“The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall have gotten hold of us.” – Thomas Jefferson
By Marc C. Johnson
The dizzying blizzard of corruption surrounding the White House is unprecedented in our history. And, I’m sorry but that is not in any way a debatable fact.
In reality, the corruption is so widespread, so vast, yet so out in the open that to act as though it doesn’t exist, as Trump supporters and elected Republicans do, is also corrupting.
Corruption breeds corruption. For example.
I suspect most Americans – I’ll include myself – don’t speculate or invest in the shadowy world of cryptocurrency, and therefore probably pay little attention to what is happening with the “industry.”
But the Trump family is paying attention and reaping a fortune. Yesterday in The Guardian:
These crypto ventures are particularly ripe for exploitation because they allow Trump and his family to collect hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign investors and government officials who would usually have a difficult time channeling money to a US politician. Trump is not only enriching himself through the presidency, he’s tapped into an industry that is rife with fraud and a lack of transparency. Within months of returning to office, the Trump administration began to deregulate the industry and ordered the justice department to disband a national unit dedicated to investigating crypto-related fraud, which was set up in 2022 under Joe Biden’s administration.
I tried with today’s piece to unpack, in a way that perhaps most of us can understand, the corruption occurring in plain sight with the American presidency.
The Price of Corruption
Imagine that a newly election county commissioner in an unnamed Idaho or Oregon county decided to create a family-owned automotive repair business. And then imagine that the commissioner-elect had the need for some working capital to make his start-up company get off the ground.
And then imagine that the wealthiest man in the unnamed county needed permission from the county to construct a road to allow cattle trucks to access his several thousand-acre ranch. And then imagine that the wealthy cattle rancher decided to “invest” in the soon-to-be county commissioner’s new business.
And then imagine that shortly after the commissioner assumes office the rancher’s road is authorized and the commissioner pockets the “investment” in his start up company.
What would you call what happened? Would it be ethical? Would it be legal? Would it be OK that the commissioner appeared to use his new office for private gain and appeared to sanction a quid pro quo with the wealthy rancher?
Would you question the commissioner’s ethics and wonder just who he is working for? Would this set of facts, at a minimum, constitute an appearance of impropriety? Maybe you’d be outraged and call it something else, like corruption.
The hypothetical facts of my would-be county commissioner, his start up auto repair business and the wealthy rancher aren’t substantially different than the actual facts of a “deal” promulgated by President-elect Donald Trump late in 2024.
As the Wall Street Journal reported last week a billionaire sheikh, Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) who also serves as the country’s national security advisor and manages a multi-billion-dollar sovereign wealth fund, secretly invested a half billion dollars in the Trump family’s fledgling cryptocurrency start-up.
The sheikh’s investment was made just before Trump took office for the second time, rather like the rancher’s investment in the county commissioner’s repair shop, albeit in the Trump case on a vastly larger scale.
Then, like the wealthy rancher who got his road permitted, as The Guardian reports, “the Trump administration announced that the United Arab Emirates would be allowed to import 500,000 of Nvidia’s powerful AI chips – overriding concerns that the deal could eventually allow China access to the technology.”
Forbes magazine said the deal appears to be extraordinarily beneficial to Trump and his family. “It’s likely that Trump’s cut of the $500 million sale, before any taxes, would thus have been roughly $260 million in all. His three sons would have split another $100 million or so,” according to Forbes estimates.
Another beneficiary of the UAE investment is Steve Witkoff, a Trump pal and his special envoy to the Middle East and Ukraine. Witkoff likely pocketed $31 million from the sheikh’s investment.
Donald Sherman, president of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called the arrangement a “blatant, disgraceful conflict of interest and a possible violation of the Constitution’s Federal Emoluments Clause.”
The Emoluments Clause – Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution – specifically outlaws the president and other federal officials from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State” without the consent of Congress.
The authors of the Constitution put that somewhat strangely worded language in the document to prevent federal officials from being influenced by a foreign government, federal officials like Trump and Witkoff and foreign governments like the UAE.
The existence of the secret Trump deal with the Emirates came in the wake of other reporting that indicates Trump has enriched himself to the tune of $1.4 billion since returning to the White House. Read that again – $1.4 billion.
The money came from overseas licensing arrangements, the phony documentary featuring Melania Trump, tech and media company payments (or bribes), a $400 million jet from Qatar and hundreds of millions in cryptocurrency schemes.
Trump said recently that he was also suing the IRS, an agency he controls, for $10 billion because someone leaked his tax returns, tax returns he once promised to release but never has. This IRS shakedown is, like the UAE deal, an enormous conflict of interest with the president literally demanding the government he heads hand him a huge sum of money.
As the New York Times said in an editorial:
It is impossible to know how often Mr. Trump makes official decisions, in part or entirely, because he wants to be richer. And that is precisely the problem. A culture of corruption is pernicious because it is not just a deviation from government in the public interest; it is also the destruction of the state’s democratic legitimacy. It undermines the necessary faith that the representatives of the people are acting in the interest of the people.
It is not for nothing that many historians of the presidency consider Donald Trump to be the most corrupt president in American history, and considering his documented corruption the distant second-place competition includes presidents like Richard Nixon and Warren Harding who, for all their sins, never contemplated vast personal corruption on a Trumpian scale. It doesn’t help that Trump’s Supreme Court has declared him essentially immune from prosecution for his lawlessness.
But why do God-fearing, died in the wool conservatives ignore the blatant corruption that has engulfed the American presidency? Do Trump voters really believe it’s OK for the president of the United States to so egregiously profiteer off the presidency? Are Republican members of Congress really going to be so sanguine about corruption when a Democrat is back in the White House?
Political corruption only grows when it is tolerated or ignored. Conservatives are doing both, while Donald Trump is cashing in. The grossness of what he is doing is matched only by the hypocrisy of those who let him get away with it.
Imagine what would happen to my imaginary county commissioner in a system of rules and ethics. A county prosecutor might investigate the commissioner’s activity, or better yet under the state’s public corruption statute the attorney general would investigate. Perhaps a grand jury would bring a criminal indictment.
In short, the commissioner would likely not get away with such blatant public corruption. Why then do conservatives let the president’s corruption grow and spread and permanently despoil the highest office in the land?
Why?
