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Federal judge halts work on Trump’s ‘anti-weaponization fund’

https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/29/politics ... ation-fund

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[caltrek]

Gangster Capitalism and Corruption in Trump’s America
By Henry Giroux
May 29, 2026

Introduction:

(Counterpunch) Corruption has never been far from the center of American politics. Some of the most notorious scandals stretch from the cronyism of Warren G. Harding to the abuses of power exposed during the Watergate scandal under Richard Nixon. Yet many historians argue that what distinguishes Donald Trump from earlier corrupt presidencies is that corruption no longer operates behind closed doors, shielded by the liberal rituals of institutional legitimacy and the euphemisms of political decorum. Under Trump, corruption is performed openly as spectacle, celebrated as a sign of strength, wealth, vengeance, and personal loyalty.

Trump’s ever-expanding regime of corruption is no longer simply hidden financial misconduct but a public display of sociopathic avarice designed to normalize greed, lawlessness, unconstrained power, and the collapse of civic accountability. It reflects a politics of moral nihilism in which fascism no longer appears as a distant threat, but as the future already taking shape.

As a badge of honor, Trump embraces corruption not simply as a mode of governance, but as a spectacle designed to legitimate greed, cruelty, and unchecked power. It functions as what Dominic Wetzel has called the “pornification of the American dream,” a culture in which excess, lawlessness, and predation are celebrated as signs of success and strength. In Trump’s America, corruption metastasizes into a theater of cruelty and violence, saturating political life with the values of fear, spectacle, and disposability. It feeds a broader architecture of domination rooted in toxic hierarchies of race, class, misogyny, and white Christian nationalism, while turning lawlessness and untethered aggression into forms of political entertainment.

Corruption, in this sense, is more than a symptom of institutional decay, moral depravity, or political vulgarity. It becomes one of the central pedagogical and political mechanisms through which fascist politics takes hold, eroding democratic values while legitimating a culture organized around brutality, humiliation, and civic abandonment. In this formulation, corruption functions as a kind of fascist staging ground, creating the conditions that nourish what Jonathan Crary calls in Scorched Earth an “implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory, and social disintegration.”

Read more here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/2 ... america/

caltrek’s comment: Missing from this article is a recollection of Ronald Reagan’s famous statement of belief: “Greed is good.” In all fairness to Reagan, his statement was made in the context of loosening regulations and allowing the free market to proceed by rewarding the “greedy” who best understood that market. So, Reagan proposed achieving his goals through a legislative process.

Trump simply wishes to totally bypass the legislative branch by a complete disregard of any law or regulation that might impede his corrupt practices. Hence his constant and continual clash with the judicial system which so far has served as a bulwark against some (but not all) of Trump’s more extreme plans of self-aggrandizement.

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