[bruce511]

Yes I think some of what he's doing isn't new, and yes some of it isn't new, just more brazen, but I think there's also a lot of new.

For example, pardons are for sale. Thats pretty obvious. maybe it's been done before (?) but certainly not on this scale and not so soon in the term.

Secondly he's set up a direct method for paying him, TrumpCoin. That's different to campaign contributions. And indeed quite a bit of trumpcoin is being sold to foreign govts. I'm gonna put that in the "new" column.

In terms of international relations it's all new. He's blowing up trust in the US, via tarrifs, threats to invade a NATO country and so on. This is long term damage at unprecedented scale for no apparent actual gain.

There are plenty of laws which say he can't do any of this. Adding more laws is not the solution. A weak congress, and a weak Supreme Court unwilling to enforce the laws is the problem.

[AnthonyMouse]

> For example, pardons are for sale.

This seems like a pretty good example of how Trump is "different" but not actually different.

The traditional way this works is through prosecutorial discretion. You make friends with the politician and then when they're in office you don't get prosecuted or the case gets dropped or settled under favorable terms. Example: When Bush got elected, the antitrust case against Microsoft was effectively made to go away "for some reason" (https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/microsoft-political-...).

Doing the same thing with pardons is way more conspicuous, because instead of something that doesn't happen (prosecution) you have something that does happen, and in public view (official pardon).

Politicians traditionally care about distinctions like that because it makes it much easier to accuse them of the thing, whereas Trump DGAF. But it's fundamentally not a different thing and the actual problem isn't that Trump isn't being subtle about it, it's that they should not be getting away with it even when they are being subtle about it.

> Secondly he's set up a direct method for paying him, TrumpCoin. That's different to campaign contributions.

Eh. It's not that much different to campaign contributions and it's not really different at all to the longstanding practice of politicians or their family members owning a private company which then gets into a bunch of peculiarly advantageous business dealings while they're in office.

> In terms of international relations it's all new. He's blowing up trust in the US, via tarrifs, threats to invade a NATO country and so on. This is long term damage at unprecedented scale for no apparent actual gain.

The problem with this one is it's the hating the other party's President one. Congress passed a law letting the President set tariffs, didn't repeal it for many years, and then the President started setting some tariffs. You can argue that it's a bad policy, you can argue that they should repeal the law that lets him do it, but he ran for office saying he was going to do this, got into office, and now he's doing it.

> There are plenty of laws which say he can't do any of this. Adding more laws is not the solution. A weak congress, and a weak Supreme Court unwilling to enforce the laws is the problem.

There are two kinds of laws in this context.

The first is the ones that punish him for doing something. Those are useless in this context because the executive isn't going to prosecute itself so you're down to impeachment and for that you need bipartisan consensus.

The second is the ones that prevent him from doing something. Take away the law that lets the President set tariffs and he can't unilaterally set any tariffs.