The message is clear from his circus administration, you can do anything as long as you bribe them
Why? Milton hired Pam Bondi's (the US attorney general's) brother to represent him.
The recent "No Kings" protests were the largest in US history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_and_demonstra...
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."
I think at least some of that 1/3 has their own problems that prevent them from being able to devote energy to politics
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.
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.
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.
It not only works, it is basic leadership skills that I and others use every day. You're unwittingly advocating your enemy's morals, saying only force works.
However, consequences are important too, depening on the situation.
You can’t out reasonable an unreasonable person, when then unreasonable person refuses to respect your (or others) boundaries.
Most of the time, in a civil society, other members of society (police, etc.) enforce the consequences silently that allow what you are describing to work.
If they won’t/don’t, what you are describing is a guaranteed path to failure with specific personalities. The evidence is all around you.
There is a reason why self-defense includes the option for violence nearly everywhere, why every society has some equivalent to armed police, why nations always have militaries, etc.
Advocating a failed approach in a given circumstance isn’t good leadership (even when it’s ‘being the good one’), it’s the worst leadership approach possible.
Nope; that's the old knee-jerk insult that people use when you don't embrace aggression. Appeasement or non-appeasement has nothing to do with it, but that's the word they say to use in the flow-chart.
Many people - maybe you - are driven to conflict as an ideology, as if there is no other effective or higher power. That justifies the bad people; that's what they want you to embrace; you're helping them without realizing it.
Read up on appeasement and tell me it isn’t applicable. [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain]. It is exactly what you are proposing.
For fascists, there is no place they won’t go, or bridge they won’t cross, because they’re fundamentally driven by fear and insecurity. Fear and insecurity they themselves create through their actions. It’s an insatiable hunger.
It’s why inevitably, tanks are the only thing that works.
Or are you under the impression the opposite approach is winning?
Surrendering just speeds up the consumption, because the only thing they actually respect is fear of consequences. Which is why they work so hard to avoid them. Because they know, deep down, they are inevitable - and will be terrible.
Unless they kill or control anyone who can actually apply them first, anyway.
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.
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.
A boat load of meaningful change comes from working class agitation, but most of the political noise comes from the chattering classes, who have the luxury of creating cliques online, making and then banning phrases.
Of course the working classes have valid opinions. The issue is, unlike thier richer friends, they are living the discrimination that both left and right claim to endure. This leaves little time for mass organisation.
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.
Honestly, the billionaire is less corrupt-able than the DNC nexus (we all know Biden wasn't running the show, and neither would Harris).
Why would you think that? Do you think that presents from foreign dictators (like plane or investment in crypto fund) are less corrupt?
This kind of vague fluffy language is becoming very common. What evidence? Where is it coming out from?
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.
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.
Biden is not a criminal mastermind, and he never was. He changed into a decrepit old man, surrounded by a cabal of people that did not shy away to use the tools of the president's office for their personal gain. We know now that a lot of the president's autopen signatures did not originate from Joe Biden. This group of people also had a general interest in hiding the president's condition.
This is satire, right?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is only a remotely viable claim if you think the two evils have extremely similar amounts of evil.
This false equivalence is exactly what counts for being "fine with this corrupt leader."
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.
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.)
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.
So you're a nazi/white supremacist/Boogaloo boy? I wouldn't worry too much about getting doxxed, there are plenty of those around.
Or are you a batshit ancap[0]? That's a smaller group, but still sizable enough to avoid being doxxed just by mentioning it.
In fact, most groups that get that kind of hate (from anyone) are big enough (Trans folks are ~3,000,000 in the US, gay folk are ~30 million. I'd expect you could give at least some detail without doxxing yourself just by mentioning it -- assuming MiiMe19 isn't the name on your driver's license.
As such, I call bullshit on your claims. Prove me wrong.
I get it, you don't want to come clean as you might have some "'splainin' to do" Lucy.
Enrique, is that you?
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.
We're not talking about me. So maybe cool it.
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.
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.
You have a train hurtling down the track that forks into two groups of people, 10 in one and 5 in the other, some of the people go on to cure cancer and some are murderers and you don't know where they are. Also it's possible batman set up the scenario to kill the bad guys and by flipping the switch you kill the good guys. Or the Joker set it up and the reverse is true.
In this case, you could argue that you only have moral culpability by intervening. Unless you are absolutely sure you have full knowledge of the intended consequences by acting, you can absolve yourself of the moral culpability by non-intervention.
And since we don't know the long term consequences of political actions, there is at least an argument for non-intervention.
Fortunately the Czech president does not have that much power.
In general, I believe that more choice is good and polarizing political systems are subpar.
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".
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.
That's your choice. "I don't participate at all" doesn't work unless it makes the whole trolley go poof.
As the eminent philosopher[0] opined:
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose Free will
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.
Don't think fox news is going to report that he enriched the prez...
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?
How indeed? You certainly didn't.
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."
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.)
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.
That even a third is okay with this is a clear enough signal. He represents their values.
"Healthy democracy"
FB, Twitter, Tiktok on the other hand...
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".
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...
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
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.
Employees of financial businesses are absolutely obligated to learn the laws of every country where they provide services.
Surely you don’t believe that CZ was charged for shits and giggles, just because he happened to make a website that Americans use?
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."
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
We have immigration laws. The US is incredibly generous, and naturalizes more than 1 million immigrants each year.
The American people don't want a "path" for illegal aliens. We already tried that in 1986. All it did was incentivize more illegal immigration.
And what the last administration did was absolutely flooding the nation. They removed nearly every EO related to border security, and then complained that they needed more laws to "fix" the problem they created.
> I'm all for a system where we screen our immigrants for criminals, terrorists, etc. But the current system is broken,
The current system is broken insofar as we are not enforcing the law thoroughly enough. We already have a system, it just needs to be followed. All illegal aliens have to go back.
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
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.
Whose money? Being given to which non-citizens?
Seriously. Be specific here. the words you used are all in English and are even fairly grammatical. But they don't model reality.
Undocumented folks, by virtue of being undocumented, are ineligible for public assistance of any kind, pretty much everywhere in the US.
What's more, in order to work, they need to provide an SSN and they need to use someone else's because they can't get their own -- because they're undocumented. But they and their employer must each still pay Social Security and Medicare taxes which pay for those programs -- but since they're undocumented, they'll never collect any of the money they paid into those programs in taxes.
So I ask again, specifically, what taxpayer money is being paid to which non-citizens? Please be specific here.
Federal Benefits
* Emergency medical care
* School meals
* K-12 education
* WIC nutrition program
California State Benefits
* Full-scope Medi-Cal
* Cash assistance (CAPI)
* In-state college tuition
* Disability and Family Leave
Hint, not even 50 cents of your paycheck went to feeding poor kids. You are an idealogue and nothing more
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.
They will overlook everything else he does. Everything
He's using US Military on US soil. Sending National Guard in where there is no legal justification for it. This is what the start of a civil war looks like.
At the same time, your belief is that failure to enact a nativist crackdown will result in "a civil war". I thought it went without saying, but this is a very extreme view, to say the least...
The connection between nativist policy advocacy and white supremacist ideology in the US isn't new. It goes back to the very notion of "illegal immigrant"; the politician who shepherded the bill that criminalized unauthorized entry to the United States was an open an enthusiastic white supremacist who pushed this bill forward to advance his white supremacy: https://immigrationhistory.org/item/undesirable-aliens-act-o...
At the same time, this relationship is not ancient history. Indeed, nativist sentiments and white supremacist ideology are still closely linked today. See, e.g.:
https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/150/2/40/98317/Immigrati...
> The correlation between immigration preferences and racial resentment was significant in every year. The steady correlation of 0.30 throughout the 1990s and early 2000s was impressively strong by the standards of opinion data of this sort. The rise from 0.30 to 0.50 by 2018 indicates an uncommonly strong relationship. [...] [E]very measure we have indicates that Whites' views of immigration are closely tied to their views of race.
There are many, many similar correlations between nativist beliefs and policy support and "racial conservatism", white supremacist beliefs, and Trump support (including support of Trump's extreme immigration measures).
"Racist" is not currently a label that many people in the United States are willing to openly embrace, even to themselves. It's not surprising that actual or perceived accusations of racism are received with defensiveness. But individual (and nominal) disavowal of "racism" is frankly less compelling than the entire history and presently observable empirical reality of nativism in the United States.
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?
But seriously, I am curious how you previously made decisions about who to vote for, and how you are thinking about changing how you decide your voting preferences in the future?
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.
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...
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.
Again no, Biden issued a sweeping pardon for his Son that pardons him of all crimes, known and unknown. Hell, it was a pardon so broad that even left leaning pundits like Politico publicly wrote about it [1]. It took me all of one second to confirm this. Why lie?
[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/02/hunter-biden-pardon...
As we now see that being executed after mass partisan purges and, in several cases (sone where this is already adjudicated, more where it is pending) illegal appointments because that was the only way yo get or keep willing hacks in position to carry out the prosecutions, its arguable the only thing Biden did wrong in that regard was not doing it widely enough.
A suitable pretext meaning a crime.
The pardon was sweeping.
You seem to be arguing semantics. I care about what his son actually did. If someone is sitting in jail for a marijuana conviction, and gets a blanket pardon, I am going to say they were pardoned for the marijuana conviction, not for some theorized other crime.
I don't really understand why this is a difficult concept for you to grasp.
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.