Trump Is Running His Transition Team on Secret Money
www.nytimes.com
Breaking with past practice, President-elect Donald J. Trump has not agreed to disclose the donors paying for his planning effort or to limit their contributions.

Summary

Donald Trump’s transition team is raising unlimited funds from undisclosed donors, including foreign nationals, bypassing federal transparency rules by refusing to sign agreements with the Biden administration.

This breaks from tradition, sparking concerns about potential conflicts of interest and influence over the incoming administration.

The team has also failed to enable FBI background checks for appointees and has not submitted an ethics plan required for pre-inauguration access to federal agencies.

Critics warn that this secrecy undermines accountability during the critical handover of power.

Non-paywall link

  • Flying Squid
    57•5 days ago

    But he won’t be that bad, am I right? That’s what I keep being told now that the “a vote for Kamala his a vote for genocide” people got their way.

    By the way, I wonder what dialect of Russian those foreign nationals speak…

    • @fukhueson
      28•5 days ago

      https://www.reuters.com/world/us/muslims-who-voted-trump-upset-by-his-pro-israel-cabinet-picks-2024-11-15/

      Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and co-founder of the Abandon Harris campaign, which endorsed Green Party candidate Jill Stein, said Trump’s staffing plans were not surprising, but had proven even more extreme that he had feared.

      “It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” he said. “We were always extremely skeptical … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played.”

      • @brutalistEnglish
        25•4 days ago

        What a bunch of fucking dipshits

    • @Grimy
      -8•4 days ago

      The dems complete incompetence led to this. Tired of seeing people think being vocal about genocide is somehow a bad thing.

      If you keep blaming anyone but the idiots that sat on their hands and decided a status quo with a side of genocide was the appropriate response to fascism, all your doing is signaling them they can try the same shit next time.

      They praised fracking at the debate ffs, it’s like they were trying to alienate voters. I blame them and no one else.

      • Flying Squid
        11•4 days ago

        Translation: “I had nothing to do with this. All I did was repeatedly tell people not to vote for Harris and then they didn’t vote for Harris and Harris lost and now I got my way and I’m mad about it.”

        • @Grimy
          4•4 days ago

          I didn’t. I was very vocal about voting for Harris anyways. I knew that the dems had already decided to roll the dice and it was up to us to knudge it along because trump was worse (including for palestinians). But I was banging my head against the walls wondering what the fuck they were thinking.

          Not only was enabling genocide morally disgusting, it was politically stupid as well. And it wasn’t just that, the dems ran on a platform of apathy. They needed to bring out people that usually don’t vote to win and they didn’t even try, while the fascist spent 12 years building a personality cult.

          If they don’t do something radically different next time, hoping trump doesn’t complete cement his dictatorship, they will lose again. They need to be held accountable.

      • @[email protected]
        5•4 days ago

        This is one of the nasty cases of “multiple parties fucked up to let this happen, and all of them are to blame”. The fascists themselves obviously bear the most blame, followed by their enablers, including various media outlets that went terribly softball on one side while picking apart the other at every opportunity. The Dems’ continuous lurch to the right and resulting voter disillusionment also counts among those, the lack of education, the Reps’ skill at pinning all the issues they cause on the Dems…

        The list is long. It also includes the voters who, faced with the question “genocide with or without fascism?” threw up their hands in frustration and said “Do whatever you want, go install the fascist for all I care” as well as the relentless “bOtH SiDeS” bullshit.

        The Dems fucked up, badly and consistently. They deserve to lose their political standing, to be usurped by an actually progressive left wing party. But achieving that through a fash victory is like weeding your garden with incendiary bombs: Sure, it might burn away the visible part of the weeds, but it’ll probably kill the crop too and still leave an invisible part ready to become a nuisance in the future.