The White House, LLC
51 comments
·May 19, 2025jameskilton
pixxel
[dead]
LocalH
We made Jimmy Carter sell off his family peanut farm for this?
Ludicrous. Criminals, the lot of them.
bix6
He’s a good businessman, ok?!?
He wont be impeached so is the only hope that the next administration (haha) can charge him?
ianhawes
He will almost certainly pardon his entire family and himself prior to the conclusion of his 2nd term.
pupppet
Who are we kidding, there will be a 3rd term and beyond.
trollbridge
Well, the precedent is set there to do that.
bdavisx
Yes and no - there's an argument to be made that you can't pardon someone for doing something illegal on your orders.
NickC25
I know you are being sarcastic, but he won't get charged because the courts have ruled that anything he decides is an official act is legal.
He's also not a good businessman. He's bankrupted 3 casinos.
To anyone here who is still on the Trump train, let's look at what this Epstien-island-visting, makeup wearing "stable genius" failed to sell to Americans:
~Red meat. ~Airline Travel. ~Gridiron football. ~College education. ~Liquor.
Yet this being is treated as some sort of business savant. Come on.
There also won't be a next administration, he's already said he's going to be president for life.
moralestapia
If the outcome of businessman is making money, then I'd say he's quite good ... and way before he became president.
bryanlarsen
His Dad transferred him $1B in NYC real estate in the 80's and 90's. If Donald had just sat on that and did nothing, he'd be a heck of a lot richer than he is now.
"Doing nothing" was a better businessman than Donald Trump.
georgeecollins
That's not really true. His father was an excellent businessman and left him what would be $1b in today's dollars. If he had just invested that money in the stock market he would be far richer in say, 2008 then he was. He probably effectively went bankrupt with the casinos, his creditors just didn't really go after him.
What turned around his fortunes was being a game show host. He did do well from licensing his name. Also he is now really making a fortune off memecoins and other stuff that seems grifty.
People that think he was a good businessman are like joe six pack or vibe economy types. People in finance or real estate in New York would laugh at the idea.
Cipater
A United Arab Emirates fund has agreed to invest $2 billion in a stablecoin (a cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar) at World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm the president owns with his sons Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Barron Trump, among other partners. The deal, which the then-candidate unveiled in September from his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, represents tens of millions of dollars in profits for the firm.
Over the past year, Trump-branded residential towers have opened in Dubai, United Arab Emirates and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, through a Saudi partner with state ties. In April, a real estate developer unveiled a Trump-branded luxury residential and golf resort at a $5.5 billion state-owned megaproject in Doha, Qatar, at an event attended by Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization, and a Qatari minister. The Trump administration and family’s company has plans for new towers in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Abu Dhabi.
In addition, sovereign wealth funds from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have pledged more than $3.5 billion to a venture capital fund led by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.
In addition, the Trump administration is in talks with the government of Qatar to accept a Boeing 747 valued at around $400 million to serve as a temporary replacement for the United States’ current Air Force One presidential aircraft, which are more than 40 years old, given the delays in Boeing’s contract to build two new presidential planes.
sam-cop-vimes
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LocalH
Too bad the US is not a democracy.
skyyler
It's interesting to think about how much money is spent on advertising every election cycle, and how much that influences the outcome of the election.
I'd be curious to see analysis of election spend vs outcomes. Bloomberg's failed run comes to mind though...
rascul
It is, though.
coldpie
> What baffles me is why that many Americans hate diversity to have elected a charlatan to the highest office in their land.
It didn't come from nowhere. It's the result of 50 years of targeted and largely unchallenged propaganda funded by the owning class to convince workers to vote against their own interests. It's no coincidence that right-wing billionaires who profit from these policies own all of our social media and most of our journalism institutions. It's been a decades-long, generational coordinated effort to end democracy in America and convert us to a Russian- and Chinese-style oligarchy, and they've finally pulled it off.
yostrovs
Propaganda is telling Americans for 4 years that their president is healthy, brilliant, and sharp, while they themselves see a fading grandpa who can't function on his own. Which leads people to not trust anything else the same media tells them. And then they start wondering about who actually is the president... Is it Jill or someone whose name they don't even recognize? And they get real angry at being taken for a fool, and vote accordingly. The last election was lost by the Dems rather than won by Trump.
This article is yet another example of how this happens.
amanaplanacanal
One common phrase is "cutting off your nose to spite your face", which almost everybody thinks is a bad idea, but here we are anyway.
Cipater
I think the current president is also a fading grandpa who is showing signs of mental decline.
Do you think he is healthy, brilliant and sharp?
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coldpie
I agree. Most (though not all!) Dems serve as tools of the owning class. That's the "largely unchallenged" part of my post, Dems are paid to be an ineffective opposition. The owning class circles the wagons when a real opposition movement (DSA, BDS, BLM, OWS) starts to poke its head up, and you see Dems, Reps, and the billionaire-owned media all working together to keep it down.
mgdev
Hear, hear.
Folks on places like HN should also realize that the broader US is not as liberal as the news and internet would make you think. The people who comment and debate online tend to be on the more extreme ends of both sides.
The rest of us (wisely or not) feel like it's typically not worth the energy to get involved.
Until it is.
sjsdaiuasgdia
And yet, the words that come out of Trump's mouth show significant mental decline, but he's given a pass because the words are spoken somewhat energetically, sometimes.
RickJWagner
Did you miss the news stories about the Clinton Foundation, or Hunter Biden’s art sales, Ukrainian job fiasco, etc?
There is never a corruption-free choice on the ballot.
null
selfhoster
> What baffles me is why that many Americans hate diversity (in all its forms - race, color, sexual preferences...)
My wife is Asian, she did, I did. I have no diversity biases. I do have a bias against the race grifters that ran the government for four years.
goosedragons
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dingnuts
the longer you stay in denial about DEI the longer the Democrats are going to lose elections.
You want democracy? Stop trying to mandate outcomes based on demographics as a ham fisted delayed reaction to Jim Crow.
Despite what Kendi says, the solution to discrimination is NOT more discrimination and if you woke idiots keep trying to force the issue we'll never have a Democratic government again. And maybe not even democratic.
yostrovs
Interestingly, the article begins with mentioning Hunter's activities in Ukraine, and implies that nothing improper happened there. Any honest observer would certainly think that a Ukrainian energy firm hiring Biden Jr to consult for major $$$ on matters he knows nothing about, while his father is the U.S. President's pointman in Ukraine, is clearly a shady deal. The article should be about how both presidents are being corrupt, but we get this.
whateveracct
The article doesn't need to be about both Presidents - why is that a necessity? The old administration is done and over.
It's clearly about the current administration, which is partaking in enough visible, ongoing corruption to fill a textbook.
razakel
He's a Yale-educated lawyer who runs a hedge fund. That's exactly the sort of person a company would want on their board.
yostrovs
Everyone that Trump is making even wealthier is highly educated and deserves it too.
eddiecalzone
Sarcasm, ha
foogazi
This comment is only about Biden’s presidency- it should be about both Trump and Biden, but we get this
goosedragons
There is only one president. Biden is not going to run again. He's not relevant anymore.
AdamN
That's really disingenuous. Clearly Biden Jr. was getting paid more than he would have but he probably did have unique insights that would be worth quite a bit of money to Burisma. But the accusation is just that he made a few $100k more than he would have and made some top-level connections (so the money actually seems sensible). Every well read person just takes these things at face value as a single individual fallling up - but he had no true secrets to give and no real power. The corruption within the Trump admin is expansive with hundreds of millions of dollars across multiple businesses and at least in the first administration real power vested in family members.
9283409232
This is "but her emails" energy. I don't care about Biden. He is done and irrelevant. Trump is the catastrophe we are dealing with right now.
soupfordummies
it's a very poor argument anyway: "oh biden did bad thing too". Okay, so you're admitting it's a bad thing first of all. Second, how does someone else doing a bad thing make it any LESS bad for others to do it?
bdavisx
Trying to what-about this just shows that you're either being deceitful or don't understand the differences. Biden Jr. was taking advantage of his dad's position - and everything seems to point that Biden Sr. was not involved and didn't really want to be invovled. The Trump family is all in and everyone is involved trying to grift as much as possible, including the President.
sjsdaiuasgdia
Yet another false equivalency.
Which is exactly what he did in his first term. The corruption and hypocrisy is the point. Republicans don't care about anything other than being the team in power.