A MAGA corruption update

Awareness rising?

As Trump and MAGA politics and policy sink their claws deeper into American government, society, commerce, education, and law, it appears that at least some people are getting somewhat woke about the matter of MAGA’s corruption. MSM reporting about the authoritarian MAGA goals of accumulating wealth and power at the expense of the public interest and the American people has been a failure. Given that, it is a bit surprising that a lot of people are starting to see the reality of just how corrupt that Trump and MAGA elite politics and policy are. A recent poll found that 89% of Americans believe that government corruption is widespread.

Is the actual wealth and power-centric reality of MAGA politics and policy really starting to sink in? If so, the awakening comes despite (1) the MSM’s failure to report it clearly, (2) a torrent of sophisticated MAGA lies, slanders, irrational emotional manipulation, and insane crackpottery constantly telling us things are better than great and rapidly getting better, and (3) blither and incoherence from subverted, complicit and/or clueless Democratic Party elites and whatever the hell one can call their messaging.

Just consider, if you will, all of the distractions, deceit, lies, thunder, and white noise that average people have to cut through to see the reality of rising corruption. If ~89% see government corruption as widespread, that has to mean the corruption is both blatantly obvious, and/or increasingly painful to most Americans. Nothing else can plausibly explain that kind of public consensus in our highly polarized with too many deceived, disinformed and manipulated people in American society.

Some context

A little context is usually helpful.

Trump’s crypto grift: A clear example of Trump’s corruption is the ~$1.4 billion he has obtained in his dealings with corrupt crypto businesses. This exemplifies corruption at its most direct. Here we have a sitting president privately profiting on an enormous scale from financial products whose value is affected by his policies, political position and ability to provide access. MAGA propaganda dismisses that description of reality as Trump just being a shrewd businessman. The problem with that explanation is that he’s supposed to be a competent president working for the American people, not a grifter working for himself.

Trump’s pardons & clemency grift: 96% of Trump’s second-term clemency recipients didn’t satisfy longstanding Justice Department guidelines for pardons or clemency. That’s compared with fewer than 1% under Biden and 14% during Trump’s first presidency. The evidence indicates that Trump’s pardons have canceled ~$1.3 billion to ~$1.7 billion in restitution, fines and forfeitures. That is how much Trump pardons and clemency grants have given to convicted criminals. Estimates are that Trump sells pardons or clemency for $2 million per transaction, Apparently at least some pardon grifts rake in at least $5 million for Trump.

To defend Trump’s pardons grifting, MAGA propaganda intelligently spins the corruption by not defending the underlying crimes. Instead. MAGA propaganda reclassifies the criminals as victims, patriots or political prisoners. The propaganda recasts lawful prosecutions as partisan persecution, or witch hunts, and ignores or minimizes the victims and the violence they suffered. MAGA demagoguery presents Trump’s personal interventions as “justice,” “mercy” or “common sense”, when in fact it is corruption, pure and simple.

Q1: Other than government corruption being blatant and/or painful, what could plausibly explain a stunning ~89% public agreement that government corruption is widespread?

Q2: Has corruption in the US risen to the level of kleptocracy, or are we still in the realm of regular good, old-fashioned political corruption?[1]

Footnote:

1. Kleptocracy: literally “rule by thieves”, is a system where political leaders use public office, government policy and state institutions to enrich themselves, their families and loyal allies. Unlike isolated bribery, kleptocracy makes corruption a governing method where leaders distribute favors to allies, weaken or neuter corruption oversight and the rule of law, and use accumulated wealth to (1) protect themselves, allied special interests, and donors, and (2) perpetuate their own political power.

Some info links:

Under the Trump crypto playbook, the family always wins. Investors don’t

How Trump and His Clemency-for-Cash Racket Let White-Collar Criminals and International Drug Dealers Walk Free and Dodge Billions in Restitution Owed to Their Victims

Trump Pardons Reality-Show Couple Convicted of $36 Million Fraud

Trump pardons Ross Ulbricht, creator of the Silk Road dark web marketplace

MSM reporting on American authoritarianism and corruption failed us

Context

Today, MAGA demagoguery routinely still attacks the MSM as unreasonably harsh or irrational in criticizing Trump, MAGA elites and MAGA politics and policy. However, the reality is that the MSM has been far too lenient, forgiving and normalizing of what is roughly the opposite of normal. Within months after Trump came on the scene in 2016, it was obvious that the MSM did not have any idea of how to deal with Trump or his poisonous demagoguery. Now about 10 years later, the MSM still fails us. However, the reasons for continuing failure appear to have shifted significantly from mostly incompetence, ignorance, and disbelief in MAGA’s authoritarianism, to a more influential degree of (1) fear of Trump and MAGA retribution, and (2) complicity by sympathetic or intimidated corporate MSM ownership. Ignorance and incompetence are still factors, but the fear and corporate factors cannot now be dismissed as minor.

Assessing the MSM’s failure

The bottom line is that conventional MSM reporting usually conveys discrete facts accurately while producing a misleading overall picture. The core failure is fragmentation of information that is reported. Each firing, prosecution threat, act of court defiance, coercive deployment, attack on universities or press outlet, corrupt pardon, regulatory favor, divisive lie or slander, and unwarranted voting restriction get reported as a one-day story. When the separate events are related, the MSM rarely assembles the information into the recognizable authoritarian or kleptocratic moves. Actions and inactions by Trump, MAGA judges on the USSC, and MAGA politicians or elites in in congress and federal agencies have all worked to concentrate presidential power, disable oversight, punish opposition, and weaken or destroy independent pro-democracy and pro-public interest institutions.

Experts in democracy describe America as in a period of exceptionally rapid autocratization with a corresponding weakening of democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties and honest, transparent, competent governance. Steep deterioration in press freedom, impartial law enforcement, judicial independence, and protections against political punishment have all been documented.

MSM failures along the way have been repeated and important. The fragmentation rises from episodic reporting of individual actions. To help people understand what is going thematic framing would help reveal cumulative causation and systemic consequences of MAGA actions and policy. For example, the MSM seems to be allergic to any reporting about impacts on the flow of wealth and power arising from MAGA actions. In all or almost all instances, MAGA policy deprotects the public interest and the American people while releasing restraints on and empowering wealth elites and powerful corporate interests.

The overwhelming effect of Trump/MAGA governance has been to transfer wealth, governmental leverage, and legal protection upward from ordinary citizens and public institutions toward affluent households, corporations, politically connected industries, donors, and the presidency itself. Available quantitative estimates suggest that ~65–70% of benefits arising MAGA tax packages flows upward to elites and special interests. But based on MSM’s poor reporting, it is very hard to see or understand what Trump, MAGA elites and their major donors and supporters are doing. Coverage seldom follows wealth and power effects regarding who pays, who profits, who becomes politically deprotected, etc.

Other MSM failures include neutrality and “both-sides” reporting that inherently obscures asymmetries between ordinary partisan conduct and attacks on constitutional government. Election reporting routinely failed to identify or condemn election denial as a democratic threat. Horse-race framing of news substitutes polls, tactics, and political “wins” for policy effects. That reduces public knowledge and increases cynicism about politics generally. Sanewashing converts Trump’s incoherent rambling, threatening, or radical language into coherent policy prose; empirical research finds evidence of this selective translation. Euphemisms such as “norm-breaking”, “controversial”, “unorthodox”, all sanitize conduct more accurately described as authoritarian, corrupt, retaliatory, or lawless. Hard-news organizations remain reluctant to use “authoritarian” even though standard definitions fit.

Q: Is mainstream media’s central failure that, although its individual stories are usually accurate, the fragmentation of reporting about MAGA’s goals creates a profoundly misleading narrative that makes Trump and MAGA politics appear normal instead of the main part of coordinated democratic backsliding and authoritarian upward wealth-and-power redistribution?

Some info links:

Pre-Primary News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Race: Trump’s Rise, Sanders’ Emergence, Clinton’s Struggle —  Media exposure is essential if a candidate is to rise in the polls. Absent a high poll standing, or upward momentum, it’s difficult for a candidate to raise money, win endorsements, or even secure a spot in the pre-primary debates.

News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters

From fake news to enemy of the people: An anatomy of Trump’s tweets

Trump calls “fake news” the “enemy of the people”

‘Alarming deterioration’ of US press freedom under Trump, says Reporters Without Borders

Political Communication and Media Agenda-Setting

False equivalencies: Online activism from left to right

‘Horse race’ reporting of elections can harm voters, candidates, news outlets: What the research says

Did journalists ‘sanewash’ Donald Trump during the 2024 election campaign? An empirical analysis

Why journalists are reluctant to call Trump an authoritarian – and why that matters for democracy

Analysis of Tax Provisions in the House Reconciliation Bill: National and State Level Estimates

Congressional Budget Office: Distributional Effects of Public Law 119-21

Is “clear mind” politics the best way to do politics?

Context

At least as long as human civilizations have existed, politics has been significantly or mostly a battle for influencing enough of what minds perceive and how they think about it to get what proponents want. For example, shooting wars are usually preceded by collecting enough minds to willingly or grudgingly support a war. Wars with bullets, bombs and drones need minds sufficiently willing to be both fighters and the public supporters needed to sustain the fighting. Leaders who want to engage in wars, usually also engage in tactics to influence public perceptions of reality and threats. Such influencing includes creating false realities and threats to build public support for war.

Modern cognitive and social science make clear that when we are engaging with politics, unconscious bias, prejudices, tribe and group loyalties or identities, self-identity, self-esteem, moral values, and ideological belief are usually dominant in our perceptions of reality and thinking about it. When they are inconvenient or identity-threatening, facts, robust truths, and good faith sound reasoning are usually downplayed, denied or distorted by most people to some non-trivial extent. Our mostly unconscious minds and their traits tends to render what is inconvenient or threatening less so, often a lot less so. Our minds evolved to protect our identities and loyalties, even when it means denying reality or distorting into something it isn't.

That doesn't apply to just war. It applies to almost everything else where politics is involved, i.e., almost everything if not literally everything. People do not evaluate political information as detached reasoners. They unconsciously apply reality- and reason-distorting filters such as motivated reasoning, biases, and defense of identity. That generally strongly influences what evidence people accept and how they interpret it.

The clear mind

As used here, a clear mind for politics or clear-minded politics refers to a state of mind that humans can achieve to some extent. That state of mind can be called anti-biasing and anti-ideology. A clear mind does not refer to perfection in reasoning or perceptions of reality. It does not assert any universal moral values. No human can be completely free of their biases, moral values, self-identity, etc. That is not possible. Humans are not the Borg, Vulcans or computers. But what people can do to some variable extent is consciously try to be more influenced by facts, robust truths, and good faith sound reasoning, especially when they are inconvenient.

Where much, probably most, political irrationality, ill-will, oppression, cruelty, war and other bad outcomes arise is from the unconscious mind's fast but subtle battle to make what is real but inconvenient or threatening either (1) less inconvenient or threatening, or (2) not inconvenient or threatening at all, e.g., by denying reality or sound reasoning. Bending unruly reality and sound reason to fit with what is psychologically or socially comfortable is a major breeding ground for war, hate, bigotry, unwarranted distrust, crackpottery, lies, slanders, and irrational emotional manipulation. Arguably, that's the most important breeding ground.

In short, clear-minded politics is not about attaining perfect neutrality, perception, or rationality. The concept is just a humble effort to at least noticeably subject one’s own preferred conclusions to evidence and criticism, especially when doing so is uncomfortable. None of this is to state or imply that unconscious bias or irrationality is unique to one side or bad outcomes. It's everywhere, in everyone. No one can make the irrationality and messiness completely go away, but everyone can try to deal with it honestly in good faith.

The concept of clear-minded politics is not new. But the label "clear mind" or "clear-minded" appears to be possibly new. For example, Magnus Vinding's 2022 book Reasoned Politics points squarely at clear mind politics, but he doesn't use that label. Philip Tetlock's 2015 book, Superforecasting: The Art and science of Prediction, does two things. First, he documents the power of unconscious biases and identity to degenerate politics into irrationality. Second, he discovered a way to find the few people in a population who are naturally talented in doing clear-minded politics. He called those people superforecasters.

Tetlock's research identified key mental traits that allowed people to be clear-minded by tamping down their own biases, prejudices, identities, ideology, etc. -- superforecasters relied more heavily on facts, robust truths and sound reasoning than average people. In other words, clear-minded politics is possible to at least some extent. It is not a utopian fantasy.

How to put clear-minded politics into practice

As an example, my core political moral values are centered on defending and fighting for secular democracy, the secular rule of law, civil liberties and honest, transparent, pro-public interest government. Engaging with in that in a clear-minded way means laying out facts, robust truths and good faith sound reasoning. Providing at least some links to at least some of the main facts, true truths and sound reasoning relied on increases transparency by allowing anyone to easily assess asserted facts and reasoning. Anyone willing to read and consider what is written is then free to completely or partly accept or reject anything written or asserted.

Once people are in possession of clear mind politics content, they are completely free to not only assess and accept or reject some or all of the facts and reasoning for themselves, they will naturally assess, and accept or reject on the basis of their moral values, biases, social loyalties, self-identity, etc. There is always be disagreements. But with clear-minded politics mindsets, disagreements will be at least somewhat more influenced and constrained by the facts, truths, and reasoning than disagreements where other mindsets dominate. Other mindsets include liberalism, conservatism, capitalist, secular, White Supremacist (racist), populist, fascist, socialist, kleptocratic, autocratic, oligarchic, and theocratic, e.g., Christian nationalist theocratic.

Q1: Does evidence- and reason-based clear mind politics (with links to info sources) help create mental freedom for people to choose and decide for themselves what they believe, disbelieve or are unsure about, or is it better for people to let ideology, self-identity, tribe loyalty, etc. mostly shape perceptions of reality and reasoning by downplaying facts, truths, and sound reasoning?

Q2: About what % of Americans who engage in politics at least a little will claim that they do not base their politics mostly on facts, robust truths and sound reasoning, and instead they claim their politics is based mostly on lies, deceit, crackpottery, and/or irrational emotional manipulation, ~2%? More? Less?

Some info sources:

National Archives: Powers of Persuasion

Propaganda and the American Public

Motivated Reasoning in Political Judgment

Cognitive–motivational mechanisms of political polarization in social-communicative contexts

 

Regarding what’s in rank & file MAGA minds

Trump's brand of governance: 

Blowing shit up

The core source of power that enables Trump and MAGA wealth and power politics is rank and file voters. Enough of them voted to give power to both Trump and MAGA politicians. Without those votes, Trump and MAGA elites would not be reaping the vast reward of their power to gain more wealth and power, mostly at our expense and the expense of the public interest.

Obviously, not mean every Trump or MAGA politician voter endorses every action they take Polling indicates that majorities oppose a lot of what Trump, MAGA officeholders, donors, and business allies have done or are getting as rewards for being MAGA supporters, funders and enablers. Without a sufficiently large voting coalition, Trump would not hold presidential authority and many MAGA-aligned politicians would be far less powerful and damaging to democracy and the rule of law.

Regarding the rule of law, Trump and MAGA elites have inflicted ghastly damage on it. Damage arises from various lines of attack. The attacks include (1) punishing lawyers for representing MAGA opponents, and (2) removing independent federal agency watchdogs who used to investigate government waste and abuse in defense of the public interest. Now the watchdogs look out to protect elites with their special interests in their quests for more wealth and power at our expense. When a president and allied political elites treat courts, lawyers, and fiscal oversight as enemies to be crushed, not limits to be obeyed, Americans lose protection from arbitrary authoritarian and kleptocratic power.

So what are they thinking?

Apparently most rank and file voters continue to support Trump and MAGA politicians primarily due to various combinations of (1) partisan identity and tribe loyalty, (2) distrust of allegedly opposing elitist institutions, (3) alleged threats to freedoms from the Democratic Party, liberalism, socialism and communism, and (4) some policy matters, e.g., immigration control. A significant portion of supporters see threats to democracy or white privilege as something they fear and want Trump and MAGA politics to defend.

In those minds, threats to democracy, the rule of law, and civil liberties come from America’s political left and center, and from the Democratic Party, not from politics or politicians they support. Many Trump supporters identify election administration, alleged widespread election fraud, a hostile federal bureaucracy (a tyrannical socialist deep state), biased censorship of truth by platforms, illegal immigration with crime, snotty elite institutions, or Democratic control of government as core threats.

A small but maybe significantly growing group of voters who voted for Trump now claim to no longer support him as much, with some maybe not voting from him if he runs for office again in 2028. The reasons they give are largely materialistic, centering on the cost of living and Trump’s failure to deliver lower costs. Some turned from Trump because they see him as either (1) too weak on immigration, or (2) too aggressive on immigration. They tend to not see any significant to democracy, the rule of law or civil liberties from Trump or elite MAGA politics. A few defected from Trump over what they see as his dishonesty, cruelty, vindictiveness, self-dealing, erratic behavior, or his fixation on personal grievances and vengeance instead of worrying about governing. Also in the mix of defector reasons is Trump’s Iran war.

But in general, continuing support for Trump and the recent loss of some support are not mostly grounded in concerns about radical right American authoritarianism, kleptocracy or the three main flavors of pro-corruption tyranny now vying for power in the MAGA world, namely dictatorship, billionaire and corporate oligarchy, and deeply bigoted, cruel, aggressive Christian nationalist theocracy.

What’s the point here?

The main point is simple. Once Trump is gone, the aggrieved, angry mindsets, and crackpot conspiracies that enabled the existence of Trump and MAGA politics and power will still be there. If threats to democracy, the rule of law or civil liberties are perceived, they are believed to come from opposition to Trump, MAGA politicians and politics, and a belief that there really was a hostile deep state government that needed to be reigned in or completely obliterated.

Even if the Dems take control of the House and Senate in the 2026 elections, they will be unlikely to get anything significant done in service to the public interest. The MAGA party leadership is not going to become bipartisan, democratic, or public interest oriented. It will remain as elitist, corrupt and uncompromising as it possibly can with whatever power it has left. Essentially all of the old pro-public interest component of the GOP was RINO hunted out of power years ago. Now, the MAGA party is in power and those people will not give up their power in the public interest unless forced to do so.

Trump did not merely inherit a lot of false beliefs. He organized and politically intensified them to the point that MAGA arose from fragmented discontent, distrust, anger, fear, and latent bigotry and racism. He crystallized and weaponized that all of unhappiness with its attendant corruption, bigotry and nastiness into what MAGA is today.

Q: Who in the MAGA party, if anyone, has Trump’s level of charm and dark arts talent that can replace Trump and hold MAGA together after he is gone, e.g., Rubio, Vance, Don Jr., Melania, or anyone else, or will MAGA disintegrate into fragmented blocks of elitist authoritarian power?

Info sources:

Ahead of midterms, Republicans confront cooling support from young men over Trump policies

As Trump presidency enters second year, his voters share hopes – and concerns

Iran crisis tests Trump standing with young men who helped power 2024 win

Authoritarianism Among Trump Voters

How Americans view the “Deep State”

Approval of Trump on economy falls in new AP-NORC poll, as Iran war drives up prices