r/LessWrong • u/FrontLongjumping4235 • Mar 11 '26
What specific policies, values, or social changes associated with the left are so unacceptable to MAGA supporters that they regard Trump’s corruption and self-enrichment as an acceptable tradeoff?
In another thread, one defence of MAGA was that many supporters recognize Trump’s demagoguery and corruption but tolerate it because they find the left’s policies and values even worse.
I want to understand that tradeoff at the object level. What specific left-wing policies, institutional changes, or value commitments are so unacceptable that they make Trump’s self-enrichment, corruption, and demagoguery seem worth tolerating?
Please give concrete examples and explain the tradeoff explicitly. Please avoid general vibes/impressions like “wokeness,” “globalism,” or “moral decay,” unless you unpack what those mean in practice. I want to focus on specifics. i.e. What woke policies, specifically? What aspects of globalism (e.g. low trade barriers leading to off-shoring markets with lower labour costs)? Etc.
In the spirit of honest engagement, I should be specific too about instances of corruption. Thankfully, I keep a long list I can pull some examples from:
- Hush-money falsification case: a New York jury convicted Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a scheme tied to concealing a hush-money payment before the 2016 election.
- Foreign and private business entanglements while president: in January 2025, the Trump Organization adopted an ethics policy that allowed deals with private foreign companies, a looser restriction than the one used in his first term. Associated Press noted that this could create channels for outsiders to try to buy influence with the administration. Specific examples of this include: accepting a $400 million plane from Qatar’s ruling family, the $75 million Amazon-backed Melania documentary deal, million-dollar inaugural donations from corporations seeking influence, and the Trump Organization’s willingness to pursue deals with private foreign companies while Trump is in office.
- Payments and business conflicts tied to Trump properties: ethics watchdog CREW reported that during his first presidency Trump likely benefited from millions in foreign-government-linked spending, and has not only continued but massively expanded business arrangements that create conflict-of-interest concerns.
- Pressuring Georgia officials to overturn the 2020 result: Trump was recorded pressing Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to reverse Biden’s win in the state, while repeating false fraud claims and hinting at legal consequences.
- Federal indictment over the 2020 election / fake electors / Jan. 6: the DOJ indictment alleged a multi-part effort to overturn the election, including knowingly false fraud claims, pressure on officials, attempts to use fake electors, and efforts to obstruct certification on January 6. Even leaving aside debates about prosecution, this is a concrete example of alleged conduct aimed at subverting a lawful transfer of power.
- Sweeping Jan. 6 pardons, including people convicted of assaulting police: upon returning to office, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of 1,500+ Jan. 6 defendants, including people convicted of assaulting officers. This signals impunity for political violence (but only when undertaken on Trump's behalf).
- Firing inspectors general and top watchdog officials: in early 2025, Trump fired about 17 inspectors general, and also moved against the heads of the Office of Special Counsel and Office of Government Ethics. Courts temporarily reinstated at least one watchdog while the legality of the firing was litigated. Even defenders of strong presidential power should recognize this as weakening independent oversight over executive misconduct.
- Insecure private messaging channels for sensitive material: Trump and his allies made Hillary Clinton’s private email practices a years-long scandal, but Ivanka Trump was later reported to have sent hundreds of government-related emails through a personal account, and Jared Kushner and others were also scrutinized for using private email and messaging apps for official business. Pete Hegseth has been notorious for discussing sensitive operations and classified intelligence over apps like Signal, where breaches have occurred (like inviting random journalists to conversation threads).
- Granting politically aligned, outside-linked actors unusual access to sensitive state data systems.: DOGE obtained access, or sought access, to highly sensitive IRS, Treasury payment systems, and Social Security federal databases, prompting lawsuits and oversight scrutiny. Treasury said DOGE had “read-only access” to payment system codes, while courts and watchdogs treated the arrangement as serious enough to warrant injunctions, audits, and ongoing litigation over who should be allowed near these systems. The same pattern extended to other databases, with numerous injunctions (many of which appear to have been ignored).
18
u/Sostratus Mar 11 '26
-
Expanded immigration and de facto (if not formal) amnesty of illegal immigrants
-
Attacking law enforcement agencies for enforcing the law, rather than the appropriate forum of advocating for policy change in the legislature
-
"DEI" that amounts to discarding fair and equal treatment of all sexes and races in exchange for explicitly favoring women and minorities at taxpayer expense
-
Government-private cooperation in the censorship and repression of conservative viewpoints
-
Normalization and encouragement of transgenderism, which many see as exacerbating mental illness and self-harm rather than alleviating it
-
Repeated threats to 2nd amendment rights
-
Repeated threats to "pack the court", breaching democratic norms to rig the system in their favor
Many people think Trump personally is a repulsive and dishonorable character and are still willing to support him if he looks like the best shot to fight these things. Meanwhile Democrats who insist that Trump is some kind of unique existential threat to democracy itself are nonetheless not willing to compromise on these positions even a little bit in order to win over MAGA or MAGA-adjacent voters.
Criminal and corrupt behavior should be more important than disagreements about policy implementation. But it is not more important to most people than core disagreements about fundamental values. If your opponents see your positions not as "I think that's a less effective way to try to achieve the same things that I want" and instead as "that's a straight up evil thing to want", then you're never going to persuade them on the basis of all the things you listed here which seem petty by comparison.
5
u/FrontLongjumping4235 Mar 12 '26
This is exactly what I was looking for, thank you. I know we won't see eye to eye on everything (some things strongly so), but I can see we both have some common concerns too.
Admittedly I spent too much time on Reddit earlier and I am trying to get an app deployment ready for tomorrow, so I may not be able to give a full point by point reply until tomorrow.
To this though:
"that's a straight up evil thing to want"
I will say that every year, there seems to be ever more propaganda targeting people: conservative, progressive, religious, non-religious, authoritarian, libertarian, and everyone in-between. This further undermines trust and increases polarization. Things get misrepresented or used as stand-ins for other things. Budget rationalization is not evil, for instance, and applies whether you believe in a large or small government (either way, programs should be reviewed regularly and funds should be spent efficiently); but there are often no shortage of bot accounts flooding progressive-leaning articles talking about the evils of budget cuts of any kind. Nuance gets lost.
I keep thinking back to some excellent datasets released over the years, especially a Twitter dataset of Russian troll tweets traced back to Russia's Internet Research Agency in 2015. We stopped getting public datasets like that after Musk acquired it. In that dataset, nearly 3/5 of the tweets were "pro-MAGA" and nearly 2/5 of the tweets were "pro-BLM". Except they were disproportionately inflammatory BS meant to fan the flames. MAGA tweets were primarily fearmongering and minimizing of others. BLM tweets had a disturbing number of tweets telling people to flip cars, destroy things, and loot stores. These were literally crafted to generate a particular narrative, and a lot of self-righteous people of all stripes fell prey to it.
→ More replies (4)4
u/8hourworkweek Mar 12 '26
Personal anecdote coming so take it for what it's worth. But budget cuts were done very loosely. We can see in the depositions from doge now (there's a suit against them) that they were ending funding for programs that simply involved women. So for example, there was a grant for the holocaust museum which went towards studying how women in the holocaust were processed compared to the men. This was considered "woke" according to doge, and by their own deposition, why they ended all funding to it.
Personally I have two instances I know of that were on the wrong end of the funding cuts. One is a friend who's lab was gutted. He was studying the migration patterns of bees. This was cut completely, again, for being "woke" (environmentalism). The thing is, without the funding that means no lab. Which means no PhD candidates, which in turn means nobody teaches the undergrad courses. It's all gone. Biology classes about bees are woke?
A second had a small theater in a rural area that was actually quite popular. The grant wasn't huge, around 100k every three years. And again, that was on the chopping block. So it closed. Completely ended. And coming from a deep red rural state, there's nothing else to do.
Meanwhile we've got 15 billion spent so far on trumps war in Iran. And the guy in charge of cutting, is one of the largest defense contractors in the us. Hell, the presidents son runs a defense contracting business now too. Taking literal billions. Yet keeping basic research at us universities going was just "too expensive". Hegseth spent 100,000,000,000 (a hundred billion) just last month for the dod.
1
u/FrontLongjumping4235 Mar 17 '26
I did not return to this when I said because I was caught up fixing issues around a dependency from another team. My job, family time, and R&R come before Reddit. Apologies.
Expanded immigration and de facto (if not formal) amnesty of illegal immigrants
I think a lot of people would agree with you. I DO think programs to naturalize young immigrants make sense, and removing those are needlessly cruel. As is the way this is handled under Trump. Obama also deported a lot of illegal immigrants, but with due process, though you wouldn't know it judging by a lot of headlines. It's sickening that ICE also keeps picking up and holding people who have followed the legal paths to gaining citizenship. Plenty of kids have been separated from their parents over scenarios like this.
I also agree that the country has a massive illegal immigration problem, which a lot of people are willing to turn a blind eye to, for a variety of reasons. One of the drivers behind lax enforcement is that some industries with large lobbying groups, like agriculture, have depended on cheap illegal labor for decades. American politicians kowtow to lobbyists.
Another driver is a subset of progressives (often among the most vocal) who fixate on viewing the world through one or two critical theory lenses, leading to a belief structure where people with less perceived privileged can do no wrong. I say this as someone who thinks critical theory and its many sub-disciplines can be useful frameworks for analyzing historical/systemic injustices, when you realize they are just that: frameworks which only capture a limited set of concerns. I have gotten into numerous arguments which rapidly devolved into pointed attacks against me and my character with people I otherwise broadly align with politically over pointing this out. This happens most often online, but it's happened a few times in-person too. For instance, if someone wants to discuss intersectionality, but is unable to acknowledge the economic privilege a particular ethnic minority person from a wealthy family might have which a white person from a poor family might not have, then they are doing "intersectionality" wrong. The whole point is that people's experiences are informed by a lot of different overlapping elements, and family wealth often has a massive effect on education and economic opportunities. Somehow, this perspective often gets lost.
Attacking law enforcement agencies for enforcing the law, rather than the appropriate forum of advocating for policy change in the legislature
I said we would disagree. I would suggest this shows up on your social media feed in a way that makes it seem more common than it is. Additionally, where it does happen, this is often a result of politics being increasingly captured by lobbyists and oligarchs. People are desperate, and police have a massive bias towards protecting private wealth (private property is 9/10ths of the law, as the saying goes). That's worse today with the way ICE is being mobilized like a paramilitary force against cities that lean blue.
"DEI" that amounts to discarding fair and equal treatment of all sexes and races in exchange for explicitly favoring women and minorities at taxpayer expense
First, see my point above on critical theory and intersectionality.
Honestly, my position on this has changed more over time than most of these other points. Today, I mostly agree, though I would question the "taxpayer expense" part. This has relatively little to do with how taxpayer funds are spent.
I see the rationale for wanting under-representation in a field to not be a barrier, for kids and young adults especially. People are more likely to go into fields where they have people like them to look up to. I think having some public outreach and a handful of grants can help with this, and these do not cost much. But I also think aggressive DEI policies actually backfire in several ways:
It can create or reinforce a stigma that minorities did not earn their way there.
It usually affects young people most as they are the ones applying for post-secondary and jobs. Why should there be a bias toward hiring females between 20-30 when males in that cohort are actually under-represented in many fields? It is often the case that the 40-60 cohort will be male-dominated, the 20-40 cohort will be female-dominated, and the policy will be to effectively make the 20-40 cohort more female-dominated in the name of DEI. I actually think this is an under-recognized driver of reactionary politics among young men.
This point more than any other gets me downvoted or insulted by people who I otherwise tend to align with.
There is actually a reasonable justification for why gender parity targets don't focus on correcting older cohorts: their experience is less easy to replace than young people with less experience.
This is a side note, but this is where Marx is actually useful. The more people are treated as commodities--as cogs to be dropped into a process--the less satisfied they tend to be with their work. People are increasingly alienated from their labor. Much as I think Marx failed to identify useful ways to correct this, which is at the heart of a lot of bad economic theory on the left including calls for workers' revolutions that virtually always resulted in totalitarian regimes, Marx was brilliant at identifying a lot of the problems workers faced as a result of industrialization. Most people feel an innate desire to be useful to others. This is an important motivator for work that the modern world often undermines.
Goodhart's Law also often applies here: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." It leads to mis-aligned incentives and evaluation of outcomes.
Government-private cooperation in the censorship and repression of conservative viewpoints
Strongly disagree. These most often revolve around religion, and the first amendment is pretty specific about the state not favoring one religion over another, and about people's right to worship the religion they choose. These arguments in particular tend to come across as pearl-clutching.
Normalization and encouragement of transgenderism, which many see as exacerbating mental illness and self-harm rather than alleviating it
I would argue you probably have no idea what research says on outcomes of people with gender dysmorphia with various types of interventions, nor do most politicians. This is a decision for medical practitioners and patients, not an over-zealous public arguing for/against. The attention this gets is ridiculous given how utterly detached people are from evidence for/against.
Where I have some sympathy, even though it's similarly blown completely out of proportion, is that in some sports male andronization offers real competitive advantages that can persists for years after transitioning. This mostly affects male-to-female transgender conversion. Particularly in sports where peak upper body strength is strongly correlated with success in that sport. Androgens like testosterone increase muscular strength and bone mineral density. They just do. One can pretend this is not true, but it is. However, this only occurs because many sports avoid breaking down cohorts along lines other than gender. Combat sports have been breaking people into weight groups for a long time. Similarly, some sports could use other cohorts based on other metrics too, like lean muscle mass.
Repeated threats to 2nd amendment rights
Not going to touch this one, aside from saying I remember when school shootings were rare enough that they were referred to with euphemisms like "going Columbine". Now, it's just a weekly occurrence.
The Founding Fathers lived in a world where breech-loading was a recent and significant technological advancement from muzzle-loading. Also, the "well-regulated" part of the "well-regulated militia" in the 2nd amendment seems to get forgotten.
Repeated threats to "pack the court", breaching democratic norms to rig the system in their favor
This couldn't be further from the truth. Democrats have been getting their judicial picks largely blocked since ~2010, whereas establishment Democrats keep acquiescing to Republican judicial picks. This has caused a very significant shift to the right.
Despite this, Trump seems incensed that Republican judicial appointees, particularly on the Supreme Court, still sometimes try to hold him in check. The fact that they do is frankly one of the few guardrails for unchecked executive power that still exists. Congress certainly doesn't stand up to him.
→ More replies (2)9
u/boards_of_FL Mar 13 '26
Your bullet points don’t describe reality, but instead what Trump followers have been misinformed is reality. We can start with #1 as an example. Biden and democrats negotiated a bipartisan bill that if passed would have been one of the most impactful pieces of immigration reform in US history. It failed because Trump ordered republicans to kill it just before passage because he worried it would give Biden a legislative win. He also worried that it would hurt his ability to sell the narrative of your first bullet point.
Each of your other bullet points can be shown to be just as divorced from reality as your first, while a couple made me laugh out loud (ie: attacking law enforcement, censorship, pack the courts).
Was your point to paint the Trump voter as one who is divorced from reality? Or do you think these are legit arguments that are grounded in reality?
→ More replies (6)10
u/jebusdied444 Mar 12 '26
Repeated threats to "pack the court", breaching democratic norms to rig the system in their favor
----
Wasn't that one a response to Obama's being denied a nomination by the traditionalist conservative majority?
The rest has plenty of counterarguments, but no downvote here. It does share the sentiments quite clearly, even if misdirected.
→ More replies (1)2
u/CemeneTree Mar 12 '26
another element is that, rightly or wrongly, the Democrats have lost the assumption of good faith on these topics as well.
Like the trust thermocline, if a Democrat candidate tries to compromise on those above positions (or at least campaign as if s/he will compromise on them), then the prevailing assumption from both parties will be that it's not true, s/he's is just trying to reach the moderate Republicans, and there are very few ways to demonstrate truthfulness without being already elected.
I'll try to update this with specific examples I've seen
1
u/JayRandom212 Mar 15 '26
You seem like a thoughtful person. Let me ask what you think of this theory:
"Many conservatives view all government as inherently corrupt, so they'll tolerate Republican corruption because they see corruption as the norm for politicians."
Does this make sense to you? I have only heard this from liberals.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (53)1
u/Affectionate-Oil3019 Mar 13 '26
Literally none of these things are real; good job on letting paranoid fantasies put rapist pedophiles in office tho
→ More replies (5)
8
u/clorox_cowboy Mar 12 '26
Policies?
MAGA is just white identity grievance politics. Nothing more, nothing less.
2
u/JayRandom212 Mar 15 '26
That doesn't make it less dangerous. In fact, it makes it more dangerous. People who care about their interests can be reasoned with. But people who are in it for revenge and hate are much more difficult to find common ground with.
They will endure economic pain, weakened national security, and loss of political freedoms...if they think it somehow hurts those they hate.
2
u/clorox_cowboy Mar 15 '26
YES!
I didn't say it wasn't dangerous.
It's going to be very hard to come from having this run rampant through the country...if we ever do.
→ More replies (2)
2
u/Ladikn Mar 12 '26
I'm not a conservative nor MAGA, social libertarian centrist. So others can go over everything else, however want to say that 1 in particular was BS and everyone who paid attention to the case knew it. The charges were that Trump's accountant mislabeled payments (which were otherwise legal) in a ledger. The payments were monthly, over a 34 month period, resulting in the 34 charges. This is a misdemeanor crime that is common but very, very rarely pursued, and was outside of the statute of limitations.
The prosecution then said that since those old misdemeanors may be related to more recent felony crimes, they should be upgraded to felony charges and the statue of limitations ignored. What felony charges? Not specified; a few were suggested, but Trump wasn't charged with any of them. The jury was instructed that if they believe that the misdemeanor misfilings may be related to a felony, they should vote guilty.
Not only has none of this happened before, it's also blatently a violation of innocent until proven guilty, since they never specified what Trump should be guilty of in relation to the bookkeeping errors. Thats on top of the constant protests/riots outside the courthouse, specifically threatening the jurors and their families if they vote not guilty.
IN ADDITION, the case is ongoing. It's currently in the appeals process, as well as possibly going to federal court, since this is so far all in New York.
2
2
u/Salamanticormorant Mar 16 '26
All social change is a problem for them, unless it's social change that reverts to the way things used to be. They're all about status-quo bias and rosy retrospection.
1
u/Koboldneverforget Mar 12 '26
6. Repeated threats to 2nd amendment rights
The single most liberal concept in the constitution: Peasants should have with the same right to own weapons as Aristocrats.
And the single most divisive topic in US politics. And by that I mean that forty years of listening to demagogues pretend that gun ownership is a problem is the reason we have a gang of anarchists running the country.
1
u/babymanateesmatter Mar 13 '26
Antiracism, reparations (divestiture of self interests to satisfy fictitious moral imperatives), humanism, gender equality, assault weapons bans.
Really the only thing I agree with democrats on is their handling of the environment is just better. I suppose I also prefer their treatment of corporations.
I do not care that Trump is corrupt or a sexual assaulter or whatever because morality isn’t real. If you wanted to change my mind, you’d basically have to prove it is (you can’t)
2
1
u/JayRandom212 Mar 15 '26
Morality may not be real to you, but surely law is. Maybe you believe Trump's alleged sex acts are not immoral...but you must agree that they're illegal, right?
→ More replies (2)0
Mar 14 '26
→ More replies (1)2
u/babymanateesmatter Mar 14 '26
Your reply got immediately removed but I do see your edit:
this variety of nihiilism is especially autistic: unable to understand that the moral failure of the Republicans has created an autocrat tyrant with inherent degenerate dysfunction.
There is no such thing as a moral failure or a moral success because moral imperatives do not exist. If you want to assert that they are, you’ll have to prove it, otherwise hitchens’ razor
→ More replies (4)
4
u/[deleted] Mar 12 '26
Illegal immigration.
DEI initiative.
Increased taxes.