The Shakedown
Photo by the Office of the Speaker of the House, Wikimedia Commons
As we ramp up to the second Trump Presidency, it has not gone unnoticed that corporations are lining up to throw money at the incoming president. In many cases, these are corporations that opposed him for a long time. NYT (gift link):
Since his victory in November, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s allies have raised well over $200 million for a constellation of groups that will fund his inauguration, his political operation and eventually his presidential library, according to four people involved in the fund-raising.
It is a staggering sum that underscores efforts by donors and corporate interests to curry favor with Mr. Trump ahead of a second presidential term after a number of business leaders denounced him following the violence by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Massive donations have rolled in from all over but the primary sources are AI interests, crypto interests and Silicon Valley, including many businesses and executives who once vilified Trump. In addition to this, Amazon is committing $40 million to making a movie about the life of Melania Trump, who might be the least interesting person to ever be the subject of a biopic. The Coca-Cola corporation presented him with a special inauguration commemorative Diet Coke bottle. Business executive are flocking to Mar-A-Lago (and, in the process, shoving massive amounts of money directly into Trump’s pocket) to wine and dine the incoming executive.
The response to this largesse has been to accuse the companies involved of trying to bribe their way into Trump’s good graces. And that’s … actually a pretty fair assessment. The mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits and vipers Trump has nominated to various positions have made it clear that laws are a sometimes things that will only be enforced against enemies of the President. Being in with the Administration both exempts companies from being the target of this engine of abuse and allows them to direct it against competitors.
Trump’s primary promise has been a massive, economy-breaking hike in tariffs. The last time he did this, however, he gave special dispensations to selected industries and companies. These exemptions were worth enormous amounts of money. With the threat of 100% tariffs looming over the economy, such exemptions are worth billions or more. This makes sucking up to Trump a worthwhile investment. A few tens of millions from Amazon and they both escape the tariffs and watch the competition get destroyed by them. A few commemorative Diet Coke bottles means Coca-Cola can continue to import coca leaves without the price of their drinks doubling.
Most of the blame for this open corruption goes on the man coming into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But a huge amount goes to Congress. As Kevin Drum points out, Congress has given the President immense power to punish his enemies and reward his allies:
Trump has promised, for example, to deport millions of illegal immigrants, and he wields sole executive authority to direct how that happens. If you’re not a Trump supporter, you might end up at the top of the list for an ICE raid of your farm or sweatshop.
Tariffs always produce lots of requests for exemptions, many of them from companies that will literally go out of business if they don’t get one. And if you don’t support Trump you probably won’t.
Do you want to drill for oil or gas on federal lands? The president has authority to decide which fields are opened up. If you don’t play ball, yours might stay untapped for the duration.
Congress had four years under Biden to start reigning in these powers and did nothing. The Courts have made it clear that they have little interest in constraining executive power (at least not when a Republican is in charge) and basically legalized bribery last year. A system of checks and balances that was intended for each branch of government to check the power of the others has been perverted to the belief that each branch has its own untrammeled domain in which it has unlimited power to bend the taxpayer over the nearest convenient surface. And throwing money at Trump is the best way to escape such a fate.
This is the way it’s going to be for four years. There’s no one riding in to stop it. Not big business, not the Courts and not Congress. We’re stuck with it. As I will no doubt be saying a lot for the next 4+ years, this is what a plurality of the American people voted for. And we’re going to get what they voted for, good and hard.
Some libertarian types like to describe government as a protection racket. I think we are seeing what that actually looks like.Report
Silicon Valley isn’t particularly surprising, really. There is a red tribe/blue tribe/grey tribe thing going on and grey tribe was aligned with blue tribe there for a while and blue tribe did everything they could to alienate the grey tribe and the grey tribe listened.
Now the grey tribe is finding out that the red tribe sucks too and the main question is whether the red tribe sucks less.Report
Assuming no external crisis my money is that the first 18 months of the administration are going to be dominated by wealthy grey tribe types coming to grips with all the many things the ‘dumb’ party doesn’t like about them.Report
The whole H1B thing has already caused a lot of stress and it is going to cause more.
Vivek has already deleted everything on twitter going back to January 5th. Elon, it’s theorized, deployed the whole Grooming Gangs topic as a way to deflect against the Christmas Twitter Debacle and, gotta say, even as a magnificent way to change the subject, it’s not the topic you wanna spend a month on before pivoting back to H1Bs.
And if the grey tribe resorts to using the attacks that always worked when the blue tribe used them, the grey tribe will quickly find themselves talking to a brick wall and asking why dialog isn’t possible.Report
Crazy weird bedfellowing going on here:
Bernie introduced an amendment to the Laken Riley act.
It addresses H1B stuff.Report
I don’t think Bernie has ever been super keen on the mass immigration stuff, even if he felt like he had to pretend to be lately. It isn’t hard to see how it becomes antithetical to the kind of solidarity and state social support that make up the core of his politics.Report
My impression was that Vivek’s no-numeric-caps statement was from a speech last summer and he linked to it for further explanation of his position. I imagine the speech is still there. If not, I’m sure tech-savvy people can find it somewhere.
I watched the part Vivek identified, and (1) there is no way no-numeric-caps happens, (2) now people think that Vivek & co.’s hidden goal is no caps, (3) there was no reason to insert no caps into that speech, and (4) a performance standard that limits admission to people who love the U.S. is a BS standard.Report
I’m not sure any tech entrepreneur is able to make the case for H1B expansion, or maybe even the case for the way the program exists today, in a way that’s going to be convincing in MAGAland.Report
They were 100% (well, 90%) on board with “the cream of the crop, the best of the best”.
“Why are you hiring people for $80K?” is a question that reveals that the game was, in fact, given away.Report
Yea the fact that H1B is not a best and brightest, not even remotely, is the sort of thing the Musk/Vivek faction need to pray that the ‘they took our jerbs’ faction doesn’t get wise to.
It’s a lot more defensible on the merits than low skill labor (er uh… ‘asylum’ seekers) and I could at least believe that the tax contributions of H1Bs in STEM really are a net contribution in the sense that they put more in than they’ll take out, including if they’re being paid under market, and eventually become citizens eligible for entitlements. But it only works if American STEM types aren’t seriously threatened. The anecdotes I hear of entire departments replacing citizens with H1Bs make me… skeptical. But I am also hardly an expert.Report
Looks like we get to rename the “Musk/Vivek faction” to the “Musk faction”.Report
Heh I mean, if I predicted that by July 4 Musk won’t be in there either would anyone bet against me?Report
I’d have to see the odds.
Musk *MIGHT* be able to readjust behavior after seeing a sufficiently large failure.Report
It would be nearly impossible for anyone to make the case for tech H1B _at all_, because it is an extraordinarily stupid policy to have. It is deliberately creating both an underclass of less powerful employees who are competing for American jobs, which is a thing that is bad for literally everyone except wealthy business owners.
And the only real possible justification is to argue we need it, but you can’t use the ‘We need immigrants to pick our food’ nonsense that usually is done for other immigrants. You have to use, uh, ‘They are smarter than Americans’, which absolutely no one is going to vote for.
The problem is, Republicans now have to do that justification.
It also would have been hard for Democrats to do it, although maybe they could have threaded the needle by yammering about ‘opportunity’ and stuff. Republicans cannot do that.
I think a lot of people are subconsciously operating on the idea ‘MAGA oppose it, and for xenophobic and often racist reasons, ergo it must be good’, but…no. It’s not.
To put it another way, when Elon Musk went crazy in the early days of Twitter and tried to get people to sign ‘I will work myself to death to pay off the debt Musk incurred by borrowing to buy this company’ crazy and probably illegal oaths, and a huge chuck of his workforce quit…the only people left were the H1B visa holders.
Without H1B visa, it is entirely possible that Twitter would have _literally failed_. Not as a company, but as a piece of software. Because no one who had a choice wanted to work there anymore. (And a reminder they didn’t quit for political reasons, at that exact moment he was pretending to be apolitical and buying Twitter because ‘They’re lying about bots’ or something. The whole Trumpism thing started months later.)
I personally think if you make your place of work so horrific that half the workforce walks out the door, it isn’t a great thing if the only reason the rest of it is staying in place is they will be _deported_ if they quit.Report
No serious disagreement from me.
The counter argument for tech might be that the industry is of sufficient strategic importance (and worth more than the sum of it’s salaries and profits) that it’s worth making sacrifices to keep the major clusters in North America. Of course if that’s what we’re going with I’d expect some quid pro quo concessions to the public from tech, like IDK, prohibiting Elon from playing footsies with the Chinese. But ymmv.Report
(walks up)
(taps mic)
(clears throat)
“Sinophobia.”Report
You know I’m hoping that if there’s a silver lining from Trump’s re-election it’s that any attempt to derail discussion of a serious topic involving the word ‘phobia’ results in a bemused look right before whoever tries it is laughed out of the room. And while I’m sure that’s wishful thinking I’ll go ahead and wish for it anyway.Report
Only a phobophobe would hope for such a thing.Report
Oh, there’s all sorts of stuff we’d have to prohibit if we decided to say the industry is of strategic importance.
For one thing, we have almost no _chip fab_ in this country. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company makes almost all of them in the world, mostly in Taiwan. They make 90% of ‘advanced chips’, like processors. One company. In Taiwan.
It’s a good thing that there is absolutely nothing could disrupt a supply from Taiwan. Absolutely no sort of geopolitical instability with a US political rival there that could happen with that place!
Anyway, we’re supposed to be fixing that, there was a law passed back in 2022, called the CHIPS & Science Act, with incentives for building chip fab in the US, causing a bunch of new plants built by *checks note* Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (Wait), GlobalFoundries, owned by Mubadala Investment Company, aka, the United Arab Emirates, and Intel, which…actually is an American company, so hey. One out of three ain’t bad.
And of course there are some other chip fabs already in the US, like Samsung. (I mean, at least that’s _South Korea_, and it is very implausible we could end up in any sort of real disagreement with them. *checks earpiece* Wait, their president’s been arrested? Is that about the relationship with us? Or we did overthrow him? *pause* No to both?! That isn’t anything to do with us at all?! Wow, that’s…unexpected. Carry on then.)
The US is actually incredibly bad at actually doing things to secure things of strategic importance. Semiconductors is an industry we’ve literally tried to pass laws to fix this in, and it’s resulted in bunch of foreign-owned plants in the US, and I don’t really feel like that’s a logical solution, unless we’re prepared to suddenly start nationalizing industries when they decide to shut down operations.Report
So basically the libertarian experience in the 90s/Aughts?Report
I don’t know. It feels different.
For one thing, nobody’s talking about weed anymore.Report
Yeah, legal in Cali, so why bother? FYIGM.
Though with so many of them moving to Texas, and Austin in particular, maybe it’ll become more of a thing for them (it is quasi-legal in Texas, but this rests on a legislative blunder, and there will at least be efforts to undo this in this year’s session).Report
“basically legalized bribery last year”
Yet the longest serving legislative leader in U.S. history is on trial right now for multiple counts of bribery. The trial started almost three months ago.
The Snyder decision ruled that the bribery statute for state officials was not written to apply to gratuities (payments given as a reward for a past action without a quid pro quo) If Congress wants to ban them, it can amend the statute governing state officials to resemble the statute government federal officials.
And I disagree with the assumption that the SCOTUS should broadly interpret criminal statutes is a way of checking executive power. Gratuities in particular seem to fall in the category of “I know it when I see it” that gives a lot of discretion to law enforcement.Report
“mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits and vipers”
brb rewriting a Cher tuneReport
Man Trump looks awful in that picture of him, Johnson, and Musk. Balding like Gerald Ford.Report
Well, like my grandma used to say, “pretty is as pretty does”, so at least he has his nimble intellect, scintillating personality, and unwavering moral framework still goin’ for himReport
No no no no no no no no no no
I was talking about TRUMPReport
His parents made it to their nineties and a lot of this is geneticReport
Oh, sweet summer child.Report