Let’s say it clearly: there has never been a president as corrupt as donald trump. There is no close second in our history.
Let’s take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just discovered that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades, an average of nearly 60 per day. This is a rapacious beat that would make a meth day trader blush. Many of them seem suspiciously programmed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, its Nvidia shares rose after Trump announced that the company would be allowed to sell its next-generation artificial intelligence chips to China. Similar, suspiciously timely calls were made before big government actions involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all transactions are conducted by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam taking place from the Oval Office pales in comparison (only millions of dollars) to the looting of $1.8 billion taxpayer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There has never been a sitting president who has sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing that he had suffered harm from the indictments before he was re-elected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the lawsuit, suspecting it could be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who had previously been Trump’s personal attorney, declared that the bogus lawsuit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said would be distributed among persecuted political allies.
This is extortion. The president is forcing the Justice Department he controls to redirect taxpayer money (i.e., you) to his most ardent supporters. This slush fund will trigger a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and will be used to reward the partisan fanatics who attacked the US Capitol (and police officers) in their name.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” agreement included a commitment signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure – in the hysterical all-caps tweet of a Trump tweet – that the government would be “FOREVER BANNED and PREVENTED from prosecuting or pursuing” any related tax claims, audits or prosecutions against Trump, his family or his businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family: a license to steal.
This is all crazy. All of this is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable, but our system was not designed to deal with a blatantly selfish president, a cowardly Republican Congress, and a conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the Constitution’s emoluments clause and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential (and most corrosive) act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan groupthink, individual acts of bravery matter. So kudos to the Treasury Department’s top lawyer, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this taxpayer-funded looting.
Just to close the corruption-palooza, Trump announced who would support the Lone Star State’s model of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish series of fraud and bribery charges that nearly led to his being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.
This all smacks of late Rome, and you’d be half-forgiven for expecting Trump to appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, while Republicans rationalize the need for greater equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refused to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their Senate confirmation hearings. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines downward deflection.
But in searching for something hopeful to cling to in dark times, one can find some solace in the fact that corruption is often what turns the tide against adjacent authoritarian administrations. And there is evidence that this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his thoughtful misrepresentation of American policy to sell long-term national interests and enduring values, come at a time when nearly half of Americans say they feel extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap fueled by a trade war and an actual war that Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further drive up energy and fertilizer prices and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace this president’s transactional nature, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is bleak if you’re not lining up at Trump’s nadir. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, the man in the White House sends everyone else to hell.
These are precisely the kind of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It’s not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point that two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he’s doing. It’s that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters (aka his base) and they feel betrayed because Trump is raising billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy food. Trump has dismissed and dismissed their concerns, turning a blind eye to anger over rising costs that brought him back to the presidency.
Trump’s goal is to make his theft so brazen that we collectively become desensitized to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. There was a time when conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicated. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reaffirm the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.
