There are a substantial number of Republican Senators who are taking proper notice of Trump’s stunning explosion of conflicts of interest and dubious Constitutional manipulations last week. (I assume all Democratic Senators are in opposition, since they would oppose anything relating to the President anyway.)Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche met with GOP Senators to discuss the nearly $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” his Department of Justice will supposedly operate as part of a settlement President Trump reached with the IRS, with the cash distributed by commissioners, appointed by Blanche (again supposedly) to selected victims of “unfair treatment by the government.” Most offensive of all, the odoriferous deal shields Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization from further action by the IRS. Reportedly there was general anger and disgust over the arrangement among the Senators. Sen. Mitch McConnell called the fund “morally wrong.” “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong – Take your pick,” he said. I’d vote for both stupid and ethically wrong, not that McConnell is an authority on right and wrong from any perspective.

I continue to think, or at least hope, that this abomination will be stopped. As I already wrote when asked in a comment, this, unlike the artificial offenses behind the two purely partisan impeachments in Trump’s first term, is a genuine impeachable offense. That’s a non-starter now, though if the Democrats take the House they will be looking for any excuse for indicting Trump, and this will be an irresistible temptation.

It is apparent by the public reaction, however, that not many people who weren’t already Trump Deranged are all that upset about the scam, that many MAGA loyalists are satisfied, even enthusiastic with it, and the vast majority don’t understand what’s going on. It might even win more votes for the GOP than it loses.

In other ethics news:

At the conclusion of the dispiriting previous post, I wrote, “I regard the episode a betrayal of trust by everyone involved, especially the President, reckless, beyond rational defending, destructive to the nation, and politically stupid. Now what?”

Upon further thinking, I find the answer to “Now what?” surprisingly clear.

President Trump’s disgusting conduct in this matter, along with the equally unethical conduct of his lackeys in the Justice Department and Treasury Departments, almost thrusts me, and any rational, objective and ethical citizen, back to the point I found myself in October of 2016. As I wrote then and have written so many times since, there was a stark choice between voting for a President I found ethically unacceptable and an entire political party, the Democrats, that had proved itself not only unfit to govern but so Machiavellian in its quest to achieve crushing power by any means necessary that to allow them such power was irresponsible and dangerous. I abandoned my plan to reluctantly hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton, instead writing in the name of a politician I considered to be honorable and capable. (I was wrong about that, as things turned out.)

But since 2016, the Democratic Party has revealed itself as far worse—unprincipled, dangerous, anti-American— than I had concluded before that election. Donald Trump has still earned more respect for his positions, his courage, his ability to successfully battle Democrats to a draw or better, and his policy successes than I believed possible ten years ago. Moreover, Trump isn’t running against the Democrats in the mid-terms, though the Democrats, as in 2024, are running against Trump. The party’s only hopes are 1) stupid voters, 2) running again on hate, lies, and “Trump is Hitler” and 3) the Axis news media continuing to misinform and mislead the public. [Aside: when the Democratic Party’s absurd post-mortem on the 2024 election was finally released today, and blamed Harris’s loss on not emphasizing Trump’s negatives effectively (despite Harris constantly calling Trump Hitler and an ‘existential threat to democracy,’) one wag wrote that “She should have really called Trump a super-duper really evil Nazi poopy-head than simply just another Hitler, I guess.”]

Donald Trump isn’t running in 2026. He’s President, and he will stay President until 2028. Allowing the Democrats, a party that has pledged to pack the Supreme Court, add Democratic states that shouldn’t be states (like D.C.), give voting rights to non-citizens, and gut the Constitution and Bill of Rights to guarantee permanent control so as to “remake America” into a Democratic Socialist utopia, is irresponsible. The party has shown its perfidy by its vile effort in Virginia to turn a 50-50 split state into a Democratic stronghold by lying to voters and violating the Virginia constitution. It has shown its values by enabling violence and abuse of the criminal laws as tools of political warfare. That’s your party, Democrats.

To vote into power this aspiring totalitarian party as a way of punishing Trump for his greed and narcissism makes no sense, accomplishes nothing positive, and will be the approximate equivalent of knocking in our teeth with hammers. He’s still tearing down the mechanism of “good” discrimination against men and whites. He is still doing what has to be done regarding Iran, while the Democrats increasingly embrace anti-Semitism. He still is working to undo as much of the catastrophic open borders policies of the Biden Administration as possible. He is still keeping free discourse on social media safe, and he has had success forcing the news media and the education establishment to accept some reforms. All of that is important enough to let him continue to fight the Angry Left, especially since no one else appears capable of doing the job.

And anyone who tries is liable to be shot.

Now what? Now hold back your gorge and remember what is substantive, lasting, and crucial. President Trump is an incorrigible asshole, doesn’t know ethics from tapioca, and will continue to embarrass his supporters, his office, his party and the nation. But at this crazy juncture in American history, the United States of American is better off and safer than if the Democrats are allowed to grab the nation by the throat.

It’s a sickening choice, but a clear one.

Whatever is going on, it’s unethical.

President Trump sued the Internal Revenue Service in January of this year, claiming that the agency had not done enough to prevent the leak of his tax information to ProPublica and the New York Times by Charles Littlejohn, a former I.R.S. contractor who pleaded guilty to the crime in October 2023. The lawsuit, asking $10 billion in damages, was remarkable in many ways, not the least of which was that the President of the United States was suing an executive branch agency of the Treasury Department, which is under his control. Whether he could do that was a key issue, as was whether his law suit came too late: by some calculations, the statute of limitations ran out before the President filed his suit.

Meanwhile, there was also a question regarding whether Justice Department lawyers would be conflicted out of defending the suit. And whether the I.R.S. could be held liable for the conduct of Littlejohn, who was a contractor and not an employee.

I.R.S. officials prepared a 25-page memorandum outlining what they judged as fatal flaws in Trump’s suit and advised the Justice Department to move to dismiss it. The memo was provided to Treasury officials in April, but no one is saying whether it ever got to DOJ before any of its lawyers ever appeared in court to respond to the suit or dispute any of Trump’s claims, came to a bizarre settlement. DOJ agreed to an unusual deal that creates a $1.8 billion fund in exchange for Trump withdrawing his suit. The money is being called an “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate people who say they were wrongly targeted by the federal government. Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General, will appoint five people to a commission that will oversee the distribution of the money, though the President will be able to fire any of the commission members, or, for that matter, Blanche, who had previously been one of Trump’s lawyers.

Ethics Alarms has been skeptical of HBO’s clown nose on/clown nose off host of “Real Time,” Bill Maher, who has recently been critical of his favored side of the political divide and even, mirabile dictu, defending Donald Trump from time to time. Bill is a pompous left-biased jerk, not half as clever as he thinks he is but not stupid, and I have detected a strategic move rightward to distinguish himself from the all-progressive-all-the-time hoard on late night TV. I have also stated that I doubt his sincerity, as I doubt the sincerity of many professional pundits and comics who style themselves as truth-tellers.

Maher recently gave a long, not particularly funny speech in his show’s “New Rules” segment harshly criticizing Democrats and progressives for their increasingly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric. It’s long: I’m going to number the paragraphs so I can comment in Part 2. Here was Bill’s speech:

1. And finally, new rules since yesterday was Israel’s birthday. Having become a nation on May 14th, 78 years ago, everyone must either wish her a happy birthday or admit they’re anti-Semitic. Now, it’s everyone’s right in a free country to be anti-Semitic, but enough with hiding behind Israel or Zionism or Netanyahu.

2. If you think, as so many do now, that when it comes to human rights, Israel is the monster country of all time, you either don’t read or you don’t care about your own hypocrisy. Because there are so many worse places. But that’s where we are these days.

3. No Jews, no news. Ha ha. But China, Russia, Sudan, Iran, Myanmar, Haiti, the Congo, North Korea, all way worse. And that’s how you know it’s anti-Semitism. It’s the inconsistency. People talk about Jews these days like something out of Stormfront, except it’s not Stormfront.

4. It’s an editor from the American Prospect, which is a venerable liberal publication that launched the careers of journalists like Ezra Klein. And yet no one blinks when one of their editors says, Israel is a brainwashed, psychopathic death cult that might need to be nuked to save the human race. Uh-huh.

5. People say the left and the right can’t agree on anything these days. Well, there is this one thing they agree on. Right-winger Tucker Carlson has Nick Fuentes and Holocaust deniers on his podcast and wonders along with them, who really was the bad guy in World War II?

6. And the New York Times has on their podcast super leftist Hasan Piker, who they call a progressive mind, and who says Zionists should be treated the same as Nazis, which I assume means hung at Nuremberg. That’s what progressive is now? I guess so.

7. The kids are sure into it. They went nuts last year at Coachella for Kneecap. That’s the name of an Irish rap group, as if Ireland hasn’t suffered enough.

8. Their stage set is a sign that says, fuck Israel. And then they send a beach ball around the crowd. Again, ha-ha.

9. Because again, Israel is the only country in the world doing anything bad. I see why the Meathead Manosphere and the Code Pink people are on the same page. Because they both went to high school in America and they don’t know anything.So we… So we really could someday soon have the tiki torch Jews will not replace us crowd and the queers for Palestine people working together to elect the next Hitler. There’s a North Carolina teenager who’s been charged with plotting to drive through a synagogue to fulfill her life goal of killing as many Jews as possible.

10. Because a kid’s got to have a dream. I’m just asking why in the world would this be the dream of some kid in North Carolina? Why is it the dream of Dan Bilzerian, who’s running as a Republican to win a House seat in Florida? Who’s Dan Bilzerian? Well, he’s a professional douchebag who’s attracted 30 million followers by doing this all day and posting it. Yes, he’ll fit in fine with the current Congress. And Dan is fairly typical of the guys in the Manosphere when he says “the only real battle in the world today that I see worth fighting is fucking exterminating Israel. I mean, I would sign up tomorrow to go fucking put boots on the ground and go fucking kill Israelis.” Why is this asshole’s life about two things? Getting more Viagra and exterminating the Jews?

11. Israel was founded on the idea that anti-Semitism made a Jewish state unnecessary because Jews would never be safe without one.Can you honestly listen to this rhetoric and not see why that turned out to be true? If you don’t have the right-wingers on your side, if you don’t have the progressives, what do you have? What’s more progressive than college, where professors now say things that would make Kanye wince?

12. Osman Umarji calls Zionists bloodthirsty animals. Who’s he, the leader of ISIS? No, he’s a professor right here in California at UC Irvine. And Candace Owens agrees with his assessment of Jews as animals because she says wherever they go, they bring their filth with them. Another professor, Hamid Dabashi, says of Israels, they have a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture. These are the kind of statements Goebbels would have read and said, no notes.

13. I mean, where are the Jewish space lasers when you need them? Now, there are absolutely horrible things said about Muslims, too. That should also be, of course, roundly condemned, like Republican Congressman Randy Fine saying, if they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one. That’s awful. But it’s not the same as they need to be nuked and let’s exterminate them. This is why Jewish people here and in Europe now say they sometimes hide their identity, afraid that the Star of David will get them attacked, as has happened in almost too many places to mention lately.

14. Leave your Star of David at home. But the keffiyeh? You can wear that anywhere. You can wear it to Fiddler on the Roof and you’ll get applause. Jew hatred isn’t just acceptable now, it’s cool. Celebrities love it and make it trendy. It’s the new Che Guevara T-shirt. The Islamophobia is just as bad argument is simply a false equivalency. Can you name a Jewish professor who talks about Muslims the way they get talked about?

15. No. Anti-Jewish crimes, hate crimes, now outpace anti-Muslim hate crimes 9 to 1. It’s not a contest, and I’m certainly not saying do more of the other.I’m just saying these are the numbers, the facts, the reality. There is a frothing anxiousness for the literal extermination of this one group. And Democrats, where are you?

16. If any other minority group was being talked about this way, you’d break out the kente cloth and have ten benefit concerts. But because you see that so many of your brainwashed-by-TikTok constituents now have an unfavorable view of Israel, you indulge them when you should be correcting them. You don’t tell your woke idiots Israel isn’t a colonizer or an apartheid state or committing genocide, and that if you brats had to spend a week anywhere in the Middle East other than Israel, you would understand what liberalism is not.

17. All the people likely running for president now on the Democratic side want it known they don’t take money from AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, a stanch which gives permission to actual anti-Semites to say, see, we’re right about Israel. That’s dirty money from a dirty country. Oh, please, you take money from crypto and factory farmers and big tech from Diddy and Weinstein and Epstein, but AIPAC is too far?

18. Let me just say this to all who ask me. Why are you harder on the Democrats than you used to be? Until you fix this whole issue, stop asking me.

I analyze this Ethics Quote of the Month in Part II, which you can read here.

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Source: RealClearPolitics

Increasingly both the questions and the answers published by Kwame Anthony Appiah, the NYU philosopher professor who has been the caretaker of the New York Times Magazine’s “The Ethicist” advice column for more than a decade, show signs of ethics rot. This is why I haven’t been commenting on them as often, though the column is like a window into the warped minds of the Woke and Wonderful.

This month, for example, the previous three questions have been “Is It Wrong to Work for a Charity That’s Funded by a Questionable Source?” (the old “dirty money” trope), “Can I Ask My Brother to Have His Racist Prison Tattoo Removed?” (of course you can ask—you can ask him if he can fly to Mars by flapping his arms, but what someone chooses to wear on their skin or their body is none of your business, and removing a racist tattoo won’t make him any less racist…), and “A Homeless Person’s Pet Needed Help. Should I Have Tried to Buy It?” (The pet is there to give love and comfort to the homeless person. Butt out.)

But this week’s question prompts the Popeye in me (“It’s all I can takes ‘cuz I can’t takes no more!”) A woman who rents a storage unit (in a bad Los Angeles neighborhood) discovered that a man is living in the unit across from hers. This makes her uncomfortable (Ya think?) but she feels compelled to ask Kwame, “I Think Someone Is Living in the Storage Unit Next to Mine. What Should I Do?” We then get an exchange of what a friend calls “toxic empathy.” It’s all the U.S.’s fault, see, because we don’t take care of homeless people like—I kid you not—Norway. This supposed ethics expert’s advice: “Asking to move yourself, rather than trying to get him removed, is probably the most humane course, and the one most likely to preserve your peace of mind.”

Well, Kwame (in NYC) and “Anonymous” (In L.A.) certainly are doing their part to make those two cities the leftist hellholes they are becoming. Hey, it’s cruel to enforce laws! The most humane course is let people disobey laws that are inconvenient or get in the way of their needs. By all means, tilt policies to the benefit of the untrustworthy and irresponsible. It only lowers standards, conduct, well-being and safety for everyone, but that’s the goal of equity and inclusion, right?

Morons. How did so many Americans end up thinking this way? I am distraught.