America's most popular governor: the lavishly corrupt Larry Hogan [R-MD]

Maryland's Larry Hogan -- a Republican who governs a blue state -- is the most popular governor in America, with a 73% approval among state Democrats. He is also a flagrant crook.

Hogan has booked $2.4m in personal income during his three years in office, most of it thanks to his cancellation of a desperately needed public transit expansion in Baltimore, the funds from which were diverted to building roads in the middle of nowhere that just happened to serve the suburban property developments his company owned. That company was nominally put in his brother's hands when Hogan took office, but as the Washington Monthly's Eric Cortellessa reports, that was a fiction, and Hogan has continued to oversee his company even as he made public policy that made his governorship the most profitable in Maryland history.

None of this is a secret: Hogan has bragged about it and his office has issued maps boasting about where his new roads were going in. Hogan claims to be "the Republican who believes in climate change," even as he's overseen a radical expansion in automobile use that was paid for by destroying an ambitious public transit scheme, which will benefit the state's suburban whites at the expense of the large Black population of Baltimore, who have been shat upon by their state for generations.

It's all probably legal, too, because Maryland has some of the weakest anti-corruption rules in America.

In the New Republic, Alex Pareene describes Hogan as the kind of "normal" Republican that centrist Democrats yearn to work with -- ordinarily corrupt and rapacious, with plausibly deniable policies of white supremacy, uncomplicated by explicit white nationalist rhetoric. Read the rest