This Seems Important

A mere 72 hours after the Chinese government agreed to put a half-billion dollars into an Indonesian project that will personally enrich Donald Trump, the president ordered a bailout for a Chinese-government-owned cellphone maker. https://t.co/FLBLV7PyKd

— HuffPost Politics (@HuffPostPol) May 15, 2018

Just a reminder that the bribery law (18 U.S.C. § 201) is still one of the few ethics laws that applies to the president, and ordering a cabinet agency to take action is one of the few things that would still qualify as an “official act” after the Supreme Court gutted the law. https://t.co/UolmT0yeYw

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) May 15, 2018

Once upon a time not so long ago, if a president obviously allowed a foreign country to bribe him, that would have been a scandal which commandeered every second of political news airtime and every headline in every paper across the land.

But after less than two years of Donald Trump's presidency, his stenographers in the political press have, with some notable exceptions, evidently decided that this is just normal now.

Zany Trump! Always changing his mind for reasons no one can understand!

Here, for example, is a significant CBS piece on the bailout, which doesn't even mention the Chinese investment in the Indonesian project.

"I've never seen a president step in and reverse an agency decision like this. It's not clear, of course, if he's planning to really reverse it or think of a solution in a larger context. But it is something that's just out of the norm," said Amanda DeBusk, the chair of the international trade and government regulations practice at the firm Dechert.

Just another day in Trump's America.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Remember when Hillary Clinton, the woman who ran against Donald Trump whose voice was icky and who got pneumonia once, was reflexively presumed that she would be corrupted by political donations from chemical companies and speaking fees from Wall Street, despite the fact that there was zero evidence she had ever been influenced in any way by Monsanto or Goldman Sachs or any other corporation? It was wall-to-wall criticism.

Now Trump is the actual president who has actually engaged in a public quid pro quo with a foreign government, who actually accepted a personal bribe in plain sight and then actually ordered a policy delivering on that bribe, and there is actually very little noise being made about it.

Cool.