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Comment by aswanson | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. I hope our government can survive the next 4 years for criminal investigations into this era. We can't become Russia.

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What crimes were committed and could be prosecuted under the Supreme Court's immunity ruling?

Market manipulation?

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/well-timed-options-...

(Besides, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if Trump's Russian oligarch friends were among these traders.)

Pausing tariffs was an official act. The Supreme Court ruled courts could not consider presidents' motives for official acts.

But what about leaking information about it?

Leaking is vague. What part of what law?

It's not vague. I'm not a lawyer but usually cases of trading with insider information are taken very seriously. It's theft, basically. And the scale here is enormous.

Leaking, insider trading, and theft are different. And laws contain specific definitions.

There is evidence of him tweeting insider information.

Again I'm not a lawyer, and I don't care what law is applicable here. But surely this warrants further investigation.

It’s not “insider” trading if you post about it publicly on Truth Social, the same way it’s not “insider” trading if you took out an ad in the New York Times.

The government is allowed to announce policy before doing it! Even if it affects stock prices!

Yeah, I'm not on that social media, nor do I read NYT. The same holds for millions of others.

Too bad! Insider trading, as a crime, requires that the information be nonpublic material information. You can join Truth Social and follow Donald Trump, so that makes the information public.

It actually is that broad. Futures traders often rely on industry-specific periodicals, which are “public”. Same for anything in the (high monthly cost!) Bloomberg terminal. So posting on a specific social media platform, where subscribing is free? That’s 100% public.

Except he didn't announce anything. He said "a good time to buy" which may be code language that his friends understand.

… are you hearing yourself? “It’s a good time to buy!” has the plain english meaning “you should buy stock”. Everyone, you included, understood he was talking about US company stocks. Which, if you did, you would have profited. This theoretical code would be “when i say it’s a good time to buy stock, we should all buy stock!”. That is, well, not a code.

He should have announced the policy, and said something like "we will pause the tariffs". But instead, he said something vague, which can be interpreted as a hint, and which will open the road for investigations.

“Now is a good time to buy” isn’t vague.

The point is that this text is not the official policy. It is a hint to investors.

A public hint to investors.

A hint to those who know the code.

It's very clear that the system of Constitutional governance has been intentionally broken. It is very common for authoritarian regimes to have compliant judiciaries and broad legislative control.

Effective restoration and reconstruction of Constitutional governance will necessarily be dramatic. It's still doable, but optimism is more of a survival strategy than an obvious conclusion at this stage.

Trump won the popular vote. I don't think this is going away without a major demographic shift, time probably measured in decades.

Tinfoil hat time, I don't think the man claiming everyone else cheated and who got caught cheating in a previous election got all his votes in a legal manner

All the data suggests the opposite. He wasn't in a position of power at the time; the federal government was controlled by the democrats. Elections are run at the state level and are so disparate procedurally that Russia gave up trying to flip them directly. There has been no discrepancy between exit polls and the results. We have to face the fact that this is who the United States chose, and this is who a significant portion of the electorate is ok with.

Elections are, in many if not most states, run electronically.

I don't know about you, but I certainly don't trust all the companies that make the voting machines. For instance, does Musk own stock in some of them? Do their owners vote Trump?

Conflicts of interest are not evidence of fraud.[1]

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/mattblaze.org/post/3lmgt4ufllc26

Voting machine integrity was litigated in the election trump lost. Fox, trump's propaganda organ, had to pay $781 million because they could not substantiate claims of electronic fraud. There are adversarial reviews of voting data at all levels, and audits done at the physical and electronic level. 60 lawsuits found no evidence of fraud. You can't just say, "I think this might have happened because it sounds sinister." There is a ton of legal, procedural, monitored, and reviewed data that overwhemingly makes the case that electronic voting fraud did not happen. If you have evidence to the contrary, present it. Otherwise, its just vibes.

Wait, do you also think Biden won because of voter fraud?

He won the popular vote in a year when incumbents across the world ate shit at the polls because of COVID inflation.

The US had the smallest drop in support for an incumbent party.

And yet he still won

It's a winner take all two-party election where a 3% swing in sentiment results in a complete blowout.

Generally one of the two participants wins those.

There's a really serious systemic problem with the party that chose him in its primaries, and there is nothing to prevent it from happening again, but my point is that a 49.8% mandate given the circumstances is... Well, it's not one of overwhelming sentiment.

He won by a single point, when 30% of the population didn’t vote. It’s not good for the future of the country that he got anywhere as many votes as he did but we should remember that an emboldened minority is still a minority.

A large minority is still large. And not voting is a signal of apathy. Not opposition.

Might be true, but a president is a president for all, not just those who voted for him.

How would this platitude apply to this discussion even if Trump believed it?

Because of the way that the Electoral College works, it doesn’t matter if 2 million more people voted in California or everyone voted in Texas. It wouldn’t change anything. Only the swing states mattered

Sure, and in the swing states he won by small margins. I’m not saying it’s good by any means – much of the damage internationally seems irrecoverable – but anyone opposing him should remember that they have a lot of allies.

> Trump won the popular vote.

He did not, he got <50% of the total votes at final tally. People who parrot this are under-informed, or lying to claim a mandate his administration lacks.

The person who received the most votes is the popular vote winner.

74,749,891 v 77,168,458 for Trump. Last time I checked, thats winning the popular vote

He got 49.8% of the popular vote.

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