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  • Hacker News
  • Even before this insiders had access to the prez. I am glad this presidency is making very apparent the inherent flaws with the US government.
    by amazingamazing
  • A teleprompter operator was making bets on what the president would say..

    And thats just one that got called out. Grift is kind of the new normal sadly.

    https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/07/trump-teleprompter-a...

    I remember someone getting into trouble for taking a trips in government vehicles. A time when scandal would cause people to stop being in politics...Seems quaint.

    https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-06-23-mn-2062-s...

    by acomjean
  • So I signed up.

    I figure if I can get over a hundred people to sign up with me at $1K a month, I pass along the info, they save money, and I profit.

    Amidoingitrite?

    <JK, but, wow, what a time we're witnessing.>

    by JKCalhoun
  • $100k seems cheap for the potential front running
    by morkalork
  • The amount of money you can make with this only depends on how much money you already have.
    by InsideOutSanta
  • Even if the front running fails, it's a cheap way to raise your profile with the president. I bet if you are paying $100k / month, your chances of the president taking your call go way up.
    by criddell
  • I'm surprised this isn't an impeachable offence.
    by tho23u434079
  • I remember when we gave a shit about "emoluments."
    by dole
  • Impeachment requires a Democrat majority.

    (for some reason this attracted a downvote? Obviously Republicans are never going to impeach a Republican President? I cannot imagine why you would think they would?)

    by pjc50
  • not like that impacts anything anymore, apparently.
    by zparky
  • The Republicans still control Congress at least until the new Congress is seated in January. At which point the House may impeach Trump for one of many crimes. But it's unlikely the Senate will have enough votes to convict, even if Democrats also take it back.
    by goatlover
  • It is.

    The US is over.

    by spiderfarmer
  • Of course it's an impeachable offense. We see several new ones every week.

    There's just no one with the power plus willingness to do so.

    by ceejayoz
  • Republicans don't even try to put on an appearance of lawfulness anymore. Their supporters revel in the criminality. They worship it.
    by Micrococonut
  • The US political system is now so deeply divided along partisan lines that it's increasingly difficult to imagine what "an impeachable offense" would look like. Impeachment requires that many members of Congress are willing to go against a President of their own party, and that doesn't really happen any more, at least not at the scale needed for impeachment.

    The founders seem to have imagined that Congress (as a whole) would have an adversarial relationship with the President. But they failed to foresee the levels of partisanship we have today which have resulted in ~half of Congress being very closely allied with the President.

    When the US was less divided, things like ethics or morals or even just not openly breaking the law mattered a lot more. Now, people (at least, the people who vote the most) care more about "is my party in power", and either don't know about or disregard everything else. I include "don't know" because if all you listen to is Fox news and social networks feeding you ideas that you already agree with then you can easily be completely unaware of things like this.

    by usefulcat
  • Why is this not being stopped by us jurisdiction? Or at least why does the rest of the world does not decouple from those markets?
    by micw
  • A video has been going around pointing out one of the consequences of the Strait of Hormuz closure.

    Over the past few years, China has quietly purchased more than a billion barrels of oil from Russia and Iran at a discount in CNY rather than USD, pushing it into newly created strategic stockpiles that would be necessary for closure of a different Strait. After putting a strategic foot on the neck of refined product exports, they are now functionally acting as the largest part of the world's crude reserves, smoothing demand so that the global price does not spike and crash the global economy & global trade. If China was to keep up its normal buying cycle over the past few months, we would have easily seen >$200 oil. Instead, oil is a third that, and it's not even the limiting factor - refinery output drops on diesel from Ukraine's Kinetic Sanctions campaign are having a more significant bottleneck on petrochemicals right now than Hormuz.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkA0bkb6ZO0

    Say what you like about the motivation, this is a form of global leadership of the sort that America used to specialize in, and every drop of oil traded in CNY rather than "The Petrodollar" weakens the USD as the anchor currency.

    by mapt
  • The answer is simple: the US is corrupt.
    by owebmaster
  • They are decoupling, it's just if you just do it quietly.
    by bamboozled
  • Hint: You will never see the folks enforcing action against this platform and the folks using and posting on the platform in the same room.
    by jasonjayr
  • we've reached the "yes, we're cheating, do something about it" stage of corruption
    by ratelimitsteve
  • I think most of us who have lived through many presidents understood that there was a decency required of the holder of the office that acted as the only true limit on their corruption. It's confounding that so many people in the US can't see it for what it is.
    by beams_of_light
  • Official "insider-knowledge-as-a-service". No surprise who the first clients are.
    by kubafu
  • Curious: are there any republicans left on HN? I have no concept of how you can defend this
    by koe123
  • There are republicans left and most will devolve to equivocating talking about corruption under Biden (Hunter Laptop), Clinton etc and maybe say "everyone is corrupt and this is just slightly more corrupt maybe more in the open" why are you making a scene about it? Not realizing that steps like these mean that society as a whole will become overtly corrupt instead of covertly corrupt.

    If a President is so corrupt that he is selling access for what is loose change for him - I mean what is $100k when he is getting $400million jet - their local offices will also feel comfortable nickel and diming them for small access. A trip to DMV will turn into "You want your driving license? That'll be $50 extra for me on top of the administrative fees". This is the reality of life in some low trust third world countries. Now coming to America!

    But in the meantime lets celebrate equivocating and whataboutism.

    by thisisit
  • https://www.daynaemcraig.com/narcissistsprayer/

    “That didn’t happen. And if it did, it wasn’t that bad. And if it was, that’s not a big deal. And if it is, that’s not my fault. And if it was, I didn’t mean it. And if I did You deserved it.”

    by toomuchtodo
  • Not a Republican, but I support this behavior because I can't wait for more talent to leave the US
    by OsrsNeedsf2P
  • I doubt there are many dyed-in-the-wool Republicans as such, but I'll bet there are many who still identify strongly enough with the old-school Republican messaging around rugged individualism and supply-side economics that they view the median Democrat as actively destructive by comparison to the merely flawed median Republican.

    I'm far from being one of those myself, but I imagine the argument would be that any regulation one could propose to address this is bound to be worse than the problem itself, in terms of chilling effects on legitimate speech and commercial activity.

    by 0xcde4c3db
  • Why shouldn't there be? Depending on the poll you look at, republicans are polling around 40%: https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/state-of-the-union/ge...
    by antiloper
  • If most were being honest, they would probably admit that the corrupt behavior like this is bad, but that the overall balance of good vs bad policy decisions still favor having Republicans in power vs Democrats.
    by Eueudhsbsj32