Have you heard about the president who received money from China and other foreign countries? No, not the current president. The former one.
House Republicans recently launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, premised on the claim that he is hiding, in the words of Speaker Mike Johnson, “millions of dollars in payments from America’s foreign adversaries.” As yet, they have produced no evidence to back up the idea that Biden profited. (The payments they have flagged involve the business interests of his son Hunter Biden, who is facing two separate federal indictments at the moment, and his brother James.)
Meanwhile, House Democrats on Thursday released a report detailing how former President Donald Trump received, and then tried to hide, millions in payments from America’s foreign adversaries. Unlike in the impeachment inquiry, which is premised on a suspicion that Republicans hope will turn up evidence, the receipts are here.
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The saga of the foreign payments is a good case study in how Trump has taught Americans to tolerate brazen corruption—so long as it’s his. To do this, Trump relies on two tactics. First, he does much of it out in the open, recognizing that voters tend to assume that only hidden deeds are nefarious. Second, he finds ways to slow-walk the release of the most damaging information, so that by the time the full picture is clear, the public has become almost inoculated—as though it had been out in the open all along.
Now that’s some irony! We call them “Banana Republics” because of how they were dominated and exploited by American fruit companies, with support from the US government, up to and including building private armies and calling in the CIA to do coup d’etats. The only thing new here is that the Republicans are normalizing doing the corruption to ourselves instead of just to others.
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At least Franklins Expedition didn’t fail for nothing.
You are more technically correct, but in common parlance for those who do not seek out to become more informed about history and politics beyond high school, the vast majority of I guess ‘laypeople’ just think that terms like banana republic and third world country just mean a poor country with unstable government, despite those terms not really actually meaning that.
The reasons why this happens are hilariously also basically the Republicans fault:
Anti Intellectualism is a big thing for most of them culturally, and Republican policies demonstrably have seriously worsened the quality of a K-12 education all across the country, and kept many families poor and unable to access higher education.
… and it is nearly always Republican talking heads and political figures which spent decades being the most prolific users of those terms incorrectly, while televised and in print or later online journalism, contributing largely to normalizing the incorrect usage of these and other similar terms.