snip ...

Both the Republicans, led by Donald Trump, and the Democrats, led by no one, are trying to hammer out their midterm messaging. And both sides are getting pretty serious about the same issue, albeit a slightly different word for it on each side. To wit, the Democrats think that "corruption" is a potential winner, while Trump and the Republicans quite like "fraud."

We'll begin by talking about the Democrats' side of that, since they will have an embarrassment of riches to choose from.

Here's a list of ten instances of corruption from Trump and other prominent Republicans. This is not an exhaustive list, by any means, and we are attempting to include both recent examples and particularly egregious examples (of course, some examples are both recent AND egregious):

snip ...

And finally, when we started planning this item, we could squint and see how the GOP approach just might work. But we think that the $1.776 billion slush fund brought that line of thinking to a conclusive end. The billion-dollar grift is going to be the bright sun in the universe of grift, outshining all else by many orders of magnitude. It's like this famous cartoon about notorious Gilded Age spoilsman Richard Croker:

All you have to do is replace "CROKER" with "TRUMP, $1.776 Billion."

In the end, the slush fund is just so egregious, and is such obvious self-dealing. Even if you believe California is committing fraud (beyond the usual level of Medicare fraud that every state deals with), nobody has suggested that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) is personally lining his own pockets.

So we think, on corruption/fraud, it's going to be "advantage Democrats" for the rest of the cycle, and beyond. (Z)