Secret Deals, Foreign Investments: The Rise of Trump’s Crypto Firm

Politics-related threads are generally the worst on HN, and if we're going to have them, people need to take extra care to follow the guidelines. In particular, we don't want HN to be a place where it's normal to attack people for their class or intellect.

> There are a lot of middle class middle aged low digit millionaires who are certainly not hurting for anything, but for some reason really love Trump.

They love him because he's as degenerate as they are, and makes it cool to be white. Or so I'm told.

Not that I believe any of that, just going by what Trump supporters tell me.

Hunter Biden, as far as I know, didn't hold an official title within his father's administration. Jared Kushner, on the other hand, did hold an official title within Donald Trump's first administration.

Hunter Biden, as far as the country has been made aware, never requested an TS-SCI clearance, as Jared Kushner did. Jared Kushner was given one via overrule from the 45th administration when the FBI and CIA said there's no way in hell he should be given access to any state secrets due to his background.

For the record, fuck Hunter Biden for anything he might have done. But don't equate selling access to demanding the highest levels of access to our nation's most closely held secrets.

Many people disagree with the Covid response.

Many people look at the Bidens’ relationship with Ukraine and wonder whether the war could have been avoided, and we wouldn’t have to hear stories about “we sent $X billions, but Zelenskyy says he received only $0.5X billions” which could have been spent here, not to mention millions of lives spared (the latter doesn’t affect ordinary Americans directly, but there you go).

Edit: it’s abundantly clear that Trump is also highly corrupt. A big part of the problem is that many are only to see the other side’s corruption (not to mention the felt need to pick a side)

The closest I've seen to a convincing explanation of this came from a recent Some More News episode. The host argued that, while Democrats at the Federal level have pretty fucking clearly been far better for normal Americans this century (and longer, but let's consider the last 25ish years) with things like the CFPB and ACA and bringing down fentanyl overdose death rates (to say nothing of economic performance under Democrats versus Republicans, going back quite a bit farther than this century), they have simply not done enough, and the perception is still, by death through a thousand cuts, that things are getting worse.

Long hold times and phone-tree mazes for help with the dozen bills that showed up due to one night in the hospital (despite insurance and all that!), housing costs shooting up year over year, inflation (people genuinely don't understand that "inflation is down" doesn't mean "prices dropped", which, after the giant covid price spike, is what they actually wanted to happen). More visible homelessness. Scam call attempts 2-3 times a day, and your Grandma and thousands of other grandmas and grandpas and fathers and mothers lost a ton of money to them, and nobody in power seems to give half a fuck. The neoliberal trade changes in the '90s were supposed to come with mountains of support to the demographics likely to be harmed by them, and that never meaningfully materialized, and people remember that and families still feel the pain from it. It may seem silly, but: tip prompts for take-out. It's some bigger things, and a whole lot of little things like that.

Add the cultivated, perceived, not-backed-by-data problems Republicans propagandize, to those very real ones above. Sky-high and worsening crime, "invasions" at the border bringing in fentanyl and such (it's mostly Americans doing it, in fact, for the obvious reason that they have a much easier time crossing the border Mex-to-US while carrying drugs when the crossing itself isn't illegal, so it's far less risky) and trans athletes, all that junk.

This left a good chunk of the electorate eager for someone promising to upend the system, when the two options presented to-date had been "we'll fix everything (but actually it'll get worse)" and "we'll fix everything (but actually it'll still get worse—just more-slowly)".

Fertile ground for a fascist conman.

There are other aspects to it, of course. Conspiratorial thinking (QAnon and friends) twisted, as it usually is when it hits politics, into "these openly-grifting elites are on my side and will stop the secretly-grifting elites I've been assured are the problem!" is a pretty big one, thanks to the feed-algo right-wing-radicalization pipeline giving that nonsense a ton of oxygen. A non-trivial set of folks really are just racist as hell. But the above is the most-plausible explanation I've seen for the "things are bad and getting worse" voters.