The Daily Populous Thursday June 4th, 2026 morning edition
Authored by jacobin.com and submitted by plz-let-me-in

From the moment he took office, Donald Trump embarked on a unique strategy of overwhelming the information space with an ever-flowing deluge of executive actions, controversies, wild public statements, and more, to the point that it was impossible to fully keep track of it all. It’s as if music producer Phil Spector applied his famous “Wall of Sound” to politics. Far from eroding his political support, this approach — call it the “Wall of Scandal” — seems unable to budge the reliable 30-something percent floor of support he enjoys no matter what.

There are so many insane, shocking, sometimes unprecedented things happening at any given moment of Trump’s second term that it pays to pause, take a breath, and really take stock of them for a moment.

Let’s put aside the Iran war, which by itself would rank among the top five disastrous things done by an American president this century, if not for much longer. For three months now, the world has watched Trump publicly flail trying to get out of this war he half-assedly lied the country into while somehow claiming a win, alternately scrambling for the exit and desperately trying to convince Americans — and probably himself — that he is actually winning. All the while, he is tanking the global economy, slowly destroying the fossil fuel industry he fetishizes, and setting himself up for a future electoral drubbing.

The fact that we can, generously, leave this out and still end up with the most spasmodic, scandal-plagued presidential administration in US history is quite something.

Take the administration’s self-dealing and corruption. Before we do, it’s worth recalling what Trump and Republicans were complaining about during the Joe Biden years: of the then-president’s son Hunter and his brother James relentlessly cashing in on his name and their connection to him while he was in public office, including by forging business connections in China, which at one point saw various Biden family members allegedly receive more than $1 million worth of payments. It also included more small-ball acts of graft, like Hunter selling his mediocre art for more than a million dollars, sales that mysteriously dried up as soon as his dad was no longer president.

Well, the Trump family seems to be going out of its way to make all this look like small potatoes.

They’re already doing the exact thing they complained about with Joe Biden, only worse: when Trump took a trip to China last month, his son Eric, who runs the president’s business, with its many interests in China, hitched a ride with his dad’s presidential delegation. (To be fair, Hunter Biden did take a trip to China with his dad while he had business interests there, but it was when Joe Biden was vice president).

There are so many insane, shocking, sometimes unprecedented things happening at any given moment of Trump’s second term that it pays to pause and really take stock of them.

Then there are the rare earths firm that Trump’s other son is invested in, which got hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and “incentives” from the federal government at the direct request of the White House. Or his son’s company’s fortuitously timed merger with a US-government-funded minerals firm that the government of Kazakhstan handed a mining project to. Or the multiple drone firms the family is invested in, one of which Trump is now on the verge of having the government buying drones from and taking an equity stake in, which sent its stock value soaring.

There’s Trump buying millions of Boeing bonds while handing it billions of dollars in government contracts and peddling its jets to China. There are the president’s superhuman levels of stock trading and the hilariously shoddy “Trump phones” his company started selling for $500 a pop last year to his supporters on brazenly false pretenses. And his cryptocurrency empire that dozens of investors just happened to pour $2 billion into four months into his second term, which now accounts for most of his nearly $6 billion net worth. Trump’s crypto business was quite literally selling access to members of Trump’s family, which is probably why foreign rulers looking to curry favor with the president have plowed money into it.

Bear in mind, this is not even remotely scratching the surface. There are so, so many of these stories that it would take many thousands of words to cover them all. And all of it means that, just seven months into his second term, Trump had become an astounding $3.4 billion richer. (Again, recall that one of the self-dealing scandals around Biden was that he may have gotten a payment of $40,000 thanks to his son trading off his name.)

It’s not hyperbole to say that there has literally never been anything like this in US history, that the famous episodes of White House graft under Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding don’t even come close to touching the scale of what is currently going on. And neither of those historical episodes involved either president personally enriching themselves like Trump has.

Yet even this is just one category of scandals and political insanity that this administration has racked up.

Trump has used his second tilt at the presidency to engineer immunity for himself from any consequences for this corruption. This year saw Trump and his two sons accused of self-dealing sue the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over the leaking of his tax returns last time he was president, before Trump’s lawyers settled his own lawsuit against his own administration and gave himself, his family, and his businesses immunity from any future IRS audits. As part of this ouroboros of graft, Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) carved out a clause in that settlement that puts $1.8 billion aside for the president to dole out to people who have been “unfairly” investigated by the government, like the January 6 defendants.

In fact, Trump won’t just be throwing taxpayer money at the convicted Capitol rioters. He’s also now shielding them from reputational damage by having his DOJ scrub hundreds of detailed pages on its website going into their crimes. That includes the role of far-right extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, whom the Trump DOJ also moved to let off the hook a month and a half ago. This was after Trump already blanket pardoned more than 1,500 rioters at the very start of his term, including a convicted child molester.

Speaking of child molesters, Trump and his underlings are continuing to block the full release of documents on Jeffrey Epstein, the president’s former best friend and this century’s most prolific child sex offender. The latest news is that his ex–attorney general, flanked by a lawyer from Trump’s DOJ, flatly refused to answer questions about the president’s role in the release of the files, which have been slow-walked, lied about, withheld, and wrongfully redacted by Trump officials in what even former Trump supporters have said is an obvious cover-up. This is, astoundingly, all as Trump has publicly mused about pardoning Epstein’s convicted coconspirator and fellow abuser, his old friend Ghislaine Maxwell.

This is, of course, while the Trump administration itself investigates and prosecutes his own laundry list of various people who have wronged him: former FBI director James Comey, for a mean tweet about the president; right-wing critics of the president like Tucker Carlson; Letitia James, the New York prosecutor who won a civil fraud suit against Trump two years ago; a spate of left-wing critics of US foreign policy for traveling to Cuba; and so many more, maybe most disgracefully one of the women whom Trump raped decades ago and who won a lawsuit against him for it in 2024.

Again, there is no recent precedent, at minimum, for this kind of flagrant and petty abuse of federal prosecutorial power.

There is no recent precedent for this kind of flagrant and petty abuse of federal prosecutorial power.

After the yearlong insanity of Trump’s deportation efforts — which saw the administration try to kill several US citizens, and several times nearly do so, before finally successfully killing two at the start of this year — his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continues to roll out nonsensical and chaotic plans for clamping down on immigration. The latest ones: threatening to cancel all international flights into left-leaning cities and forcing anyone applying for a green card to carry out the process, which can last years, from their home countries. Or not — as usual with this administration, it quickly dialed this idea back.

Meanwhile, the domestic police state Trump is creating on the nominal basis of deporting people continues to build up in alarming ways. DHS is now ordering hundreds of iris scanners to add to its growing collection of invasive surveillance tech, three men have been slapped with felonies for protesting against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and other protesters are being surveilled and intimidated by agents who sometimes drive their cars at them, all as a record number of corpses pile up under DHS custody. To do this, the administration has diverted resources away from tackling actual serious offenses like child sex trafficking and other violent crimes, leading to a large drop in prosecutions of those crimes.

Kash Patel, Trump’s ex-podcaster FBI director (an already wild thing to write), is engulfed in scandal after alarming lower-ranking officials with his erratic behavior, like allegedly being drunk on the job frequently — something he responded to, calmly and levelheadedly, by threatening to sue the reporter who wrote about these episodes and criminally investigating her.

In some ways, this is the least alarming part of his tenure. Patel’s FBI is the leading prong of Trump’s overt and escalating efforts to steal future elections, by intimidating election officials in swing states, seizing ballots and voter information from their election offices, and laying the groundwork to purge voters from voter rolls.

Meanwhile, not put off by the seemingly never-ending fiasco he started with Iran, Trump is revving up the war machine in ways we’ve never seen. He’s now killed nearly two hundred people as he continues to blow up random fishing boats in the ocean (all while there’s more cocaine, the drug this is meant to be stopping, entering the country than before). And he’s weighing an invasion of Cuba, whose population he has deliberately plunged into starvation through an oil blockade that he hopes will collapse its social order.

Then there’s the nonpolitical stuff Trump is doing that in any other presidency — recall the right-wing outrage over Barack Obama, say, wearing a tan suit or a bike helmet, or the firestorm over Bill Clinton’s extramarital affair — would be a roiling political controversy. Like the fact that Trump was trying to get taxpayers to foot the bill (a billion dollars, no less) for his ballroom, which he already, astonishingly, demolished part of the White House to build. Or that he’s going to block veterans’ view of Arlington Cemetery by building an obnoxious triumphal arch that is intended for, in his words, “me.”

Or that he’s going to host a cage-fighting match on the South Lawn for his own birthday. Or that he had to cancel his planned concert for the country’s 250th anniversary because a spate of artists on its already embarrassingly C-list lineup pulled out. Or that he’s trying to stick his own face on a new $250 bill.

The worst corruption in US history personally enriching the president by billions. Giving himself immunity while frivolously prosecuting his enemies. Covering up damning details about his close friendship with a pedophile. A brazenly illegal war on random South American fishermen. An allegedly alcoholic FBI director trying to steal elections for him. Destroying part of the White House. And these are just some of the things happening over roughly the past month.

Almost every sentence in this article describes something that in any other White House would have been one of the craziest things you’ve heard a president do, if not a potentially career-destroying scandal. In this presidency, they’re just another Tuesday. And they barely seem to move the needle in terms of Trump’s support, which appears to be largely dictated by the public’s view of the economy.

This is a genuinely puzzling political-sociological phenomenon. It is almost as if, by overwhelming us with scandals, crimes, and various misdeeds, Trump has simply numbed us to them. Or maybe it’s oversaturation. Even for someone who works in the political space, it is impossible to keep up with it all; so imagine how hard it must be for the average person, for whom consuming the news might be just a small, not especially enjoyable part of the day, squeezed between work, family, and recreation.

Whatever the case, it begs the question: Has the president innovated a new political strategy that a future Republican administration or even the Left can learn from? Or is this simply a strange power that Trump and only Trump is capable of?

tkshow on June 4th, 2026 at 00:06 UTC »

This was true 9 years ago too.

B-Z_B-S on June 3rd, 2026 at 23:55 UTC »

By far. Not just the most corrupt President in American History, the most corrupt by far. (Citing: Heather Cox Richardson, renowned scholar and professor of American History.)

drivelikedingus on June 3rd, 2026 at 23:54 UTC »

Yeah, no shit.