this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
287 points (99.3% liked)
Political Memes
11998 readers
3089 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
1) Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
2) No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
3) Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
4) No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
5) No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think the media latches onto simple corruption cases like this because they're easy for people to grasp.
"Trump overpays donor to do subpar job on major national monument, ruining it" is a simple quid pro quo with visible (and ironically metaphorical) results.
It's a little harder to talk about all his insider trading schemes, Melania movie $40M kickback, crypto rugpulls, campaign finance violations, etc. Because those have more plausible deniability and the results don't have immediate and observable effects - often just pay for play schemes between him & corporations which are less concrete.
People can either delude themselves into thinking it's legitimate because they don't understand financial stuff/how things typically worked before being massively corrupt, or because it's initially just Trump making money (usually illegally) which is something they expect him to do and the illegality is difficult to explain or not very hard-hitting.
Or because they don't matter. It's millions while the war is costing billions.
Well that's a bit of a false equivalency. Yes the war is costing billions in tax payer money, which is bad, but that isn't corruption. That's just a warmongering administration getting into and losing unnecessary wars.
All these random, relatively small, examples of corruption are sometimes uses of taxpayer money like in this case, but that isn't the problem - if the pool needed to be resurfaced then that is a legitimate government expense. It wasn't necessary, but that'd just be waste if we stopped there. The actual problem is the corruption - the facilitation of funding to the Trump campaign and Trump family, illegally, through pay for play schemes.
Both things matter, and obviously the war matters more as it has cost innocent lives, they are not the same type of thing though.
Right. However if newspapers would start investigating the war expenses, don't you think they would find billions wasted in corruption?
You thinking maybe we don't trust the military-industrial complex? I Ike the way you think.
I think they are investigating that though, right? It's just a different sort of story, requiring more reporting investment and more specialized reporters. I've seen lots of reporting on the war over the past months (humanitarian, economic, military, etc. etc.)
Obviously though most of that reporting is institutionalist, serves western interests, etc. I just don't expect different from the corporate press