Daydreams of Impeachment

DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

His solution was Trump shouldn’t be allowed to run for office because the issues are so obvious and fundamental.

Oh, and as for that…it’s so obviously true I find myself amazed by the entire concept of someone like him being president.

Let’s pretend, for a second, that Trump was some super-rational president, who had mostly perfectly normal policy positions, and a perfectly normal temperament, who owned exactly the same stuff Trump owned. In fact, let’s totally disconnect this from Trump, and have this guy, Monald Wump, be a Democrat, pushing normal Democratic policies.

Let’s look at what China has just done, in retribution to tariffs: They deliberately targeted tariffs at Republican-leaving states, aka, Trumps own voters. Fun fact: Trump has _overseas properties_. Granted, he doesn’t have one in China. (Although China has a hell of a lot of influence over Indonesia, where he does.) But you know where he does have one? The Republic of Ireland. So so does Wump.

And Monald Wump, being a Democrat, doesn’t like the practice of corporations offshoring their profits to avoid taxes. And he proposes some sort of law punishing companies that do that. The exact law is not important, only that it does look like it would work to some extent and companies would start to back off that sort of thing.

Well, a major place to offshore companies to is Ireland. And Ireland makes a lot of money in corporate taxes off it. (Their corporate taxes are _low_, not non-existant.) And it also generally boasts their economy because those tax-relocation corporations do tend to put _something_ in Ireland, if only some sort of corporate office.

And now one tiny tweak to the real world: In this world, the Irish government is, let’s say, less ethical than it probably is in real life.

So the Irish government passes a law that says that anyone who signs legislation like that will forfiet all business interests in Ireland. Just have all their assets seized by the government, no reimbursement. And few people immediately thought ‘They can’t do that.’, but…they’re a foreign government. They really can, or, at least, it’s up to _them_ if they can. We can’t, like, telepathically make them enforce the law in a just manner.

Monald Wump paid 15 million euro for the Wump International Golf Links and Hotel Ireland. He loses all that if he signs.

Does he sign? Yes or no? Do we believe him if he doesn’t sign, but says it was because it was a bad law?

This is what is called a ‘conflict of interest’. It’s when ethical people in a position of control over something have to choose to either do what is the ‘correct’ thing, or the thing that will benefit (or not harm) them. Which is why ethical people make sure they do not have conflicts of interests at the start.

A president with expensive foreign properties basically can’t ethically operate as president, and thus should not have been elected as president.

..of course, back when I pointed out this out, I, for some utterly unknown reason, assumed President Trump would actually try to operate within ethical bounds. Silly me. Trump literally does not have conflicts of interests…that would imply that he weighs his decisions as president between the duties of the offices and any possible enrichment on his part, and thus those two things can conflict. He…does not do that. He does not seem to understand the first thing exists at all.

Edit: Oh, and I forgot to mention: Normally, conflicts of interest can be resolved with someone stepping aside on a single decision. They have a conflict in one place and step aside for that. The president cannot do that.Report

DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:

Eh. I don’t know if the whole pivot from “it was legal for people in Congress to do that at the time” to an expectation of moral outrage really works for me.

I didn’t say it _was_ doing insider trading. I said there are things that he has done look like insider trading. A plausible case could be made…pretending it was illegal at the time. I was putting an absolute cap on the wrongdoing, which is objectively much less than subverting domestic policy to make money, like Tom Price did, or subverting foreign policy to make money, which is it increasingly looking like Trump did.

And I feel I should point out that Trump gave hints of the jobs report first to people who follow his Twitter, thus enabling literally millions of acts of insider trading. Like, even in this very very specific wrongdoing he’s somehow way way worse!

But I’m not going to make that argument. Instead, I will point out that trying to stop BSDI is nonsense. Because it’s pretty clear the conservative media will literally just make up stuff if it can’t find anything.

As I said in my other response, they basically just invented a scandal with ‘Biden and Kerry relatives run an investment firm that has a fund with Chinese backers’, despite literally no evidence of any sort of wrongdoing or tit-for-tat. They basically have to make up a bunch of stuff to handwave timing things, and deliberately mispresent whether or not the ‘Asian Pivot’ would have made China happy or sad. And ignore the fact that Biden was not running around making Chinese policy, and Kerry doesn’t seem to have been doing anything related either. (And they had the gall to do this while _Trump_ was president. This wasn’t a funny example of how the conservative media flip-flopped on what was acceptable after Trump took office.)

We live in a world where the conservative media has decided that ‘Democrats always are corrupt and much much worse than any minor indiscretions by Republicans, who are basically all good people’. That is literal fact and always true in their minds, and it doesn’t matter what is actually happening.

So there is absolutely no point in trying to ‘clean up’ minor Democratic behavior as strategy of convincing voters.(1) Because Democratic scandals will just be invented out of thin air.

You’re still trying to live in some sort of objective world where actual truth matters, but we’re actually in a world where the half the media will just imply Pelosi is trying to make your kids gay with Common Core and that will become the operative truth with 30% of the population. It doesn’t matter what is _actually_ happening. And I have fully given up on what those conservative-bubble people think.

But her eemaaaaiiillls….

1) Now, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to stop this sort of thing, and I’m all for things that have been proposed making this illegal. And Congress should feel free to do that, and the people doing it could even make the thing bipartisan by pointing out that both sides, indeed, actually do it. But we are actually living in a universe where Donald Trump is actively harming our national security, and frankly that needs to be dealt with first.Report