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Even Trump’s Kids Haven’t Donated to His Campaign

With less than two weeks until the election, Donald Trump has amassed an impressive army of small donors, fueling his bid with individual contributions of $200 or less. But noticeably absent from the list of contributors is basically anyone with the last name Trump, many of the surrogates who represent The Donald on national television, and members of his own campaign staff.

On Sept. 7, 2016, Eric Trump appears to have contributed $376.20 listed only as “meeting expense: meals.”

The Federal Election Commission on Tuesday said it had fined the publisher of the National Enquirer for its role in a "hush-money" payment made to quiet a woman who alleged an affair with former President Donald Trump during the 2016 election cycle, according to documents made public by Common Cause, a watchdog group.

The $187,500 fine came after the commission found that American Media Inc., whose successor is A360 Media, LLC, made an illegal corporate campaign contribution by paying $150,000 during Trump's first presidential campaign to prevent former Playboy model Karen McDougal from going public with her claims of an affair. Trump has denied the affair.

The FEC conciliation agreement with A360 Media -- made public by Common Cause, which had filed a complaint about the McDougal payment -- came after AMI signed a 2018 non-prosecution agreement with Manhattan federal prosecutors in which it admitted that its "principal purpose in entering into the agreement" to pay McDougal "was to suppress [McDougal's] story so as to prevent it from influencing the election."

“Look, I was just wondering: What’s the Republican Party all about these days? What does it, well, stand for?”

Republicans now partly define their party simply as an alternative to that other party, as in, “I’m a Republican because I’m not a Democrat.”

In a long-forgotten era — say, four years ago — such a question would have elicited a very different answer.

Record numbers of Americans felt strongly favorable or unfavorable toward Trump during his time in office. (The strongly favorable and unfavorable was 71% in a Fox News poll last month, for instance.)

Trump's presidency drove historic turnout and record donations to political campaigns in a country whose voters have often shown a disinterest in politics.

The 2020 campaign, by comparison, had a little less than 160 million voters participate

“I’ve told my six-year-old daughter, ‘Running for office is real simple: you just surgically disconnect your shame sensor,’” he said. “Because you spend every day asking people for money.

Starting with the attack on the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law in 2003, opponents have won an accelerating series of victories against similar laws. The result has completely changed the world of campaign finance. Citizens United struck down limits on independent expenditures. SpeechNow made it possible for contributions to be largely hidden. Aggregate limits on personal contributions were swept away by McCutcheon v. FEC in 2014

For extremely wealthy donors who want to elect candidates and influence issues, their newfound power is a godsend. After spending $92 million on super PACs in 2012, Sheldon Adelson can summon any Republican candidate he wants and has their ears to discuss Israel, his pet issue.

Ted Cruz failed to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans from the nation's largest banks when he ran for the Senate in 2012, a potential violation of federal election rules.

The senator did eventually list the loans on personal financial disclosures

"These loans have been disclosed over and over and over again,"

how do campaign donations that appear to be connected with Boeing manage to avoid violating this law? The answer is a loophole, cemented in the law in the 1970s, that permits government contractors to set up “separate segregated funds,” or political action committees, to make political contributions using money typically pooled from the contractors’ executives and major shareholders. Such funds are legal even if the parent company pays for their operating and fund-raising costs. This exemption — whose ostensible justification is the free-speech rights of contractors’ employees — is why political action committees like Boeing’s can exist.

The corporate PAC workaround is “clearly bad, policy-wise,” said Brendan Fischer, the director of federal reform at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan ethics watchdog

Boeing’s PAC is a “major player” Mr. Fischer said. The sum of its contributions is three times larger than the sum of any independent individual contributions from its employees

In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.

Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.

Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.

it is clear that human societies do not progress inevitably toward greater wealth. Creating the conditions in which self-interest will foster economic development is harder than optimistic Enlightenment thinkers believed. Economic growth is not predestined: Many countries have seen long-term declines in standards of living, as did Argentina in the twentieth century. Others, such as large parts of Africa, seem mired in strife and poverty. With even the United States and Western Europe facing economic stagnation, burdensome debt levels, unfavorable demographics, and rising global competition, it seems that sustained stability and prosperity may be the historical exception rather than the rule.

Why some societies stagnate while others thrive is the question addressed by economist Daron Acemoglu and political scientist James Robinson in Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.

differences, Acemoglu and Robinson argue, can all be explained by institutions. Long-lasting institutions, not short-term government policies, are the key determinant of societal outcomes. Development is not as simple as adopting a smarter set of economic policies: Instead, "the main obstacle to the adoption of policies that would reduce market failures and encourage economic growth is not the ignorance of politicians but the incentives and constraints they face from the political and economic institutions in their societies."

ut why are we so divided? We’re not fighting a hugely unpopular war on the scale of Vietnam. We’re not in a deep economic crisis like the Great Depression. Yes, we disagree about guns, gays, abortion and immigration, but we’ve disagreed about them for decades. Why are we so divided now?

But that begs the question of why we have been so ready to be divided by Trump. The answer derives in large part from what has happened to wealth and power.

hey talked instead about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up” or “make the system work again” or “stop the corruption” or “end the rigging”.

. A Democrat hasn’t won statewide office in South Carolina in more than a decade, President Donald Trump is easily outpacing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, and the three-term incumbent, Republican Lindsey Graham, won his last re-election contest by more than 15 points.

Once a moderate Republican who was part of the bipartisan group that devised a 2013 immigration reform bill, Graham has transformed from a Donald Trump critic to one of the President’s closest allies.

Harrison has capitalized by focusing on local issues. “The urgency to get Supreme Court justices through, or tee time with the President, or going on Fox News—all those things are much higher on the priority level for Lindsey Graham than addressing the issues people are dealing with,”

US lets corporations delay paying environmental fines amid pandemic

Ten corporations that agreed to a total of $56m in civil penalties for allegedly breaking environmental laws are not being required to make payments under a pause granted by the US government during the Covid-19 pandemic.

They signed settlements with the government agreeing to pay fines without admitting liability but the justice department last month advised most of the companies of extensions in letters which were obtained by the government watchdog group Accountable.US via public records requests.