Trump's epic corruption

Outdoing even his own first term

Thanks for reading America Explained. If you haven’t already, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support independent journalism.

During Donald Trump’s first administration, I think it was pretty clear that he was the most corrupt president in U.S. history. He maintained ownership of his sprawling business empire of hotels and golf courses while in office. Whenever he was visiting one of his properties - which he did for about one out of every three days of his presidency - he charged the Secret Service and other federal employees money to stay there, directing millions of dollars of taxpayer money into his own bank account.

He also profited as foreign governments and anyone else trying to curry favor with him funnelled money into his properties. If you were a lobbyist or a spy and you were meeting with Trump in D.C., they you stayed in the Trump International Hotel. Again, this put money straight into the president’s bank account. It was all blatant and out in the open - so much so that after four years, it barely attracted any comment any more.

There have been previous administrations tainted by widespread corruption, but they rarely saw the president himself amassing wealth. Watergate wasn’t really about money. Before Watergate, the biggest scandal in American history was Teapot Dome. But in that case, it was the Interior Secretary who gave away oil leases on federal land, not President Warren G. Harding. There was also widespread corruption in Ulysses S. Grant’s administration, but he personally left office penniless.

So, Trump was already reigning as king of corruption after his first term. And then he took office again.

This time around, Trump’s corrupt acts have been on a different scale. The influence-peddling at the hotels and the golf courses was deeply offensive, but it consisted of thousands of small acts spread over four years. That’s probably one reason why it didn’t bubble too close to the surface. But Trump is clearly done messing around. He’s now going in for corruption that’s just too big to ignore.

Witness his announcement on the eve of the first overseas trip of this term that he will accept a $400m Boeing 747 from Qatar. The plane will serve as Air Force One during Trump’s presidency, and then revert to his ownership once it is over. He says he’ll then give it to his presidential foundation, the organization which promotes a president’s legacy and typically builds a museum about him. But Trump lies all the time, so there is no particular reason to believe this.

I feel confident in saying that accepting a $400m gift from a foreign government is the kind of thing that no previous president would even have contemplated doing. If he had, most of the nation’s media and political class would have had a collective aneurysm. It’s particularly amusing to contemplate the reaction if Barack Obama had said he would accept a $400m gift from the government of a Muslim nation. I honestly think he would have been impeached - and convicted.

Somewhat surprisingly - and, I think, encouragingly - Trump is actually catching flak from the right for the plane decision. Noted MAGA fanatic Laura Loomer is against it. Even conservative outlets like The Wall Street Journal are writing editorials opposing it:

Media reports say White House lawyers think accepting the jet wouldn’t constitute bribery, since the offer isn’t contingent on any official action by Mr. Trump. Maybe so, but “sometimes the scandal is not what is illegal but what is legal,” as our friends at the New York Sun put it.

Qatar might feel that it’s owed at least Mr. Trump’s goodwill. If the emir calls the White House to share his views on Iran, Israel and the region, won’t he expect the President to pick up the phone? Should voters even have to wonder? It demeans the Presidency to have a foreign government handing out such a valuable gift to America’s elected leader.

It doesn’t just demean the presidency - it’s also pretty blatantly unconstitutional. The founders were extremely concerned about foreign influence-peddling, and they explicitly wrote into the constitution that no president “shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State”.

Good luck waiting for this aspect of the constitution to be enforced. There were various court cases against Trump on these grounds during his first term, but few of them went anywhere. This time around, the decision to have the 747 technically be under the control of the Department of Defense and only transfer to Trump when he leaves office is probably enough to avoid a successful court challenge. As always, so much of the constitution depends on unwritten norms, not enforceable requirements.

The likelihood of justice is even smaller with regard to Trump’s other major second-term corruption scandal, one that is arguably even worse - his crypto scam.

Earlier this year, Trump launched a cryptocurrency called $TRUMP. Cryptocurrencies are assets you can invest in which have no intrinsic value or use and are entirely unregulated. This makes all kinds of scams possible.

For instance, if you seek to inflate the price of a company’s shares by issuing misleading positive news about the company’s performance and then sell the shares to reap a huge profit, that is highly illegal because the stock market is regulated. But the lack of regulation means you can do basically anything you want to gin up crypto prices, make a quick buck, and leave everyone else high and dry - and that is exactly what Trump is doing.

The latest scheme is to promise a dinner at the White House and other perks to the top owners of $TRUMP coins, something that has seen large amounts of money pile into them. Trump’s family makes money every time someone trades one of the coins, meaning that each transaction is money directly into their wallet - over $300m so far, to be precise.

Trump’s family and allies also own large amounts of the coins and are amassing huge paper increases in net worth. At the same time, holders of the coins are quite literally buying access to the president - and they could be foreign spies or lobbyists or basically anyone else.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people who have made small investments in the coins - mostly Trump supporters who don’t realize they are being duped - have already lost their money. As Trump gets ready to step onto his new luxury jet courtesy of Qatar, there’s no sign that he cares.

Thanks for reading America Explained. If you haven’t already, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support independent journalism.