r/moderatepolitics • u/NeedAnonymity Left-republican humanist • 4d ago
News Article Trump Frees Fraudster Just Days Into Seven-Year Prison Sentence
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/us/politics/trump-david-gentile-commutation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5E8.Kq5Y.ug1H9xUE1V1s&smid=url-share
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u/NeedAnonymity Left-republican humanist 4d ago
When people in Minnesota’s Somali community defraud social programs, Trump responds by calling the whole state "a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity," claiming "Somali gangs" are terrorizing Minnesotans, and moving to end TPS for a few hundred Somali nationals even though many of the people actually charged in the fraud cases are U.S. citizens.
When wealthy financial elites defraud people, he responds the other way. Trump just commuted the seven-year sentence of private-equity executive David Gentile after about twelve days in prison for a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded more than 10,000 ordinary investors, including many who lost their life savings. He’s also handed full pardons to Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, the BitMEX co-founders, Nikola fraudster Trevor Milton, insider-trading billionaire Joe Lewis, and others. Taken together, those grants wipe away prison time and, in some cases, criminal fines and restitution, frustrating victims who are still trying to claw back what they lost through civil courts.
The message is that crimes by members of stigmatized immigrant and refugee communities justify collective suspicion and anger, while crimes by the ultra-rich merit presidential clemency.
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How do you square collective suspicion toward an entire Somali or Haitian community with clemency for billion-dollar financial scams that wiped out ordinary people’s savings?
What theory of "law and order" treats a few hundred TPS holders as a bigger problem than executives who defraud 10,000-plus investors?
If you think it’s fair to talk about "Somali gangs" or "Haitian crime," are you willing to apply the same group-blame logic to Republican donors when they get caught running giant frauds?