During President Trump’s first term, the idea that special interests and governments were buying meals and booking rooms at his hotels set off legal and ethical alarms about the potential for corruption.
Mr. Trump’s second term is making those concerns look trivial.
The administration’s plan to accept a $400 million luxury jet from the Qatari royal family is only the latest example of an increasingly no-holds-barred atmosphere in Washington under Trump 2.0. Not only would the famously transactional chief executive be able to use the plane while in office, but he is also expected to transfer it to his presidential foundation once he leaves the White House.
The second Trump administration is showing striking disdain for onetime norms of propriety and for traditional legal and political guardrails around public service. It is clearly emboldened, in part because of the Supreme Court’s ruling last year that granted immunity to presidents for their official actions and because of the political reality that Mr. Trump’s hold on the Republican Party means he need not fear impeachment.
Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee raked in $239 million from wealthy business interests hoping to curry his favor or at least avoid his wrath, more than doubling the previous record, $107 million, set by his inaugural committee in 2017. There is no way to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on dinners and events, and the committee has not said what will happen to leftover funds.
Before returning to office, Mr. Trump also started a meme cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, which allows crypto investors around the world to enrich him. His family has already made millions on transaction fees, and its own reserve of the digital coin is worth billions on paper.
This month, Mr. Trump went further by auctioning off face-to-face access to himself through sales of the coin, announcing that top buyers would get a private dinner at one of his golf courses and that the largest holders would get a tour of the White House. The contest injected new interest in the coin, even though it has no intrinsic value.
The removal of such constraints extends to law enforcement.
In April, the Trump administration disbanded a Justice Department unit dedicated to investigating cryptocurrency crimes.
Earlier, Mr. Trump had also ordered the department to suspend enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it a crime for companies that operate in the United States to bribe foreign officials.
And Attorney General Pam Bondi, herself a former highly paid lobbyist for Qatar, narrowed enforcement of a law requiring lobbyists for foreign governments to register such relationships and disclose what they are paid.
The administration has not made public its legal analysis concerning the agreement with Qatar.
A person familiar with the matter said that Ms. Bondi had personally signed a Justice Department memo blessing the plan as lawful, although the person added that it had been drafted and cleared by lawyers in the department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
To be sure, aspects of the cultural shift predate Mr. Trump. In 2016, the Supreme Court unanimously made it harder to prosecute public officials for corruption by narrowing what counts as an “official act” for federal bribery laws, vacating the graft conviction of a former Virginia governor.
And Washington has always been a place where money and politics can mix in unseemly ways, with no party having a monopoly on people eager to exploit public office for private gain.
Last year, for example, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, Robert Menendez, resigned from office after being convicted of taking bribes.
And Hunter Biden gained a lucrative seat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while his father, Joseph R. Biden Jr., was the vice president. Trading on his father’s status in that way was widely seen as unbecoming even if the facts of the arrangement were overshadowed by a conspiracy theory, peddled by the right, that it also involved bribes by a Russian oligarch.
But the current moment, coming as Mr. Trump’s crypto gambit merges into his intended acquisition of a Qatari plane, is particularly remarkable for the openness with which the president, his immediate family and entities in his orbit are unabashedly leveraging his position to accrue personal benefits or to otherwise advance his personal agenda separate from governmental policymaking
Ahead of Mr. Trump’s current trip to the Middle East, his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric Trump, have in recent weeks traveled the world and announced new overseas business deals involving billions of dollars, including a luxury hotel in Dubai, a high-end residential tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and a new golf course and villa complex in Qatar.
Donald Trump Jr. and his business partners are opening a $500,000-a-person private-membership club in Washington, to be called Executive Branch. The aim is apparently to cater to deep-pocketed business moguls who want to rub elbows with Trump administration officials outside the view of reporters or Democrats.
Mr. Trump has pressured several major law firms to donate tens of millions of dollars in free legal services toward his favored causes, using the threat of official actions, like prohibitions on them and their clients from government business, as a cudgel. (Other law firms have fought his directives in court, with growing success.)
He has also found other ways to extract money from tech companies. Amazon reportedly paid $40 million for the rights to stream a future documentary about the first lady, Melania Trump.
Meta agreed to pay $25 million to the nonprofit that will build and run Mr. Trump’s future presidential museum, settling a lawsuit over Facebook’s suspension of his account after his lies about the 2020 election culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Corporate owners of news media organizations are also settling lawsuits with Mr. Trump that many media lawyers had considered winnable. ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to the Trump museum foundation.
Paramount, which needs Trump administration approval for a sale to a Hollywood studio, is considering a similar settlement with Mr. Trump in a lawsuit he brought against one of its subsidiaries, CBS News, over how “60 Minutes” edited an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris last year.
Mr. Trump’s plan for the Qatari plane appears to be to use it as Air Force One until the end of his presidency, while Boeing finishes building a new generation of presidential aircraft. The Pentagon would then transfer it to his museum foundation. (He called it his “library,” but presidential libraries are research facilities run by the National Archives. They often adjoin museums run by private foundations that are dedicated to former presidents.)
Mr. Trump compared that plan to one by Ronald Reagan’s museum in Simi Valley, Calif., where a presidential Boeing 707 is now a star attraction. But that plane was at the end of its life span — it had been used as Air Force One from 1973 to 2001 before being decommissioned. It also remains the property of the Air Force and is merely on permanent loan.
The Qatari plane will still be nearly new in 2029, raising the question of whether Mr. Trump’s museum foundation, which is run by his allies, would allow Mr. Trump to keep using the plane after he leaves office. On Monday, Mr. Trump denied that this was his intent.
Even if so, it was unclear why it would benefit the U.S. government to decommission an expensive and nearly new aircraft. Parking it at a future Trump museum would, however, contribute to glorifying Mr. Trump.
On Monday, Mr. Trump also signaled that he viewed Qatar’s offer of a plane as something of a quid pro quo, emphasizing that the United States had provided security to the Gulf country and “we will continue to.”
He added that he considered the gift “a very nice gesture” from the Qataris. Only a “stupid person,” he said, would turn down a “free very expensive airplane.”
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
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