Our Mob Boss President
The article critiques Donald Trump's presidency, describing it as focused on personal enrichment rather than the public good. It characterizes his actions as a form of corruption that resembles petty theft rather than honest governance. The author likens Trump's leadership style to that of a mob boss, suggesting a misuse of power for personal gain.
- ▪Trump's presidency is described as a pecuniary presidency focused on personal enrichment.
- ▪The article argues that his actions represent a form of petty theft from the public coffers.
- ▪The author compares Trump's leadership to that of a mob boss, emphasizing a lack of accountability.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | kottke.org |
| Canonical URL | https://kottke.org/26/05/our-mob-boss-president |
| Publication time | 2026-05-20T15:40:00Z |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-20T15:46:11.380Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-20T15:48:02.354Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | h4G6Soo49Aup |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
So what manner of presidency has Trump devised for himself?You could call it the pecuniary presidency, a presidency not devoted to the public good or to the preservation of the union or even to some narrow ideological crusade, but to the quest for personal enrichment. A presidency devoted to the aggrandizement of a single person, not to satisfy a grand design for the nation but to squeeze a few million here and a few billion there out of the public coffers for your own benefit.This isn’t the “honest graft” of Tammany Hall — corruption as the price paid for public improvement. It is petty theft. It’s stealing from the Treasury and using your authority, enhanced by the baroque theories of your allies on the Supreme Court, to make yourself unaccountable.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at kottke.org.
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