Tangle - I'm responding to criticisms of my Trump corruption piece.

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

Last week, I published an exhaustive 6,000-word essay on the self-dealing and potential corruption of President Donald Trump’s second administration.I shared clips of the article on X, and it went viral. The initial feedback from readers within and outside the Tangle community overwhelmingly asked us to drop the paywall on the piece. After a few hours, we did.Since then, we’ve been inundated with comments, criticism, and questions. Usually, when an article takes off like this, I write a follow-up piece addressing those criticisms and questions. I do this because I think engaging with our audience is an important way to gain trust and an important exercise in humility and intellectual honesty. I often engage with feedback by quoting specific readers and then responding directly to what they said in a Q&A format. That’s exactly what I’m doing today.Ad-free podcasts are here!To unlock the rest of this podcast ad-free, and to enjoy our subscriber only premium content, go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!Here is the piece Isaac is responding to: Corruption in the Trump administration?“After reviewing the evidence of the first 15 months of President Trump’s second term, I believe the president is profiting off the office and making foreign policy decisions based on business interests to a level we’ve never seen or even conceived of before, and apparently nothing is being done to stop it.”Gold phones, Qatari planes, Syrian golf courses, cryptocurrency schemes, ballroom donations. Market moves, board seats, lawsuits dropped, lawsuits threatened. Pardons, prosecutions, profits, profits, profits… This past Friday, Executive Editor Isaac Saul waded through all of it in a thorough exploration of the charges of corruption against President Donald Trump.In case you missed it, you can read the piece here. We’ve also decided to make this Friday edition open to everyone, so please share it with anyone you think would be interested!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast written by: Isaac Saul and audio edited and mixed by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Lindsey Knuth, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to Patangle podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, I am answering your feedback and criticism. Last week, I published an exhaustive 6,000-word essay on the self-dealing and potential corruption of President Donald Trump's second administration. I shared clips of the article on X. I read it down here on the podcast. It blew up when viral. The initial feedback from readers within and outside the Tangle community overwhelmingly asked us to drop the paywall on the piece. So after a few hours, we did. Since then, we've been inundated with comments. criticism and questions. I've done some interviews about the piece. Usually when an article like this

takes off, I write a follow-up piece addressing those criticisms and questions. I often do this by quoting specific readers and then responding directly to what they said in a Q&A format. I do this because I think being in dialogue with my audience is an important part of gaining their trust and an important exercise for me to stay humble and intellectually honest. So that's what I'm doing today. Of course, as is typical, the responses came from across the political spectrum. To give just one illustrative example, a reader named Mary Ellen wrote in to say that I've skewered Biden's son over and over and used this article to pour more venom into that story. She also expressed her frustration that I was only slightly less biased than the rest of the major media who report on Trump corruption on page

or not at all on TV. Simultaneously, a reader named John said, I'm one of the readers who stopped reading about halfway through. I just couldn't stand Isaac's obvious distaste, if not revulsion of President Trump. It's obvious in all of his my-take comments. I think he's doing a disservice to the multiple employees of all those watchdogs he's trying to hang.

Not one of them can speak up, even off the record. By the way, I can't stand Trump, but I'd like to see some verified facts, not some wannabe editor alleging such. This is the environment we live in now, and I'm trying to navigate it as honestly as I can. You write a piece like this, and one side says,

where the hell have you been, while the other side thinks you're a hack editor making baseless allegations. Alternatively, some readers actually wrote in questioning the facts that provide the basis of the piece. One Tangle reader told me her friend had used chat GPT to quote-unquote fact-check me and found that there are multiple claims in the article

that are either unverified, misleading, or likely false as written. In one telling example, Chat GPT said there is no confirmed Iran war being negotiated by Jared Kushner, and that Kushner is a private citizen with no record of being involved in negotiating the war's end, despite the fact there obviously is an Iran war, and Kushner is a chief negotiator in ending that war. ChatGPT also claimed there is no widely confirmed reporting from the New York Times about Syrian billionaires lobbying Trump for sanctions relief, despite that very New York Times article obviously existing. What explains the enormous discrepancy here?

It turns out the critic was copying and pasting the text of my piece into ChatGPT without the linked primary sources. Once they sent ChatGPT the actual article, it conceded that the facts of the piece were accurate, apologized for getting it wrong, and suggested only that I was injecting strong language that included my own feelings. and guilty is charged. On the suspension of the rules podcast this week,

I talked more about this chat GPT fact-check story, the other things chat GPT got wrong, and the frightening new reality where people regularly export their critical thinking to artificial intelligence, even as they prompt the LLM in ways that produce inaccurate results. This is a new playing field, where someone thinks I'm lying

because an AI chatbot tells them things that are absolutely untrue. We'll be right back after this quick break. Now, on to some more specific feedback. One of the most common responses we got and what I should have thought to preempt was about the Obama's. Many, many readers and listeners said something along the lines of, Obama came into office with X amount of dollars and left with many more,

yet you ignore that story. This feedback was maybe best articulated by a reader named Kelly, who commented, from community organizer making $35,000 at most to state and U.S. Senator, Obama entered the White House with $1.3 million. Where did that come from? He left the White House with close to $40 million. By no means does this condone Trump corruption, but what has been newly corrupted that wasn't already. So I think the big difference here is that we understand pretty clearly how President Obama accumulated his wealth. Obama released his tax returns throughout his career, so the way he accumulated his estimated net worth of $70 million is documented, and you can find those tax returns and follow the

paper trail. The vast majority of his wealth came from publishing books and speaking tours. He netted just under $5 million in royalties from his first two books by the first year of his presidency. Then, as his second term expired, he and Michelle got a $65 million deal for two additional books, one from each. After that, Obama signed a TV deal with Netflix worth reported $50 million. He also gets paid as much as $400,000 for a single-speaking engagement. I really don't know what to say, except that the Obama's opportunism is self-evidently very different from Trump's. The closest comparison is that Obama's Netflix deal was negotiated by Ted Serendos and Obama donor whose wife got an ambassadorship in the Bahamas. But crucially, that

appointment actually preceded the Netflix deal by roughly a decade. What's more, it's actually another example of a scandalous behavior Trump has engaged in to an even higher degree. In my entire 6,000 word piece, I didn't even get into the Trump donors receiving ambassadorships because there was so much other stuff going on, and I'll talk about that more in a minute. Also, Obama got his TV deal after he was in office, not during. On top of that, the Trump family isn't just getting money through TV deals while he's presidency, Melania, and Amazon, he is using the presidency to become wealthier. He is regulating businesses that make him money, or taking investments from foreign leaders while striking arms deals with them, or launching Trump-themed cryptocurrencies whose values evaporate for investors

while he makes a profit. Further, because Trump does not release his tax returns and is not transparent about his finances, we are left putting two and two together through investigative journalism and leaks. Conversely, the way the Obamas accrued their wealth is well documented. We know how they made their money and when. You can think those deals were too cushy or his speaking fee is outlandish, and even that such a fee opens doors to palm greasing. But the fact remains that these income streams were not nearly as directly linked to his decisions as president in the way that Trumps have been. Separately, quite a few readers wrote in about this sentence, quote, By the time Trump ran for office in 2016, under the drain-the-swamp mantra of rooting out corruption by other politicians,

he excoriated the Clintons for taking money from Saudi Arabia and other Middle East monarchies. That money, which Trump criticized her for accepting, was going to the Clinton Foundation, a philanthropic fund run by the Clintons. Many people countered that the Clinton Foundation was actually just the front for the Clintons to get rich by leveraging their fame. One representative comment came from Getaway Girl who said, You state without qualification that the Clinton Foundation was a philanthropic organization when it is well established, it was simply a funnel to get what was then huge amounts of money to the Clinton family and associates, noting the Clintons are now personally worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Where do you think that came from?

Okay, I'm going to start with just a confession, something many Tangle readers and listeners may not know, and I hope this act of transparency will earn me some trust here. In 2016, I was blogging about the Democratic primary for the Huffington Post. I penned a piece titled,

I despise Hillary Clinton and it has nothing to do with her gender. In it, I wrote about how my generation shared the feelings I had at the time, overwhelmingly, politically independent, directionally liberal, and exhausted by establishment Democrats like Clinton. As a 24-year-old political writer

living in Pennsylvania, I was fully tapped into the populist movement that Trump and Bernie Sanders stepped into, which is why so much of his campaign appealed to me in 2016 and how I knew he was going to win. I was and am anti-war, and I knew Hillary was a hawk. I loathe the state of the country. As I wrote in that initial piece, quote, our friends are in college debt, they're opioid addicts, they're in jail, or they're unable to afford a house, end quote.

And while Clinton speaks to solving issues like addiction, she takes more money from Big Pharma than any candidate in this race. I criticize her pro-war language and enthusiasm for killing more people. We have no business killing, and argued that she didn't give two shits about the poverty in our country. That piece I wrote got some traction, but it was a piece I penn later for a now-defunct website that I helped start, called A-plus, that went absolutely viral. In it, I apologized to Clinton for the arrogant, fiery nature of my initial writing, and I tried to criticize her in more fair and reasonable terms

while conceding that she was a qualified candidate who presented a positive vision for the country. Clinton eventually wrote me a letter, thanking me for elevating our political discourse an act of grace that showed me I could make a point without being an asshole and still change some people's minds. Which is all just to say, I have a very complicated relationship with Hillary Clinton,

but that history should show I'm not afraid of criticizing the Clinton's directly and in print. Having said that, I do not think it is an established fact that the Clinton Foundation is simply a funnel to get what was then huge amounts of money to the Clinton family. The idea that the Clintons have pocketed charitable donations is not new and is still an unproven claim. If you have evidence to present about this claim through one of the many journalistic or legal investigations into it, I'm happy to see it. And I will concede I was wrong publicly right here in Tangle. But as far as I know, the Clinton Foundation has been examined by many independent charity watchdogs and always receive strong ratings. One of the most well-known and reputable organizations to dig into it is Charity Watch,

whose executive director we interviewed earlier this year on the Tangle podcast. Charity Watch currently gives the Clinton Foundation an A-minus rating, and in 2015, when these allegations were most common, found that a relatively high 89% of its funding went directly to charity as opposed to overhead cause. Interestingly, that number has come down to 78% when I checked it for this piece. Comparatively, the National Breast Cancer Foundation receives a B-plus rating with 72% of its funding going directly to charity. That's not a dig, just an example of how other organizations doing good work receive comparable or lower ratings than the Clinton Foundation. Like Obama's deals, this organization's activity is not particularly opaque. The Clinton Foundation is a public charity.

Republicans spent years investigating it. People donate. Those donations are filed through tax returns. The Clintons have to show evidence of how they spent it and so on. What is a legitimate allegation and one where I think there was a real story was the pay-to-play stuff. This story here is that while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, donors to the foundation may have gotten favorable access or policy treatment from the U.S. government. The foundation was accused of wrongdoing in 2015, but multiple investigations. investigations through 2019 weren't able to uncover evidence of illegal activity. It did uncover some oddities like Raj Fernando, who donated $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation and then was appointed to the International Security Advisory Board. The Associated Press also did some great reporting about the significant number of Clinton's private meetings as Secretary of State being with Foundation donors. Now, to bring all of this to the present, let me just say, I didn't even have to be room in my 6,000-word piece to mention that Trump has repeatedly given campaign donors even more

high-ranking positions than Clinton offered Fernando. By April of 2025, President Trump's ambassador nominees collectively had donated nearly $60 million to him or other Republican candidates in the two years leading up to their nominations. That's three times that of Biden's nominees. Warren Stevens donated roughly $6 million to Trump's 2016 campaign and about $4 million. and more to his 2024 campaign, then became ambassador to the United Kingdom. Charles Kushner, Jared Kushner's dad, a felon who Trump pardoned and one of the biggest donors to Trump's Super PAC in 2023, was appointed ambassador to France, which has had some genuinely negative consequences. I didn't mention any of this because donors being rewarded

with these kinds of posts is a long-standing scummy bipartisan practice. Yet, like other pay-to-play schemes, Trump has taken it to an entirely new level. This is the point. Accusations against Hillary Clinton are only partially and narrowly true. She spent years being investigated for them and as a result, her political career was destroyed. Yet what Trump is doing is far more egregious at a much larger scale and nobody seems to care. There are no investigations, no political damage, nothing. That is why I wrote the piece the way that I did. One reader named Craig accused me of suffering greatly from TDS and then offered several counterpoints he thought were not addressed in my article. Now I'm going to try to reply to each

one of his points, which I put in bold in today's newsletter. Hey everybody, this is John, executive producer for Tangle. We hope you enjoyed this preview of our latest episode. If you are not currently a newsletter subscriber or a premium podcast subscriber and you are enjoying this content and would like to finish it, you can go to readtangle.com and sign up for a newsletter subscription, or you can sign up for a podcast subscription or a bundled subscription, which gets you both the podcast and the newsletter, and unlocks the rest of this episode, as well as ad-free daily podcasts, more Friday editions, Sunday editions, bonus content, interviews, and so much more. Most importantly, we just want to say thank you so much for your support.

We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offering, so stay tuned. I will join you again for the Daily podcast. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day, y'all. Peace. Our executive editor and founder is me. Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Wohl. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas.

Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kback and associate editor's Audrey Moorhead, Lindsay Canuth, and Bailey Saul. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at retangle. com.