One of the single most corrupt acts in American history

My Sunday movie was Twilight’s Kiss, a love story between two senior men, both with families. One scenario is two men who realize late in life that they are gay. That’s not the case here. Pak, 70, appears to have been cruising for quite a while. Hoi, 65, is a member of a group of senior gay men petitioning for a gay nursing home. Figuring out the setting of this film took me a while. Pak drives a taxi and doesn’t want to retire. In addition to “TAXI” on the side of the car there are Chinese characters. But he drove on the left, so this isn’t China. But their speech didn’t sound like Japanese. I realized what it was only a moment before the movie confirmed it – it’s set in Hong Kong. Pak has a wife, a daughter about to be married, and a son with his own daughter. Pak picks the girl up from school and they all frequently eat together. He doesn’t want to lose all that. Hoi, newly retired, was divorced a long time ago and raised a son on his own. That son, with wife and daughter, is now a member of a conservative Christian church. Hoi doesn’t want to lose that either. Pak meets Hoi in a park. Hoi wants more than a quick release. They become lovers, hiding it from their families, taking time together when they can. It’s a tender story. I enjoyed it. I finished the book We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian. I bought the book because I heard it had the same setting as the author’s book You Sound Be So Lucky which I read and discussed here. At the time I didn’t recognize that book is the sequel and still didn’t until I was done with this book and reread the opening of the other and saw character names I recognized. As in many series like this – a gay romance, well any romance – additional books in the series focus on a different couple with the main characters of one story serving as side characters in the next. The setting is 1958-1959 New York. As in the other book one of the characters is a reporter or writer for the New York Chronicle newspaper. In this case it is Nick. He’s there when the owner’s son Andrew III shows up and is assigned to the news room, where Nick works. Andy looks so lost and inept that Nick befriends him and serves as mentor. Their friendship deepens. When Andy can’t stand to live in his deceased mother’s apartment anymore Nick offers his spare bedroom. Nick is deeply closeted (this is a decade before Stonewall). That his older brother Mike is a cop only makes that worse. When Andy, who was engaged to a woman before she called off the wedding, begins to realize he is queer and has fallen for Nick, there are a lot of issues to work through. Andy is about to inherit the paper, though he feels he’s not cut out for the job. Will Andy being Nick’s boss work? Can Nick allow himself to love and consider a future when the society is so homophobic and he could lose so much? But this is a romance. It follows the formula, complete with happy ending. I enjoyed it, though I’m souring on romances and their formula in general. Sabrina Haake of the Daily Kos community lists the huge amount of grifting the nasty guy has been doing, from the “astonishing” number of stock trades quite likely based on insider information to the gilded phone he offered that now has updated terms that say thanks for your deposit but the phone may never actually appear. He’s even more corrupt than the infamous New York Tammany Hall. Emily Singer of Kos reported on those stock trades.

Financial disclosures released this past Thursday show Trump’s investment portfolio included over 3,600 stock trades made in the first three months of 2026. Wall Street experts say that the trade volume is so large that it looks more like a hedge fund’s balance sheet than that of a singular trader—especially the president of the United States. It also raises serious questions about insider trading. Trump’s stock portfolio is not in a blind trust, and many of the stocks he bought and sold were from companies whose leadership he has worked closely with in his capacity as president, including Intel, Nvidia, and Oracle. “I’m baffled,” Eric Diton, president and managing director at The Wealth Alliance, told Bloomberg News. “In the 40-plus years of my time on Wall Street, this is an unusual amount of trading by any standards.”

So, of course, the nasty guy is against passing a law that would ban members of Congress and the president from trading stocks. Lisa Needham of Kos reported the nasty guy dropped his lawsuit against the IRS, where he demanded $10 billion for leaking tax returns. There is all kinds of wrong with that lawsuit, including he was essentially suing himself. Instead, he “settled” for a $1.776 billion (yeah, we know where that number comes from) “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate those who attacked the Capitol back in 2021 and were jailed for their crimes. Other grifty aspects of this deal: The money is to be disbursed by a committee and the nasty guy has control of the membership. The deal was not reviewed by a court. There will be no reporting of how much was given to whom, so fraud is almost guaranteed. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Democrats do it too and this deal is just like an Obama-era settlement. Needham documents the important differences that show why one is legal and the other is pure corruption. NPR host A Martínez talked to reporter Carrie Johnson about the case, giving more detail than Needham had supplied. NPR host Leila Fadel spoke about all this with former federal prosecutor Harry Sandick.

FADEL: I'm curious if you agree with the assessment we just heard from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington that this is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history. SANDICK: I do agree with it broadly. Nothing like this has ever happened before. For a president to sort of reach with his, you know, with one hand as the litigant and with another hand as the person who controls the government. And to take almost $2 billion and intend to use it, with almost no controls, to provide, you know, settlements, I guess is what they'll call it, to people who were engaged in the January 6 insurrection. So there's - I've never seen anything like this before.

In Saturday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Paul Waldman’s Substack:

This is what Democrats so often lack: Not something they can talk about today, not a proposal they can make, not a failure of the other side they can point to, but a big idea that helps voters understand and articulate both what the problem is, and most importantly, who is to blame. It’s the corruption, stupid. Trump’s corruption? Yes, of course. But it’s more than that. It’s a system, a rot, a disease, an explanation for nearly every complaint voters have. Corruption is why you can’t afford health care, why prices are too high, why there aren’t enough good jobs, why the government keeps failing at the things it’s supposed to do, and so much more. This is the big idea Democrats have been looking for.

Alas, a problem is that Democrats, by taking donations from billionaires, have been corrupted. Katie Rogers tweeted a link to an article in Vulture with the title and subhead:

The Feed is Fake That “viral” song, movie, influencer, and celebrity drama you scrolled by recently was likely the result of a stealth marketing campaign.

Rogers added a quote from the article

Reporters and editors who get their ideas from their social-media feeds — which is most of them, most of the time — can mistake a paid simulation of public interest for the real thing and then make it real by covering it.

A week ago Kos of Kos discussed a comment by the nasty guy made at a time when his approval ratings are quite low as voters blame him more and more for the bad economy.

President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter Tuesday, “To what extent are Americans’ financial situations motivating you to make a deal?” It’s a fair question, right? ... “Not even a little bit,” he answered. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran: they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing—we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”

Kos says though the statement seems ludicrous it is among the most honest things he’s said. It’s also a gift for Democrats In Friday’s pundit roundup Dworkin quoted John Stoehr and his Editorial Board:

In the run up to the midterm elections, the Democrats accuse Donald Trump of broken promises. Among other examples, they cite rates of inflation that have wiped out wage gains. But the president kept his promise. A majority of voters wanted whiteness to be dominant again. That’s what he’s doing. The problem is that whiteness causes ruin, even for those who vote for it. You can’t have one without the other, but they didn’t believe it, because, to them, whiteness is prosperity. What they’re mad about now is their own desire backfiring on them. If the Democrats win in November, which seems likely, the leadership will have incentive to control everything rank-and-file Democrats say for the purpose of seeming reasonable to these voters, therefore retaining hopefully their support in advance of the 2028 election. The problem is there’s no way to seem reasonable to Americans who desire freedom from consequences.