Summary:
I grade 2025 as the year of institutionalized scandal—mapping how corruption, crony giveaways, and open-air authoritarianism converged into one playbook.
The second Trump regime as exactly what happens when you mobilize the least serious actors to run a serious country. There are two “flavors” of corruption—self-enrichment at the top and targeted harm to everyone outside the top 10%—and a walk through the marquee scandals: a UAE crypto slush fund, a Qatari 747 “gift,” USAID’s dismantling, mass pardons (including a crypto kingpin), ICE’s dragnet, and the economic fallout most Americans are living through.
Chapters:
00:00 – how 2025 became inevitable
03:00 – The UAE crypto bribe
06:00 –Caribbean/Latin America strikes framed as fentanyl fights
09:00 – National security erosion & Kremlin wind
12:00 – Economic gut-punch
16:00 – What the next three years likely hold
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Music Credit: Good_B_Music
Mentioned in this episode:
Left in Exile Intro
Left in Exile Intro
And these morons thought that the second go around would turn out differently. Somehow these morons thought a second bite at the apple would lead to better results. Everything that we've seen in the last year is exactly what was predicted by anybody and everybody that was actually paying attention. Unfortunately, the people that were paying attention were outnumbered by the toothless, inbred, morons that put this guy back into [00:01:00] place.
think about as we reflect on:And a vast number of convictions from their administrations compared to the handful, two or three out of Democratic presidential administrations.
of the second Trump regime. [:When you look at what's happened in the last 12 months, there's two major flavors of corruption that's happening in plain view of everybody.
On the one hand, it's Trump enriching himself and his friends to a degree that is far beyond what any other president has done. And the other flavor of corruption that's happening is directly attacking anybody that's not in the top 10% of US society.
tegy as well. When we look at:So let's list off some of the major Trump scandals that we need to look at. And this is just a fraction of the scandals that have taken place during during this first year, you have the UAE crypto bribe. Everybody references the teapot dome scandal as one of history's biggest scandals that happened under a president.
And this was during the Nixon era, and that involved maybe a couple of million dollars. The UAE crypto bribe involved a $2 billion stable coin purchase in World Liberty Financial, which essentially is the president's personal crypto slush fund. And when you think about what that implies, when a foreign government is spending $2 billion on your personal slush fund, there is no way that comes without any strings attached.
[:but that's just the first in a long line of corrupt actions that this regime has taken.
We all know about the 7 47 that the Qatari gave as a gift to Trump. That's in plain sight, a bribe. And yet, what do you see republicans and Republican allies and Trump regime mouthpieces say over and over again?
He's not gonna own this and it's not even gonna be ready in time for him to use it.
compliments, and he'll drop [:When you look at what the UAE has done in their crypto bribe and what the Qatari have done with their 7 47 bribe, that's garden variety financial scandal is happening,. There's a lot more at play than just that. You have to already start counting up the death toll that this regime has been responsible for.
When Elon Musk was part of the administration, one of the first things that he did was he shuttered usaid. That's gonna have a death toll that will rack up into the millions before too long.
And that's just one agency that this regime has cut down. And the reason that they've cited is that those agencies are rife with fraud. But let's be real. The reason why they are doing this and they're cutting all of these services is so that they can pay off their billionaire friends,
. There are people that have [:Policy positions, they are fine with death as long as there are black and brown faces attached to it, and every single policy and executive order that they've pushed forward is designed with the specific intent of exterminating brown and black people.
Keeping in line with that. What have we seen more recently?
the US military. It's cover [:We've seen this before. It's the same old Republican playbook where they want to exterminate as many people, destabilize as many countries as possible so that they can keep the gravy train moving in terms of funding America's military industrial complex
now for a regime that seems to tout law and order.
aw and order, he just let off:Domestic terrorists who were convicted and or pled guilty off the hook and [00:08:00] wiped their records clean. Now we're starting to see that many of those people are getting rearrested for all sorts of things that you would typically expect the white, Christian, Republican crowd to do, and that's no surprise.
But the level of corruption just doesn't stop there.
The Trump regime. Has pardoned so many financial fraudsters that there's over a billion dollars in restitution that's been cleared off of the books thanks to his pardons. One of the biggest pardons that should be on everybody's radar is the pardon of Binance, CEO, Xang P xo.
Binance was the LA World's largest cryptocurrency exchange, and the Biden, DOJ put the guy in jail for failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program. Things that fund terrorists and the black market and all sorts of stuff like that. The Trump regime pardoned their CEO and in exchange that former CEO plopped more money into World Liberally Financial.
If that doesn't [:You've seen Russian aligned propaganda. Organizations like Tenant Media regain a foothold after the Biden administration had shut them down and kicked them out of the country. It is clear beyond a reasonable doubt that this regime is.
For all intents and purposes, a puppet regime of the Kremlin and that's just one country that has their hooks into the Trump regime. We're not even gonna get into all the different Middle Eastern entities that have various hooks into Trump and his cronies as a way to weaken the US and enrich themselves.
when you take [:And in that dragnet, close to 200 CI citizens have been rounded up in that process and that's before you start looking into all the legal residents that have been rounded up as well. This is part and parcel a function of directives given by Steven Miller, who is this regime's version of Goebbels .
s versus looking through the [:The fact of the matter is that what they're doing is a low-key ethnic cleansing. They're rounding up anybody that doesn't look like they quote unquote, belong here. That's code for doesn't look like a white European and shipping them off to a concentration camp and then shipping them off to some foreign country to be tortured to death, and legal residents and American citizens are getting caught up in the process.
This is the early stages of a widespread extermination campaign that this regime would love to bring forward if they can get away with it. And the only reason that it hasn't gotten worse is because American citizens have been fighting back and documenting everything.
's why you see the scandals. [:When you pair all of those scandals with the giveaway to the billionaire crowd in the beginning of the year, what you're seeing is a complete gutting of the working class.
The Trump regime has done its best to gut as many working class Americans as possible. So far, we've seen over a million people laid off as a direct result of Trump's mismanagement of the economy.
Overall employment for the working class has dropped by almost 400,000 people, and those are folks without college degrees.
go up, you've seen tariffs, [:You've seen the unemployment rate go up. All in all, when you look at what this regime has done in its first year, 2025 can be summed up in really simple terms. Fewer jobs, slower wage growth, higher costs. That's the Trump formula. It's the same thing that happened to his first go around. There's a reason why this guy has been bankrupt as many times as he has.
When we look back at his first time term in office, he has the distinction of being the only president that left office with fewer jobs than what he started with, and he is continuing that trend.
This go around. He inherited one of the historically best economic growth lines ever from the Biden administration has prompted to tank it, and that's before you consider how much cooking of the books is happening with the economic data.
omy that has been generating [:That's what we call the Trump effect. The fact of the matter is that the first year. It's probably going to be the best year of the four that we're in for. This is just scratching the surface of how terrible it's going to get and I wouldn't be surprised if we see a large scale depression come forward. Thanks to the economic mismanagement of this regime
lly the enemy of the working [:They are fully invested in serving the 1% and exterminating as many of the 99% as possible. The economic policy bears that out. The health policy bears that out. There is nothing about this party and this regime that should indicate that they are working. For the greater good. They're working for the 0.01% and their solution for everybody else is either get with the program, or drop dead,
me, we are seeing the project:When we look at everything that's happened, this was predicted, it was talked about, unfortunately, 77 million morons. Thought that it was all fake news because their orange, God told them to. And what's interesting to observe after all of this, after they've lost their farms, they've lost their jobs, they've lost their snap benefits, they've lost their public assistance, they've lost their healthcare.
fix this going forward. The [:So 2025, as bad as it was. Could be the best part of the next four years. And if you're coming to any other conclusion other than that. You're likely deluding yourself.