"DOJ will no longer prosecute cryptocurrency fraud" is clickbait and not what the Todd Blanche memo says.
They will still go after the Sam Bankman-Frieds:
>Prosecutors shall prioritize cases that hold accountable individuals who (a) cause financial harm to digital asset investors and consumers; and/or (b) use digital assets in furtherance of other criminal conduct...
But seem to be intending to deal with whether it is ok to do things like issue trump token by setting regulations rather than prosecuting companies after the event. Which is not wholly a bad idea.
> ok to do things like issue trump token by setting regulations
That would make sense if the Trump admin were actually regulating crypto but they're tearing that up as well.[1] Why would Trump regulate his own scam coins? Finally regulation isn't a magic wand that stops behavior, it stops it with the threat of punishment after the event. So no this doesn't make sense.
Yes, but typically there are clear guidelines on what will be punished and what is allowed. That was not the case under Gensler. Crypto companies begged for clear regulations and the SEC steadfastly refused to publish any. Instead they just filed enforcement actions and people had to find out their view of things in court.
And as your link says:
> “We in the crypto space felt it was very deceptive the way they [the Biden administration] went about dealing with crypto firms. They told crypto firms to come in and register, to come in and engage with them,” said Nic Carter, a founding partner at crypto investment firm Castle Island Ventures. “There was no meaningful way to do that.”
Yeah, and the day they find an application for crypto that isn't "literal unregulated security" (the basis of all the enforcement "lacking guidelines" you are complaining about!) will be the day I dig deep to find some compassion. Until then, the guidelines are clear if you want to market and sell securities. You just didn't like what they say.
If they are securities, then there should be a way to register them with the SEC and follow the law. As your link said, that's not the case.
But BTC and ETH at least are not considered securities at this point, and in general, the SEC has not done all that well when companies took it to court.
He didn't even tell whether ETH, the second highest value cryptocurrency is considered security or not, even though he was asked about it all the time.
Yes, considering it was ~2 years from freezing withdrawals to the approved bankruptcy plan to repay customers.
FTX was only able to repay customers because the value of BTC increased during that time. But customers were only repaid the value of their portfolio at the time of the collapse.
If I steal your money, invest it, then return the principal amount after 2 years, would you consider it financial harm?
Many reasons why this wouldn't be sufficient. Having a fall guy is a good example, doesn't allow for action against organization level willful fraud would be another. It basically slows down any sort of justice.
Just another good reason to stay out of crypto unless you're already rich and have money to gamble.
I try to view things like this from the other perspective and wonder just why so many people still view this person like he's the common man's savior. I think I'm cognitively dissonance-ing myself from possibly all the cognitive dissonance I'm surrounded with.
Welcome to demagogy 101. In this session, we'll talk about "guiding" public opinion by buying a small but loud support team that looks bigger in the media.
Thank you for enrolling at Banana Democracy Uni! We look forward to train the new generation of wannabe dictators.
The average person spends less than 5 minutes a month consuming news content and assumes important information will just fall into their lap. People in general are just not paying all that much attention.
Trump’s secret sauce is exploiting this from every angle.
“And in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn't fully understand.”
— Alfred describing why the mob hired the Joker
It’s clear that both political parties in the US are captured by the investor class, the democrats didn’t even have an election to choose Kamala she was selected by their donors who preferred someone they could control over someone with the best chance of winning.
If the lesson people take away from this is that Republicans are just uneducated and naive, they’re missing the point. People were desperate for something different, they thought Trump was someone from outside of the system but they didn’t realize that the system is money and no one is outside of it.
There's a very good reason for this: those general elections cost states money. Money they have not budgeted to re-run a primary. In addition, in most states, the primary is framed in a legal process that does not allow for an "out-of-band" second election. It would, generally, have been illegal to re-run an election (at least using the physical voting apparatus of the myriad states) to choose an alternate when Biden dropped, which is why the party chooses via their own process.
And as far as I'm aware, that process was followed following Biden's announcement. I wouldn't accuse Republicans of being uneducated and naive if people didn't vote for Harris because "she never won a primary..." I'd accuse traditional Democrat voters of not knowing very much about the party they (nominally) tend to support. It'd be nice if civics weren't just something people's parents and grandparents did.
As for being an outsider... In 2024, I fail to see how voters would think a former President could be considered outside the system.
Biden should have simply refused to run again in 2024. There was already signalling to this effect in 2019, though it was never explicitly promised.[1][2] If he had just kept to that, there would have been plenty of time to run a primary and an actually strong candidate could have been selected.
My understanding is that Biden was very concerned about his legacy and there are rumors about the "no daylight" phrase he spoke with Harris on her campaign and probably part of the reason she lost. But Biden should have dropped down much earlier and will taint his legacy forever. At least he passed the infrastructure bill.
Not to rehash this for the 1000th time, but I really don't understand this point of view. Why assume that everything before the Biden drop-out was unchangeable and ordained by God?
It is very clear that, long before the primary, Biden was not fit to run again, probably not even fit to stay in office. A functioning party would have gotten their senile standard-bearer to at least not run again, ideally even step down and let his VP take office and build a relationship with voters. Either way, they could have run a real primary and therefore chosen somebody that Democratic voters might actually have been excited about voting for in the general election. This may even have been Harris, but a version of Harris with a much better shot at winning because she'd spent an additional year or so campaigning.
Why is this an impossible set of events? If it isn't, why not lay the blame for this colossally bad fuckup at the feet of the Democratic leadership?
I wouldn't, personally, have had any issue with such a scenario. My comment was in response to the pervasive and wrong idea that the Democrats could have "just" re-run the primary when Biden dropped after being elected in that primary.
I think people believe elections are internet-fast or internet-convenient, which is where this skewed idea comes from. They aren't, for reasons that should be obvious with some consideration about how elections are secured.
They could have had a mini primary leading to the Democrat convention in August and let the voters in the convention (electors?) decide from multiple candidates while taking polls into account, for example. Having a memory, I do remember people discussing the option of mini primaries. Harris wasn’t pre-ordained, she was just a bad decision that Democrat insiders made without input from the outside.
This would just be show anyway. Even with a "real" primary, the DNC's "superdelegate" structure means that party insiders essentially get to choose the candidate, just like in the 19th century (the mythical "smoke filled room").
The primary process itself is just for show, but a competent party would understand that it needs to have at least the appearance of legitimacy.
The last Democratic presidential primary that seemed legitimate to voters who were paying attention was 2008: 2012 was 2nd term Obama, in 2016 insiders ratfucked Sanders to pick Clinton, 2020 they did something similar to pick Biden, and then of course the disaster of 2024.
It's been nearly 20 years since we've had a "real" Democratic primary that at least advertised itself as a democratic process. Seems logical that Democratic voters would be skeptical about the so-called leadership of the party.
It's not precisely "just for show;" there are enough non-super DNC delegates that they can, in fact, outweigh the superdelegates if they have something approximating consensus. When it's a close race, the superdelegates can dominate the outcome.
But there's no reason to assume that anyone would have shown up to challenge Harris. The incumbent effect is very strong in both parties, and it's extremely rare to refrain from nominating the sitting first-term President, so there's no reason to believe the result of all of that wouldn't have been the successor the President recommended. Note that the initial Primary went landslide to Biden. American voters tend to go with recognizable names and tend to hew to tradition.
You're quite correct that relative to the GOP, the Democrats have a more elitist structure that consolidates leadership to party operatives. When you don't have that... Well, nobody in the GOP party machinery really wanted President Trump, but the GOP doesn't have superdelegates.
> 2016 insiders ratfucked Sanders to pick Clinton
This is a common hypothesis but Sanders never had the votes. He was about 3 million short of Clinton. While there's no doubt that the party preferred Clinton, the voters didn't show enough of a preference for Sanders to overcome that inertia. Again, American voters tend to go with recognizable names, and they already saw Clinton close to the White House (even if, as First Lady, she wasn't actually elected).
Were the Democratic voters even wrong? Clinton ultimately went on to win the popular vote. There's no particular reason to believe Sanders would have done so; we'll never know what that alternate reality would have looked like, but his opponents would have drilled in on his Jewish heritage and it would have gotten quite ugly (as Trump revealed, there's a lot of straight-up bigots who became politically motivated in 2016).
If this had happened, wouldn’t people say the result was not legitimate because they didn’t win real primaries, the donors easily gamed the mini-primary, etc? Maybe they were screwed as soon as anything unusual happened, and/or some people will find any reason to say Dem insiders play favorites, any reason for Trump to keep “Sleepy Joe” as his opponent.
The proportions matter and I think much fewer people would be saying the result was not legitimate if it was through some sort of campaign and primary process than an insider decision made through whatever backroom deals they did.
> And as far as I'm aware, that process was followed following Biden's announcement.
This is exactly the problem. The Democratic Party excuse is always "we're following the process". The results suck and then they wring their hands wondering how they lost the election. The goal should be to get power, and getting power requires nominating someone popular. Anyone who has paid attention to US politics for the last decade could have explained just how unpopular Kamala Harris would be.
Pushing too far in that direction results in a Trump wearing a different hat.
The Democrats do follow process. That's one of the key things that makes them Democrats in contrast to the demagoguery and power-at-any-cost approach that seems to have co-opted their colleagues across the aisle. I don't think the kind of people who would vote for a Democratic candidate at all actually want a rule-breaker (and if they do, we got one in the Oval Office right now).
Wrong. We do want someone who will break rules when the rules are there to stop the government from serving its' constituents. So glad they kept the filibuster; so glad they listened to the Senate Parliamentarian; so glad they followed the process and anointed Kamala. Look at where worshipping the process lead.
> Wrong. We do want someone who will break rules when the rules are there to stop the government from serving its' constituents.
Some of you do. Some of you don't. Most of you want of you presidents to obey courts at least.[1]
> So glad they kept the filibuster
In 2013 Democrats eliminated the 60 vote requirement for most nominations. In 2022 all but 2 Democrats voted to eliminate it for some legislation. Who kept it was 100% of Republicans, Sinema, and Manchin.
Some people who sounded like you said Democrats could have and should have blackmailed Sinema and Manchin to get 50 votes. They couldn't explain what would have stopped Sinema or Manchin from defecting to the Republicans.
Because once you start breaking rules you don't get to control when it stops.
If we're blackmailing Senators, what do we do when the courts step in to stop it?
Breaking the process leads to a pyrrhic victory. It's France going from guillotining the king to guillotining feminists. If that's one's goal, rejoice! The man in charge right now is the best opportunity since the adoption of America's Constitution in the first place to get there.
ETA: As a side question on this topic: let's assume the Democrats, upon finding that Biden wouldn't be willing to serve, found some way to re-run the primary. We'll magically ignore the massive cost to do so and the fact that it would be illegal to use the voting apparatus of most states in a surprise out-of-band second primary, and we'll magically assume they could organize and pull it off in time for the general election. Who would have come out of that process that would have beaten Trump?
We didn't get to control where it stops by following the process either, at least we could have had a hand on the wheel. You are advocating for bringing a knife to a gun fight.
For what its' worth, by the time Biden was elected, the party was already dead. It would have realized that in 2020 if Trump hadn't messed up COVID so badly. The best example of what I am talking about is Obama not seating Merrick Garland on the court and daring the Senate to stop him.
Believe me, I would have loved to have seen hands on wheels. It'd be great if people who cared about the Democratic party messing up would actually bother to show up to breathe some life into the party; party events are published, offices have addresses, local and state government positions go up for election far more often than Presidents do.
Instead, I saw Americans stay home, again, and Trump get elected, again. It would appear, sadly, Americans are getting the government they're willing to put in the effort to have. All the resources in the world to stop these circumstances and they didn't use them.
Ah, well. Pax Americana was a pretty good run. We got the Internet out of it. Hopefully, the reshuffling of global power into something that replaces it will be even better.
We gave Democrats the whole government in 2008 and 2020 - they refuse to wield power. But sure, blame the voters for being disaffected by their failure, I’m sure that’ll move things in the right direction.
There's nothing my blame or praise will do that the coming economic collapse won't.
And in the American system, where We the People consent to be governed by a government that derives its power from those people... Where else would the blame lie?
Do the post-hoc rationalizations matter? Kamala wasn’t elected in a primary and so the perception by many is that she was an illegitimate candidate. That perception translates directly to votes, the justifications for Kamala being the candidate do not.
When the choice was between a current VP or an insurrectionist and convicted felon, anyone who thought Harris was less legitimate for candidacy has a funny definition. (I guess I don’t believe in protest votes or third parties in this climate.)
Maybe subconscious feelings made people not bother to get to the polls to vote for her, but I don’t think there’s a sensible conscious argument to ditch her on this basis. In fact, people often say she failed for a reason that is almost an opposite of her unfairly replacing Biden – they say she acted just like him and wouldn’t differentiate herself from him.
I get it was unusual and maybe offensive the way she got nominated, but if a principled voter is going to weigh informal notions of legitimacy, the obvious choice is hold their nose and vote for Harris.
The most rational conclusion after the 2024 election is that most voters are not rational (or, more specifically, "models of their behavior need to prioritize something other than rational-self-interest").
It would be rewarding bad behavior though. Since there would then be no incentive to stop, voting for Harris would increase the likelihood of the Democrats continuing to skip primaries or promote candidates from within while ignoring their lack of popularity in the primaries.
I don’t believe in voting for the lesser of two evils. It’s a myopic viewpoint that doesn’t take into account long term consequences.
People can rationally look at the long term benefits vs short term risks and rationally vote for Trump. It is extremely hubristic to think that people who don’t agree with you politically are stupid or irrational.
> I don’t believe in voting for the lesser of two evils. It’s a myopic viewpoint that doesn’t take into account long term consequences.
I fail to see that position. There's always a choice between better and worse; even if the choice of better isn't what you want right now, it bends the arrow in the direction where the next choice starts from a better position.
Is your argument that there's a risk of local maxima? Perhaps. But I think it's hubris to imagine that if you bend the arrow down, you'll get to decide who survives the local minima to see whether there's a better maxima after it. That's a choice to put a lot of blood on one's hands.
Yes, local maxima. You cannot reward a political party when they skip the democratic process and appoint a candidate. If they repeat it again, hopefully they keep losing until they learn their lesson and we get a better set of people who can run the country well.
The issue is that the other side is actual fascism. There is significantly-above-zero threat that the "reward" America will get for getting the Democrats to "learn their lesson" is that they never get to usefully vote for a candidate again.
I would have preferred if the GOP hadn't put actual fascism on the table so that people had meaningful choice over policy (and, indeed, had Trump lost, perhaps it would be the GOP who would've learned their lesson that Americans won't tolerate fascism). But since they did, and America chose the GOP choice, we're now in a situation where the best we can hope for in 2028 is a vote to reject fascism instead of something better.
I don't think that gets us pointed in the right direction, sadly.
(In the larger sphere, the problem is people thinking all they can or should do is vote for President. There's a whole four years and several Congress and state elections in which to do something effective towards desired outcomes, but Americans get very drilled-down on the President only, to their detriment. Half the reason Congress is so sclerotic is most Americans can't be bothered to know who their Congressional reps are, let alone what they stand for).
I get it, I wonder if I am over-reacting too, but when they're shipping people to prison in the hands of a third world dictator for allegedly being gang members (we pinky promise but oops we made some mistakes), with no trial, against judges' direct orders, with US officials retweeting said dictator's giggle at doing it anyway... it feels different this time.
Back in the olden days of Bush or Obama, they would at least have a trial in a secret court with a judge who was maybe not rubber-stamping it, the public was pretty sure they were real terrorists, and the jailers (or executioners!) were Americans who faced consequences when they mistreated the prisoners.
That's fine. Hitler's first attempt to seize power was a failed 1923 coup. He ascended to the Chancellorship in 1933. Germans also heard about fascism for ten years and things were fine.
... until they weren't. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there sure are a lot of historians in America who have actually packed up and fled the country as of late...
> It would be rewarding bad behavior though. Since there would then be no incentive to stop, voting for Harris would increase the likelihood of the Democrats continuing to skip primaries or promote candidates from within
Speaking of myopia... so a voter considering voting Dem should have thought, "Well, if Biden died today she would become President for awhile anyway, and if he died after winning she would be president for the rest of his term, so she's halfway to being a presidential candidate anyway... but I'm really pissed they didn't re-run the primaries in ways that might not even be legal and would inevitably invite attacks on the legitimacy of the winner, so I'm going to teach them a lesson. I'm so mad I didn't get a chance to have a new-blood lefty or whoever I think is better than Harris but somehow didn't beat Biden, that I'd rather make it more likely for the far-right to win again. I won't vote for someone who disrespects democracy by accepting an unprecedented party nomination, I would rather the winner be the one who disrespects democracy by egging on violent attacks on the capitol, attempting fake elector schemes and pressuring the VP and state governors to throw the election, and violate campaign finance laws. I may be saddling myself and the entire country with a president I don't want, but at least I will have stood my ground stopping Democratic party insiders from upgrading a nearly-nominated VP candidate to Presidential candidate!"
That is the argument that I am saying is stupid and irrational, not being Republican or voting for Trump per se. I just don't see a reasonable, self-consistent argument from "I'd consider a Democrat, but they bent their own rules" to "I should let the non-Democrat who has broken laws win." That's emotion, insistence on following one rule at the expense of all others, and denial of political realities, not logic. And people are free to vote on feelings and perceptions, as I am free to argue they were stupid or irrational if they say this is their reason.
And yeah, some of those accusations against Trump haven't been proven in a court of law, but neither has the idea that Harris was illegitimate.
If you care about Dem ideology etc enough to follow their primaries, you would stick with the party even if they didn't yield exactly the flavor of candidate you prefer, not hang everyone out to dry with a far-right alternative in the generals. If you were content to let the far right win, it doesn't feel like you were truly invested in the Dems anyway, so why should they care how you would have voted in their primary re-run? Again, it's emotionally-driven, this desire or hope to use the party's power to get your candidate onto the ballot, and punish them if they don't do it.
Maybe I should be open to choices other than Trump or Harris, but I feel they're worthless in this climate, and I don't think your premise cares about them either. If you want to vote third party, why care whether one of the two parties followed their nomination rules?
It's also "fun" how Republicans whined about rule-breaking and denying the will of the people in this situation, then a few months later they're entertaining plans like putting up a strawman for president so he can resign and give Trump a third term by succession. (Which as I understand, most lawyers believe is BS, but these days... it might just work.)
> If you care about Dem ideology etc enough to follow their primaries
I don’t. I follow both primaries because that’s where almost all of the democratic process in the Presidential election happens. Once you have two candidates (third parties are obviously jokes), you get to choose between the two.
So, the primary process is very important to make sure democracy happens and I put a lot of importance in it. As should everyone.
And so, if a candidate does not win through that primary process, that candidate is illegitimate.
What is the point of a presidential ballot with only one viable and legitimate candidate? You're just throwing away your choice, because an old man tried to run and then backed out, and his party made possibly the least-impact change they could.
If Biden won and died on day 1 in the office, you'd still end up with "a president who never won the primary" but it wouldn't be the party's fault. Biden stepping down is approximately the same endpoint without dying; is it really logical to blackball the party over a possibility that could have happened accidentally?
Even supposing they legally could have done what you want, they were also legally permitted to do what they did. Harris was a candidate produced by the party following laws and its own procedures. You didn't like the outcome, but that doesn't mean it was not legitimate. Call it undemocratic if you want (though I'm not sure the normal primary process is democratic anyway), but it's legitimate.
> though I'm not sure the normal primary process is democratic anyway
That's a great point, and one I wish more voters understood. The primaries are very undemocratic, both of them. In most states, you can't even vote in both primaries because you can only have one party affiliation.
How much real choice do Americans have when the primaries determine, practically, the candidates and they can only lend their voice to one party's choice of candidate?
Interesting take. I believe this is a theme that everyone in the US is familiar with, but the idea that "big money is the enemy" and the reality of it has somehow not permeated through the general public enough. It seems that the Trump-voting public sees the Democrats as compromised rather than the Republicans, but even with this one action by Trump you can argue strongly that they are as well.
Let me give you a simpler, Occam's-razorish explanation: People who voted for Trump aren't stupid, or naive, or anything. They simply were unable or unwilling to accept the world changing around them regarding race, sexuality, welfare, climate, economy, foreign and domestic policies. They elected someone who told them "we'll go back to the old times one way or another, consequences be damned".
This is exactly what they voted for, what they were hoping for. They knew leopards would've eaten the face of a few of them, but it was somewhat expected, a calculated risk. There's a few casualties even when you win the war.
They saw something they could cling to, to avoid changes for the remaining of their lives, even if this meant destroying their country, the rest of the world or the future for the matter. And they replied with "Yes, we're fine with that".
TBF, that sounds a lot like "stupid or naive" with extra words. You can't rewind history. Not without a lot of death; the only way to kill a meme is to destroy every mind it's hiding in and burn every record it was recorded in. There's moving forward, developing the time that is now into a future time by refining and challenging the existing ideas; backwards isn't a desirable goal.
In particular, the "Make America Great Again" era they seem to hearken to was an era of massive industrial growth fueled by being the largest country untouched domestically by a World War. Getting back there would require burning half the world again. We shouldn't want that.
These are lessons history teaches consistently, and I'm sorry they apparently slept through that day of class.
> … but it was somewhat expected, a calculated risk.
The way many of them think of it is that illness and death due to disease, starvation, lack of medication, problem pregnancies, etc. are acts of god and a part of life. They don’t want relief from that, if it comes with a government that has the power to change things they don’t want to change.
It is true that Trump won his reelection with 49.8% of the vote, but that isn’t the same thing as 49.8% of voters. With only 63.7% of eligible voters casting ballots last November, Trump’s share of the vote narrows to just under a third of the electorate, significantly less than half.
But it is worth noting that an April 2024 NBC News poll showed Trump leading voters who say they do not follow political news by 26-points. Meanwhile voters who said they read a newspaper every day supported Joe Biden 70% to Trump’s 21%.[0] Additionally, a survey conducted in November 2024 by Northeastern University found that just 24% of Republican voters relied on news media, while the rest said they got their news from family and friends, as well as social media.
This means that while less than 1/3rd of eligible voters cast their ballots for Trump, only ~8.3% of the electorate entered the voting booth reliably informed, and then still chose to support him.
Likely because it enraged some Democrats with the reference to Kamala being unelected. It's back above 0 for me now, so it looks like the broader consensus is that this is in fact a good comment.
It doesn't anger anyone, it's just dishonest. The circumstances of her being the democratic candidate are well-document, you can't just say things that aren't true.
Biden won the primary, then he stepped down. That's the actual story, and if you don't include the teensy little detail you're being dishonest. As a reminder to everyone, choosing not to tell the whole truth is dishonesty.
> The nomination will officially be voted on either shortly before or during the convention itself. Unless a major Democratic figure mounts a serious challenge — which did not appear to happen within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement — the president’s endorsement of Harris will likely carry the day with delegates
You’re the one being dishonest. The democratic nomination wasn’t official until August, and to suggest the Democratic Party had no other option is factually incorrect and a revision of history that ignores the months the party and pundits spent discussing other options, as well as the legal argument the party itself made to justify choosing Harris.
Harris was the only option for the DNC unless major election laws would have been changed very late in the cycle (moving funds raised to another candidate - highly improbable). There’s a strong argument that the DNC was at fault for not preparing a suitable backup candidate in case of emergencies. There’s even an argument that such a thing was done deliberately so that voters would be stuck with Harris. Nevertheless, once Biden dropped out, she was the only practical option.
Two important notes: the RNC would have been just as screwed if the DNC had succeeded in putting a bullet in Trump’s brain. Also, Harris performed unusually badly during her presidential primary, stoking angers that she was not only unelected, but that she wouldn’t have been elected given the chance.
You’re conflating the option to move funds with the option to choose a different candidate. Harris was not the only option, anyone could have been selected up until the official nomination in August:
> The nomination will officially be voted on either shortly before or during the convention itself. Unless a major Democratic figure mounts a serious challenge — which did not appear to happen within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement — the president’s endorsement of Harris will likely carry the day with delegates.
The idea that Harris was the only option because they couldn’t move funding is absurd, we’re talking about an election for the highest position in the world. If the party wanted to choose someone else, they would have found a way to reallocate the funding or just eat the cost.
> There’s even an argument that such a thing was done deliberately so that voters would be stuck with Harris. Nevertheless, once Biden dropped out, she was the only practical option
Ultimately, if Harris wasn't a good candidate for the Presidency, then she shouldn't have been VP in 2020. That was where the issue lay.
I’m not a fan of Trump but my steelman argument for this is: policing public markets is a public good because efficient capital markets are the bedrock of a capitalist society.
It’s hard to make the same case for crypto, which (despite the insistences of its participants) more or less exists in isolation from the rest of the market. The industry feels it is over-regulated. Makes sense that a more lassiez-faire leader would take a more hands-off approach to it.
If nothing else, I feel like this view is myopic. Capital markets are people and jobs. When crypto projects collapse, or rampant fraud, abuse, manipulation, and outright theft are allowed, that money is coming out of real peoples pockets, and that has real rippling effects that are not only objectively disruptive to the economy, but are also much more difficult to then predict, measure, and respond to which further amplifies their detrimental impacts.
This isn’t really “allowing” fraud though. From the memo:
> Prosecutors shall prioritize cases that hold accountable individuals who (a) cause financial harm to digital asset investors and consumers; and/or (b) use digital assets in furtherance of other criminal conduct, such as fentanyl trafficking, terrorism, cartels, organized crime, and human trafficking and smuggling. Seeking accountability from individuals who perpetrate these types of wrongdoing deters future illegal activity, compensates victims, and promotes the public’s confidence in the digital asset markets and broader industry. On the other hand, criminal matters premised on regulatory violations resulting from diffuse decisions made at lower levels of digital asset companies often fail to advance the priorities of the Department.
I read this as switching from proactive enforcement (stop the act before it causes damage) to reactive regulation (punish the guilty after the act happens). Proactive regulation of public markets makes sense because the general public has an interest in well-functioning capital markets even if they are not direct participants (markets are essentially the capitalist replacement for central planning).
I worry that having the SEC regulate crypto can actually be worse for those people, because it sends the message that it’s a legit government-approved investment instead of a wild west zero-sum craps table.
I’m thinking there will be prosecution but there will be quid pro quo’s like the guy Trump just pardoned after the felon donated 2 million to GOP.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/nikola-founder-mil...
Wipe the slate so the felon no longer owes money for fraud.
The title of the article on the website is misleading and actually untrue.
The memo did not say “no longer targeting fraud”- it said that it was no longer targeting individuals and exchanges for regulatory missteps. The theme of the memo is “we’re not going to use mountains of regulations written for non-crypto regulation to go after crypto exchanges”, which is in line with a general regulatory themes of the Trump administration to avoid “lawfare” type activities and reduce regulatory burdens.
In fact, the memo specifically said (according to the article, near the end) that the government would focus their efforts on fraud against crypto investors.
Now you might or might not agree with these goals, and you might or might not support the Trump administration, and you might or might not like Trump, but the article headline was at odds with the article content and with the DoJ memo.
Seems like an odd choice to move some but not all comments between posts like this. Especially when the only ones moved seem to be conservative talking points. This one even discusses a title that doesn’t exist on this article?
> Seems like an odd choice to move some but not all comments between posts like this
The idea is to move good, substantive comments that have something to contribute to the new thread, and to leave the ones that don't fit that description and are bound by the context of the previous article.
I'm not saying I made all the calls perfectly about which ones to move and which ones to leave, but that's the idea at least! If there are cases I missed, I'd be happy to take a look.
> Especially when the only ones moved seem to be conservative talking points.
You can't jump to conclusions like that from such a paltry handful of datapoints. I say "you can't", but of course you can, because everyone does! But it's not reliable to do so:
> prior Administration used the Justice Department to pursue a reckless strategy of regulation by prosecution
What was the idea before? It wasn't necessarily illegal but they prosecuted it anyway?
> Executive Order 14178 requires the Justice Department to prioritize investigations and prosecutions that involve conduct victimizing investors, including embezzlement and misappropriation of customers’ funds on exchanges, digital asset investment scams, fake digital asset development projects such as rug pulls, hacking of exchanges and decentralized autonomous organizations resulting in the theft of funds, and exploiting vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Such enforcement actions are important to restoring stolen funds to customers, building investor confidence in the security of digital asset markets, and the growth of the digital asset industry.
I guess before anyone using these crypto services was a target for prosecution and now they are not, just by the virtue of using them.
A few comments here have hinted at this: we don't need to have a debate about penalizing platforms for the fraud of the users, everyone agrees that's problematic. The reason this directive confuses me is because very often the fraudsters are the platform runners themselves.
> Instead of policing crypto platforms and exchanges, Trump’s DOJ will “focus on prosecuting individuals who victimize digital asset investors, or those who use digital assets in furtherance of criminal offenses such as terrorism, narcotics and human trafficking, organized crime, hacking, and cartel financing.”
Wonder if this hints at possibly reducing or relaxing KYC rules also?
> Wonder if this hints at possibly reducing or relaxing KYC rules also?
Good call, I would assume so. KYC helps prevent money laundering, bribes and a ton of other illegal transactions. Eliminating it would line up with other actions performed by this admin.
On the other side KYC rules and enforcement can be anything from annoying to downright asinine (and not just for banks).
I'd prefer if governments would take a step back and invest into enforcing actual crimes themselves and not just stick with money laundering charges because these are easier to prove. It was already bad under Al Capone (who got nabbed for taxes instead of murder), and it's way worse today.
It's not, it's just audited. If you go to the bank and give them 10,000 dollars they don't lock you up. They just have one of their people do some research and ask you for some paperwork.
Now, the police seizing money is different, but the police are the police. They can do almost anything they want, and you have next to zero recourse. Of course, they're going to abuse this and steal your money.
Do we think FTX would have been prosecuted if Trump were in office? Note that if FTX were able to hide its fraud for a few more months, they would have been able to bounce back and then some. Not saying that makes it better or worse, but a few months of questionably legal delay tactics would probably go over fine these days (is my 2 cents).
Why? Because Sam donated to Democrats in addition to the GOP. Paying both sides, or playing both sides, doesn't matter. Sam donated money to the GOP's mortal enemy. That's a sin.
Trump would have thrown the fucking book at him and then some.
what an amazing investment! cryptocurrency criminals donated just a few hundred million to Trump's "campaign" (primary money laundering op), and they get a license to do infinity crime against the government and civilians.
corruption has the best ROI around, by fucking far.
The constitution requires that the executive "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." The executive is not granted unlimited power to refuse to enforce the law.
However, courts have historically given the executive leeway in how it chooses to prioritize things and this has led to plenty of cases where the federal government has official policy to deprioritize enforcement of certain crimes. This has not been abused too much in the past but I'm not sure if that norm will hold in the future.
Correct. In general, the backstop would be Congress saying "Enough" and threatening impeachment were the law not enforced.
There have been interesting examples on both sides of the aisle of strategic non-enforcement. When states began legalizing marijuana, the law is quite clear (as per the supremacy clause) that federal law enforcement can still enforce the restrictions on growing and selling it. The Obama administration made extremely clear that within the states where it had been legalized, enforcing the federal law would be a career-limiting move for the relevant federal agents. AFAIK, every administration since has de-facto kept that policy regarding those states, even though Congress has never moved to make marijuana legal to use and distribute.
Unfortunately, the Constitution's text has been increasingly under subject of debate. Trump himself is trying to redefine the meaning of the jurisdiction clause in birthright citizenship.
To the degree that would promote widespread corruption, it's inconsistent with the president's oath of office and the Constitutionally defined duty that the president uphold the law.
But it's also a political question (this means the Court probably won't get involved, not that the question is normal politics) because the only way to end such an obvious travesty is to impeach, convict, and remove from office.
To whatever degree the Congress can't do that, impugns the Congress who all take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not a leader.
To whatever degree people continue to elect those who support and defend a cult instead of the Constitution? They have given in to passion, and can't be reasoned with. Why argue with irrational people?
The statute of limitations for many crimes exceed the term of any executive, so this is quite risky to rely on. You could just be prosecuted by the next guy for crimes done under the previous guy.
Absolutely true but it's worth noting this has only been done for a small fraction of marijuana crimes, and as far as I know not at all through the backdoor method commonly used (by all administrations) where they just prosecute otherwise legal gun ownership as "owned a gun plus owned weed" and backdoor it as a gun crime.
Yes discretionary (non) prosecution is what opened the door to legalization. Very few lawmakers would run on that issue 20 years ago. But as prosecutors in some areas stopped bringing cases for possession, it became more normalized and full legalization became more acceptable as it was de-facto what was happening anyway. And, it's a new thing to tax which is always going to get attention.
Yes; the president in the US is in charge of the federal prosecuting agency, and has, in practice*, unlimited power to direct non-prosecution.
(And, separately, also has plenary power to pardon federal crimes).
*Late edit: there was an historic case study of this power balance, just a few weeks ago. When Trump directed the DoJ to suspend the criminal prosecution of NYC mayor Eric Adams, in order to corruptly use the continuing threat of prosecution as a cudgel to extort policy concessions from his office, no federal prosecutor had any ability to resist that order. At least seven resigned[0] rather than obey it. The illustration being: whatever laws might say and whatever ethical norms exist—a federal prosecutor, as an employee of the executive branch under the POTUS, has no practical ability to contradict what the POTUS directs them to do.
The check on everything that Trump is doing is _impeachment_, and congress can't get it's shit together to protect its own power. The whole design of the federal government was that ambitious assholes in Congress would keep ambitious assholes in the White House in check, and it doesn't work if Congress is full of lickspittles and cowards.
For the longest time, it worked in the US because we had overlapping political parties. For reasons (mostly having to do with race) you had conservative and liberal Democrats and Republicans, and they overlapped a lot ideologically, so bills would pass mostly in a bipartisan way (even something like the creation of Medicare and Medicaid got about half the minority party to support it- https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/89-1965/h35 and https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/89-1965/s151). Over the past 30 years that has gone away and parties are strictly sorted ideologically. My personal theory for that is the decline of local news. With Facebook and Craigslist killing the local advertising business all that's left is national news sources, and so all people know about their local Rep or Senator is the letter after their name, and their opinion on the President, there is no room for looking at someone as an individual. And so the people who could be an individual have largely left, and replaced by a great mass of indistinguishable nonentities.
I think counter-intuitively, a lot of the anti-corruption reforms in congress basically destroyed the ability of congress to write compromise bills, because you could no longer buy people off by building a highway in their district or whatever. It would probably be a good thing to bring back horse trading and earmarks again, somewhat.
>How does separation of powers work in the US? could Trump decide not to prosecute let say financial fraud in general?
He can "do" essentially anything, per the supreme court. For 250 years we had norms and customs and decorum and shame that kept things from escalating to a constitutional crisis. But that has all been so thoroughly broken at this point that literally no one knows what will happens next. One thing is certain, that there will be no way out of this but elections.
more has to do with my time preference around money and whether i think i could get a better return on the market. that said, of course we are in a more precarious place than anytime in the 21st c - but still not very precarious democracy wise imo
> He can "do" essentially anything, per the supreme court.
This is often said, but it's not true and it has nothing to do with anything that Trump is doing. What they ruled is that he can't be _prosecuted_ for most actions he takes as president. It obviously doesn't mean that the Supreme Court can't overrule executive actions, because they continued to do that after that ruling was made. And as much as Democrats complained about it at the time, it's probably the only thing keeping Biden from facing some kind of phony indictment right now.
The _only_ thing that is allowing Trump to get away with this is Congress's inability to act, or passive acquiescence to what he's doing.
> This is often said, but it's not true and it has nothing to do with anything that Trump is doing
This is not true. It has everything to do with what Trump is doing and has done.
> What they ruled is that he can't be _prosecuted_ for most actions he takes as president.
Again untrue. What they ruled is that he cannot be held criminally liable for any official actions. Unofficial actions are still up for debate. And you'd have to be extremely naive to wonder why they didn't give any guideline regarding distinction between official and unofficial actions. Or wonder why they refused to take up the exact same issue when asked by the prosecutor.
> And as much as Democrats complained about it at the time, it's probably the only thing keeping Biden from facing some kind of phony indictment right now.
This isn't true as well. If they wanted to, they can still go after Biden and claim that his acts were "unofficial".
> The _only_ thing that is allowing Trump to get away with this is Congress's inability to act, or passive acquiescence to what he's doing.
Definitely not the only thing, but one of the reasons why Congress doesn't act is because of violent backlash from the MAGA crowd. Like when credible death threats pressured the NC senator into voting for the SecDef - https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/politics/cowardice-gop-faces-...
They have only _ever_ been able to enforce their rulings through the acquiescence of the other branches. There's no enforcement mechanism in the constitution, and neither is judicial review, for that matter. If the president wants to ignore the court, and congress doesn't do anything about it, there's nothing the courts can do, and that has always been true.
Except it wasn't. The character was nothing like Trump ever was. If you remember correctly, Trump was America's darling up until the second he announced he was running as a Republican. This was the most obvious smear campaign in history, and no one could have survived it like him had the actually been guilty of any of it.
>Screenwriter Bob Gale confirms long-standing fan theory that Marty’s nemesis in the trilogy was modelled on the Republican presidential candidate
>“We thought about it when we made the movie! Are you kidding?” Gale said to the Daily Beast. “You watch Part II again and there’s a scene where Marty confronts Biff in his office and there’s a huge portrait of Biff on the wall behind Biff, and there’s one moment where Biff kind of stands up and he takes exactly the same pose as the portrait? Yeah.”
Reviewers trashed Donald Trump’s first book. They dismissed The Art of the
Deal as self-promotional pap. They called the author a huckster. “The man’s
lack of taste is as vast as his lack of shame,” said the Washington Post.
Fortune noted his “shallowness” and “pomposity” and his need for “more
money,” more “toys” and “more attention.” The book, said The New Republic,
“is a weapon in the continuing public relations war that is Donald Trump’s
way of doing business.”
Trump was always the butt of businessman jokes. He was never "america's darling". He always wanted to be in the club, to be seen as an example of business excellence, but the actual examples are generally pretty quiet and keep to themselves.
I grew up in a town slightly north of Manhattan often known for being the bastion of the Hedge Fund industry. IYKYK.
Donald Trump once owned a home in that town. He didn't hold on to it for very long, as Donald Trump was the butt of every joke those same financiers and their kids told growing up in the 90s and early 2000s. He realized that in the world of UHNW people, wealth is quiet and wealth also knows who's for real, and who isn't.
Turns out, a loudmouth who wears makeup and bankrupted 2 casinos isn't really wealth. Donald Trump was ran out of town because it was clear quickly that he was nothing more than a cartoon character.
It's so painfully obvious to anyone paying attention that his whole character reeks of fraud. How this news could ever come as a surprise to anyone is a testament to how poorly our mainstream and social media outlets have informed the citizenry.
Fox News is by far the most watched TV news channel in the US.
I think it is clear that they are not out there to inform the citizenry in any meaningful capacity. (Side note: I suggest watching the channel every now and then just to get an idea of what the largest “news” channel is feeding Americans.)
If you think about it, television has never been designed to inform or edify anyone.
Television is meant to sell ads and blanket the nations with a haze of opiates in order to keep us pacified and distracted and far too stupid to make waves.
Obviously fox news is politically biased in its coverage. I just dont understand how any objective observer could perceive the others (cnn, msnbc etc) as any different?
They are all opinion shows but Im sure its not that hard to find examples in the opposite vein on other channels where America is described as racist, white supremacist etc (all the left-wing tropes).
The examples of opinion shows on msnbc/cnn attacking republicans and covering for democrats are endless and just as relentless as fox news.
Rachel Maddow for example, ran the Russia collusion hoax lie for years.
Literally all that's on Fox News is lies upon lies in service of the GOP. I do not hold the other channels in my heart, but there are degrees of misleadingness and partisanship.
Everything and everybody is politically biased. It means nothing to say that. Everyone is a liar, but it means nothing about honesty to point that out.
What is meaningful is the degree to which they are, and what else they are. I don't think we need a pedantic debate about Fox News.
The difference is what the bias tends towards. Jon Stewart made this point a decade ago, and I don't think anything has changed. Fox New is biased in partisan way – specifically protecting and advocating towards the goals of a political party.
NYT, CNN, etc are biased towards other things first (conflict, spectacle, consensus) and while the majority of their staff likely have a liberal bias, they are not actively partisan.
Oh? I hadn’t heard that Stewart got his company a 780+ million dollar settlement in large part because he had texts stating he knew he was lying to the public.
Someone should do something about that Stewart fellow if he keeps getting away with the stuff
I was being sarcastic. Tucker is a proven in court liar and propagandist and the person I was replying to was stating that John Stewart’s biases are equivalent in magnitude
I never argued otherwise. But implying that just being biased towards one side is equivalent to Tucker Carlsons level of dedication to the cause in spite of the truth is where you are wrong.
Eh, wrong is too weak. I think you fully understand the false comparison you are making and how it influences public discourse
Carlson, in contrast to Stewart, is probably one of the better examples of the strength of freedom of the press in the United States.
Where Stewart has and does continue to work successfully with several mainstream media channels, Carlson is so dislikable he can only be heard because he founded his own podcast. Truly, it is a great country that has the laws protecting that man's right to keep being heard.
I believe Carlson was one of the most popular hosts on one of the most popular channels till he was sacked. Keeping your job in the mainstream media, is no badge of honour.
It just means you're happy to sacrifice your independence and submit to the demands of the media biz (and mainstream groupthink).
Indeed, whether it is a badge of honor to be so professionally dislikable you can no longer hold employment in the entertainment sector under anyone but yourself is something reasonable people can disagree on. But what a great country it is that guarantees him the right to still be so self-employed!
I think there is a very big difference between Stewart and Tucker.
You might not agree with Stewart's principles, but he has them and will fight his own party over it. Tucker flew over to Russia to kiss Putin's behind and even Putin made fun of how bad it was. He then tried to show how awesome it was in Russia and made it obvious that he hasn't been in a grocery store in ages.
Binary is the word you are looking for. 2 alternatives. Binary.
Boolean is a more general concept in algebra, tracing back to George Bool. That many programming languages call the 2-valued data type that expresses truth values as some variant of "boolean" is unfortunate.
The problem is not political bias, but disinformation.
Clumping everyone in one group is actually one of the goals of this: to get people tired of trying to figure out reality and to give up.
As obvious as it is - when you think everyone lies, liars will be the only ones who win. When you think that everyone is the same - the worst ones will win every time.
I'm not completely sure what point you are trying to make but I can assure you we get all kinds of distortions, half-truths, lies and cherry-picked narratives from channels other than Fox news too.
Fox News is less a news outlet and more a performance art piece in which actors, costumed as journalists, deliver carefully scripted outrage to an audience so thoroughly conditioned they believe they're watching journalism—when in reality, it’s more akin to a soap opera written by a political strategist and directed by the ghost of Joseph McCarthy.
Anecdotally, most of the people I know who support his policies do so in hopes that their financial choices will work out. They are educated and financially well off individuals. Do they check all the boxes (international dev, economics, science, etc)? No, but they can be considered educated over the general US pop.
Not a great comparison obviously, but education was great in the Weimar republic as well, with a diverse and thriving press and near 100% literacy. The United States can't match those numbers.
It seems its always about something else besides educational level.
It's partially an educational problem. I'm old enough to have been taught an idealized version of U.S. history in school. We learned things like how George Washington chopped down his father's cherry tree, but when his father asked him if he had done it, he "could not tell a lie." There was Honest Abe, who, as a child, walked 5 miles to return 2 cents that had been given to him as change in error.
Now, maybe this stuff wasn't all historically true, but in a sense it was better than true. It set an expectation for an ideal President. Serious dishonesty was taught as being disqualifying for the office of President, and honesty was taught as the deepest American value. Even if, in reality, prior Presidents hadn't always been honest, it created a tendency for voters to strongly prefer honest appearing candidates. Nixon's resignation was maybe the strongest affirmation of this principle that ever happened. I think it was with Clinton that this broke, and people started not to care too much about honesty and exclusively focus on their own perceived interests. Certainly the media environment, economic conditions, and the decline of mainline Protestantism had something to do with it too.
> I think it was with Clinton that this broke, and people started not to care too much about honesty and exclusively focus on their own perceived interests.
Or, more likely, when Fox News was launched (1996) during his tenure.
Well yes, it's complicated. That's part of what I meant by the "media environment." In the post-war period, broadcast media was mostly dominant, but it was both regulated and subject to the fairness doctrine, but also limited. There were only a few channels per metro area. News was only on an hour or two per day, and it wasn't that popular, so it lost money, but it was required by law as public interest programming in order to retain the FCC broadcast license.
The lower production costs, higher reach, and nonexistent regulation of wide bandwidth cable TV created the space for Fox, and then also to a lesser extent, MSNBC.
In my opinion, the distorted information propagated by these outlets had a synergistic effect with the changes in the emphasis of the educational system in the late 80s-early 90s to deemphasize honesty as a core American value.
I think the media continues to sane-wash him. The AP news headline of his recent meeting with Mark Rutte was
"NATO secretary-general tells Trump he’s motivating alliance members to spend more on defense"
It doesn't say anything about Greenland. It should have because Trump continued to push it:
""We've been dealing with Denmark, we've been dealing with Greenland, and we have to do it. We really need it for national security. I think that's why NATO might have to get involved in a way, because we really need Greenland for national security. It's very important," Trump said."
From Reuters, which seems to be doing a moderately better job.
"Trump wants to control Greenland" along with "Trump threatens to annex Canada" should be at the top of every headline because its complete insanity. No one voted for this, no one wants this, if Biden had said it or Obama had said it or any president had said it at any time every they would have become a laughing stock and every politician and voter would have risen up against them.
But it gets swept under the rug, in the same way all his insanity gets swept under the rug. Where were the headlines when he openly admired Arnold Palmer's penis? Nowhere, instead we got "Trump attacks Harris on immigration".
I've got my explanations but they all make me sound like a raving conspiracy theorist. Nevertheless, its my only explanation. This is what happens when its us vs. the billionaires. They can always outspend, and everyone really only cares about the bottom line.
Billions of dollars spent on elections by people with insane net worths and you're going to blame the citizens who largely struggle to get from paycheck to paycheck? Hacker News attracts a real "social bully" element for reasons I can't rightly determine.
It's easy to assume everyone thinks the same way. It's hard to comprehend just how different other lifestyles might be, so it's just easier hand wave it all away. It might not even be intentional or consciously being done.
Most politics chatter is in-group therapy sessions. For SC libs under a Republican administration the analysis becomes: did the majority push the Republican button? And the analysis ends there.
For this therapeutic session there is no room for looking beyond the absolute surface of the issue, like you did.
But unfortunately these narratives don’t just get trotted out among apolitical libs. The political scientist Rachel Bitecofer had a social media meltdown when Trump won. And again the analysis was “who pushed the Republican button”.
Those same citizens voted for Trump so they could put screws in iPhones and their children would have a bright future working in coal mines and factories.
It's both, we know citizens have power (Wisconsin), we know money has power(Elon Musk)
But Wisconsin was wondering because people hate Elon Musk.
My worry is that billionaires would fund anonymously both political media and they also own their own social media and so citizens would kind of less vote ... Or billionaire power would overcome that of citizen.
I think we need citizens to be aware of this but I also understand politics is a shitshow and i have so many hassles, why take another one.
And to that, I have no answer. i myself am stuck on this dilemma. I am really going to stop reading news because I don't think I personally can do anything. I have better things to do like studying or building software which can do better impact.
Though it also doesn't sucks to know about politics except I have seen people are really set in stone of politics, myself included.
According to a sibling top-comment this is not a decision to not pursue cryptocurrency fraud altogether, just to leave some such crimes to other agencies in the federal government. That is, if the SEC wants charges filed against some person, then presumably the DOJ will prosecute, but the DOJ will not prosecute w/o the SEC (or other regulator) requesting it.
> is a testament to how poorly our mainstream and social media outlets have informed the citizenry.
You're assuming people _want_ to be "informed." You could build the best news apparatus in the world, the most accurate reporting, with full scale third party auditing of your results.
It likely would not change very much. Humans are not designed to lock into large scale groups and then make coordinated long term decisions together. In my opinion we should avoid doing this as much as is possible.
Great point. I made much the same before in a different way.
We're all clear Disney, Star Wars, TV is entertainment. People are not clear that Rush Limbaugh, opinion makers on podcasts, Fox, CNN, Tick-tock is also entertainment.
The straightest venue for news proper has got to be CSPAN. They're clearly there to inform not to push a point, piss you off at the other side, or any other shadow-boxing goals.
Getting people pissed off to own the liberals, the neo-cons, to own the Trump supporters is ... entertainment and it doesn't hurt (I write this cynically) it helps drives up ad-revenue.
It's been obvious since the 70s. That's what baffles me so much. He's been the face of the rich person asshole fraudster for 50 years. I cannot wrap my head around it.
I know people, some of them educated, who are absolutely addicted to Burnett's reality TV shows. Those shows are uniformly routinely cruel to their participants. I find it creepy that some people are attracted to that kind of entertainment. There's something deep inside them that I don't want to see.
He gives people permission to be their worst selves.
When the president gets away with all sorts of crime. When he openly mocks people. When he indulges in racism. When he complains about being treated unfairly. When he lies. When he defrauds, or grifts, or flip-flops. When he's misogynitic. What's he saying is "you too can do these things and get away with it".
People like that. People like that there's no accountability for bad behavior.
Sure, we can talk about policy, or economy, or whatever (how's that working out?) But deep down the democrats ask us to be the best version of ourselves (or else) and Republicans delight in us being the worst.
Human nature being what it is, we end up here. Just remember folks, we voted for this.
Over the decades Trump has popped in and out of my attention like "oh, I guess that guy is still around". Yet from what I gather there have been people following him the whole time like he's someone important or worthwhile.
I think what it comes down to is that the average person in our society is just an aggressive basic shithead who isn't burdened by an abundance of thinking, and so to them Trump appears as a successful businessman rather than a hollow snake oil salesman.
It's because the folks in the back-end of things like what he represents in terms of wealth consolidation and fewer lookie-loos to peek inside to see what's truly going on. "Trump" is a symptom of much broader things that can only be fixed by fire. And even then, just like the cockroach, he'll scurry away under the baseboards to hide until his next meal.
This plus pausing enforcement of foreign bribery plus having is own meme coin, is anyone still questioning if Trump is absolutely being bribed by foreign agents?
IMO what is becoming painfully obvious is that the checks and balances don't work, and need a serious overhauling. It should be impossible for a single person, or even a whole party, to blatantly break the law, or risk national security with reckless decisions, and face no consequences.
If you're screwed enough you eventually just want to burn the whole thing down, whether it's rational or not, and there are definitely some people who voted that way.
That, or he's just a recognition of reality: resources and being a dick get you everywhere, whether it be business, politics, international relations, or the courts. Being authoritarian didn't stop China from becoming a near-parity superpower. Europeans were more than happy to start working on Nordstream 2 and attend both the World Cup and Winter Olympics in Russia long after it became apparent that Putin and his ilk were going to return to being imperialistic autocrats. Why does it matter if the US does the same if you're willing to fall in line?
Most of Europe and European leaders have admitted they were wrong about Russia. Some, but not enough, Republicans know the vatniks among them are wrong.
They were, but they've shown that they'll gladly ignore human rights abuses and autocracy so long as the price is right. Trump's used to doing business that way, unfortunately.
Really, if Putin hadn't invaded Ukraine, I don't think Europeans would particularly care about those problems in Russia. It only really became problematic when the order of the continent was threatened, and even then it took some serious arm-twisting to get certain members of NATO and the EU to commit to measures to do something.
Of course, relative to starting a land war in Europe "...if Putin hadn't invaded Ukraine, I don't think Europeans would particularly care..."
That's proportionate. Equally, though, I'm sure they would be pleased to find Russia wanting to join a rules based order. Bolsonaro was just recently found to be plotting to kill his political rival in Brazil. What should we who are not Brazilians do about that?
Depends. Are the Brazilians doing anything about it?
If not, and no one else is, then there's a chance that someone like Trump might try to do something like that himself. That's what he does. He sees someone else getting away with something bad, tries to do it because he thinks he'll get an advantage, gets caught, and complains about how unfair it is that he got caught.
If for some reason you did not understand cryptocurrency outside of its use in countries like North Korea, and wanted to crush its consumer confidence, you would in fact turn it into a lawless madhouse in favour of your fiat (which is rapidly losing value)
Trump forgets the US, and most other major nations have a cryptocoin. a loss of confidence in an emerging currency market is a great way to torpedo your nations hegemony.
He has never committed "fraud", besides all those times he had to pay fines for committing fraud and settling class actions for fraud. But beyond that, he's fine. It's just TDS haters talking about "reality" and "facts".
Can you illuminate the legitimate reasoning behind the OP then? If you have a claim that people have the wrong idea about Trump, then why not provide some of your own evidence?
The only TDS is the blind devotion his cult has, that lets them contort themselves into supporting anything the fascist con-artist spews out.
Not getting into the cryptocurrency rug-pull he just pulled during his inauguration 2 months ago.
Not even getting into his lie about election fraud.
Here's just a small smattering of the civil and legal judgements Trump has lost in regards to defrauding people.
> In December 2022, two entities of the Trump Organization were found guilty on 17 counts, including tax fraud and falsifying business records. The scheme involved providing executives with off-the-books perks to evade taxes
> In May 2024, Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. The charges were related to hush money payments made during his 2016 presidential campaign to conceal information.
> In February 2024, a New York judge ruled that Donald Trump and his companies had engaged in a years-long scheme to inflate his wealth on financial statements.
The court imposed a $355 million penalty and barred Trump from serving in top roles at any New York company for three years
> In August 2022, Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization's former CFO, pleaded guilty to 15 felony charges, including grand larceny and tax fraud, admitting to a scheme that evaded taxes on $1.7 million in income.
> In November 2019, a New York state judge ordered Donald Trump to pay $2 million in damages for misusing the Trump Foundation's funds to further his political and business interests.
> Trump University, a for-profit real estate training program, faced multiple lawsuits alleging that it defrauded students by making false claims about the value of its courses and the involvement of Trump himself. In April 2018, a federal judge finalized a $25 million settlement to resolve these lawsuits
> Trump and his companies have been accused for decades of refusing to pay contractors, workers, and small businesses after work was completed
It might be good for Bitcoin, it's bad for pretty much everything else.
We depend on our institutions to investigate cases of fraud. If all a fraudster has to do in order to legally commit fraud is to launder it through a cryptocurrency then of course every fraudster is going to do that.
It's getting fucking exhausting seeing how blatant this orange president is being without even trying to pretend he's not corrupt. He launched two cryptocurrencies on the day he took office, and he's in charge of a publicly traded company.
Frankly I am kind of just sick of this cryptocurrency shit in general. I am embarrassed that I ever fell for it, and frankly if anyone still believes in it as a concept at this point then I really don't understand why.
If you didn't see this coming when he launched a memecoin then I don't know what to tell you.
> Per Blanche’s memo, which was circulated on Monday, the Justice Department is dropping litigation and enforcement actions “while President Trump’s actual regulators do this work outside the punitive criminal justice framework.”
Elon Musk and Russell Vought have been trying to kill the CFPB and the SEC is toothless now so what financial regulators is he talking about?
WaPo Gift Link: https://wapo.st/4cpZiWJ
Article: https://archive.ph/A9CD5
The memo: https://archive.ph/Td0Fn (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43636327)
"DOJ will no longer prosecute cryptocurrency fraud" is clickbait and not what the Todd Blanche memo says.
They will still go after the Sam Bankman-Frieds:
>Prosecutors shall prioritize cases that hold accountable individuals who (a) cause financial harm to digital asset investors and consumers; and/or (b) use digital assets in furtherance of other criminal conduct...
But seem to be intending to deal with whether it is ok to do things like issue trump token by setting regulations rather than prosecuting companies after the event. Which is not wholly a bad idea.
Memo text here: https://archive.ph/Td0Fn
> ok to do things like issue trump token by setting regulations
That would make sense if the Trump admin were actually regulating crypto but they're tearing that up as well.[1] Why would Trump regulate his own scam coins? Finally regulation isn't a magic wand that stops behavior, it stops it with the threat of punishment after the event. So no this doesn't make sense.
1: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5170036-trump-sec-cryp...
Yes, but typically there are clear guidelines on what will be punished and what is allowed. That was not the case under Gensler. Crypto companies begged for clear regulations and the SEC steadfastly refused to publish any. Instead they just filed enforcement actions and people had to find out their view of things in court.
And as your link says:
> “We in the crypto space felt it was very deceptive the way they [the Biden administration] went about dealing with crypto firms. They told crypto firms to come in and register, to come in and engage with them,” said Nic Carter, a founding partner at crypto investment firm Castle Island Ventures. “There was no meaningful way to do that.”
Yeah, and the day they find an application for crypto that isn't "literal unregulated security" (the basis of all the enforcement "lacking guidelines" you are complaining about!) will be the day I dig deep to find some compassion. Until then, the guidelines are clear if you want to market and sell securities. You just didn't like what they say.
If they are securities, then there should be a way to register them with the SEC and follow the law. As your link said, that's not the case.
But BTC and ETH at least are not considered securities at this point, and in general, the SEC has not done all that well when companies took it to court.
Gensler was perfectly clear, the crypto people just did not like the answer.
He said everything is a security but he didn't sue everything. It felt really unfair if you got sued and your competitors didn't.
He didn't even tell whether ETH, the second highest value cryptocurrency is considered security or not, even though he was asked about it all the time.
>Prosecutors shall prioritize cases that hold accountable individuals who (a) cause financial harm to digital asset investors and consumers
Technically FTX/Alameda was able to repay investors and consumers so did SBF cause financial harm?
He definitely did fraud (a crime), but did he cause financial harm?
Similarly does Money Laundering (a crime) cause financial harm?
Yes, considering it was ~2 years from freezing withdrawals to the approved bankruptcy plan to repay customers.
FTX was only able to repay customers because the value of BTC increased during that time. But customers were only repaid the value of their portfolio at the time of the collapse.
If I steal your money, invest it, then return the principal amount after 2 years, would you consider it financial harm?
does that mean musk will finally pay for the dogecoin manipulation?
Many reasons why this wouldn't be sufficient. Having a fall guy is a good example, doesn't allow for action against organization level willful fraud would be another. It basically slows down any sort of justice.
Just another good reason to stay out of crypto unless you're already rich and have money to gamble.
(This was originally posted as a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43634582, but it's a substantive comment so I've merged it along with the others.)
I try to view things like this from the other perspective and wonder just why so many people still view this person like he's the common man's savior. I think I'm cognitively dissonance-ing myself from possibly all the cognitive dissonance I'm surrounded with.
Welcome to demagogy 101. In this session, we'll talk about "guiding" public opinion by buying a small but loud support team that looks bigger in the media.
Thank you for enrolling at Banana Democracy Uni! We look forward to train the new generation of wannabe dictators.
The average person spends less than 5 minutes a month consuming news content and assumes important information will just fall into their lap. People in general are just not paying all that much attention.
Trump’s secret sauce is exploiting this from every angle.
i mean the other perspective is that this headline is a lie. i'm no supporter of trump, but it is a simply false headline
What about the headline is a lie (I do think it may have changed, but I'm not sure after looking at it this morning)?
yeah they changed it
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“And in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn't fully understand.”
— Alfred describing why the mob hired the Joker
It’s clear that both political parties in the US are captured by the investor class, the democrats didn’t even have an election to choose Kamala she was selected by their donors who preferred someone they could control over someone with the best chance of winning.
If the lesson people take away from this is that Republicans are just uneducated and naive, they’re missing the point. People were desperate for something different, they thought Trump was someone from outside of the system but they didn’t realize that the system is money and no one is outside of it.
The Democrats chose Biden in the election. If a party's candidate cannot serve, there is a process to choose a new candidate, which is not a general party election. (https://www.vox.com/2016/9/12/12887632/if-presidential-nomin...).
There's a very good reason for this: those general elections cost states money. Money they have not budgeted to re-run a primary. In addition, in most states, the primary is framed in a legal process that does not allow for an "out-of-band" second election. It would, generally, have been illegal to re-run an election (at least using the physical voting apparatus of the myriad states) to choose an alternate when Biden dropped, which is why the party chooses via their own process.
And as far as I'm aware, that process was followed following Biden's announcement. I wouldn't accuse Republicans of being uneducated and naive if people didn't vote for Harris because "she never won a primary..." I'd accuse traditional Democrat voters of not knowing very much about the party they (nominally) tend to support. It'd be nice if civics weren't just something people's parents and grandparents did.
As for being an outsider... In 2024, I fail to see how voters would think a former President could be considered outside the system.
Biden should have simply refused to run again in 2024. There was already signalling to this effect in 2019, though it was never explicitly promised.[1][2] If he had just kept to that, there would have been plenty of time to run a primary and an actually strong candidate could have been selected.
1: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/12/joe-biden-one-te...
2: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/06/biden-president-...
My understanding is that Biden was very concerned about his legacy and there are rumors about the "no daylight" phrase he spoke with Harris on her campaign and probably part of the reason she lost. But Biden should have dropped down much earlier and will taint his legacy forever. At least he passed the infrastructure bill.
Not to rehash this for the 1000th time, but I really don't understand this point of view. Why assume that everything before the Biden drop-out was unchangeable and ordained by God?
It is very clear that, long before the primary, Biden was not fit to run again, probably not even fit to stay in office. A functioning party would have gotten their senile standard-bearer to at least not run again, ideally even step down and let his VP take office and build a relationship with voters. Either way, they could have run a real primary and therefore chosen somebody that Democratic voters might actually have been excited about voting for in the general election. This may even have been Harris, but a version of Harris with a much better shot at winning because she'd spent an additional year or so campaigning.
Why is this an impossible set of events? If it isn't, why not lay the blame for this colossally bad fuckup at the feet of the Democratic leadership?
I wouldn't, personally, have had any issue with such a scenario. My comment was in response to the pervasive and wrong idea that the Democrats could have "just" re-run the primary when Biden dropped after being elected in that primary.
I think people believe elections are internet-fast or internet-convenient, which is where this skewed idea comes from. They aren't, for reasons that should be obvious with some consideration about how elections are secured.
They could have had a mini primary leading to the Democrat convention in August and let the voters in the convention (electors?) decide from multiple candidates while taking polls into account, for example. Having a memory, I do remember people discussing the option of mini primaries. Harris wasn’t pre-ordained, she was just a bad decision that Democrat insiders made without input from the outside.
What is a "mini-primary?"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/07/21/heres-how-d...
Basically speeches/debates/mini campaign before the convention, and the delegates vote at the convention without regard for the original primary.
This would just be show anyway. Even with a "real" primary, the DNC's "superdelegate" structure means that party insiders essentially get to choose the candidate, just like in the 19th century (the mythical "smoke filled room").
The primary process itself is just for show, but a competent party would understand that it needs to have at least the appearance of legitimacy.
The last Democratic presidential primary that seemed legitimate to voters who were paying attention was 2008: 2012 was 2nd term Obama, in 2016 insiders ratfucked Sanders to pick Clinton, 2020 they did something similar to pick Biden, and then of course the disaster of 2024.
It's been nearly 20 years since we've had a "real" Democratic primary that at least advertised itself as a democratic process. Seems logical that Democratic voters would be skeptical about the so-called leadership of the party.
It's not precisely "just for show;" there are enough non-super DNC delegates that they can, in fact, outweigh the superdelegates if they have something approximating consensus. When it's a close race, the superdelegates can dominate the outcome.
But there's no reason to assume that anyone would have shown up to challenge Harris. The incumbent effect is very strong in both parties, and it's extremely rare to refrain from nominating the sitting first-term President, so there's no reason to believe the result of all of that wouldn't have been the successor the President recommended. Note that the initial Primary went landslide to Biden. American voters tend to go with recognizable names and tend to hew to tradition.
You're quite correct that relative to the GOP, the Democrats have a more elitist structure that consolidates leadership to party operatives. When you don't have that... Well, nobody in the GOP party machinery really wanted President Trump, but the GOP doesn't have superdelegates.
> 2016 insiders ratfucked Sanders to pick Clinton
This is a common hypothesis but Sanders never had the votes. He was about 3 million short of Clinton. While there's no doubt that the party preferred Clinton, the voters didn't show enough of a preference for Sanders to overcome that inertia. Again, American voters tend to go with recognizable names, and they already saw Clinton close to the White House (even if, as First Lady, she wasn't actually elected).
Were the Democratic voters even wrong? Clinton ultimately went on to win the popular vote. There's no particular reason to believe Sanders would have done so; we'll never know what that alternate reality would have looked like, but his opponents would have drilled in on his Jewish heritage and it would have gotten quite ugly (as Trump revealed, there's a lot of straight-up bigots who became politically motivated in 2016).
If this had happened, wouldn’t people say the result was not legitimate because they didn’t win real primaries, the donors easily gamed the mini-primary, etc? Maybe they were screwed as soon as anything unusual happened, and/or some people will find any reason to say Dem insiders play favorites, any reason for Trump to keep “Sleepy Joe” as his opponent.
The proportions matter and I think much fewer people would be saying the result was not legitimate if it was through some sort of campaign and primary process than an insider decision made through whatever backroom deals they did.
> And as far as I'm aware, that process was followed following Biden's announcement.
This is exactly the problem. The Democratic Party excuse is always "we're following the process". The results suck and then they wring their hands wondering how they lost the election. The goal should be to get power, and getting power requires nominating someone popular. Anyone who has paid attention to US politics for the last decade could have explained just how unpopular Kamala Harris would be.
Pushing too far in that direction results in a Trump wearing a different hat.
The Democrats do follow process. That's one of the key things that makes them Democrats in contrast to the demagoguery and power-at-any-cost approach that seems to have co-opted their colleagues across the aisle. I don't think the kind of people who would vote for a Democratic candidate at all actually want a rule-breaker (and if they do, we got one in the Oval Office right now).
Wrong. We do want someone who will break rules when the rules are there to stop the government from serving its' constituents. So glad they kept the filibuster; so glad they listened to the Senate Parliamentarian; so glad they followed the process and anointed Kamala. Look at where worshipping the process lead.
> Wrong. We do want someone who will break rules when the rules are there to stop the government from serving its' constituents.
Some of you do. Some of you don't. Most of you want of you presidents to obey courts at least.[1]
> So glad they kept the filibuster
In 2013 Democrats eliminated the 60 vote requirement for most nominations. In 2022 all but 2 Democrats voted to eliminate it for some legislation. Who kept it was 100% of Republicans, Sinema, and Manchin.
Some people who sounded like you said Democrats could have and should have blackmailed Sinema and Manchin to get 50 votes. They couldn't explain what would have stopped Sinema or Manchin from defecting to the Republicans.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/majority-americans-believe-...
Courts, sure. Your story is an perfect example of where half-measures led the party, so I’m not sure why you brought that up.
Because once you start breaking rules you don't get to control when it stops.
If we're blackmailing Senators, what do we do when the courts step in to stop it?
Breaking the process leads to a pyrrhic victory. It's France going from guillotining the king to guillotining feminists. If that's one's goal, rejoice! The man in charge right now is the best opportunity since the adoption of America's Constitution in the first place to get there.
ETA: As a side question on this topic: let's assume the Democrats, upon finding that Biden wouldn't be willing to serve, found some way to re-run the primary. We'll magically ignore the massive cost to do so and the fact that it would be illegal to use the voting apparatus of most states in a surprise out-of-band second primary, and we'll magically assume they could organize and pull it off in time for the general election. Who would have come out of that process that would have beaten Trump?
We didn't get to control where it stops by following the process either, at least we could have had a hand on the wheel. You are advocating for bringing a knife to a gun fight.
For what its' worth, by the time Biden was elected, the party was already dead. It would have realized that in 2020 if Trump hadn't messed up COVID so badly. The best example of what I am talking about is Obama not seating Merrick Garland on the court and daring the Senate to stop him.
Believe me, I would have loved to have seen hands on wheels. It'd be great if people who cared about the Democratic party messing up would actually bother to show up to breathe some life into the party; party events are published, offices have addresses, local and state government positions go up for election far more often than Presidents do.
Instead, I saw Americans stay home, again, and Trump get elected, again. It would appear, sadly, Americans are getting the government they're willing to put in the effort to have. All the resources in the world to stop these circumstances and they didn't use them.
Ah, well. Pax Americana was a pretty good run. We got the Internet out of it. Hopefully, the reshuffling of global power into something that replaces it will be even better.
We gave Democrats the whole government in 2008 and 2020 - they refuse to wield power. But sure, blame the voters for being disaffected by their failure, I’m sure that’ll move things in the right direction.
There's nothing my blame or praise will do that the coming economic collapse won't.
And in the American system, where We the People consent to be governed by a government that derives its power from those people... Where else would the blame lie?
Do the post-hoc rationalizations matter? Kamala wasn’t elected in a primary and so the perception by many is that she was an illegitimate candidate. That perception translates directly to votes, the justifications for Kamala being the candidate do not.
When the choice was between a current VP or an insurrectionist and convicted felon, anyone who thought Harris was less legitimate for candidacy has a funny definition. (I guess I don’t believe in protest votes or third parties in this climate.)
Maybe subconscious feelings made people not bother to get to the polls to vote for her, but I don’t think there’s a sensible conscious argument to ditch her on this basis. In fact, people often say she failed for a reason that is almost an opposite of her unfairly replacing Biden – they say she acted just like him and wouldn’t differentiate herself from him.
I get it was unusual and maybe offensive the way she got nominated, but if a principled voter is going to weigh informal notions of legitimacy, the obvious choice is hold their nose and vote for Harris.
The most rational conclusion after the 2024 election is that most voters are not rational (or, more specifically, "models of their behavior need to prioritize something other than rational-self-interest").
It would be rewarding bad behavior though. Since there would then be no incentive to stop, voting for Harris would increase the likelihood of the Democrats continuing to skip primaries or promote candidates from within while ignoring their lack of popularity in the primaries.
I don’t believe in voting for the lesser of two evils. It’s a myopic viewpoint that doesn’t take into account long term consequences.
People can rationally look at the long term benefits vs short term risks and rationally vote for Trump. It is extremely hubristic to think that people who don’t agree with you politically are stupid or irrational.
> I don’t believe in voting for the lesser of two evils. It’s a myopic viewpoint that doesn’t take into account long term consequences.
I fail to see that position. There's always a choice between better and worse; even if the choice of better isn't what you want right now, it bends the arrow in the direction where the next choice starts from a better position.
Is your argument that there's a risk of local maxima? Perhaps. But I think it's hubris to imagine that if you bend the arrow down, you'll get to decide who survives the local minima to see whether there's a better maxima after it. That's a choice to put a lot of blood on one's hands.
Yes, local maxima. You cannot reward a political party when they skip the democratic process and appoint a candidate. If they repeat it again, hopefully they keep losing until they learn their lesson and we get a better set of people who can run the country well.
The issue is that the other side is actual fascism. There is significantly-above-zero threat that the "reward" America will get for getting the Democrats to "learn their lesson" is that they never get to usefully vote for a candidate again.
I would have preferred if the GOP hadn't put actual fascism on the table so that people had meaningful choice over policy (and, indeed, had Trump lost, perhaps it would be the GOP who would've learned their lesson that Americans won't tolerate fascism). But since they did, and America chose the GOP choice, we're now in a situation where the best we can hope for in 2028 is a vote to reject fascism instead of something better.
I don't think that gets us pointed in the right direction, sadly.
(In the larger sphere, the problem is people thinking all they can or should do is vote for President. There's a whole four years and several Congress and state elections in which to do something effective towards desired outcomes, but Americans get very drilled-down on the President only, to their detriment. Half the reason Congress is so sclerotic is most Americans can't be bothered to know who their Congressional reps are, let alone what they stand for).
Okay, I don’t believe this actual fascism thing. Have been hearing it for 10 years and things have been fine.
I get it, I wonder if I am over-reacting too, but when they're shipping people to prison in the hands of a third world dictator for allegedly being gang members (we pinky promise but oops we made some mistakes), with no trial, against judges' direct orders, with US officials retweeting said dictator's giggle at doing it anyway... it feels different this time.
Back in the olden days of Bush or Obama, they would at least have a trial in a secret court with a judge who was maybe not rubber-stamping it, the public was pretty sure they were real terrorists, and the jailers (or executioners!) were Americans who faced consequences when they mistreated the prisoners.
That's fine. Hitler's first attempt to seize power was a failed 1923 coup. He ascended to the Chancellorship in 1933. Germans also heard about fascism for ten years and things were fine.
... until they weren't. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there sure are a lot of historians in America who have actually packed up and fled the country as of late...
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> It would be rewarding bad behavior though. Since there would then be no incentive to stop, voting for Harris would increase the likelihood of the Democrats continuing to skip primaries or promote candidates from within
Speaking of myopia... so a voter considering voting Dem should have thought, "Well, if Biden died today she would become President for awhile anyway, and if he died after winning she would be president for the rest of his term, so she's halfway to being a presidential candidate anyway... but I'm really pissed they didn't re-run the primaries in ways that might not even be legal and would inevitably invite attacks on the legitimacy of the winner, so I'm going to teach them a lesson. I'm so mad I didn't get a chance to have a new-blood lefty or whoever I think is better than Harris but somehow didn't beat Biden, that I'd rather make it more likely for the far-right to win again. I won't vote for someone who disrespects democracy by accepting an unprecedented party nomination, I would rather the winner be the one who disrespects democracy by egging on violent attacks on the capitol, attempting fake elector schemes and pressuring the VP and state governors to throw the election, and violate campaign finance laws. I may be saddling myself and the entire country with a president I don't want, but at least I will have stood my ground stopping Democratic party insiders from upgrading a nearly-nominated VP candidate to Presidential candidate!"
That is the argument that I am saying is stupid and irrational, not being Republican or voting for Trump per se. I just don't see a reasonable, self-consistent argument from "I'd consider a Democrat, but they bent their own rules" to "I should let the non-Democrat who has broken laws win." That's emotion, insistence on following one rule at the expense of all others, and denial of political realities, not logic. And people are free to vote on feelings and perceptions, as I am free to argue they were stupid or irrational if they say this is their reason.
And yeah, some of those accusations against Trump haven't been proven in a court of law, but neither has the idea that Harris was illegitimate.
If you care about Dem ideology etc enough to follow their primaries, you would stick with the party even if they didn't yield exactly the flavor of candidate you prefer, not hang everyone out to dry with a far-right alternative in the generals. If you were content to let the far right win, it doesn't feel like you were truly invested in the Dems anyway, so why should they care how you would have voted in their primary re-run? Again, it's emotionally-driven, this desire or hope to use the party's power to get your candidate onto the ballot, and punish them if they don't do it.
Maybe I should be open to choices other than Trump or Harris, but I feel they're worthless in this climate, and I don't think your premise cares about them either. If you want to vote third party, why care whether one of the two parties followed their nomination rules?
It's also "fun" how Republicans whined about rule-breaking and denying the will of the people in this situation, then a few months later they're entertaining plans like putting up a strawman for president so he can resign and give Trump a third term by succession. (Which as I understand, most lawyers believe is BS, but these days... it might just work.)
> If you care about Dem ideology etc enough to follow their primaries
I don’t. I follow both primaries because that’s where almost all of the democratic process in the Presidential election happens. Once you have two candidates (third parties are obviously jokes), you get to choose between the two.
So, the primary process is very important to make sure democracy happens and I put a lot of importance in it. As should everyone.
And so, if a candidate does not win through that primary process, that candidate is illegitimate.
What is the point of a presidential ballot with only one viable and legitimate candidate? You're just throwing away your choice, because an old man tried to run and then backed out, and his party made possibly the least-impact change they could.
If Biden won and died on day 1 in the office, you'd still end up with "a president who never won the primary" but it wouldn't be the party's fault. Biden stepping down is approximately the same endpoint without dying; is it really logical to blackball the party over a possibility that could have happened accidentally?
Even supposing they legally could have done what you want, they were also legally permitted to do what they did. Harris was a candidate produced by the party following laws and its own procedures. You didn't like the outcome, but that doesn't mean it was not legitimate. Call it undemocratic if you want (though I'm not sure the normal primary process is democratic anyway), but it's legitimate.
> though I'm not sure the normal primary process is democratic anyway
That's a great point, and one I wish more voters understood. The primaries are very undemocratic, both of them. In most states, you can't even vote in both primaries because you can only have one party affiliation.
How much real choice do Americans have when the primaries determine, practically, the candidates and they can only lend their voice to one party's choice of candidate?
Interesting take. I believe this is a theme that everyone in the US is familiar with, but the idea that "big money is the enemy" and the reality of it has somehow not permeated through the general public enough. It seems that the Trump-voting public sees the Democrats as compromised rather than the Republicans, but even with this one action by Trump you can argue strongly that they are as well.
Let me give you a simpler, Occam's-razorish explanation: People who voted for Trump aren't stupid, or naive, or anything. They simply were unable or unwilling to accept the world changing around them regarding race, sexuality, welfare, climate, economy, foreign and domestic policies. They elected someone who told them "we'll go back to the old times one way or another, consequences be damned".
This is exactly what they voted for, what they were hoping for. They knew leopards would've eaten the face of a few of them, but it was somewhat expected, a calculated risk. There's a few casualties even when you win the war.
They saw something they could cling to, to avoid changes for the remaining of their lives, even if this meant destroying their country, the rest of the world or the future for the matter. And they replied with "Yes, we're fine with that".
TBF, that sounds a lot like "stupid or naive" with extra words. You can't rewind history. Not without a lot of death; the only way to kill a meme is to destroy every mind it's hiding in and burn every record it was recorded in. There's moving forward, developing the time that is now into a future time by refining and challenging the existing ideas; backwards isn't a desirable goal.
In particular, the "Make America Great Again" era they seem to hearken to was an era of massive industrial growth fueled by being the largest country untouched domestically by a World War. Getting back there would require burning half the world again. We shouldn't want that.
These are lessons history teaches consistently, and I'm sorry they apparently slept through that day of class.
> … but it was somewhat expected, a calculated risk.
The way many of them think of it is that illness and death due to disease, starvation, lack of medication, problem pregnancies, etc. are acts of god and a part of life. They don’t want relief from that, if it comes with a government that has the power to change things they don’t want to change.
It is true that Trump won his reelection with 49.8% of the vote, but that isn’t the same thing as 49.8% of voters. With only 63.7% of eligible voters casting ballots last November, Trump’s share of the vote narrows to just under a third of the electorate, significantly less than half.
But it is worth noting that an April 2024 NBC News poll showed Trump leading voters who say they do not follow political news by 26-points. Meanwhile voters who said they read a newspaper every day supported Joe Biden 70% to Trump’s 21%.[0] Additionally, a survey conducted in November 2024 by Northeastern University found that just 24% of Republican voters relied on news media, while the rest said they got their news from family and friends, as well as social media.
This means that while less than 1/3rd of eligible voters cast their ballots for Trump, only ~8.3% of the electorate entered the voting booth reliably informed, and then still chose to support him.
0. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/poll-biden-tr...
Could someone explain why the parent comment would (currently) be downvoted?
It has an interesting conjecture, and sounds like it was written in good faith.
Likely because it enraged some Democrats with the reference to Kamala being unelected. It's back above 0 for me now, so it looks like the broader consensus is that this is in fact a good comment.
It doesn't anger anyone, it's just dishonest. The circumstances of her being the democratic candidate are well-document, you can't just say things that aren't true.
Biden won the primary, then he stepped down. That's the actual story, and if you don't include the teensy little detail you're being dishonest. As a reminder to everyone, choosing not to tell the whole truth is dishonesty.
> The nomination will officially be voted on either shortly before or during the convention itself. Unless a major Democratic figure mounts a serious challenge — which did not appear to happen within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement — the president’s endorsement of Harris will likely carry the day with delegates
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/is-it-really-unlawful-...
You’re the one being dishonest. The democratic nomination wasn’t official until August, and to suggest the Democratic Party had no other option is factually incorrect and a revision of history that ignores the months the party and pundits spent discussing other options, as well as the legal argument the party itself made to justify choosing Harris.
Harris was the only option for the DNC unless major election laws would have been changed very late in the cycle (moving funds raised to another candidate - highly improbable). There’s a strong argument that the DNC was at fault for not preparing a suitable backup candidate in case of emergencies. There’s even an argument that such a thing was done deliberately so that voters would be stuck with Harris. Nevertheless, once Biden dropped out, she was the only practical option.
Two important notes: the RNC would have been just as screwed if the DNC had succeeded in putting a bullet in Trump’s brain. Also, Harris performed unusually badly during her presidential primary, stoking angers that she was not only unelected, but that she wouldn’t have been elected given the chance.
You’re conflating the option to move funds with the option to choose a different candidate. Harris was not the only option, anyone could have been selected up until the official nomination in August:
> The nomination will officially be voted on either shortly before or during the convention itself. Unless a major Democratic figure mounts a serious challenge — which did not appear to happen within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement — the president’s endorsement of Harris will likely carry the day with delegates.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/is-it-really-unlawful-...
The idea that Harris was the only option because they couldn’t move funding is absurd, we’re talking about an election for the highest position in the world. If the party wanted to choose someone else, they would have found a way to reallocate the funding or just eat the cost.
> There’s even an argument that such a thing was done deliberately so that voters would be stuck with Harris. Nevertheless, once Biden dropped out, she was the only practical option
Ultimately, if Harris wasn't a good candidate for the Presidency, then she shouldn't have been VP in 2020. That was where the issue lay.
> if the DNC had succeeded in putting a bullet in Trump’s brain
Wait, what?
I’m not a fan of Trump but my steelman argument for this is: policing public markets is a public good because efficient capital markets are the bedrock of a capitalist society.
It’s hard to make the same case for crypto, which (despite the insistences of its participants) more or less exists in isolation from the rest of the market. The industry feels it is over-regulated. Makes sense that a more lassiez-faire leader would take a more hands-off approach to it.
If nothing else, I feel like this view is myopic. Capital markets are people and jobs. When crypto projects collapse, or rampant fraud, abuse, manipulation, and outright theft are allowed, that money is coming out of real peoples pockets, and that has real rippling effects that are not only objectively disruptive to the economy, but are also much more difficult to then predict, measure, and respond to which further amplifies their detrimental impacts.
This isn’t really “allowing” fraud though. From the memo:
> Prosecutors shall prioritize cases that hold accountable individuals who (a) cause financial harm to digital asset investors and consumers; and/or (b) use digital assets in furtherance of other criminal conduct, such as fentanyl trafficking, terrorism, cartels, organized crime, and human trafficking and smuggling. Seeking accountability from individuals who perpetrate these types of wrongdoing deters future illegal activity, compensates victims, and promotes the public’s confidence in the digital asset markets and broader industry. On the other hand, criminal matters premised on regulatory violations resulting from diffuse decisions made at lower levels of digital asset companies often fail to advance the priorities of the Department.
I read this as switching from proactive enforcement (stop the act before it causes damage) to reactive regulation (punish the guilty after the act happens). Proactive regulation of public markets makes sense because the general public has an interest in well-functioning capital markets even if they are not direct participants (markets are essentially the capitalist replacement for central planning).
Why police any gambling where people can get addicted and lose their home and worse m? There’s a lot of reasons.
I worry that having the SEC regulate crypto can actually be worse for those people, because it sends the message that it’s a legit government-approved investment instead of a wild west zero-sum craps table.
The reality is that it exists and that people take crypto risks. Just like illegal gambling.
There is a reason exchanges were investigated in the first place and it wasn’t for fun.
But what’s to reason to not prosecute lawbreakers/fraud?
My read is that they will still prosecute fraud once it happens, they just won’t proactively regulate the industry.
I’m thinking there will be prosecution but there will be quid pro quo’s like the guy Trump just pardoned after the felon donated 2 million to GOP. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/nikola-founder-mil... Wipe the slate so the felon no longer owes money for fraud.
The title of the article on the website is misleading and actually untrue.
The memo did not say “no longer targeting fraud”- it said that it was no longer targeting individuals and exchanges for regulatory missteps. The theme of the memo is “we’re not going to use mountains of regulations written for non-crypto regulation to go after crypto exchanges”, which is in line with a general regulatory themes of the Trump administration to avoid “lawfare” type activities and reduce regulatory burdens.
In fact, the memo specifically said (according to the article, near the end) that the government would focus their efforts on fraud against crypto investors.
Now you might or might not agree with these goals, and you might or might not support the Trump administration, and you might or might not like Trump, but the article headline was at odds with the article content and with the DoJ memo.
(This was originally posted as a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43634582, but it's a substantive comment so I've merged it along with the others.)
Seems like an odd choice to move some but not all comments between posts like this. Especially when the only ones moved seem to be conservative talking points. This one even discusses a title that doesn’t exist on this article?
> Seems like an odd choice to move some but not all comments between posts like this
The idea is to move good, substantive comments that have something to contribute to the new thread, and to leave the ones that don't fit that description and are bound by the context of the previous article.
I'm not saying I made all the calls perfectly about which ones to move and which ones to leave, but that's the idea at least! If there are cases I missed, I'd be happy to take a look.
> Especially when the only ones moved seem to be conservative talking points.
You can't jump to conclusions like that from such a paltry handful of datapoints. I say "you can't", but of course you can, because everyone does! But it's not reliable to do so:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> This one even discusses a title that doesn’t exist on this article?
Yes, that's why I replied—to make the context switch explicit because otherwise the comment wouldn't make sense.
> prior Administration used the Justice Department to pursue a reckless strategy of regulation by prosecution
What was the idea before? It wasn't necessarily illegal but they prosecuted it anyway?
> Executive Order 14178 requires the Justice Department to prioritize investigations and prosecutions that involve conduct victimizing investors, including embezzlement and misappropriation of customers’ funds on exchanges, digital asset investment scams, fake digital asset development projects such as rug pulls, hacking of exchanges and decentralized autonomous organizations resulting in the theft of funds, and exploiting vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Such enforcement actions are important to restoring stolen funds to customers, building investor confidence in the security of digital asset markets, and the growth of the digital asset industry.
I guess before anyone using these crypto services was a target for prosecution and now they are not, just by the virtue of using them.
Before they prosecuted 1% of crypto scams and now they're going to prosecute 0%.
A few comments here have hinted at this: we don't need to have a debate about penalizing platforms for the fraud of the users, everyone agrees that's problematic. The reason this directive confuses me is because very often the fraudsters are the platform runners themselves.
If your goal is to shield them from government enforcement it’s not confusing at all.
Trump serves only to serve himself consummately.
> Instead of policing crypto platforms and exchanges, Trump’s DOJ will “focus on prosecuting individuals who victimize digital asset investors, or those who use digital assets in furtherance of criminal offenses such as terrorism, narcotics and human trafficking, organized crime, hacking, and cartel financing.”
Wonder if this hints at possibly reducing or relaxing KYC rules also?
> Wonder if this hints at possibly reducing or relaxing KYC rules also?
Good call, I would assume so. KYC helps prevent money laundering, bribes and a ton of other illegal transactions. Eliminating it would line up with other actions performed by this admin.
On the other side KYC rules and enforcement can be anything from annoying to downright asinine (and not just for banks).
I'd prefer if governments would take a step back and invest into enforcing actual crimes themselves and not just stick with money laundering charges because these are easier to prove. It was already bad under Al Capone (who got nabbed for taxes instead of murder), and it's way worse today.
Right, that was more my line of thinking. Possession of >$10,000 in cash should not be a crime or assumed to be evidence of one.
It's not, it's just audited. If you go to the bank and give them 10,000 dollars they don't lock you up. They just have one of their people do some research and ask you for some paperwork.
Now, the police seizing money is different, but the police are the police. They can do almost anything they want, and you have next to zero recourse. Of course, they're going to abuse this and steal your money.
Civil forfeiture is even worse, indeed. Legalized highway robbery.
You should also be able to go into a bank and deposit $10k in cash without an anal exam or mandatory reporting to the federal government.
At minimum all of these rules should be inflation-adjusted.
AI Capone is a great name for a crypto trading bot, thanks for the idea.
Since KYC is a major tool for spotting the use of assets for criminal purposes, I would not expect it to be reduced.
They're going to make stablecoins mostly exempt from KYC.
also, the always thorough Molly White https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-81/
Do we think FTX would have been prosecuted if Trump were in office? Note that if FTX were able to hide its fraud for a few more months, they would have been able to bounce back and then some. Not saying that makes it better or worse, but a few months of questionably legal delay tactics would probably go over fine these days (is my 2 cents).
Yes, absolutely.
Why? Because Sam donated to Democrats in addition to the GOP. Paying both sides, or playing both sides, doesn't matter. Sam donated money to the GOP's mortal enemy. That's a sin.
Trump would have thrown the fucking book at him and then some.
And how is this a good thing?! This goes massively against crypto to a massive level - now less people will want to touch it even with a 10-foot pole!
The minnows all think they are sharks.
lol anyone know if this might mean that americans will get access to Binance (specifically not Binance US)?
what an amazing investment! cryptocurrency criminals donated just a few hundred million to Trump's "campaign" (primary money laundering op), and they get a license to do infinity crime against the government and civilians.
corruption has the best ROI around, by fucking far.
Purely about helping Russia and North Korea.
They must be laughing so hard how easily it is to manipulate Trump to do their bidding.
How does separation of powers work in the US? could Trump decide not to prosecute let say financial fraud in general?
The constitution requires that the executive "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." The executive is not granted unlimited power to refuse to enforce the law.
However, courts have historically given the executive leeway in how it chooses to prioritize things and this has led to plenty of cases where the federal government has official policy to deprioritize enforcement of certain crimes. This has not been abused too much in the past but I'm not sure if that norm will hold in the future.
Correct. In general, the backstop would be Congress saying "Enough" and threatening impeachment were the law not enforced.
There have been interesting examples on both sides of the aisle of strategic non-enforcement. When states began legalizing marijuana, the law is quite clear (as per the supremacy clause) that federal law enforcement can still enforce the restrictions on growing and selling it. The Obama administration made extremely clear that within the states where it had been legalized, enforcing the federal law would be a career-limiting move for the relevant federal agents. AFAIK, every administration since has de-facto kept that policy regarding those states, even though Congress has never moved to make marijuana legal to use and distribute.
Unfortunately, the Constitution's text has been increasingly under subject of debate. Trump himself is trying to redefine the meaning of the jurisdiction clause in birthright citizenship.
To the degree that would promote widespread corruption, it's inconsistent with the president's oath of office and the Constitutionally defined duty that the president uphold the law.
But it's also a political question (this means the Court probably won't get involved, not that the question is normal politics) because the only way to end such an obvious travesty is to impeach, convict, and remove from office.
To whatever degree the Congress can't do that, impugns the Congress who all take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not a leader.
To whatever degree people continue to elect those who support and defend a cult instead of the Constitution? They have given in to passion, and can't be reasoned with. Why argue with irrational people?
Yes. For a concrete example, see marijuana.
The statute of limitations for many crimes exceed the term of any executive, so this is quite risky to rely on. You could just be prosecuted by the next guy for crimes done under the previous guy.
The executive can fairly trivially prevent that on the way out.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_4483
Absolutely true but it's worth noting this has only been done for a small fraction of marijuana crimes, and as far as I know not at all through the backdoor method commonly used (by all administrations) where they just prosecute otherwise legal gun ownership as "owned a gun plus owned weed" and backdoor it as a gun crime.
Yes discretionary (non) prosecution is what opened the door to legalization. Very few lawmakers would run on that issue 20 years ago. But as prosecutors in some areas stopped bringing cases for possession, it became more normalized and full legalization became more acceptable as it was de-facto what was happening anyway. And, it's a new thing to tax which is always going to get attention.
Yes; the president in the US is in charge of the federal prosecuting agency, and has, in practice*, unlimited power to direct non-prosecution.
(And, separately, also has plenary power to pardon federal crimes).
*Late edit: there was an historic case study of this power balance, just a few weeks ago. When Trump directed the DoJ to suspend the criminal prosecution of NYC mayor Eric Adams, in order to corruptly use the continuing threat of prosecution as a cudgel to extort policy concessions from his office, no federal prosecutor had any ability to resist that order. At least seven resigned[0] rather than obey it. The illustration being: whatever laws might say and whatever ethical norms exist—a federal prosecutor, as an employee of the executive branch under the POTUS, has no practical ability to contradict what the POTUS directs them to do.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5298040/justice-departm... ("Fallout from Eric Adams case continues at the Justice Department")
The check on everything that Trump is doing is _impeachment_, and congress can't get it's shit together to protect its own power. The whole design of the federal government was that ambitious assholes in Congress would keep ambitious assholes in the White House in check, and it doesn't work if Congress is full of lickspittles and cowards.
For the longest time, it worked in the US because we had overlapping political parties. For reasons (mostly having to do with race) you had conservative and liberal Democrats and Republicans, and they overlapped a lot ideologically, so bills would pass mostly in a bipartisan way (even something like the creation of Medicare and Medicaid got about half the minority party to support it- https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/89-1965/h35 and https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/89-1965/s151). Over the past 30 years that has gone away and parties are strictly sorted ideologically. My personal theory for that is the decline of local news. With Facebook and Craigslist killing the local advertising business all that's left is national news sources, and so all people know about their local Rep or Senator is the letter after their name, and their opinion on the President, there is no room for looking at someone as an individual. And so the people who could be an individual have largely left, and replaced by a great mass of indistinguishable nonentities.
I think counter-intuitively, a lot of the anti-corruption reforms in congress basically destroyed the ability of congress to write compromise bills, because you could no longer buy people off by building a highway in their district or whatever. It would probably be a good thing to bring back horse trading and earmarks again, somewhat.
>How does separation of powers work in the US? could Trump decide not to prosecute let say financial fraud in general?
He can "do" essentially anything, per the supreme court. For 250 years we had norms and customs and decorum and shame that kept things from escalating to a constitutional crisis. But that has all been so thoroughly broken at this point that literally no one knows what will happens next. One thing is certain, that there will be no way out of this but elections.
> One thing is certain, that there will be no way out of this but elections.
Those inconveniences will be next for the chop. Mark my words.
Wanna bet? I will give you 5-to-1 odds that there will be elections in 2026, 2028. I win, I pay you $1000 - you win you pay me $200.
Offering only 5-to-1 odds that the United States will have a presidential election just shows what an insane place we're in right now.
more has to do with my time preference around money and whether i think i could get a better return on the market. that said, of course we are in a more precarious place than anytime in the 21st c - but still not very precarious democracy wise imo
> He can "do" essentially anything, per the supreme court.
This is often said, but it's not true and it has nothing to do with anything that Trump is doing. What they ruled is that he can't be _prosecuted_ for most actions he takes as president. It obviously doesn't mean that the Supreme Court can't overrule executive actions, because they continued to do that after that ruling was made. And as much as Democrats complained about it at the time, it's probably the only thing keeping Biden from facing some kind of phony indictment right now.
The _only_ thing that is allowing Trump to get away with this is Congress's inability to act, or passive acquiescence to what he's doing.
> This is often said, but it's not true and it has nothing to do with anything that Trump is doing
This is not true. It has everything to do with what Trump is doing and has done.
> What they ruled is that he can't be _prosecuted_ for most actions he takes as president.
Again untrue. What they ruled is that he cannot be held criminally liable for any official actions. Unofficial actions are still up for debate. And you'd have to be extremely naive to wonder why they didn't give any guideline regarding distinction between official and unofficial actions. Or wonder why they refused to take up the exact same issue when asked by the prosecutor.
> And as much as Democrats complained about it at the time, it's probably the only thing keeping Biden from facing some kind of phony indictment right now.
This isn't true as well. If they wanted to, they can still go after Biden and claim that his acts were "unofficial".
> The _only_ thing that is allowing Trump to get away with this is Congress's inability to act, or passive acquiescence to what he's doing.
Definitely not the only thing, but one of the reasons why Congress doesn't act is because of violent backlash from the MAGA crowd. Like when credible death threats pressured the NC senator into voting for the SecDef - https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/politics/cowardice-gop-faces-...
> It obviously doesn't mean that the Supreme Court can't overrule executive actions…
What is their plan for enforcing said ruling?
They have only _ever_ been able to enforce their rulings through the acquiescence of the other branches. There's no enforcement mechanism in the constitution, and neither is judicial review, for that matter. If the president wants to ignore the court, and congress doesn't do anything about it, there's nothing the courts can do, and that has always been true.
Always true, not always so problematic.
The Executive Branch, of which Trump is granted oversight in our Constitution, is responsible for the enforcement of our laws.
Our courts have established that the Executive branch can't decide which laws to enforce, but can prioritize which laws to enforce.
IANAL, but at the Federal level I'd say "yes".
States can do their own thing, using their own laws & resources, +/- the risk of annoying Trump.
The US has no real seperation of powers.
Well, yes it does, but it doesn’t do any good if two of the branches decide not to exercise their power.
[flagged]
Lol, Idiocracy 2 already happened. First showing was a little over four years ago.
Biff's whole schtick in Back to the Future 2 was literally based on Trump.
Except it wasn't. The character was nothing like Trump ever was. If you remember correctly, Trump was America's darling up until the second he announced he was running as a Republican. This was the most obvious smear campaign in history, and no one could have survived it like him had the actually been guilty of any of it.
>Except it wasn't.
[cough]
>Screenwriter Bob Gale confirms long-standing fan theory that Marty’s nemesis in the trilogy was modelled on the Republican presidential candidate
>“We thought about it when we made the movie! Are you kidding?” Gale said to the Daily Beast. “You watch Part II again and there’s a scene where Marty confronts Biff in his office and there’s a huge portrait of Biff on the wall behind Biff, and there’s one moment where Biff kind of stands up and he takes exactly the same pose as the portrait? Yeah.”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/23/back-to-the-fut...
He's been a pariah since the 80s at least. See eg Muppets Episode 2399 about Grump Tower https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FeyDm4vrFo or https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/1988-the-yea... for a more detailed history on some of his decisions. From the article regarding his 1987 first book:
This reads like campaign copy.
Trump was always the butt of businessman jokes. He was never "america's darling". He always wanted to be in the club, to be seen as an example of business excellence, but the actual examples are generally pretty quiet and keep to themselves.
I grew up in a town slightly north of Manhattan often known for being the bastion of the Hedge Fund industry. IYKYK.
Donald Trump once owned a home in that town. He didn't hold on to it for very long, as Donald Trump was the butt of every joke those same financiers and their kids told growing up in the 90s and early 2000s. He realized that in the world of UHNW people, wealth is quiet and wealth also knows who's for real, and who isn't.
Turns out, a loudmouth who wears makeup and bankrupted 2 casinos isn't really wealth. Donald Trump was ran out of town because it was clear quickly that he was nothing more than a cartoon character.
I learned it first on HN a few weeks ago, but someone else said it was 4 casinos.
It's so painfully obvious to anyone paying attention that his whole character reeks of fraud. How this news could ever come as a surprise to anyone is a testament to how poorly our mainstream and social media outlets have informed the citizenry.
Fox News is by far the most watched TV news channel in the US.
I think it is clear that they are not out there to inform the citizenry in any meaningful capacity. (Side note: I suggest watching the channel every now and then just to get an idea of what the largest “news” channel is feeding Americans.)
Fox News is entertainment masquerading as news.
Not even masquerading. They came out and stated publicly that they're an entertainment company.
To avoid having to be truthful
Brain washing masquerading as entertainment masquerading as news.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. It was stated in a court case from them that they're entertainment.
If you think about it, television has never been designed to inform or edify anyone.
Television is meant to sell ads and blanket the nations with a haze of opiates in order to keep us pacified and distracted and far too stupid to make waves.
And people blame religion for this stuff ...
Obviously fox news is politically biased in its coverage. I just dont understand how any objective observer could perceive the others (cnn, msnbc etc) as any different?
It's awfully hard to find any content on CNN or MSNBC that approaches the total shamelessness which Fox displays on a regular basis.
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1895597181945725304
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1905778768511406175
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1909744238621020262
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1909717088241172661
Something about first two links gives me Breencast vibes.
e.g. https://youtu.be/1gKcGrxZbFA
https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Breencast
They are all opinion shows but Im sure its not that hard to find examples in the opposite vein on other channels where America is described as racist, white supremacist etc (all the left-wing tropes).
Then go find them and report back.
The examples of opinion shows on msnbc/cnn attacking republicans and covering for democrats are endless and just as relentless as fox news. Rachel Maddow for example, ran the Russia collusion hoax lie for years.
Literally all that's on Fox News is lies upon lies in service of the GOP. I do not hold the other channels in my heart, but there are degrees of misleadingness and partisanship.
Everything and everybody is politically biased. It means nothing to say that. Everyone is a liar, but it means nothing about honesty to point that out.
What is meaningful is the degree to which they are, and what else they are. I don't think we need a pedantic debate about Fox News.
The difference is what the bias tends towards. Jon Stewart made this point a decade ago, and I don't think anything has changed. Fox New is biased in partisan way – specifically protecting and advocating towards the goals of a political party.
NYT, CNN, etc are biased towards other things first (conflict, spectacle, consensus) and while the majority of their staff likely have a liberal bias, they are not actively partisan.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYbtUztVctI
"they are not actively partisan"....again, no objective observer believes this. And quoting Jon Stewart would be like me quoting Tucker Carlson.
Oh? I hadn’t heard that Stewart got his company a 780+ million dollar settlement in large part because he had texts stating he knew he was lying to the public.
Someone should do something about that Stewart fellow if he keeps getting away with the stuff
I can find this (easily). Link?
I was being sarcastic. Tucker is a proven in court liar and propagandist and the person I was replying to was stating that John Stewart’s biases are equivalent in magnitude
Stewart is obviously a died-in-the-wool leftist and if you can't see that then you lack basic comprehension skills.
You seem to enjoy stating subjective, debatable opinions as objective fact without any evidence while pairing them with juvenile insults.
It's very effective.
The facts exist independent of your empty words.
I never argued otherwise. But implying that just being biased towards one side is equivalent to Tucker Carlsons level of dedication to the cause in spite of the truth is where you are wrong.
Eh, wrong is too weak. I think you fully understand the false comparison you are making and how it influences public discourse
went right over my head. oops.
Carlson, in contrast to Stewart, is probably one of the better examples of the strength of freedom of the press in the United States.
Where Stewart has and does continue to work successfully with several mainstream media channels, Carlson is so dislikable he can only be heard because he founded his own podcast. Truly, it is a great country that has the laws protecting that man's right to keep being heard.
I believe Carlson was one of the most popular hosts on one of the most popular channels till he was sacked. Keeping your job in the mainstream media, is no badge of honour. It just means you're happy to sacrifice your independence and submit to the demands of the media biz (and mainstream groupthink).
Indeed, whether it is a badge of honor to be so professionally dislikable you can no longer hold employment in the entertainment sector under anyone but yourself is something reasonable people can disagree on. But what a great country it is that guarantees him the right to still be so self-employed!
I think there is a very big difference between Stewart and Tucker.
You might not agree with Stewart's principles, but he has them and will fight his own party over it. Tucker flew over to Russia to kiss Putin's behind and even Putin made fun of how bad it was. He then tried to show how awesome it was in Russia and made it obvious that he hasn't been in a grocery store in ages.
Jon Stewart has never presented the news
Because it's not boolean
Binary is the word you are looking for. 2 alternatives. Binary.
Boolean is a more general concept in algebra, tracing back to George Bool. That many programming languages call the 2-valued data type that expresses truth values as some variant of "boolean" is unfortunate.
Sorry. I knew that but wasn't paying enough attention writing the comment
The problem is not political bias, but disinformation.
Clumping everyone in one group is actually one of the goals of this: to get people tired of trying to figure out reality and to give up.
As obvious as it is - when you think everyone lies, liars will be the only ones who win. When you think that everyone is the same - the worst ones will win every time.
I'm not completely sure what point you are trying to make but I can assure you we get all kinds of distortions, half-truths, lies and cherry-picked narratives from channels other than Fox news too.
Fox News is less a news outlet and more a performance art piece in which actors, costumed as journalists, deliver carefully scripted outrage to an audience so thoroughly conditioned they believe they're watching journalism—when in reality, it’s more akin to a soap opera written by a political strategist and directed by the ghost of Joseph McCarthy.
I think the media has made it plenty clear he's a fraud. The citizenry is to blame (or I guess maybe the education system or lead)
Anecdotally, most of the people I know who support his policies do so in hopes that their financial choices will work out. They are educated and financially well off individuals. Do they check all the boxes (international dev, economics, science, etc)? No, but they can be considered educated over the general US pop.
Not a great comparison obviously, but education was great in the Weimar republic as well, with a diverse and thriving press and near 100% literacy. The United States can't match those numbers.
It seems its always about something else besides educational level.
Germans were grappling with losing WWI. Americans are grappling with being overtaken by China.
54% of all Americans read and comprehend at a Grade 6 lvl. This probably includes the President and his closest advisors.....
It's partially an educational problem. I'm old enough to have been taught an idealized version of U.S. history in school. We learned things like how George Washington chopped down his father's cherry tree, but when his father asked him if he had done it, he "could not tell a lie." There was Honest Abe, who, as a child, walked 5 miles to return 2 cents that had been given to him as change in error.
Now, maybe this stuff wasn't all historically true, but in a sense it was better than true. It set an expectation for an ideal President. Serious dishonesty was taught as being disqualifying for the office of President, and honesty was taught as the deepest American value. Even if, in reality, prior Presidents hadn't always been honest, it created a tendency for voters to strongly prefer honest appearing candidates. Nixon's resignation was maybe the strongest affirmation of this principle that ever happened. I think it was with Clinton that this broke, and people started not to care too much about honesty and exclusively focus on their own perceived interests. Certainly the media environment, economic conditions, and the decline of mainline Protestantism had something to do with it too.
> I think it was with Clinton that this broke, and people started not to care too much about honesty and exclusively focus on their own perceived interests.
Or, more likely, when Fox News was launched (1996) during his tenure.
Well yes, it's complicated. That's part of what I meant by the "media environment." In the post-war period, broadcast media was mostly dominant, but it was both regulated and subject to the fairness doctrine, but also limited. There were only a few channels per metro area. News was only on an hour or two per day, and it wasn't that popular, so it lost money, but it was required by law as public interest programming in order to retain the FCC broadcast license.
The lower production costs, higher reach, and nonexistent regulation of wide bandwidth cable TV created the space for Fox, and then also to a lesser extent, MSNBC.
In my opinion, the distorted information propagated by these outlets had a synergistic effect with the changes in the emphasis of the educational system in the late 80s-early 90s to deemphasize honesty as a core American value.
You are right about everything except it goes back to Nixon.
I think the media continues to sane-wash him. The AP news headline of his recent meeting with Mark Rutte was
"NATO secretary-general tells Trump he’s motivating alliance members to spend more on defense"
It doesn't say anything about Greenland. It should have because Trump continued to push it:
""We've been dealing with Denmark, we've been dealing with Greenland, and we have to do it. We really need it for national security. I think that's why NATO might have to get involved in a way, because we really need Greenland for national security. It's very important," Trump said."
From Reuters, which seems to be doing a moderately better job.
"Trump wants to control Greenland" along with "Trump threatens to annex Canada" should be at the top of every headline because its complete insanity. No one voted for this, no one wants this, if Biden had said it or Obama had said it or any president had said it at any time every they would have become a laughing stock and every politician and voter would have risen up against them.
But it gets swept under the rug, in the same way all his insanity gets swept under the rug. Where were the headlines when he openly admired Arnold Palmer's penis? Nowhere, instead we got "Trump attacks Harris on immigration".
I've got my explanations but they all make me sound like a raving conspiracy theorist. Nevertheless, its my only explanation. This is what happens when its us vs. the billionaires. They can always outspend, and everyone really only cares about the bottom line.
Billions of dollars spent on elections by people with insane net worths and you're going to blame the citizens who largely struggle to get from paycheck to paycheck? Hacker News attracts a real "social bully" element for reasons I can't rightly determine.
It's easy to assume everyone thinks the same way. It's hard to comprehend just how different other lifestyles might be, so it's just easier hand wave it all away. It might not even be intentional or consciously being done.
Most politics chatter is in-group therapy sessions. For SC libs under a Republican administration the analysis becomes: did the majority push the Republican button? And the analysis ends there.
For this therapeutic session there is no room for looking beyond the absolute surface of the issue, like you did.
But unfortunately these narratives don’t just get trotted out among apolitical libs. The political scientist Rachel Bitecofer had a social media meltdown when Trump won. And again the analysis was “who pushed the Republican button”.
Those same citizens voted for Trump so they could put screws in iPhones and their children would have a bright future working in coal mines and factories.
It's both, we know citizens have power (Wisconsin), we know money has power(Elon Musk)
But Wisconsin was wondering because people hate Elon Musk.
My worry is that billionaires would fund anonymously both political media and they also own their own social media and so citizens would kind of less vote ... Or billionaire power would overcome that of citizen.
I think we need citizens to be aware of this but I also understand politics is a shitshow and i have so many hassles, why take another one.
And to that, I have no answer. i myself am stuck on this dilemma. I am really going to stop reading news because I don't think I personally can do anything. I have better things to do like studying or building software which can do better impact.
Though it also doesn't sucks to know about politics except I have seen people are really set in stone of politics, myself included.
According to a sibling top-comment this is not a decision to not pursue cryptocurrency fraud altogether, just to leave some such crimes to other agencies in the federal government. That is, if the SEC wants charges filed against some person, then presumably the DOJ will prosecute, but the DOJ will not prosecute w/o the SEC (or other regulator) requesting it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43636390
> is a testament to how poorly our mainstream and social media outlets have informed the citizenry.
You're assuming people _want_ to be "informed." You could build the best news apparatus in the world, the most accurate reporting, with full scale third party auditing of your results.
It likely would not change very much. Humans are not designed to lock into large scale groups and then make coordinated long term decisions together. In my opinion we should avoid doing this as much as is possible.
Agreed. People want to be entertained, not informed.
Great point. I made much the same before in a different way.
We're all clear Disney, Star Wars, TV is entertainment. People are not clear that Rush Limbaugh, opinion makers on podcasts, Fox, CNN, Tick-tock is also entertainment.
The straightest venue for news proper has got to be CSPAN. They're clearly there to inform not to push a point, piss you off at the other side, or any other shadow-boxing goals.
Getting people pissed off to own the liberals, the neo-cons, to own the Trump supporters is ... entertainment and it doesn't hurt (I write this cynically) it helps drives up ad-revenue.
Are you people?
"Are you not entertained?!"
It's been obvious since the 70s. That's what baffles me so much. He's been the face of the rich person asshole fraudster for 50 years. I cannot wrap my head around it.
Whoever it was that hired him for The Apprentice has a lot to answer for.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-apprentice-producer-burnett...
I know people, some of them educated, who are absolutely addicted to Burnett's reality TV shows. Those shows are uniformly routinely cruel to their participants. I find it creepy that some people are attracted to that kind of entertainment. There's something deep inside them that I don't want to see.
He gives people permission to be their worst selves.
When the president gets away with all sorts of crime. When he openly mocks people. When he indulges in racism. When he complains about being treated unfairly. When he lies. When he defrauds, or grifts, or flip-flops. When he's misogynitic. What's he saying is "you too can do these things and get away with it".
People like that. People like that there's no accountability for bad behavior.
Sure, we can talk about policy, or economy, or whatever (how's that working out?) But deep down the democrats ask us to be the best version of ourselves (or else) and Republicans delight in us being the worst.
Human nature being what it is, we end up here. Just remember folks, we voted for this.
Over the decades Trump has popped in and out of my attention like "oh, I guess that guy is still around". Yet from what I gather there have been people following him the whole time like he's someone important or worthwhile.
I think what it comes down to is that the average person in our society is just an aggressive basic shithead who isn't burdened by an abundance of thinking, and so to them Trump appears as a successful businessman rather than a hollow snake oil salesman.
It's because the folks in the back-end of things like what he represents in terms of wealth consolidation and fewer lookie-loos to peek inside to see what's truly going on. "Trump" is a symptom of much broader things that can only be fixed by fire. And even then, just like the cockroach, he'll scurry away under the baseboards to hide until his next meal.
This plus pausing enforcement of foreign bribery plus having is own meme coin, is anyone still questioning if Trump is absolutely being bribed by foreign agents?
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/paus...
https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/trumps-meme-coin-...
IMO what is becoming painfully obvious is that the checks and balances don't work, and need a serious overhauling. It should be impossible for a single person, or even a whole party, to blatantly break the law, or risk national security with reckless decisions, and face no consequences.
If you're screwed enough you eventually just want to burn the whole thing down, whether it's rational or not, and there are definitely some people who voted that way.
That, or he's just a recognition of reality: resources and being a dick get you everywhere, whether it be business, politics, international relations, or the courts. Being authoritarian didn't stop China from becoming a near-parity superpower. Europeans were more than happy to start working on Nordstream 2 and attend both the World Cup and Winter Olympics in Russia long after it became apparent that Putin and his ilk were going to return to being imperialistic autocrats. Why does it matter if the US does the same if you're willing to fall in line?
Most of Europe and European leaders have admitted they were wrong about Russia. Some, but not enough, Republicans know the vatniks among them are wrong.
They were, but they've shown that they'll gladly ignore human rights abuses and autocracy so long as the price is right. Trump's used to doing business that way, unfortunately.
Really, if Putin hadn't invaded Ukraine, I don't think Europeans would particularly care about those problems in Russia. It only really became problematic when the order of the continent was threatened, and even then it took some serious arm-twisting to get certain members of NATO and the EU to commit to measures to do something.
Of course, relative to starting a land war in Europe "...if Putin hadn't invaded Ukraine, I don't think Europeans would particularly care..."
That's proportionate. Equally, though, I'm sure they would be pleased to find Russia wanting to join a rules based order. Bolsonaro was just recently found to be plotting to kill his political rival in Brazil. What should we who are not Brazilians do about that?
Depends. Are the Brazilians doing anything about it?
If not, and no one else is, then there's a chance that someone like Trump might try to do something like that himself. That's what he does. He sees someone else getting away with something bad, tries to do it because he thinks he'll get an advantage, gets caught, and complains about how unfair it is that he got caught.
If for some reason you did not understand cryptocurrency outside of its use in countries like North Korea, and wanted to crush its consumer confidence, you would in fact turn it into a lawless madhouse in favour of your fiat (which is rapidly losing value)
Trump forgets the US, and most other major nations have a cryptocoin. a loss of confidence in an emerging currency market is a great way to torpedo your nations hegemony.
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Never been proven? He’s been convicted of a crime already. Are there really HNers who only watch Fox News?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-05-30/bloomb...
> TDS is real,
No it isn't. It's just a hand-wavy way to say "this is no longer a serious conversation".
My degree from Trump University can confirm this.
He has never committed "fraud", besides all those times he had to pay fines for committing fraud and settling class actions for fraud. But beyond that, he's fine. It's just TDS haters talking about "reality" and "facts".
Can you illuminate the legitimate reasoning behind the OP then? If you have a claim that people have the wrong idea about Trump, then why not provide some of your own evidence?
> no one has ever proved it
What? Trump University [1]. Atlantic City [2][3].
> any successful business person will have those in their portfolio
Most businesses don’t have this sort of widespread rap sheet. And most businesses aren’t headed by a felon.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/spin-deride-attack-h...
[2] https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fincen-fines-trump...
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Rock_Hotel_%26_Casino_A...
The only TDS is the blind devotion his cult has, that lets them contort themselves into supporting anything the fascist con-artist spews out.
Not getting into the cryptocurrency rug-pull he just pulled during his inauguration 2 months ago.
Not even getting into his lie about election fraud.
Here's just a small smattering of the civil and legal judgements Trump has lost in regards to defrauding people.
> In December 2022, two entities of the Trump Organization were found guilty on 17 counts, including tax fraud and falsifying business records. The scheme involved providing executives with off-the-books perks to evade taxes
> In May 2024, Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. The charges were related to hush money payments made during his 2016 presidential campaign to conceal information.
> In February 2024, a New York judge ruled that Donald Trump and his companies had engaged in a years-long scheme to inflate his wealth on financial statements. The court imposed a $355 million penalty and barred Trump from serving in top roles at any New York company for three years
> In August 2022, Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization's former CFO, pleaded guilty to 15 felony charges, including grand larceny and tax fraud, admitting to a scheme that evaded taxes on $1.7 million in income.
> In November 2019, a New York state judge ordered Donald Trump to pay $2 million in damages for misusing the Trump Foundation's funds to further his political and business interests.
> Trump University, a for-profit real estate training program, faced multiple lawsuits alleging that it defrauded students by making false claims about the value of its courses and the involvement of Trump himself. In April 2018, a federal judge finalized a $25 million settlement to resolve these lawsuits
> Trump and his companies have been accused for decades of refusing to pay contractors, workers, and small businesses after work was completed
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this is good for Bitcoin
It might be good for Bitcoin, it's bad for pretty much everything else.
We depend on our institutions to investigate cases of fraud. If all a fraudster has to do in order to legally commit fraud is to launder it through a cryptocurrency then of course every fraudster is going to do that.
It's getting fucking exhausting seeing how blatant this orange president is being without even trying to pretend he's not corrupt. He launched two cryptocurrencies on the day he took office, and he's in charge of a publicly traded company.
Frankly I am kind of just sick of this cryptocurrency shit in general. I am embarrassed that I ever fell for it, and frankly if anyone still believes in it as a concept at this point then I really don't understand why.
it's fucking terrible! I'm shitposting while having breakfast https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/this-is-good-for-bitcoin
Ah, whooshed over my head! I'm a bit out of the loop with this stuff I guess.
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If you didn't see this coming when he launched a memecoin then I don't know what to tell you.
> Per Blanche’s memo, which was circulated on Monday, the Justice Department is dropping litigation and enforcement actions “while President Trump’s actual regulators do this work outside the punitive criminal justice framework.”
Elon Musk and Russell Vought have been trying to kill the CFPB and the SEC is toothless now so what financial regulators is he talking about?
The words "President Trump" appears in that memo six times. Does someone have a "suck up" filter that inserts this?
In preparation for the kleptocrats to loot various pools of money from the government.
Can SBF be out now?
Turns out the real rug pull was on November 5.
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There is no mandate, Trump received under 50% of the votes