Trump’s gifts from Qatar, asylum for Boers, persecuting speech and more
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It isn’t that hypocrisy is good or even necessarily benign. It’s just that it’s a fact of life. So instead of wishing hypocrisy didn’t exist, I try to focus on the direction of people’s hypocrisies. When do they shift their moral goalposts, and why?
Take corruption. Donald Trump’s supporters claim to be obsessed with corruption — inside trading in Congress, woke billionaires, human trafficking, whatever post-QAnon insanity is currently in vogue. Pro-Israel reactionaries (there’s obviously a huge overlap there) have similarly been obsessed since well before the October 7th attacks with the allegedly pernicious influence of the Arabian Gulf states, especially Qatar, on U.S. universities, whose money they are convinced is being used to brainwash hapless American college students into supporting anti-Israel dogma (branded unquestioningly as “antisemitism”) and general “terrorism.”
So now, of course, their mental alarms must be clanging over the news that Trump himself is not only openly accepting foreign bribes through his memecoin but is reportedly ready to personally accept a $400 million luxury Boeing 747-8 — from the Emir of Qatar! — to use as a new Air Force One. (This clearly unconstitutional bribe, which comes on the heels of other Trump family deals with the petrostate, has been reportedly signed off on by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who used to lobby on Qatar’s behalf at a salary of $115,000 a month). I mean, the national security implications alone, as helpfully detailed here by Garrett Graff, of a sometimes-adversary presenting its own plane for the use of the president of the United States, must be seriously concerning to people whose core abiding principle is supposedly “America First.”
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