The Sunday Subject: April 20, 2025
Week seventeen: Massive bribes, failed bills.
Trump Accepts Massive Bribe From Qatar
Convicted felon Donald Trump, who spent his first term in the White House repeatedly violating the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause — which forbids the President from accepting foreign gifts or pocketing taxpayer money — is doubling down on corruption in his second term. Qatar’s royal family has offered the failed airline magnate a massive luxury airplane, valued at $400M.
Trump claims he only intends to use the plane for presidential business, and then donate it to his as-yet-nonexistent presidential library. (He also claimed to release his tax returns in two weeks at least monthly during his original presidential run.) The blatant ethical violation has generated strong objections from the Democrats, but also from Trump’s own supporters.
Refitting the plan to serve as Air Force One could cost taxpayers up to $1 billion dollars, and taxpayers are already on the hook for an expensive and long-delayed Air Force One Trump had ordered from Boeing during his first term.
Budget Committe Stops GOP “Megabill”
A massive fiscal bill died in committee after strong opposition from Democrats and a handful of Republican defectors. Democrats attacked the bill for hurting Medicaid recipients, worsening climate change, and increasing the deficit; the Republican defectors objected to those things not happening quickly enough.
The bill represents convicted felon Donald Trump’s legislative agenda for his second term, and is very much in line with the GOP’s Project 2025 agenda — it includes cuts to Medicaid, which currently serves 80 million Americans; a reversal of Biden’s green energy tax credits; and an extension of the tax cuts passed during Trump’s first term, which were criticized for being weighted heavily towards the richest 1%, and increasing the deficit. On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump promised to cut the deficit in half in 8 years; it in fact increased every year he was in office after going steadily down from 2009-2015. A major focus of Trump’s second term has been “government efficiency”, in the form of brutal cuts to essential services including foreign aid and air traffic control; despite this, government spending is on pace to increase every year of his second term.
DOGE’s Social Security Fraud Claims Proven False
DOGE, the unofficial government agency run by Trump campaign donor Elon Musk, swept into office making extravagant claims about a government bleeding money to fraud by ordinary Americans (and not, say, government contractors like Elon Musk). Musk at one point made the laughable claim that 40% of calls to the Social Security Administration were fradulent.
After instructing the SSA to install anti-fraud checks for benefit claims made over the phone (although DOGE has no legal authority over the SSA), the SSA complied, and found a fraud rate of not 40%, but 0.0018%.
DOGE’s haphazard firings and uncontitutional cuts to Congressionally-approved funding have proven to be unpopular with the public, and even Congress is starting to push back, as even Congressional Republicans rejected legislation that would give DOGE’s cuts legal standing.