Not quite. There are supposed to be checks and balances. See this for how he works with the acquiescence of the Republican Party who is fully responsible for letting him do it:
With all but 2 Republican senators voting to make Todd Blanche our Attorney General, Donald Trump just walked away from a $100 million fine for tax fraud that the IRS has been trying to collect from him for over a decade. This was the centerpiece of the “settlement” that Blanche wrote up that says that Trump, Uday and Qusay, Jared and Ivanka, Tiffany and Boulos, and even Barron will never again have to worry about paying taxes or ever being audited. It may well even extend to their business partners.
Meanwhile, last week Capital One bank submitted sworn testimony to a court that back in 2021 they shut down and closed 385 Trump-owned businesses because their fraud department — and its leader, a man with “extensive financial fraud law enforcement experience” — believed Trump’s businesses were engaging in illegal money laundering and the bank wanted nothing to do with it.
Even more astonishing, neither of these revelations from the past two weeks made more than the tiniest stir in our corporate media, which is increasingly afraid of crossing Trump or his neofascist billionaire buddies. There’s a meme that’s traveling around the internet right now that’s shockingly on-the-nose:
“It’s so weird how everybody simply accepts that Trump is a criminal and a Russian stooge and then goes on about their days.”
Setting aside the legal horror show this all represents for a moment, this mind-boggling level of corruption could be political gold, and today’s Democratic leadership is pissing it away.
Democrats are (continuously, it seems) debating what should be their campaign strategy, their main through-line message, for the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Every faction and special interest group in the country is pushing their own idea, but there’s one overarching concept — one word — that can encompass most all of them and do so with a proven political punch:
“Corruption.”
At every level, ever since the Reagan Revolution, the heart of Republican policies has been the naked corruption of our American political and economic systems by billionaires and giant corporations. Since the 1980s, Republicans have sold their corruption with slogans like, “Government is the problem, not the solution,” and “Let the market decide,” but their real message is, “Turn it all over to billionaires and their corporations.” The result has been:
— Tax cuts and loopholes for billionaires and big corporations that, in aggregate since 1981, add up to more than our total national debt of $39 trillion (in other words, Republicans borrowed $39 trillion in our names that our kids will repay and gave all of it to the morbidly rich).
— Reagan’s 1983 suspension of enforcement of the anti-trust laws that has caused every industry in America to become a form of monopoly dominated by five or fewer massive corporations, gutting small business competition and raising prices.
— Five on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court ruling that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as “free speech,” handing our elections over to the highest bidders.
— Virtually every legacy federal regulatory agency being run today by industry insiders working on a revolving-door basis.
— Members of Congress and the corrupt Trump regime engaging in insider trading with impunity; for $100,000 a month, Trump‘s Nazi-infested social media site will even sell you insider information.
— A GOP-aligned military-industrial complex that’s essentially taken over Pentagon procurement.
— An anti-labor Labor Department; an anti-education Education department; an anti-civil rights Civil Rights enforcement agency; an anti-environment Environmental Protection Agency; etc…
— Trump’s mysterious pardons that always seem to go to people who’ve given him millions of dollars (after Giuliani claimed he and Trump were selling pardons for two million each and splitting the money).
— Gutting of the Internal Revenue Service so that wealthy tax cheats and multinational corporations can more easily evade taxes with near-impunity.
— The systematic sabotage and even privatization of public institutions — from the US Postal Service to public schools to prisons — so Republican-donor corporations can profit off the essential services that used to be considered part of the commons.
— The rivers of dark money after Citizens United that’re letting billionaires and corporations secretly pour functionally unlimited amounts of cash into our elections with zero accountability.
— Using the Federal Communications Commission to loosen media ownership rules for Trump’s billionaire and nepo-baby buddies while, at the same time, threatening to shut down or force sales of those outlets that don’t sing Trump’s praises.
— Red-state and federal voter suppression laws that make it harder for poor, young, female, and minority voters to have a say in our democracy.
— The Republican Party’s multi-decade refusal to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices causing Americans to pay the highest prescription costs in the developed world.
— Paralyzing the Federal Election Commission so even the most bizarre and blatant violations of what’s left of our election laws by Republican politicians are never even investigated, much less prosecuted.
— The use of tax havens and trade policy to encourage offshoring American jobs while bigshot executives reap record profits and bonuses, hollowing out the American middle class.
— The Republican normalization of lobbyists literally writing legislation via groups like the Koch-funded ALEC, ensuring laws are crafted to benefit industries and billionaires rather than the public.
— Rewriting environmental and labor rules for the benefit of polluting industries, often done brazenly and in the open by Trump appointees with direct financial stakes in the companies or industries they’re supposed to regulate.
— The strategic packing of the federal courts with hardcore rightwing/neofascist judges that ensures decades of rulings that favor corporate and billionaire power, weakens labor and consumer protections, and shields Trump’s corruption from any kind of meaningful accountability.
Republicans understand the power of mobilizing the public’s outrage against the corruption that they themselves have participated in for over 40 years. Astonishingly, cynically, that’s the meta-message to Trump’s main campaign slogan each of the three times he’s run for president: “Drain the swamp.”
And it worked, even though it was an outrageous lie.
Democrats, who have actually been trying to do something about corruption for years, need to appropriate the anti-corruption theme as their main message for 2026 and 2028. Because, universally, it works.
— When working in Russia, I witnessed the way Alexi Navalny came so close to taking down Putin that the Russian dictator ordered him murdered; it was done via Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. It systematically and relentlessly exposed the ways Putin and his cronies were looting their nation’s government while passing out favors to oligarchs willing to align themselves with them.
— In the 1980s, I was working for a German international relief organization in The Philippines when Cory Aquino mobilized an anti-corruption message against the Marcos dynasty; the week Marcos and his wife fled the country I was bumped off Philippine Airlines flights five days in a row because so many of their cronies were appropriating all the seats (the airline was run by a crony).
— When Jair Bolsonaro first successfully ran for president of Brazil it was on a campaign against the corruption that “Operation Car Wash” had exposed in the Lula administration. When elected, Bolsonaro, instead of ending the corruption, slid right into the system and expanded it, leading to his own ultimate downfall and current imprisonment.
— In Delhi, activist Anna Hazare’s 2011 anti-corruption hunger strike ignited a nationwide movement that helped spur passage of India’s Lokpal anti-corruption law and led his former allies to found the Aam Aadmi Party, which rose from scratch to power in Delhi on a clean-government platform.
— And, of course, it was the anti-corruption message of the EuroMaidan “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014 that lifted then-comedian and TV star Volodymyr Zelenskyy into the presidency of Ukraine.
From Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Era of the early 20th century to the present, anti-corruption messages have repeatedly proven to be one of the most potent forces in American politics, too.
— In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt built a foundation of mass support by casting monopolies as a “corrupt alliance” between the morbidly rich and our government, while the exposure of William M “Boss” Tweed’s graft by Thomas Nast’s biting cartoons helped bring down New York’s Tammany Hall.
— The Watergate scandal turned corrupt abuse of power into a national reckoning that forced Richard Nixon from office and fueled sweeping electoral gains for reformers like Jimmy Carter, while more recent scandals like George Santos’ lies and loss reinforced “clean government” as a winning local message.
— At the national level, Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” campaign and the “rigged system” critiques by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren show that, across the ideological spectrum, framing political battles as struggle against entrenched, self-dealing elites remains one of the most consistently reliable ways to get energized voters to the polls and win power.
It makes perfect sense that this should be the Democrats’ main strategy: the core philosophy of the GOP that was first made explicit by the Reagan administration — “greed is good” — openly invites corruption.
As we’ve seen in virtually every congressional vote over the past four decades, Republican politicians are now entirely in the pockets of the fossil fuel, health insurance, tax preparation, and weapons industries, among others.
Whether it’s the corrupt collusion between the Kushner and Netanyahu families that helped lead us into an illegal war against Iran, the billions Trump’s family has made in crypto and other schemes, the insider trading on the war, putting industry insiders in charge of regulatory agencies, or the DeSantis and Paxton/Abbott corruption scandals, there are vivid examples of Republican corruption laying on the public ground all over the country in plain sight.
Every Democrat in America should scan their local horizon for examples of corruption they can use against Republicans because, for the GOP, corruption has become a way of life.
The words “Republican corruption” should be continuously on Democrats’ lips, whether campaigning, speaking to constituents, or making media appearances.
Hammer these corrupt SOBs with their own crimes against democracy and the middle class, and Democrats will see results like Magyar, Zelenskyy, Aquino, and so many others have achieved.
It’s simple, easy, and powerful: “It’s the corruption, stupid!”
Louise’s Daily Song: “When Did Trump’s Corruption Stop Being News?”
oh reminds me to the movie Syriana, many years ago:
Accepting corruption as somehow necessary or inevitable is certainly a point of view one can have, but even granting that for the sake of argument, we have now reached a point where corruption has no limits and an appalling percentage of the people have embraced it and revel in it. At least if it doesn’t seem to impact them personally and directly, or if it is more harmful to those they distrust or outright hate.
I saw a pretty good thought piece the other day … quoting a journo who said “the people of South Carolina like the notion that …” I don’t remember what the notion was exactly, something along the lines that poverty is caused by laziness maybe … the essayist made the point that “notion” is exactly the right word here. It isn’t an idea, which would have to be grounded in facts / evidence / reality and might have some nuance to it. It’s just a notion which can be a total fantasy, something you wish were true and that you might try to will to be true. Probably something that promotes your tribal identities.
I think it’s that way with civil society. If it’s an idea as it was with the New Deal, we might be able to build a progressively less corrupt and more just society, as we were arguably doing, if imperfectly, between WW2 and about the 1970s or 80s. If it’s just a notion, we might end up with what we had before Trump just made it explicit, which is the good cop / bad cop, less / more corrupt two party system all puppet-mastered by the same elitists and oligarchs with semi-deniable but inexorable extraction of value from the lower classes.
Trump’s only contribution was to turn dishonesty, cruelty and tribalism into performance art. His connections to professional wrestling aren’t accidental.
After nearly a decade of loudly complaining about the fact that modern US aircraft carriers use electromagnetic systems to launch fighter jets instead of steam-powered catapults, Donald Trump has directed the Pentagon to redesign a new aircraft carrier to replace the modern system with the old-fashioned catapults he prefers.
Didn’t I say the next big war would be US Steampunk against Chinese Lasers?
It isn’t a case of the one-eyed leading the blink, it’s a case of “non are as blind as those who do not want to see” … and are criminally incompetent to boot … Trump, Hegseth, RFK jr,. …
This is similar to the “Trump class destroyers” that no actual military analyst says we need or would be at all useful in modern warfare. I think sometimes the military just says they’ll get right on it and then do nothing, and figure (often rightly) that his gnat-like attention span will cause him to forget about it.
I think directives like this just appeal to his rabid base, where everything is about returning to some imagined good old days that never actually existed.
I’d say expensive Jets worth Billions against swarms of cheap but effective drones…
Operation Spiderweb well conducted by Ukraine showed us the future.
Слава Україні!
P.S. the software used for this operation is open source 
There, fixed that for you. Many taxpayers would agree that they’re not “worth” the staggering cost (those in the Industrial-Military Complex excluded).
The justice department, “as we once knew it, is no more”, McQuade (a University of Michigan law professor) wrote. “Blanche has turned it into Trump’s private law firm. What a complete disgrace.”
I agree but that isn’t the future, that is already here. Currently mostly against stationary aircraft, but it’s just a matter of time.
What I’m getting at is how Trump’s anti-Science stance has not just driven away a large part of the brain power that made the US the top dog, but by his greed and pushing his partners’ agenda (mainly oil and gas) is actually reversing technological, medical, environmental, social, economical, legal & more gains - and the Americans pay for that not just at the pump, but in lost respect and willingness of the outside World.
Coal powered steam trains next?
No Todd they should ALWAYS make that pledge ESPECIALLY amid the concern over Trump steering the DoJ
He did just push for a return to steam powered launch systems on aircraft carriers so really can horse & buggy & steam trains be far behind ?
Horses and cowboy colts… the push for the devine frontier in the west, to genocide baptise and colonize teach the First Nations. This is the vision of MAGA, isn’t it?
Not from me but captures it perfectly:
Trump has somehow managed to hand America its most embarrassing, humiliating and ridiculous military defeat in her entire 250 years of existence.
No matter what happens now, no matter how many more bombs the Americans drop, the Iranians will take it, and at the end of it all, they will simply dust themselves down and Iran will carry on being Iran.
Not one American objective will have been achieved in a conflict that will have a $300 billion bill for the American taxpayers to pay, right at the very bitter end.
What Trump has actually achieved is to just empower Iran to heights that they could only ever have dreamed of nine months ago. Trump martyred them as a whole country.
Iran will now be the magnet for every anti-Western regime on the planet. They stood toe-to-toe with the most powerful military force on earth and they didn’t bend an inch.
Because, sadly for America, all that powerful military force has been in the hands of vanity-driven idiots who seemed to think that the war would unfold like an American blockbuster Hollywood movie.
You have a US Commander in Chief who was, in reality, a five-times draft dodger, who was from a family who have not fought or even served for any country in over 150 years, including two world wars. Even Trump’s own grandfather was branded a coward by his own country of origin and refused re-entry after fleeing abroad to avoid his own military service.
Yet during this conflict Trump was busy and really bizarrely posting, in the dead of night, made-up photos of himself on social media as a five-star General in full uniform and wearing the Medal of Honor on his chest.
Iranian leaders died in their homes, along with their families, including children and babies, or at their offices and places of work, all at the hands of American missile strikes.
One senior Iranian officer said that he would be at his desk serving his country if the Americans wanted him. They did want him, and they killed him at his desk the next day with a missile strike.
As for Trump, he hid in an airliner’s food trolley at the mere mention of a threat and left all his staff, including mostly women who were also mothers, to all fly home on the plane.
The plane that the threat was specifically made against. To be obliterated out of the sky.
Yet another victory for Iran and yet another utter humiliation for America.
The rest of the world literally did a giant eye-roll at Trump’s sheer cowardice and the lack of any kind of valour within him.
If you cannot see the sheer insanity of all of this, then sadly you are also the reason America has fallen so fast and so hard, and to such low depths.
Trump somehow has managed to take a fanatical, religious, cruel and at times inhumane regime, a regime who were still hanging young people from cranes, and turned them into a beacon of hope for every country who has ever felt bullied and wronged by the West and especially America.
Trump has made the brutal Iranian regime into folk heroes in many people’s eyes.
That includes former allies who have all just had an absolute gutful of the disrespect and the insults and threats hurled at them continually for two years by Trump and his administration.
The sheer ingratitude that Trump has shown to allied countries who lost young men and women that were fighting to protect American interests. Men and women who answered the American call for help after 9/11.
The damage that Trump has done to American military might will have a follow-on effect and repercussions for years.
The Iran conflict is now all but lost.
No matter what Trump does, no matter how many more people he kills, Iran just has to simply survive and they will rightly claim a historical victory that will be written about in books for years to come.
Meanwhile, Hollywood will make a disaster movie of Trump’s vanity war.
Iran will have proved that no matter how much firepower one has, it is the resilience and the endurance of the enemy that will ultimately decide the outcome.
Trump’s war was cruel and unjust and, above all, it was cowardly.
Trump started it without warning and with Iran believing they were in the middle of peace talks.
It was absolutely no different to the infamous attack by Japan at Pearl Harbor, when the Americans were in the middle of peace talks with Japan.
Roosevelt called it a “cowardly/dastardly attack” and he was right.
Trump then somehow managed to kill 127 little school girls, along with their teachers, in their school, on the very first day of the war.
The world should have been outraged.
When you fight a war you need to be on the right side. You need to be morally right and there needs to be a threat, a threat that you are entitled to confront.
Trump and the US military had none of these on their side. Most US military personnel must have known that there was no real reason to attack Iran.
There was no nuclear threat. Trump’s own various intelligence agencies told him that Iran was not seeking to restart its military-grade uranium enrichment.
Even if Iran suddenly decided to, it was at least a decade away from even testing a nuclear bomb, and that was providing they could source parts and technology and were left unhindered.
But after Trump, you can bet your house on the fact they now realise if they had actually had a nuclear capability, then America would have left them well alone.
Iran has had no ties to any terror attack against the US or any part in an attack on US soil.
In fact, Trump’s own ICE agents had killed more American citizens than Iran had at that point.
Iran had absolutely no part in 9/11.
The two countries that DID, Trump just accepted a plane from one, and is now selling military arms to the other and, astonishingly, Trump is also planning to sell nuclear enrichment technology to them as well.
Trump has made America look weak and at times helplessly pathetic. Trump has emboldened other countries to make a stand against US interests around the globe.
Nobody is looking in awe at America anymore. In fact, they should be looked upon with pity, because they destroyed themselves from within. The hate came from each other and that hate for each other resulted in Trump. Twice!
America and Trump can try and spin this anyway they want.
They can claim victory as many times as they want.
But Americans, and even MAGA Americans, know deep down that they lost, and they lost really badly.
They lost because they put their superior power into the hands of an absolute vanity-driven idiot!
An idiot who doesn’t even have a decent grasp of reality at this point in time. Even as you read this, Trump is busy posting AIs of himself with George Washington on horseback and with Patton during WWII, or as a cape-wearing muscular superhero!
It’s all now just utter insanity…
And that is the Bare Naked Ugly Truth…
—
I only have one thing to correct: the attack on the primary school killing 127 school girls was due to Musk and Hegseth cutting the department responsible for updating the list of potential targets. Because it’s not needed for War. That idiocy is mind boggling as accurate intelligence is essential in War.
So when an old barracks building was converted to a school, it was still listed as a target.
A few years back I said on this forum that a look at the economic history and the political party in charge shows that the Republicans run the economy into the ground via tax cuts for the rich, and Democrats turn it round. Rinse and repeat. One person in particular attacked me for it.
Turns out it has been Republican policy for the last 45 years, as admitted by a Republican advisor)
Despite Republicans’ sloganeering, their tax cuts never “paid for themselves” by generating a burst of economic growth. Instead, they borrowed the money to keep up spending. That invariably left Democrats in a budgetary mess to clean up every time they came into office.
Bruce Bartlett, a former Republican policy adviser who worked on a precursor to Reagan’s 1981 tax cut plan, explained the strategy thus: “It’s all part of Republican plan going on for quite a long time to tie the hands of Democratic presidents.” The huge tax cuts in Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) will “make sure the next Democratic president is a complete and total failure”.
[…]
Destructive though it appears, the OBBBA was just one big step along a path set 45 years ago. Federal government revenues declined as a share of GDP in every Republican administration since Reagan’s. Budget deficits widened every time. The precedent bodes ill for the Democratic administration that seems likely to succeed Trump’s unhinged four years in power.
[…]
To be fair, the OBBBA, the latest chapter in the Republican’s fiscal path of destruction, did cut spending – $1tn-plus from Medicaid and food assistance programs for the poor. But that was no match for $5tn-plus worth of tax cuts doled out largely to the most affluent Americans.
And this leaves Democrats, again, in a budgetary pickle. If the optimistic predictions come to pass and they win control of both houses of Congress in November and the presidency in 2028, they will arrive into the seat of power with at least one hand tied behind their back.
Ambitious, expensive ideas like Medicare for All or allowances for families with children will struggle, given the ballooning deficits and debt Trump left in their way. Even undoing Trump’s cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and subsidies for health insurance under Obamacare will seem forbidding.
Republicans have never been punished politically for their dismal stewardship of the budget.
Full article:
Republicans have not worked for ordinary John Does for at least 45 years, instead they massively redistributed wealth to the rich and powerful.
Not from me, but accurate:
Iran are absolutely handing Trump his own diaper-wearing arse in the war of the comebacks.
So after Iran, YET AGAIN, gave Donald the middle finger to any American deal or request to please please please surrender.
Trump has come up with a shiny new and very cunning plan indeed.
Trump last night:
“I am going to wage a devastating economic war on Iran. I am going to ruin them financially and run their whole economy into the dirt.”
Iran, five hours later, speaking to an Arab news station:
“This threat is from a five-times bankrupt ‘businessman’ who has damaged his own country’s economy twice as President. So yes, we are taking this threat a little more seriously - his track record for creating financial disasters is quite impressive.”
Trump: “They are fu#@ing maniacs”
BOOM…
US debt under Trump is now over 40 trillion dollars and rising.
Trump absolutely owned again. No wonder he keeps having these little sweary, schoolgirl hissy-fit meltdowns over Iran.
And we are all here for it.
The Truth hurts.
It is also very reminiscent of Blackadder & Baldrick …
Again, not from me, but I agree:
If you aren’t following the bond market and the US’s increasingly frantic attempts to stabilize first the Yen and now our own over-extension, you should. I don’t do tons of financial reporting here, because it isn’t my biggest area of interest, but you do need to understand what’s coming, so here’s a fairly basic primer.
I have an essay from earlier this year explaining the basics of how the Bond Market works and why you should care even if you don’t have money. I will link it below in comments, but broadly, Bond rates rising means it is more expensive to borrow money, and the US, with 40 Trillion dollars in debt, also has to pay a larger and larger portion of its assets JUST to service interest payments.
Japan’s interest rates, however, are extremely low - close to 1%, to encourage borrowing. It makes much more sense for Japanese investers who need money to sell off their Treasury Bonds, and replace them with Japanese sources of money, but if they did so, since Japan is the largest single holder of US Treasuries, it would be a financial disaster for the US, so we basically paid them off not to do so. And it lasted…less than a week before all the interventions collapsed and Japan was back to the exact same position.
Yesterday, the Treasury announced it would double the number of Treasury bonds it buys back, and it would fund buying all these Treasuries back every month by selling short dated paper at high rates. At this point, almost no one in the world wants long-dated US Treasuries (I will leave it to you to think about what that might mean.)
And the problem with that, besides the fact that basically it is like putting your mortgage on your credit card, with much higher interest, and the fact that the US is wildly over-extended, plus the fact that many of the reserves have almost certainly been looted and are mostly paper at this point, is that everyone smells blood in the water. You don’t have to buy back your own debt at this scale or put your mortgage on your credit card unless there’s a very serious problem.
And if the US governmentt is ALREADY throwing all its resources at borrowing money, what happens when the economic collapse they are definitely trying to stave off until after the midterms hits, and they have to pay EVEN MORE to respond to the recession? Or cannot service our debt?
The simple fact is that there is no possible way that the US Treasury CAN buy back enough of its debt to shift the markets completely, so these interventions are bound to failure - all they are is a sign of how weak we are. And after that, the economy fallst to the sharks.
The Bond market affects interest rates at the corporate and household level as well - it gets harder to borrow money. And many large companies also have urgent need to borrow rapidly and at low rates, in large part because of the AI bubble. That won’t go well.
The last time Treasury Bond Yields on the longer notes rose as high as this, we had a massive recession, because no one wants to borrow at these rates, and the US still has to keep paying interest - very high interest rates. Trump is desperate to LOWER interest rates, and he may succeed in doing so, but doing so in this context would simply speed up a crash, as everyone recognizes more overt market manipulation that can’t succeed.
And of course, this does not exist in isolation. The Super El Nino and rapidly expanding infrastructure destruction, the hyper-grift, the deregulation, the war and the blockage of Hormuz all play into this. And what it says is that an economic crash is coming. I would not be surprised if these assholes can fake it until November, but it won’t outlast that. And then we’ll all be poorer for their manipulation.
You might have gotten the [correct] impression that some people might be happy of this happening as there is a LOT of money to be made (aka the sharks are circling). Now what is interesting is that Project 2025 talked about this at length …
The president of the US recently suggested the use of the military to solve the bond crisis. Bombing creditors?
Given that I will be retiring very soon and a have a lot of my retirement money in bonds (45% Stock, 50% Bonds Majority intermediate, the rest short term and 5% cash) I am very concerned… If a significant amount of my investmens go away retirement will be very hard - the USA is not a great place to be old and poor!