazy thing to observe

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Isn't the hatch act supposed to prevent this?

Due to a lapse in appropriations, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel is closed. Complaints may still be filed, but most will not be addressed until OSC reopens. [0]

They are the "independent" body that enforces Hatch act regulations.

[0]: https://osc.gov

> They are the "independent" body that enforces Hatch act regulations.

Right. And I have this nifty bridge you might be interested in buying.

I don't think the hatch act is supposed to prevent the use of the White House account for political purposes. It seems like basically every administration with an X account has done this, e.g.: https://x.com/WhiteHouse46/status/1662171756830892032 .

Although there are probably more contentious case with other government agencies.

The Hatch act just makes them more careful about what they say when an election is imminent. It's not a blanket ban on "politics."

That seems like it could have been a headline in a nonpartisan newspaper.

A nonpartisan newspaper could also condemn or blame a political party for an action. But if all of its posts were supportive of one administration, it would no longer be partisan.

You can just look through the old white house accounts. For example this tweet https://x.com/WhiteHouse46/status/1879171105044181097 , "While Congressional Republicans refused to pass a bipartisan border security agreement, President Biden took action and encounters today are the lowest since July 2020."

Looking through the tweets, you'll see it's not nonpartisan and isn't supposed to be.

Nobody is going to enforce any laws on Trump or his executive. Either the midterms will allow for oversight to return or he dies before the transition into authoritarianism is complete. With SCOTUS about to end the Voting Rights Act, it could be over sooner than people think.

Unfortunately it’s worse in that the Supreme Court has declared that nothing Trump can do is illegal anymore.

No such thing has occurred.

Do you think a sitting President could ever be charged with a crime (apart from impeachment)?

Wrong.

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/supreme-court-grants-tru...

If it were August-September of 2026 and an election were around the corner, yes. The Hatch act is pretty narrowly tailored if you look at its enforcement history, though.

Laws depend on having someone who wants to enforce them.

The Hatch Act was famously almost never enforced.

Couple that with this admin going out of their way to only selectively enforce laws/policies in ways that benefit only them and their desired constituents, and it’s not even worth talking about the Hatch Act until someone else heads the Executive Branch.

> for partisan political messaging is clearly damaging to the long term credibility of those accounts, damage which will last long after this administration is gone.

It's a common topic with this admin: short term profits, long term losses. Be it that weird shit with a sell-off of public lands, the closure of and impedance to science in general, the rollback of clean renewable energy sources in favor of fossil fuels, the turn towards corruption and fascism, the fear they're spreading in everyone who's not white, citizenship be damned.

In Germany we have a saying for this - "nach uns die Sintflut" or "after us, the floods may come". Trump, those around him and those profiting off of him are having one last blast at the cost of what is going to be our children, the truly uber rich are already building bunkers and thinking how to keep their guards loyal - everyone clearly knows where this ship is headed.

We have that saying in English, too, except that we quote it in French. "Après moi, le déluge."

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