Q: How much more incompetence and corruption is still to be revealed now that the Trump era is over?
A: A lot.
The bottom line is the thing that stops future corruption is people being busted for past corruption.
If Trump has shown a way to get away with corruption in plain sight with no repercussions because some people just don’t want to be bothered by news they don’t like then the country is in a really bad place.
Perhaps digging all of this out will be painful and unpleasant but it needs doing for the future health of the US government.
You do remember that one of the two political parties seems committed to destroying the US government, right? What incentive do you think they have to “dig all this out”?
^ 100% this.
Yeah, I figure that if the press brings things to light–or finally gets real info that was previously squashed–then Congress (or half of Congress, at least) will have the option of investigating, and it won’t be up to Biden anyway.
This isn’t just the usual administration looking back on the previous one, and letting bygones be bygones. I believe that Trump enabled a whole ecosystem of corruption on a scale we haven’t seen for at least century or so.
If you move into a house that has rotting dead bodies in the walls, you can’t just ignore it.
Does intentional dysfunction come under the heading of incompetence?.
President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to “restore the soul of America.” It is a worthy, poetic goal. Another, more prosaic objective also lies before him: fixing America’s plumbing.
By which I mean repairing the machinery of government, which has been corroded by Trumpian incompetence and malevolence. In the months ahead, there are at least three areas that need the Biden transition team’s urgent attention: policy, people and public trust.
The federal government is a massive, slow-moving ship. Even in the best of times it is often dysfunctional. But for the past four years, the Trump administration has deliberately made parts of government more dysfunctional, throwing sand in the gears in order to sabotage programs the president doesn’t like that are nonetheless required by statute.
…Last week, for example, the Department of Health and Human Services proposed a rule that would require nearly every regulation ever issued to automatically expire unless reviewed within a certain time. The goal seems to be to jam up the Biden administration, so it spends all its time keeping Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Medicare from accidentally blowing up.
Merely rolling back Trump-era regulations and enforcement memos won’t be sufficient to repair the damage if government infrastructure remains weak. And it might, without concerted effort to improve employee morale.
There have been purges, sidelinings of expert talent and voluntary brain drain across government agencies. Morale is poor at agencies whose missions have fundamentally changed under Trump, such as the increasingly anti-consumer Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. At least two targeted agencies, the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, were effectively dismantled; a sudden (seemingly punitive) forced move across the country led 75 percent of affected employees to quit.
…
I am saying the Biden admin needs to dive in and dig this corruption out.
I doubt they will barely touch it though. Maybe a few low level scapegoats will get nailed to make it seem like they did something.
I started a similar thread here: Predictions for the depth of rot that will be found in the Trump Administration
I think it will be national security issues that will get Trump in the end. Traitors don’t get pardoned or forgiven and no one will want to be anywhere near Trump once they have solid evidence of just how much he was Putin’s cyka.
Hopefully everything will be released and come to light. And the Biden administration doesn’t have to make it a big deal - he can say he’s focused on fighting the pandemic and helping Americans, while the DoJ or whoever releases all the documents that show what Trump really did.
No, that would be straight-up malice. I should have included that in my post title.
My apologies; I scanned Politics & Elections to see if a similar thread existed but didn’t see yours.
I hope if there are national security issues they come out into the light and trump has to pay for what he did. For the life of me, I don’t understand why some of the really questionable national security-related choices he made did not resonate more at the time- like hastily pullling troops out of Syria and abandoning the Kurds after a phone call with Erdogen. Our troops had to bomb their bases because they didn’t have time to remove all of their equipment and didn’t want Syrian troops to get their hands on it! And how he didn’t say a word when news of Putin paying a bounty on American troops to the Taliban came out. It seems extremely obvious to me that there was something deeply compromised with trump.
I agree with both of these opposing views fully and completely.
I believe letting the current corruption to go unchecked will become encouragement for it to happen again.
Ideally Biden will move ahead and never pursue or even mention Trump and his long list of crimes. However, others will and Trump will be placed into a situation where he can not bargain or plead his ass out it. In an ideal world, the second to last story on every local and national news cast two and three and four years from now will be:
In other news tonight, Trump’s lawyer’s lost another appeal in federal/district/state court today. None of the seized property will be returned to the Trump family, and his sentence will not be shortened or served under house arrest. In striking contrast to their pretrial boasts, his lawyers have been found guilty of filing frivolous and baseless law suits. They have each been disbarred and sentenced to serve 24 to 60 months hard time. And now to Ashley with tonight’s water skiing squirrel story."
Unlikely to happen, but perfectly just and ideal.
The Trump Administration has truly earned its legacy.
It seems like these and other accurate and pertinent descriptions of Trump’s Presidency should be carved in stone in a series of archways through which visitors to the Trump Presidential Library must pass before gaining access.
100% Concur.
One of the fundamental problems in the US today is a lack of accountability. We see all too often the rich and well connected getting away with crap that would get you (general “you”) and me crucified in a heartbeat. We see police regularly getting away with murder (literally). Politicians who are not held to the standards their own supporters proclaim.
That needs to change.
I am not saying these people deserve special attention because we just do not like them. I am saying they need the same attention that you or I would get and suffer the same consequences that you or I would get.
Here I disagree. Biden has plenty to focus on and none of it involves looking backward. But SOMEONE needs to pursue this relentlessly.
The people who would do so are part of the Biden admin. That’s just how it works.
I know someone will tell me the states can do it. This needs more.
As long as it is not the focus of the new administration, and Biden is free to pursue his agenda with uninterrupted vigor. AND as long as the media does not make it a focus point or a circus I am okay with it. Nothing should be announced, and even results should be downplayed and considered past news. If/when results are revealed they are accompanied by convictions.
I think Biden’s agenda should include fixing government so we do not have a repeat of an overt criminal in the White House using the US government for his own purposes. It is hard to overstate that. Trump co-opted the DoJ for his purposes. The DoJ was acting like Trump’s personal defense counsel. And that is only one example of his perfidy.
Doubtless Biden would rather we forget all of that and focus on climate change or something.
I submit that fixing government is one of the most important tasks he could focus on. That is fundamental to getting everything else done.
YMMV
WTF??