By now, the story has made the rounds. Back in June, Oklahoma’s superintendent for public instruction, Ryan Walters, ordered every classroom in the state to teach the Bible between fifth grade and high school. Three months later, when he released the guidelines for companies bidding to supply the Bibles, they included some unusually specific terms.
The Bibles had to contain not just the King James Version of the Old and New Testaments, but founding documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as well as the Pledge of Allegiance. And they had to be bound in leather, or some reasonable facsimile.
The only Bibles that fit these parameters happen to be endorsed by Donald Trump or his son. The $59.99 “God Bless the USA” Bibles (which are, incidentally, printed in China) cost 20 times more than a mass market paperback version of the King James Bible. It’s not clear how much Mr. Trump earns per sale — The Times has reported that he receives royalties for use of his name — but his cut is likely significant. Mr. Walters’s spokesman has confirmed that the $3 million in the state budget earmarked for Bibles came directly from “payroll savings”; that could pay salaries for 75 entry-level teachers in Oklahoma.
Maybe a rogue ideologue handing a chunk of Oklahoma’s education budget to the former president strikes you as egregious. It should also strike you as familiar. Mr. Trump’s entire term in office was marked by profit-taking schemes and uses of public funds for personal benefit. If we know anything about what life would be like if he wins again, we know this bottomless grifting would continue.
Corruption is not unique to any particular political party. In the last 13 months, Democrats such as former Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas and New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, have all been indicted (and in Mr. Menendez’s case convicted) of accepting bribes in exchange for official acts. But in Mr. Trump’s first term, the ethical lapses, while often not technically illegal, tended toward pervasive, unending, low-level self enrichment. That is, in fact, an unheralded explanation for his participation in politics. Mr. Trump ran his business by stiffing contractors, ripping off customers and exploiting bankruptcy to shed debts. He ran his government with the same mentality, as did many of those around him.
That hasn’t been a prominent topic of this presidential campaign. We can tick off the broader scandals: two impeachments, threats to democracy and national security and ugly or shocking policies such as family separation. Anti-Trump figures are invested in placing themselves at the center of a struggle against the potential collapse of our governing institutions. And they have cause for alarm.
But we know what it looks like to have Mr. Trump in charge. The word that comes to mind is kleptocracy. His last term encompassed everything from direct self-dealing to wasteful spending that makes the lives of those in charge a bit more comfortable. Rolling kleptocracy desensitizes people to the idea that rules exist to stop such plunder. That erodes institutions as much as a frontal assault, with the destruction carried out in the lost confidence of the people. This above all is Mr. Trump’s core competency, and it would be the core feature of a second term.
To understand how bad it could get in a second Trump term, we must look back at the first. Scott Pruitt, Mr. Trump’s first director of the Environmental Protection Agency, used a security detail for personal travel. His policy chief didn’t work for most of three months while still taking a salary. He had E.P.A. staff members pick up his dry cleaning and take him to find a specific type of moisturizer. He sent them to try to get an old mattress from a Trump hotel. The comical accumulation of those scandals eventually led Mr. Pruitt to resign.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross owned stock in Navigator, a major natural-gas shipping company, while he was personally negotiating a deal for America to export natural gas to China. When The Times got wind of the story and asked Mr. Ross for comment, he made trades in Navigator that bet on the stock to fall. Shares plummeted when The Times published, and Mr. Ross made money. (Mr. Ross has denied any connection between the Times’s questions and his decision to short the stock.)
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao appeared to mix Mr. Pruitt’s petty corruption with Mr. Ross’s macro corruption. She allegedly used agency staff members to run her personal errands, and to benefit her father’s multinational shipping company, according to an agency inspector general report.
No less than six Trump cabinet officials billed taxpayers millions of dollars for travel on private jets and government-owned planes to places such as Las Vegas, the Caribbean and the Wimbledon tennis tournament. Steven Mnuchin, the secretary of the Treasury, had to be talked out of using a government jet for his honeymoon. The overseer of Medicare and Medicaid services, Seema Verma, used $2 million from her budget on a personal public relations campaign; Mr. Pruitt spent taxpayer dollars on a $43,000 soundproof office phone booth; Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke resigned amid a number of scandals, including a department plan to spend $139,000 upgrading his office doors.
If I continued with every cabinet and sub-cabinet official, you would be reading this for a week. And of course, all of these Trump administration officials were simply modeling the behavior of the family at the top.
Like a bloodhound, Mr. Trump quickly sniffed out how to make a buck running the government. In his first week in office, his Mar-a-Lago club doubled its initiation fees. He put his businesses in a trust run by his sons, but added a stipulation that he could withdraw cash at any time without disclosure. And by spending personal time at his various resort properties, his Secret Service detail had to pay the Trump Organization millions for lodging, meals and other expenses.
Corporate executives and foreign dignitaries started routinely staying at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, or holding annual conferences at Trump resorts, stuffing money in the president’s pockets while seeking favorable treatment. Even laws Mr. Trump signed were opportunities for raiding government coffers. The rules around “opportunity zones,” one of the signature elements of the Trump tax breaks, were put in place to benefit a host of donors and hangers-on, including the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
While Mr. Kushner eventually sold the stake in one company that received the tax breaks, his private equity firm received at least $112 million in fees from the government of Saudi Arabia and other foreign investors, an arrangement Senate Democrats see as a way for foreign governments to further fatten the wallets of the Trump family in a bid for influence.
Mr. Trump is managing his presidential campaign like an infomercial pitchman. Besides the Bibles, he’s selling limited-edition gold sneakers, $100,000 gold watches, digital trading cards of him in a superhero outfit and (along with his sons) a crypto token. Trump donors, whether Big Money types seeking political favors or avid supporters scrounging up money from couch cushions, directly and perhaps unwittingly funded $100 million in his legal bills as of March, according to The Times.
The election will decide whether, once again, the treasury is another target. Elon Musk, who has pledged many millions of dollars to getting Mr. Trump elected, holds lucrative contracts with the federal government, whose contractors are supposed to be banned from making expenditures related to federal elections. Mr. Trump has said he would tap Mr. Musk to run a government efficiency commission, which could decide the fate of budgets of the agencies that regulate his businesses.
Among those in the rumor mill of cabinet appointments are loyalists such as Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas, who narrowly survived impeachment removal in his home state for varying degrees of public corruption, including having a donor pay for renovations to his home in exchange for legal assistance. And Oklahoma’s Ryan Walters, who billed his state for a public relations firm to get him in national media, certainly seems to be angling for a cabinet slot.
Maybe free plane trips and crypto rug pulls seem too small to threaten democracy. But kleptocracies are often associated with military juntas, dictatorships and oligarchies in places such as Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) under Gen. Mobutu Sese Seko or Russia in the early rule of Vladimir Putin. The license to steal stems from a lack of accountability between government and its people. As it extends out from the head of state to friends and associates, it widens the gap between those able to enrich themselves and those unable. Kleptomania is tied to extreme inequality and plutocracy, as well as a loss of faith in what purpose government even serves, other than to funnel cash upward. It’s enough of a danger on its own.
It’s true that Project 2025 is meticulously focused on eliminating obstacles to far-right policy, and Mr. Trump could deport immigrants in mass quantities. But the narrative that a second Trump term would be more confident and devious than the first neglects what Mr. Trump and friends were good at last time around. They manipulated government like a private-equity firm manipulates a new acquisition, squeezing it for personal benefit. If we expect another Trump term to be better at authoritarianism, it will likely also be better at stealing. The election is a referendum on whether Americans find such con artistry acceptable.
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