Perhaps the most spurious of hardcore MAGA arguments in defense of Donald Trump since his first term in office is the fantasy that Trump is a patriot who loves the country more than any leader before him and that proof of this is that he gains nothing from being president. On the contrary, dyed-in-the-wool MAGA folks argue, Trump has had to make great sacrifices to be president. Not only, they say, does he not collect the four hundred thousand-dollar-a-year salary granted to presidents (getting instead a token one-dollar-a-year check since presidents must be compensated under the law), but has also—in MAGA mythology—taken huge hits on business deals he could have conducted were he not a presidential office-holder.
That would, of course, be the case if
Trump were to adhere to the ethical standards that his presidential
predecessors have. But he doesn’t.
To anyone with an even passing knowledge
of the Trump empire—in other words, anyone who is willing to dig deeper in
their research than MAGA social media, Fox News and far-right influencers—it is
clear that not only Donald Trump, but also members of his family and many of
his associates have profited richly from his two presidencies to date. The
facts tend to show that the PR value of not accepting his pay as president is
well worth it, because it makes for good press, and compared with increases in
his net worth since taking office, the four hundred grand presidential salary—a
fortune for most Americans—is a mere drop in the bucket.
Trump critics, including this one, have long
argued that, contrary to MAGA legend, Trump and his crime family have created
an illicit association in the White House from which they use the levers of
power for profit, and in which—in frank violation of the Constitution and
anti-corruption laws and rules—the headquarters of the Executive have become
the center of a vast and shady commercial enterprise that Trump heads. From this
enterprise—presidency for profit—that includes blatant insider trading and
foreign and domestic conflicts of interest, Trump profits beyond all imagining,
in complete conflict with his duties and obligations as president of the United
States.
But in strictly debatable terms, the fact is that, in order to justly revile Donald Trump’s behavior in office, there is no real need to prove criminality on his part—despite the fact that where there’s smoke, it stands to reason that there is also fire. In a dark time for democracy and the rule of law, in which the president violates federal law and the Constitution daily and in which his hijacked governing party and far-right-packed Supreme Court let him get away with everything short of public murder—indeed, a time in which any federal court action against Trump’s abuse of power is seen by the media as akin to an act of heroism—suffice it to say that Donald Trump has provably abused the powers, visibility, and influence of the presidency in ways that have substantially increased his wealth and that of his family and close associates, and in ways that are completely and historically unethical. And this pattern of abuse of power has been well documented by mainstream reporting, ethics watchdogs, and legal scholars alike.
In short, Donald Trump has transformed
the presidency into a vehicle for personal and family enrichment on a scale
unprecedented in modern American history. From the outset, he has thumbed his
nose at the Emoluments Clauses under constitutional law. The main purpose of
these clauses is to keep elected officials of the US government honest. They
are contained in Article I, Section 9, Clause 8; Article I, Section 6, Clause 2;
and Article II, Section 1, Clause 7. The second one of these is specifically
designed to prevent members of Congress from accepting gifts and bribes, and to
keep that branch independent from the Executive (good luck with that in today’s
climate). But the other two affect, both directly and indirectly, the
presidency.
Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 prohibits
any person holding an "Office of Profit or Trust" under the US
government from accepting any present, emolument, office, or title from any
king, prince, or foreign state without the consent of Congress. Emolument is a
general term that refers to any sort of salary or profit. The purpose of this
clause is to protect the Nation against foreign corruption, bribery, and undue
influence. (The undue influence of Putin’s Russia in the politics of the Trump
Era was already made clear, for anyone who actually read it, in Special Counsel
Robert Mueller’s controversial report during Trump’s first presidency). And a blatant
example of an improper gift from a foreign power is the four hundred
million-dollar plane that Donald Trump received from the reigning emir of
Qatar. Although the Trump regime bent over backwards to pass off the
plane—originally designed as a flying luxury palace for Qatari royalty—as
belonging to the Department of Defense (which still wouldn’t explain why Qatar
would make such an expensive gift to the US government) Trump has made it clear
that he considers the plane his and plans to take it with him, one way or
another, when he leaves office. This is
a plainly clear abuse of presidential power and a glaring act of corruption.
As far as emoluments go, one has to dig
deeper beneath the surface to discover how Trump and his family are profiting
from the presidency. But it’s not as if that takes a great deal of research
either, since one of the latest hallmarks of Trump Era 2.0 is that corruption
and unethical behavior are even more in-your-face in this second term than they
were during the first one, in which there was still some pretense of
correctitude.
Unlike previous presidents who divested
assets, placed holdings in blind trusts, or avoided any perception of active
commercial expansion while in office, Trump has maintained extensive financial
interests that continue to benefit from government policy, foreign
relationships, regulatory decisions, political branding, and public office
itself.
The point, then, is not merely that
Trump has remained wealthy while president. No one would argue that he should
have to take a vow of poverty in order to hold his office. The real point is
that Trump has turned the presidency into a wealth-generating plant for his
worldwide businesses, investments, licensing ventures, and cryptocurrency
projects, and has done so for his politically connected associates as well.
Earlier this year, ethics experts at the
Brennan Center for Justice wrote that, "The scale of President Trump's
self-enrichment is unprecedented." The center estimated that, "Since
taking office in January 2025, President Trump has pocketed an estimated three
billion dollars," while his family accumulated billions more. How many
billions more? Latest independent estimates indicate that the Trumps have been
making hay while the sun shines—in other words, before the midterms. So much so
that while Donald Trump’s personal fortune has burgeoned threefold to 6.5
billion dollars just since 2024, the Trump family empire as a whole is
estimated to have grown to more than ten billion dollars. Wall Street
Journal investigative reporter David Uberti claims that since the start of
Trump’s second term fifteen months ago, Trump’s family has added four billion
to their net worth, and that, Uberti says, is a conservative estimate. Even
young Barron has accumulated an estimated one hundred fifty million by joining
in on his stepbrothers’ World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency venture.
The Brennan Center also claims that
foreign governments and other foreign agents have been one of the major sources
of the Trump empire’s recent windfalls. All of this matters because the central
concern to democracy regarding these issues is not whether the transactions are
illegal as such, but rather, whether political power can be converted into
private wealth.
The Brennan Center also claims that
foreign governments and other foreign agents have been one of the major sources
of the Trump empire’s recent windfalls. All of this matters because the central
concern to democracy regarding these issues is not whether the transactions are
illegal as such, but rather, whether political power can be converted into
private wealth.
From the get-go, Trump rejected the
modern presidential norm of divestment. For decades, presidents from both
parties generally separated themselves from business operations to avoid
conflicts of interest. Trump, instead, has placed assets in a family-controlled trust
overseen by his children rather than a traditional blind trust. Anybody who
knows anything about the Trump family business knows that Donald is the CEO and
calls the shots.
Ethics scholars have repeatedly noted
that a trust run by family members is fundamentally different from a blind
trust because the president continues to know what assets he owns, and can
potentially benefit from policy decisions affecting them. Trump, then, did not
merely keep his existing wealth. He preserved an architecture through which
government decisions could and did affect his family's fortunes.
Furthermore, foreign governments and
foreign investors continue to do business with Trump-linked enterprises.
According to reporting from PBS, Trump took his 2025 Middle East trip at a time
when his family maintained substantial business interests there. As a result,
PBS reported, "billions of dollars have poured into Trump-owned
companies."
This creates an obvious conflict of
interests and is a potential threat to national security. More specifically, foreign
governments seeking favorable treatment from the US under the Trump regime have
a clear incentive to direct money toward businesses linked to the Trump’s
family. The quid pro quo involved is obvious—and for the Trumps, highly
profitable.
And it is blatantly unconstitutional—and
thus, illegal—since this sort of situation is precisely why the US Constitution
includes the Foreign Emoluments Clause, as a means of preventing foreign powers
from gaining leverage over American leaders.
But perhaps the most significant
development in corruption since Trump began his second term involves cryptocurrency.
There is ample evidence to demonstrate
that crypto has created an entirely new channel for Trump’s corrupt
profiteering through the presidency. The
obvious collusion of the hijacked GOP’s paper-thin majority in Congress (which
keeps him momentarily unimpeachable), and that of the Supreme Court in
rendering Trump basically unindictable as long as he holds office, are clearly the
only reasons that the president is being allowed to get away with this sort of
overt corruption.
According to that report, "The
Trump Family's corruption is deeply disturbing." But beyond partisan
rhetoric, the underlying facts on which the report is based are undeniably
noteworthy. Reporting cited by the committee shows that Trump-linked crypto
projects generated hundreds of millions of dollars in fees. Foreign investors
participated in the Trump crypto ecosystem. And at the same time that the
Trumps were richly profiting from their crypto ventures, the administration
moved to take control of cryptocurrency regulation, further rigging the system
to favor Trump and company.
If anyone should need to have this
spelled out, the main ethical concern is straightforward and unquestionable.
Namely, that in his presidency-for-profit maneuvers, Trump has positioned
himself to directly influence the regulatory environment that affects
enterprises from which he and his family and friends stand to reap enormous
financial benefits.
A flagrantly egregious illustration of this conflict of interest has been provided by the Trump meme-coin controversy. This was basically a grift by which purchasers of a type of crypto better known as a “token” bearing Trump’s image spent millions to acquire the coins at their launch in order to gain access to an exclusive dinner with the president. Trump’s use of the presidency as a hook for profit couldn’t have been more clear.
The token soared in market value by some
three hundred percent to seventy-five dollars. The scam was basically a bidding
war in which Trump voters were led to believe they could win a place at the
presidential table and there were different levels of participation according
to the value of each participant’s investment—an exclusive, formal cocktail
with the president for the top twenty-five, a gala black-tie dinner for the
two-hundred highest investors, and so on.
Obviously the crypto launch dinner was
attended by major investors and wealthy foreign dignitaries, not the MAGA rank
and file. According to investigative reporting in The Washington Post,
Trump-affiliated businesses generated millions of dollars out of this grift,
which, ethics experts agree, completely blurred the lines between public office
and private profit. It is an even more grave act of corruption of the
presidential office if you consider that
those who bought in on the meteoric rise in the $Trump token suffered
multi-million-dollar cumulative losses, considering that, from its peak of
seventy-five dollars, the Trump bitcoin is today trading at about two dollars.
Trump and his family, however, made out like bandits.
Even if one sees Trump’s dubious use of
personal access of supporters to the president as a political campaign chip,
there is a huge ethical difference between offering that access in exchange for
campaign contributions—like the ten-thousand-dollar-a-plate gala dinners (the
ethics of which are questionable enough) that other politicians have indulged
in—and the purchasing of access by acquiring a financial asset by which the
president and his family hugely and directly profit.
It has also become crystal clear,
especially during the current Trump administration, that where traditional
ethical constraints are unceremoniously tossed out of the Oval Office window,
the power of the State can and will be used to benefit not only the president,
but also his donors, allies and relatives as well.
Make no mistake, many of the seemingly
insane actions taken by Trump’s regime since he took office again at the
beginning of last year have tended over time to demonstrate that there may often
be method in his madness. The mistake is to look at these actions from a
conventional and sincere standpoint—in other words, from the standpoint of an
honest upstanding citizen. Seen from that rather naïve—or, more to the point,
authentic—standpoint, the things Trump does appear irrational and utterly
crazy. Why? Because the questions we ask ourselves are the wrong ones. Someone
honest asks: How can Trump think this is good for America and Americans? The
reason that’s the wrong question is the answer is: He doesn’t, and moreover, he
couldn’t care less how the measures he takes affect American or US interests.
Indeed, he has said as much publicly.
When asked if he thought about the financial strain Americans have been placed
under because of his tariffs and his personal war with Iran, Trump admitted,
“Not even a little bit. I don’t think about anybody.” Perhaps in the back of
his mind he was thinking about the true and effective end to that sentence, “I
don’t think about anybody,” except myself.
Many of his most controversial actions
are clearly designed to increase his bottom line, or those of his family and
friends, even when they cause direct harm to working Americans, and, indeed, to
many hard-working people in other parts of the world as well. For instance, I
am an American expat living in Argentina. Here, since the start of Trump’s
unilateral war in Iran two months ago, our gasoline prices have risen by
twenty-three percent in dollars, adding as much as a couple of hundred
dollars a month to average Argentine families’ monthly expenses But it doesn’t end there. Diesel fuel in
Argentina has seen peak rises in the past two months of as much as
thirty-percent in dollars, and since just about everything in the far-flung
reaches of Argentina travels by truck, this increased expense is fueling
inflation, particularly in supermarkets and grocery stores, where the
government was already struggling to bring rampant inflation in dollars under
control, and where shoppers were struggling to pay for their daily food needs.
This is then, a problem we are having five thousand miles away that has Trump’s
fingerprints all over it, and it’s just one example of multiple effects
worldwide.
As
the Brennan Center had already predicted last year, the Trump regime, since
retaking office, has manipulated tariffs, regulations, contracts, tax money and
executive orders in ways that have hurt the majority of Americans while tending
to benefit not only Trump-linked businesses, but the president’s major donors
and allies.
This broadens the corruption issue
beyond Trump personally. The presidency is not merely enriching Trump. It
is also creating opportunities for an entire network of family members,
investors, business partners, and political allies.
Even in Trump’s personal war with Iran,
which has not only cost billions in taxpayer money, but also caused further
suffering to Americans through inflation tied to skyrocketing fuel prices,
there have been clear winners. Big Oil is reaping enormous profits from the
war’s effect on petroleum prices, and arms manufacturers are scrambling to keep
up with increased demand due to Trump’s dilapidation of American weapons
stockpiles, which have left the US far more vulnerable should some other
foreign conflict break out or if the US should come under attack.
But this isn’t just something that,
thanks to nepotism, they are dabbling in. Key defense contracts and defense ventures
in which the Trump boys are involved are numerous.
For instance, there is the Powerus
Corporation, a West Palm Beach-based drone manufacturer backed by the Trump
brothers. The company—which went public via a reverse merger with Aureus
Greenway Holdings—landed an agreement with the US Air Force to supply
interceptor drones, which, thanks to Trump’s private war with Iran, are in
increasingly short supply. The Trump kids are also actively pitching weapons systems deals
to Gulf states, which, thanks to Trump and his war, suddenly find themselves
lethally vulnerable to attack from Iran, which sees them as indispensable
allies to Trump in his devastating assault on that country.
Eric Trump has, meanwhile, been amusing
himself with some Te
rminator stuff, and was recently bragging about landing a
twenty-four-million-dollar Pentagon R&D contract for Foundation Future
Industries, a robotics firm to which he is linked and which is researching
advanced military and humanoid AI systems.
Don Jr. is a partner in 1789 Capital, a
company that is actively investing in defense contractors. Both Trump brothers
form part of Vulcan Elements (which is backed by 1789 Capital). Vulcan
specializes in rare-earth magnets.
A rare earth magnet is the strongest
type of permanent magnet available. Crafted from alloys of rare-earth elements,
they are crucial for modern technology because their immense magnetic strength
allows for highly compact, lightweight designs in everything from smartphones
and headphones to electric vehicle motors. The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic
Capital recently granted Vulcan a six hundred twenty million-dollar loan.
This area of investment by the Trump
boys seems noteworthy considering that acquiring rare earth resources is a
strategic priority of the Trump regime’s foreign investment platform. China has
long had a monopoly on key minerals and Trump has pursued a global and domestic
strategy to build a secure "mine-to-magnet" supply chain.
This has involved massive funding deals like a 1.6 billion-dollar package in funding and loan capacity granted by the Trump regime to a firm called USA Rare Earth. It just so happens that, among their heavy involvement and financial stakes in the critical minerals and mining industry, Don Jr. and Eric are linked to USA Rare Earth through substantial financial and federal contracting ties.
Additionally, Don Jr. is now on the
advisory board of drone-maker Unusual Machines (UMAC). That firm has,
coincidentally (?) recently secured a US Army contract for the supply of drone
motors and components.
These growing business ties to the
military-industrial complex have drawn significant public and political
scrutiny. Government ethics experts and congressional Democrats have raised
concerns regarding potential conflicts of interest, prompting opposition inquiries
into whether the White House is directly influencing the Pentagon's procurement
process to benefit the president's family. (Ya think)?
But it doesn’t end there. The Trump
family trust (perhaps a better term would be crime syndicate), in which the
president is very obviously still involved, has been actively trading stocks
while Trump has been president.
Let’s stop a second and define the term
“insider trading”. Insider trading is when someone with access to confidential
information about factors affecting publicly traded companies (better known as
“material information”) buys and/or sells pertinent shares. What is meant by
“material information”, is any data that constitute an undisclosed fact that
could substantially impact the stock's price or an investor's decision to
trade.
The grift here, then, is obvious: The
president controls policy, tariffs, regulatory announcements, and public
statements that can move markets. No one in history has used and abused these
presidential powers the way Trump has. He and his trust’s personal participation in stock trading
clearly creates the appearance—or reality—of financial self-interest
influencing government action.
Although the far-right-dominated Supreme
Court has basically handed the president a get-out-of-jail-free card—ostensibly
permitting Trump, for as long as he is in office, to get away with
murder—insider trading is a felony. You go to prison for it. I mean, you and I
do. Not Trump. Ironclad ethics have kept other presidents from engaging in it.
But Trump has no ethics, and whatever he can get away with, he will do.
Some other very powerful people have, in
the past, not been so lucky. Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire founder of the
Galleon Group hedge fund was convicted of heading up a massive insider-trading
ring and was handed an eleven-year federal prison sentence in 2011. Former
Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling was convicted on multiple felony counts, including insider trading, for selling
tens of millions of dollars in stock based on non-public knowledge of the
company's impending collapse. He ended up serving twelve years of a twenty-four-year
federal prison sentence. Jordan Belfort, better known as the "Wolf of Wall
Street", served twenty-two months
in federal prison after being convicted of securities fraud and money
laundering tied to his pump-and-dump and insider trading schemes at Stratton
Oakmont. Former ImClone Systems CEO Samuel Waksal, got an eighty-seven-month
federal prison sentence for securities fraud and insider trading after
attempting to sell off his company stock prior to an FDA rejection of their new
cancer drug. This also got TV personality and lifestyle mogul Martha Stewart
into trouble when she was riding the crest of her fame. Investigators initially
charged her with insider trading for the suspicious unloading of her ImClone
stock, but couldn’t make the charge stick. She refused a plea bargain and
maintained her innocence, but still ended up spending five months in federal
prison and another five months under house arrest on obstruction and perjury
charges. And infamous, if iconic 1980s Wall Street arbitrageur Ivan
Boesky, whose slogan was “greed is good” ended up pleading guilty to charges of
conspiracy and spent twenty months in prison before turning State’s evidence
and serving as a key government confidential informant.
But the way things stand now, that will
never happen to Trump as long as the GOP is in power. Nor will it happen to any
of his friends or family, whom he will almost surely pardon before leaving
office for anything they have, might or could have done, since pardoning
“friendly” felons has been a perverted constant throughout his two
presidencies.
Speaking of which, the most glaring case
of Trump’s pardon power as president being used to the advantage (and
enrichment) of his own business interests is that of Changpeng Zhao—a.k.a.
CZ—the billionaire founder and ex-CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange known as
Binance. In late 2023, Zhao and Binance plead guilty to federal charges of
failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program. Prosecutors
noted that their lack of prevention had allowed funds to flow through them to
cybercriminals and terrorist organizations. CZ ultimately stepped down as CEO
and spent four months in a US federal prison. That doesn’t seem like much for a
guy who, wittingly or unwittingly, was channeling money to terrorists, but we
should have learned by now that, if you’re rich, you get a pass, and CZ also
ended up paying a 4.3-billion-dollar fine.
 |
| A.K.A. CZ |
So why, then, did Trump, as president,
feel it necessary to grant CZ a full and unconditional pardon in October of
last year? Well, it’s not hard to imagine that the fact that the pardon came
after a massive investment deal between Binance and the Trump family’s crypto
business had something to do with it.
And we’re not talking about chickenfeed
here. This was a two-billion-dollar investment deal. The connection to Binance
involves the Trump (crime) family trust and Trump and sons’ crypto firm, World Liberty
Finance (WLF).
So, pay attention now, because this gets
a little complicated. The Trumps launched a dollar-pegged crypto stablecoin
known as USD1. That crypto coin was created using technology and software that
Binance provided. Mid-year last year, an Abu Dhabi state-backed investment fund
called MGX agreed to execute a two billion-dollar investment in Binance. At
Binance's direction, the two billion-dollar purchase price was paid using—you
guessed it—World Liberty's USD1 stablecoin.
By routing the transaction through the
Trump family's proprietary token, the deal functioned as a massive injection of
liquidity for World Liberty Financial. Binance left the two billion dollars
deposited in the Trump family platform. This deposit generates tens of millions
of dollars in annual interest for the Trumps and their business partners.
Now, the part of this that is raising
eyebrows—and the ire of Democrats and some Republicans in Congress—is that it
was only on the completion of the two billion-dollar deal with the company that
CZ founded, a deal which dramatically augmented the Trump family’s crypto
business, that Trump signed Zhao’s pardon. The DOJ has tried to characterize
the pardon as simple justice, a correction of “overreach” by the Biden
administration that was part of what the Trump regime depicts as “a war on
crypto.”
But that argument isn’t flying. In separate instances in which Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was answering questions in Congress, he was grilled twice about the CZ pardon. Maryland Democratic Representative Glenn Ivey pressed Blanche on the pardon, pointing out that there was an obvious potential for quid pro quo involved. Blanche replied that the Constitution gave the president the power to pardon whomever he pleased. But Ivey pushed him again, asking if a pardon in exchange for direct payment wouldn’t violate bribery laws. Blanche admitted that it would, if that were the case. Ivey asked him if, as attorney general, he shouldn’t perhaps be investigating if that indeed was the case.
 |
| Blanche |
In a later session, this time in the
Senate last month, Maryland Democrat Chris Van Hollen again raked Blanche over
the coals about Zhao’s suspicious pardon, specifically mentioning the
two-billion-dollar deal that preceded it. In a heated argument, Blanche again
said that Trump could pardon whomever he wanted. When Van Hollen questioned
that statement, Blanche said unrestricted pardon power was a right granted to
the president under the authority of the Constitution. Van Hollen said that
while that might be true, the Constitution did not give the president
the right to sell pardons for personal profit.
Criticism is not confined to Democrats.
Concerns have been raised by former Republican and conservative ethics
officials with regard to Trump's shady crypto ventures and other questionable business
arrangements. Many traditional conservatives who favor limited government also
argue that public office should not be used for private enrichment. The issue,
then, is not one of left versus right but one of proper democratic-republican
government. In short, in a democratic republic, should public power serve the
public interest, or should it serve private financial interests?
Whatever your response to that question
might be, it is clear by now that the Trump regime is serving private interests
almost exclusively, starting with those of the president, his family and his
friends. And lately, Trump is making no bones about it. He has more than once
recently said openly that he simply doesn’t care about anyone’s interests but
those of the regime, going as far as to say publicly, “I don’t think about
Americans’ financial interests. I don’t think about anyone.”
There is no precedent in US history for
such vile and all-pervasive levels of corruption in the executive—including
Trump’s latest attempt to create a 1.8-billion-dollar slush fund by playing
both prosecutor and defendant in a suit he filed through the DOJ against the
IRS, which he controls. He basically sued himself for ten billion dollars and
then settled with himself out of court for 1.8 billion in tax-payer money. The
DOJ has since said that it will no longer seek to create the slush fund—which
would have ostensibly been used in part to pay compensation to the January
Sixth Insurrection ex-convicts, who Trump himself pardoned. Putting that grift
on hold is clearly in response to a federal court decision to investigate the
maneuver as a possible fraud perpetrated by the Trump regime on the courts.
But the “settlement” slush fund was
created under a written DOJ mandate, and no similar order has been drafted to
rescind it, so Congress and American taxpayers only have Todd Blanche’s
(dubious) word that the idea is dead in the water, and won’t crop up again once
the furor has died down.
 |
| From the ballroom to the reflecting pool... |
The shop-worn MAGA arguments in defense of Trump, no matter how blatant his dishonesty becomes, have grown pathetic and ludicrous. One of the most naïve is the MAGA contention that, "Trump was already rich before he took office so it’s no surprise or proof of wrong-doing that he is growing richer."
But just being wealthy (and a great deal
less wealthy) before taking office doesn’t address whether the office itself is
generating additional wealth. On the contrary, all evidence points to Trump’s
becoming much wealthier because of the presidency. Bottom line, Trump’s
holding the presidency has substantially increased the value of his family's
enterprises by the use of policy at the service of new revenue streams that would not otherwise
exist.
Another MAGA argument that requires an incredible
level of naïveté and suspension of disbelief is the one that claims, "Nothing
Trump has done has been proven illegal.” Ethics experts argue that there are
gaps in federal ethics law—something which needs to be corrected in view of the
unprecedented Trump Era—which depend on the correct behavior and ethical
integrity of those who hold the country’s most powerful post. Ethics have not
taken into account the rise of an extraordinary bad actor, a sociopath who is
accustomed to doing everything he can get away with, and to never proceeding in
accordance with the law, except where absolutely unavoidable. This is someone
who has operated with an unprecedented level of ethical wrongdoing over the
course of his entire business career, and who is a thirty-four count convicted
felon—not counting all of the wrongdoing for which he has never been caught.
There are, then, clearly loopholes that have permitted the president to get
away with incredible wrongdoing—not the least of which is the get-out-jail-free
card handed to him by the Supreme Court—but which has been deeply damaging to
democratic accountability.
The other MAGA argument is that “the
president’s assets are in a trust.” But as we have seen, a trust managed by his
family members and in which he is still obviously active is not the same as a
blind trust. Trump still knows what he owns and can benefit from increases in
value, which can, in turn, be triggered by manipulating policy, executive
actions and the law.
In all fairness, Donald Trump obviously
didn’t personally invent the concept of political corruption. And some of his
business dealings might clearly be legitimate. But Trump has, indeed, normalized
a model of presidential power in which the boundaries between public office,
family business, political influence, foreign investment, and personal
enrichment have become blurred beyond all recognition.
As the Brennan Center has concluded:
"The scale of President Trump's
self-enrichment is unprecedented."
And this is not an opinion or
interpretation, but a cold hard fact for which there is a plethora of proof.
The question is whether he will ever be held accountable, as long as he remains
in office. And unless Democrats take both houses of Congress in the November
midterms, the answer to that question remains dubious.
