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This is a fantastic, succinct summation of just how outlandish the Trump Administration is in terms of how it conducts the people's business. Trump's private business was notoriously authoritarian, corrupt, & deceitful; so of course his WH is as well. propublica.org/article/trump-…
About a year ago I wrote something that tried to capture the petty, bumbling, bullying, and yet successful nature of Trump's approach to the world that's depicted in that podcast. My run at it was more analogy than analysis...but here it is FWIW. medium.com/@sethcotlar/wh…
Serious question. How many people who say "iT wOuLd bE gReaT tO haVE a BusINeSSmaN aS pResIdENt" also freaking hate their boss and complain about how companies are always trying to rip them off?
Why are Americans so eager to ignore private corruption, and yet so willing to believe any trumped up charge of public corruption that gets splattered across the Fox News screen?
Corruption is bad, regardless of where it's done and who does it. In the public sector we have procedures in place to try to diminish and root out corruption. Privately owned companies like Trump Org, however, have no such thing.
A good chunk of what's happening to Trump and his cronies is that they are people used to being utterly unaccountable to anyone, and now they are in a sector that is all about accountability. They experience this as "unfairness" and persecution. We call it, democracy.
Indeed, I'd argue that one of the things many conservatives find appealing about the private sector is how undemocratic it can be. "You're fired!" [because I said so.] And a reason why they dislike the public sector is because it emphasizes democratic accountability.
American conservatism has often boiled down to efforts to protect private fiefdoms from public oversight carried out in the name of protecting the rights of those occupying the bottom rungs of those private fiefdoms, whether they be families, workplaces, or local communities.
Whether this be parents who want to control the sexuality of their daughters, white people who want to maintain white supremacy in their local schools and communities, or employers who want free reign to treat their workers as they wish...the "bad guy" is always the feds.
To say this about the abuses of private power is not to claim that centralized power is always a good thing. It's just to point out that in America, attacking "oppressive" centralized, democratic authority is often a way already powerful people try to avoid accountability.
Or as @jbouie points out in this piece. There's a long history of American conservatives protecting private forms of power from democratic accountability and calling it "a defense of liberty." nytimes.com/interactive/20…
