djt's pardon machine: The new normal rule of law

In a lawsuit I am aware of, X has been convicted of braxen insider trading. Pxy's analysis and estimate of the likelihood of X asking for a djt pardon and getting it suggests it is reasonable. X has been convicted and their appeal options are running out. Jail time is imminent.

Q1: Has X appealed to Trump for a pardon?

A1: Given X’s high-profile conviction for insider trading and securities fraud, and the fact that they face a potentially lengthy prison sentence and substantial financial penalties, it is plausible that X would consider seeking a pardon from President Trump. X has a history of using all available legal avenues—they previously cooperated with prosecutors for immunity in (a gigantic 1980s fraud case) case and is expected to appeal their current conviction. The current climate, where President Trump has demonstrated a willingness to grant pardons to white-collar and politically connected individuals, further increases the likelihood that X will at least explore this option, especially if their appeal fails.

Based on the available search results, there is no evidence that X has appealed to President Trump for a pardon. The most recent official updates regarding X's legal situation focus on their conviction for securities fraud, a forfeiture order, and an upcoming sentencing hearing. None of the provided sources mention any public or legal request by X for a pardon from Trump.

Q2: About how much would X need to pay to Trump to get a pardon? What is an estimate of the going rate for Trump pardons of non-violent white-collar criminals?

A2: There is substantial reporting that the process for seeking a pardon from Trump has become highly transactional, with large sums spent on legal fees, lobbying, and campaign donations by those seeking clemency, especially in high-profile white-collar cases.

While not formally required, there are documented cases where large campaign donations or fundraising for Trump or his affiliated groups coincided with the granting of pardons. For example, Chris Christie highlighted that Paul Walczak’s mother was a "million-dollar donor/fundraiser for Trump" and that Walczak received a pardon despite a conviction for stealing $10 million in payroll taxes. This pattern suggests indicates that significant financial support for Trump’s political efforts may increases the likelihood of receiving clemency, though there is no official "price list." (edits added for clarity)

For comparison, reputable law firms specializing in federal pardons typically charge between $15,000 and $30,000 for standard cases, but these figures do not reflect the scale or political nature of the current Trump pardon environment, where access and influence are paramount.

This kind of white collar corruption is the new normal. Maybe X can pay djt enough to overcome their past political neutrality and get the golden ticket pardon.

MAGA bits: DOGE employee sees reality, and gets fired for it; Pardoned criminals' payoffs

Government Executive reports that contrary to MAGA's expectations, one of Musk's DOGE employees discovered that government worked pretty well and wasn't corrupt, so he got fired for saying that in public: 

VA-based DOGE associate gets ‘the boot’ after publicly discussing his work

Sahil Lavingia detailed in a personal blog how the reality of hunting inefficiencies at the Department of Veterans Affairs was not what he had expected. 

Sahil Lavingia — an engineer, tech startup founder and CEO of Gumroad, an e-commerce platform for content creators — wrote in a recent personal blog that he “got the boot” from DOGE without warning the day after Fast Company published an interview in which he spoke about finding less inefficiencies than he expected in the government during his DOGE assignment as senior advisor to the chief of staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions,” Lavingia told Fast Company in the piece, which also noted that he noticed the number of mission-driven people working in government. “But honestly, it’s kind of fine—because the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.”

This is more evidence that the point of DOGE is not waste, fraud and abuse, but instead it is about building a kleptocratic dictatorship and accumulating power and wealth at the expense of democracy and the public interest. Poor Mr. Lavingia -- he was banboozled. He didn't understand what his real job was. Quaint naïvety, or childish gullibility?

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

A reddit post, The consequences of Trump selling pardons, by a former pardons attorney in the DoJ is keeping track of how much money djt has saved the criminals being pardoned. So far, djt has saved the criminals $1.34 billion in fines and restitution payments they had been on the hook for. One can reasonably wonder what djt's cut of the payback was.

One of the Peanuts commented: This money was owed the victims of those crimes. Trump is therefore stealing money from the victims of crime and fraud through the power of pardon. How nice.

Another responded: I wonder whether one of the victims will try to assert a 5th Amendment taking claim. It would be unprecedented, as far as I know, but the logic seems sound to me. Those victims had a right to compensation from the criminal and that right was enforceable at least by the federal judge who imposed the sentence. Now, due to Trump's pardon, there is no more right to compensation.

Pxy analyzed the legal question: While victims who lose access to restitution payments due to presidential pardons may intuitively feel their property has been "taken" by government action, the legal reality is significantly more nuanced and generally unfavorable to such claims. The Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause provides that private property shall not "be taken for public use, without just compensation." The critical legal barrier facing victims seeking takings claims lies in the requirement that property rights must be "vested" to receive constitutional protection. Legal analysis is clear that victims deprived of court-ordered restitution due to presidential pardons face significant barriers to successful Fifth Amendment takings claims. The established legal doctrine treats restitution orders as penal sanctions rather than vested property rights, eliminating the foundation necessary for takings claims.

Bottom line: djt has (1) screwed innocent people and businesses out of $1.34 billion, and (2) rewarded criminals with $1.34 billion minus djt's cut, maybe 20%? How nice. /s 

Context: A president can condition pardons on the payment of court-ordered restitution, provided the clemency grant explicitly includes this term. The legal foundation for this exists in centuries of precedent and DOJ guidance. Thus, djt intentionally chooses not to make the crooks pay.

Do you feel it?

 Link to article here.

Since the birth of modern cosmology in the 1920s, we’ve been bombarded with discoveries so staggering they border on the surreal. There are more than 2 trillion galaxies in the observable Universe. The gold in our jewelry was forged in the cataclysmic collision of neutron stars. We can now detect the faint afterglow of light emitted when the Universe was just 380,000 years old. Ninety-five percent of the cosmos — dark matter and dark energy — remains an open riddle. And the atoms in our bodies were once inside stars that died in spectacular explosions.

These aren’t just astronomical facts — they are fragments of our own story. And yet, the cosmos stays strangely “over there,” like a brilliant mural we’re not sure how to enter. These revelations strike us with intellectual awe, but remain oddly weightless, precisely because they are too inconceivable to hold. What, after all, can a single human mind do in the face of such scales?

Q: Do you ever feel a sense of being “One with the universe?”  If yes, talk about it.

Only the poets among us will get that.  Otherwise, no harm, no foul.  Carry on. 😊

(by PrimalSoup)

2024 election analysis: A current assessment

One can reasonably wonder why and how djt got elected in 2024. By then, his mendacity, corruption, explicit authoritarian intentions, e.g., his 1/6 coup attempt, and poor track record of governance were clear. There was no empirical basis to trust him. Nonetheless, tens of millions of people trusted, believed and voted for him. Tens of millions of others did not vote for Harris. 

Election analyses constantly point to three factors as the main reasons. Near or at the top was economic discontent, resentment and pain associated with (i) wage stagnation, (ii) inflation, which was effectively blamed on Biden, and (iii) globalization, which was blamed on Biden and Democrats generally. Also among the top factors were (1) fear, anger and resentments grounded in perceptions that immigration was very bad, with the borders being uncontrolled, (2) cultural fear, anger and resentments related to relentless cultural and anti-woke narratives of oppression and discrimination, e.g., DEI and woke extremism, and (3) demographic political shifts of expanded support for djt and Republicans generally among Black men, Hispanics, and young white men not college-educated.

Truth made tribal

Although not usually included as an important factor in 2024 election analyses, was decades of radical right authoritarian demagoguery and divisive propaganda. djt’s ascendancy was not an aberration. Instead, it was the culmination of a intentional decades-long propaganda effort designed to displace empirical (evidence- and reason-based) governance with emotion- and loyalty-driven authoritarianism. Along the way, major changes in the media landscape played a role. For example, Clear Channel (now iHeartMedia) owned 800+ AM radio stations by 2011. That constituted a homogenized authoritarian messaging Leviathan. We are all aware of the authoritarianism and demagoguery that dominated major radical right sources like Faux News for decades. The Moral Majority’s opposition to civil rights and LGBTQ+ protections established a template in the 1980s for conflating natural social change with moral decay.

Although authoritarianism was inherent all along among elites, popular right-wing rhetoric aimed at the rank and file evolved over time from more or less principled, institutional democratic conservatism to populism to mostly unprincipled authoritarianism and demagoguery. The Overton window was gradually pushed from the right, to the hard right to the extreme authoritarian right. Rush Limbaugh was an example. His rhetoric started out as a Reagan-style small government conservatism with belief in constitutional separation of powers (not belief in a unitary executive), federalism, and respect for democratic institutions like the courts, free press, and academia. Over time his rhetoric evolved (2009-2016) (Obama won via “illegal immigrant voters”). Later his rhetoric became harsher (2107-2021) and degenerated into a more reality- and reason-detached authoritarian demagoguery (the 1/6 Capitol rioters were “hundreds of thousands of people — Americans who have gotten fed up with having elections stolen from them by the Democrats, including the White House.”). 

Also, there was the rise of toxic media, which became a much bigger factor starting about 2008-2010. The collective legacy of Limbaugh, Faux News and other sources of radical right authoritarian demagoguery was that they made truth tribal for a significant minority of Americans. Politics went from more or less evidence- and reason-based to more or less emotion and tribe loyalty-based. Collectively, that paved the way for the rise of djt as an openly authoritarian demagogue despite what his public track record showed him to be.

Crypto corruption

Rolling Stone reports about djt's corrupt crypto bribery scheme:

Foreign Interests Appear to Be Pouring Millions Into Trump’s Meme Coin 

President Donald Trump’s meme coin is already a thing that shouldn’t exist, much less as a vehicle for foreign entities to funnel money to the sitting president, yet here we are. 

According to a Wednesday report from Bloomberg, over half of the top holders of $TRUMP — a personal cryptocurrency token established days before his inauguration — are likely foreign buyers, who have dumped millions into the project.

And likely not without motive. Last month, the token announced that Trump would be hosting an exclusive May 22 dinner for about 200 of $TRUMP’s largest investors at his Washington, D.C., golf club, leading to a flurry of purchases. According to Bloomberg, “76 percent of the token value held among the top 220 wallets likely belongs to foreign owners because the wallets used exchanges that are not available to U.S. residents.” According to a separate analysis by The Washington Post, roughly $100 million worth of tokens were purchased after the dinner was announced.

The lack of transparency, easy access for foreign influence, and ethical vacuum surrounding this constitutes a bribery scheme. Foreign power and entities can buy influence by secret financial contributions. Although a large portion of the top holders are reportedly foreign, Americans and American businesses can also bribe him.

Congressional Democrats have proposed legislation to ban elected officials and their families from profiting off meme coins or similar ventures, but chances of that passing in congress is low, maybe ~1%. Chances of djt ever signing an anti-crypto corruption law are lower.

Fact checking

MAGA lies

The volume of MAGA lies is off the charts. A few examples.

The Latin Times reports: "Elon Musk Brands Bono a 'Liar/Idiot' for Telling Joe Rogan DOGE's USAID Cuts Have Cost 300,000 Lives "Zero people have died!" -- Musk insisted, a claim that has been widely debunked by experts. .... The 300,000 figure cited by Bono comes from a model estimating the "human cost" of DOGE's cuts to USAID, developed by Brooke Nichols, a mathematician and infectious disease professor at Boston University. The Washington Post backed Nichols' findings, reporting that roughly 96,000 adults and 200,000 children have died due to foreign aid cuts under the Trump administration."

The NYT reports: "Trump and Allies Sell Domestic Policy Bill With Falsehoods -- As the Senate considers a domestic policy bill to enact the White House’s agenda, President Trump and his allies have sought to assuage some lawmakers’ concerns over its price tag and cuts to Medicaid with inaccurate claims. .... The bill passed by the House will reduce federal spending on Medicaid by at least $600 billion over a decade and reduce enrollment by about 10.3 million people, according to a preliminary estimate from the Congressional Budget Office. But most of the changes to Medicaid have little to do with waste, fraud or abuse as defined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service."

Even if the 300,000 death estimate is 80% too high, 60,000 have died, or if 90% too high, 30,000 are dead. Neither is zero. Musk is a liar.

Trump and Johnson are liars.

CNN reports on the failure of DOGE to do much of anything other than cause massive damage, despite contrary claims: "How Musk and DOGE could end up costing more than they save -- Picking apart the “estimated savings” of $175 billion on the DOGE website, Tolan told me that less than half that figure is backed up with even the most basic documentation. That means it’s possible only even to start investigating about $32 billion of savings from terminated contracts, $40 billion of savings from terminated grants and $216 million of savings from terminated leases that DOGE claims. .... Max Stier, CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, has estimated in a back-of-the-envelope way that DOGE cuts could end up costing the US $135 billion simply because it will need to retrain and rehire elements of the work force that have been let go. The federal workforce is literally in trauma — something Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, said was an aim of his."

Musk is a liar and Vought is a cruel, corrupt sadist.

How MAGA deals with inconvenient science: Hide it, deny it, claim public support

NBC News reported about a research study the Utah state legislature commissioned to prove that gender-affirming health care was harmful for children and teens. The study was commissioned in a 2023 Utah law that banned gender-affirming care. MAGA legislators believed that gender-affirming care was harmful and they were gonna prove it. The study, about 1,000 pages was published on May 19, 2025 on the Utah state legislature's website. The bottom line from the report: Gender-affirming care was generally helpful, not harmful. 

The study analyzed data from 28,000 transgender minors across 134 clinical studies and concluded that gender-affirming care correlates with improved mental health, reduced suicide risk, and better psychosocial outcomes. NBC News comments:

Utah's Department of Health and Human Services and experts from the state's leading health organizations concluded from a study of thousands of transgender people that gender-affirming care generated "positive mental health and psychosocial functioning outcomes."

"Patients that were seen at the gender clinic before the age of 18 had a lower risk of suicide compared to those referred as an adult" according to the study. "When left untreated, individuals with gender dysphoria may experience psychological and social harms."

The agency is not taking a position on whether lawmakers should lift the statewide ban on hormone therapy and surgeries for minors. But it reminded lawmakers that they had intended for the prohibition to be temporary until the state could conduct its own research.

Well, now the state has conducted its own research. I asked Pxy to find a link to the study, so I could see it for myself. Pxy gave me this link:   https://le.utah.gov/publications/reports/2025/DRRC_Gender_Affirming_Care_Report.pdf. The study is entitled Utah Legislature: Gender-Affirming Care Study Report. The study was posted on the legislature's website as part of the state’s compliance with SB16 (2023), Utah's gender-affirming ban law. 

Clicking on that link, led to this:

  That's odd. A search of the entire Utah state legislature website led to this:

The study was not listed among the first 100 documents of the 321,162 in the database. I could not find the study.

Straight Arrow News reports: "Utah lawmakers stand by gender care ban after study refutes reasoning -- Study findings: Two years after Utah banned gender-affirming care for minors, the state’s health department released a study finding positive mental health and body image outcomes linked to such treatments. .... What do GOP Utah lawmakers say? The House sponsor of Utah’s 2023 ban and the current chair of the health committee said they have no plans to lift the restriction on gender-affirming care. In a joint statement to The Associated Press, Republican Reps. Katy Hall and Bridger Bolinder said, “Simply put, the science isn’t there, the risks are real, and the public is with us.” "

Well there we have it. According to MAGA politicians, the science isn't there and the public agrees. And it is true, the science isn't there, or at least I can't find it. The document at this link states the reason for doing the study was to inform the legislature about future legislation, e.g., this: "include any other information the department, in consultation with the entities described in Subsection (2), determines would assist the Legislature in enacting legislation related to the provision of hormonal transgender treatment to minors."

Q: Is this exemplary of how MAGA elites will treat inconvenient science going forward, i.e., hiding it, denying it and simply blowing off scientific evidence when it is inconvenient to MAGA dogma?

MAGA vs. the Federalist Society vs democracy

A spate of reporting centered on djt blowing up at the FS (Federalist Society). Some of its hand-picked judges have ruled against some of what djt wants to do. For example, this NYT opinion (not paywalled):

Trump declared himself “so disappointed” in the Federalist Society because of its “bad advice” on judicial nominations. But he reserved his real venom for Leo, calling him a “sleazebag” and a “bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America.” .... But there was a problem. The Federalist Society never capitulated to Trump. It’s a decentralized group, and its members are stubbornly independent.

At the beginning of his Truth rant, he refers back to the Court of International Trade and asks: “Where do these initial three Judges come from? How is it possible for them to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP?’ What other reason could it be?”

The NYT opinionator goes on to defend the FS as conservative. That felt like sheer nonsense. Pxy, a neutral analyst with no ideological skin in the game, analyzed whether the FS is mostly pro-democracy conservative or mostly anti-democracy authoritarian:

Q: Is the federalist society more authoritarian than democratic, e.g., it believes in the unitary executive theory and unlimited secret special interest spending in politics? Is this analysis of the fed soc reasonable or too soft: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/01/opinion/trump-judges-federalist-society.html ?

A: The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies stands as one of the most consequential yet controversial legal organizations in modern American history, wielding unprecedented influence over the federal judiciary while maintaining a carefully constructed image as a nonpartisan educational forum. .... An examination of the Society's institutional practices, ideological commitments, and political influence reveals an organization that, while operating within legal bounds, exhibits characteristics that align more closely with authoritarian approaches to power than with democratic pluralism.

The Federalist Society emerged in 1982 from a coalition of conservative law students at Yale, Harvard, and the University of Chicago who sought to challenge what they perceived as liberal orthodoxy dominating American legal education 2 3.

The organization's intellectual framework draws inspiration from The Federalist Papers and claims the legacy of James Madison, whose silhouette serves as its logo. This symbolic choice reflects the Society's attempt to ground its mission in America's founding democratic traditions.

However, critics have increasingly questioned whether the Society's actual practices align with its democratic rhetoric. Political scientist Amanda Hollis-Brusky has characterized the organization as having "evolved into the de facto gatekeeper for right-of-center lawyers aspiring to government jobs and federal judgeships under Republican presidents" 2. This gatekeeping function suggests constitutes an institutional structure more focused on advancing partisan political objectives than on fostering genuine intellectual debate about constitutional principles. (revision added for clarity)
 

The Federalist Society has emerged as a primary institutional advocate for the unitary executive theory, a constitutional interpretation that dramatically expands presidential power over the federal bureaucracy 5 11 20. This theory, which "posits the President should have control over the entire executive branch," represents a fundamental departure from traditional American approaches to separated powers and checks and balances 5. (I have recently warned about the grave authoritarian danger to democracy that is inherent in the unitary executive theory, e.g., here, here and here)

The Federalist Society's relationship with dark money networks represents perhaps the most troubling aspect of its impact on democratic governance. Leonard Leo, the organization's former executive vice president and current co-chair, has constructed an extensive network of nonprofit organizations that channel anonymous donations to support conservative legal causes 6 7. Most dramatically, Leo obtained a historic $1.6 billion donation through connections made via the Federalist Society, creating what may be the largest political donation in American history 6. (once again, we see the ugly specter of the 2010 Citizens United USSC decision)

Conclusion
The evidence strongly suggests that the Federalist Society, despite its democratic rhetoric and educational framing, functions primarily as an institutional vehicle for advancing authoritarian approaches to governance. The organization's advocacy for unitary executive theory promotes dangerous concentrations of presidential power that undermine constitutional checks and balances. Its extensive dark money networks operate in secrecy that contradicts democratic norms of transparency and accountability. Most significantly, its systematic influence over judicial selection has created a federal judiciary that serves partisan political objectives rather than neutral legal principles.

The Society's authoritarian characteristics become particularly evident when examined alongside contemporary scholarship on democratic backsliding and authoritarian capture of democratic institutions. Like authoritarian movements worldwide, the Society employs legal methods to achieve anti-democratic objectives, using the legitimacy of educational discourse to advance political projects that would be rejected if presented openly as partisan advocacy. The organization's success in reshaping American legal institutions while maintaining claims of neutrality demonstrates the sophisticated nature of contemporary threats to democratic governance.  

The New York Times analysis referenced in the query significantly understates these concerns by treating the Society as a legitimate educational organization experiencing normal political tensions rather than recognizing its role as a central node in networks that systematically undermine democratic governance. (emphases added)

So, once again the mainstream media, the NYT opinion in this case, completely intentionally ignores a critically important point. By calling the FS conservative instead of authoritarian, it hides, deflects from and normalizes authoritarianism in American politics. Shame on the NYT. This opinion gets an F-.

Ranking of polls for 2025

The last time I posted Nate Silver's poll ranking (Aug 2024), NYT/ Siena was ranked 1st. Now Silver ranks it 5th (https://www.natesilver.net/p/pollster-ratings-silver-bulletin). AtlasIntel, which was 21st, is ranked 1st, or at least at the top of the list. The first 4 of 27 pages of ranking is shown below.

What a crazy-go-nuts world. 🤪