The message is clear from his circus administration, you can do anything as long as you bribe them
Why? Milton hired Pam Bondi's (the US attorney general's) brother to represent him.
The recent "No Kings" protests were the largest in US history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_and_demonstra...
Also, while I believe more Americans should be protesting, people in other countries (like myself, at one point) may have an inaccurate idea about what heavy US protest "ought to" look like in the media they see.
We'd love to be protesting at the iconic White House and federal Capitol building, creating horizon-to-horizon crowds for the rest of the world to marvel at... But for me (and ~40% of the population) that's a 3500-3700 km trip. How often would you expect someone in Portugal to travel the distance to Moscow for a day of protest? (Worse, assume no good trains.)
Instead, we gather at local state locations, which will typically not get shown (or recognized) internationally, except when folded into a sentence about how "millions protested across the nation."
I think at least some of that 1/3 has their own problems that prevent them from being able to devote energy to politics
Regarding CZ and Binance and the Trumps, they have kind of a symbiotic relationship.
After Binance and CZ pleaded guilty to money laundering in November 2023, for which they paid over $4 billions in fines, WLFI (which is a clone of AAVE belonging to the Trump family) launched a stablecoin called USD1. Magically on March 2025, $2 billion flowed into Binance through MGX, a state backed Abu Dhabi fund, later revealed to have been paid in USD1 (two months before it was unveiled and without at the time no effective audits), effectively propping WLFI’s coin (backed, unbacked, nobody knows, I assume backed). CZ applied for a presidential pardon inmediately after in May 2025.
WLFI now gets to earn about $60–80 million per year in yield from the USD1…
…As long as Binance doesn’t redeem those $2 billion.
I still don’t know what MGX got out of this deal, but I am pretty sure they didn’t walk empty handed.
Honestly, the billionaire is less corrupt-able than the DNC nexus (we all know Biden wasn't running the show, and neither would Harris).
Why would you think that? Do you think that presents from foreign dictators (like plane or investment in crypto fund) are less corrupt?
This kind of vague fluffy language is becoming very common. What evidence? Where is it coming out from?
This is satire, right?
It is the loss of complexity. Many cannot understand that by choosing the lesser of two evils does not mean you support evil. It means your choices are limited. We have turned the political issues into good and evil, rather than disagreements in how to achieve our mostly shared goals. We can no longer see the other side as friends and family, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anyone countering this can just proclaim "both sides" and in some sense they will be right, they have evidence and people do abuse that framework. But at the same time that destroys the bridge between us. The abuse of calling both sides evil along with the accusation that all use cases are instances of abuse. It binarizes the environment, creating a simple world where there are only two choices. Which is easy to do when everything is so complex, as we're so tired and don't want to think.
It's also why this administration's strategy is so effective: overload the opposition. After all, Brandolini's Law states: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." They've weaponized it. It's an effective strategy, and hard to defend against. I'm sure someone will offer a solution, "it's so simple, you just..." and we perpetuate the game.
I don't know which is worse, that 32% were in support of the corrupt leader or that 68% in total are either supported him or didn't care enough to support anyone else
Or, they were not fine with whoever won.
We've got two abismal parties to choose from. Yes, there's an agument for voting for the lesser of two evils, but it's not a great one.
I'd like to believe at least some of those 36% would vote for a decent candidate/party. But once you lose faith in the system, and realize that it doesn't represent you, you might just stop participating in it.
No, we have one destructive/harmful party (R) and one status quo party (D). They are not the same level of bad and that's immediately obvious from this last year.
This is only a remotely viable claim if you think the two evils have extremely similar amounts of evil.
I still voted, because my personal laziness or moral superiority does not trump the very real world effects of the "bad ones" winning. Lazy people like you with post hoc rationalizations exist here too, and they're just as bad and wrong.
They've normalized corruption irrespective of magnitude. That's partly a problem of the little corruption existing in the first place. But it's also a problem of education and tribal populism being given this much power.
Don't think fox news is going to report that he enriched the prez...
You assumed the leader is corrupt, possibly assumed the leader has bad intentions, and that the world can't possibly be more complex than these assumptions. Assumed the leader made this choice instead of a team behind him.
Then presented a generality. Possibly assumed he doesn't know more than you and "everyone who won't say anything".
Called an entire administration a circus. Another generality.
Suggested bribery without evidence.
How does one respond constructively to a comment like this?
How indeed? You certainly didn't.
Reminds me of this Bill Gates quote: "We were a bit naive: we thought the internet, with the availability of information, would make us all a lot more factual. The fact that people would seek out—kind of a niche of misinformation—we were a bit naive."
Most people can't keep up with the firehose of news and don't really want to. This particular bit of unethical behavior is just one more bit of inconsequential news which will have completely disappeared from the headlines by tomorrow. It basically never happened to 95% of the country, regardless of political leaning.
Secondly, conservatives live in their own highly filtered and mutated information bubble. Good news is amplified, bad news is either downplayed, justified (pure fiction is acceptable) or simply ignored. So even if they do hear about this, it won't be a big deal.
In short, most people won't care, and conservative media will actively work to overlook or more often, rationalize this sort of unethical behavior to the point where it somehow is totally fine. (Simply read this thread to watch it happen in real time.)
It is not accurate to say that half of Americans are ok with this. It’s just our system doesn’t allow for doing anything about it except wait.
That even a third is okay with this is a clear enough signal. He represents their values.
"Healthy democracy"
FB, Twitter, Tiktok on the other hand...
On a baser level, if you go on twitter, there's a whole slew of delusional people who either don't believe this because of "fake news", another portion that's in the same "Clinton/Obama/Biden were even worse", and the rest just doesn't even care so long as "the libs are owned".
It's because you are still thinking of the USA as a democracy. Musk helped buy the election for Trump. It's an open oligarchy since companies were allowed an opinion as if they were citizens.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citi...
And if it does break through the right info bubbles, right-wing media pundits and influencers will be on-the-ready to quickly rationalize or what-about it away and coax their audiences back to their "happy" places, where they can nurse their favorite grievances about the left, the media, the trans people, etc
This is the most embarrassing part of all of it. The US is ping ponging between two very different ways of misusing state power.
CZ was charged with violating a highly technical US securities law that is not common to most countries despite not being a US citizen or ever setting foot in the US. His crime was letting his employees (also non-US and under no affirmative obligation to learn the laws of every country in the world just because they run a website) tell crypto whales they could use VPNs to get the non-US, non-nerfed version of Binance.
The public's interest in protecting crypto whales from Binance is extremely tenuous. Unsophisticated users would hit the geofence. These were whales using Binance because they wanted to, not because they were tricked.
The US's right to enforce arcane securities law outside its own borders is also very tenuous. If every country pulls this level of aggressive enforcement of atypical law on every website (even geofenced ones!) we will have total chaos. Should China, Russia, or India be able to hunt you down for violating some arcane law? No? Then why should the US?
This is also happening in the context of an active public debate over the application of this law within the US, one cryptocurrency supporters won fairly definitively in the last election.
Whatever discretion the law provides US enforcers, they should have recognized that it was wrong to use that discretion and left CZ alone once Binance made reasonable gestures at compliance.
Instead, once their political coalition signaled that they should put symbolic heads on platters, they went about scoring career points. This is the kind of misbehavior that drove Aaron Swartz (a friend of mine) to suicide. We should be clear that it's wrong.
And here we are. A choice between venal corruption and cruel punching down at immigrants on one side, and a blind, symbolic use of power for power and ideology's sake on the other.
Employees of financial businesses are absolutely obligated to learn the laws of every country where they provide services.
Surely you don’t believe that CZ was charged for shits and giggles, just because he happened to make a website that Americans use?
People need space to make a U-turn. I hope you get some grace because it's a lot easier to say "I told you so" than "I was wrong."
The problem is we dont believe him. There has been ample time to make a u turn. A decade at this point. Trump has never shied away from his corruption. He has been upfront about his intentions from the beginning. I just do not believe that this is the straw that broke the camels back when so many straws have come before.
To me, this sort of behavior just seems par for the course for how he has been acting since before his presidency. Did you follow his record in business and politics closely prior to voting for him? If so, what mitigating factors were there that let you still feel comfortable in voting for him?
Is this an isolated source of issue with him? Part of a broader trend? In either case, is it/these a big enough deal for him to lose your support moving forward? For the rest of the political party supporting him?
If there has been a shift in your ability to support him, what is it that broke the camel's back?
You could have literally opened a random page and order whatever is on there. It is perfectly safe to order the burger as you will most likely be served monkey brains anyway.
No one will rage at you for voting for Afroman. There are no dire consequences.
But I knew Trump was shady and didn't like that he partied with Epstein in the 90s. A country takes a long time to change directions. I saw a chance for a smaller less restricting federal government. It was a gamble I was willing to take to at least get the ship turning around.
Your reps (or likely preferred choice of reps, if they didn't win their district) are enabling this, and don't give two shits about anything I say.
They will overlook everything else he does. Everything
Welcome to the resistance!
Just curious. Since you voted for someone who is a terrible President last time, what are you planning to change about how you make voting decisions next time? Are there particular people or media you plan to listen to less, and others more? Particular aspects you will weight higher or lower?
I’m not supportive of Biden pardoning his son. But it’s inarguable that the Trump administration is orders of magnitude more corrupt than Biden’s was. To say “they’re both corrupt” is to flatten everything out to meaninglessness.
This is despite the fact that Hunter was gone after on a charge that is basically never enforced alongside a media and political campaign ramping up all sorts of lies and half-truths and trying to draw connections to things he was never on trial for, much less convicted of, with an incoming president that had spoken extensively about his desire to weaponize the government to enact revenge on his political rivals, which we have seen him do extensively already.
I don't like that Biden pardoned his son, but I also think the idea that it is at all comparable to the pardons Trump has issued that are blatantly corrupt is absurd. Meanwhile, Jan6 pardonees have a whole Wikipedia section detailing all of the crimes they have gone on to commit since being pardoned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_January_6_United_Sta...
2. Hunter's pardon was still wrong and widely condemned by dems.
Biden misused the office to pardon his son but he was not corrupt.
