NobleTeam360 said: Wow, that's a pretty odd thing for them to complain about. I didn't bother watching the video or anything so maybe I'm missing some context? |
Here's the context. So, let's say Trump declines the salary. Suppose the next president is a democrat who is also fairly wealthy. Republicans be all like "well Trump declined his salary, so you should too, unless you're greedy". And then the next president is a wealthy republican, and the democrats are all like "well you're rich too, you should decline the salary". And so on so forth.
Eventually, you have someone who is running for president who isn't all that wealthy. He gets elected to office, and unlike the other presidents who declined it, he could actually use the money. But the opposing party (whichever it happens to be) is all like "omg that dude is so greedy. How dare he take his salary." So this discourages that person from running, since they would not be able to pursue other economic oppurtunites while in office. And if he does take the office, he is theoretically more likely to be bribed if he actually needs the money.
Of course, all of this is predicated on the idea that a not rich person can run for president, and that's kind of doubtful (although Bernie came pretty close and he's doing ok but not rich compared to Trump or even Hillary). But basically, they just don't want to set a precedent where a president is expected to turn down the salary, because that would make the process (more) biased towards the wealthy. Of course it may not happen that way, but it could, and this was the argument presented to George Washington when he did not want to take a salary. The simple solution is for Trump simply to take the money and donate it to a charity.
The point of the article was to explain that there is a good reason for people to want Trump to take the money, even if it is counterintuitive. But instead of actually examining the article, the guy on youtube plucked quotes out of context and said "SEE THE CRAZY LIBERALS ARE BEING CRAZY!" Then someone posted it on this board and they were like "OMG SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIORS ARE GOING INSANE". And then people read nothing but the OP, and were all like "Wow that's crazy. Liberals really are nuts."
And shit like that is why we have the issues we do. It's not because the media is rigged (although it might be). It's because people want to react but don't want to research.