During his first presidency, Donald Trump collected millions of dollars of other people’s money. He charged the taxpayer nearly $2 million to protect him during the hundreds of times he visited his own properties. He accepted millions of dollars of campaign-related funds from Republican candidates who sought his favor. His businesses collected at least $13 million from foreign governments over his first term in office.
When it was all over, Trump apparently decided he had been thinking too small. In his first term, he made improper millions. In his second term, he is reaching for billions: a $2 billion investment by a United Arab Emirates state-owned enterprise in the Binance crypto exchange using the Trump family’s stablecoin asset. An unknown number of billions placed by Qatar in a Trump-family real-estate development in that emirate, topped by the gift of a 747 luxury jet for the president’s personal use in office and afterward. Government-approved support for a Trump golf course in Vietnam while its leaders were negotiating with the United States for relief from Trump tariffs. Last week, Trump hosted more than 200 purchasers of his meme coin, many of them apparently foreign nationals, for a private dinner, with no disclosure of the names of those who had paid into his pocket for access to the president’s time and favor.
The record of Trump real-estate and business projects is one of almost unbroken failure; from 1991 to 2009, his companies filed for bankruptcy six times. Few if any legitimate investors entrusted their money to Trump’s businesses when he was out of office. But since his return to the White House, Trump has been inundated with cash from Middle Eastern governments. Obscure Chinese firms are suddenly buying millions of dollars’ worth of Trump meme coins. So are American companies hard-hit by the Trump tariffs and desperately seeking access and influence. After Trump invited major holders of his crypto funds to dinner, Wired quoted a crypto analyst about the coin’s value proposition: “Before, you were speculating on a TRUMP coin with no utility. Now you’re speculating on future access to Trump. That has to be worth a bit more money.”
Nothing like this has been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency. Throw away the history books; discard feeble comparisons to scandals of the past. There is no analogy with any previous action by any past president. The brazenness of the self-enrichment resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a postcolonial African dictatorship.
One of Trump’s tricks, throughout his career in office or competing for it, has been to depict the U.S. political system as corrupt from top to bottom. Here’s how the method works.
In August 2015, Fox News hosted the first of the 2016 Republican-primary debates. Trump then led the polls, but he was still generally dismissed as a novelty candidate, certain to fade as summer turned to autumn and the contest became more serious. After all, Trump had briefly led the polls of prospective candidates in 2011 too, but never entered the race. Trump was asked a question that must have looked deadly when it was drafted by the Fox hosts:
Mr. Trump, it’s not just your past support for single-payer health care. You’ve also supported a host of other liberal policies; you’ve also donated to several Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton included, Nancy Pelosi. You explained away those donations, saying you did that to get business-related favors. And you said recently, quote, “When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.”
The trap set for Trump in this seemingly damning choice is either to justify his support for liberal causes or to condemn himself as a crook who paid bribes for corrupt favors. Trump answered:
I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.
The moderator tried to close the trap: “So what did you get from Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi?”
Trump nimbly pivoted and thrust the likely Democratic Party nominee into the trap instead: “I’ll tell you what. With Hillary Clinton, I said, ‘Be at my wedding,’ and she came to my wedding. You know why? She had no choice! Because I gave.”
Suddenly, a potentially damning image—of Trump grinning for the cameras alongside Bill and Hillary Clinton—was converted from a vulnerability into a weapon. Trump did not care if listeners thought ill of him, so long as they thought equally badly of everyone else. If all were crooked, then the most shameless crook might present himself instead as a brave truth-teller.
“Everybody does it” became Trump’s all-purpose excuse. The excuse worked, to the extent it did, because of widespread disinformation about the “everybody,” the “does,” and the “it.” If Trump and his supporters can defame others, they can dull voters’ awareness of the astounding and horrible uniqueness of Trump’s corruption.
Not all past presidents were great men. Many were highly flawed.
But one flaw is strikingly rare in the men who reached the presidency, even the worst of them. Very few, if any, of our past presidents used the office to gain improper wealth. Their conduct has given rise to plenty of scandals, but almost none of those scandals originated in self-enrichment of the kind that Trump has practiced since 2016.
Ask any American about the worst case of corruption in the nation’s history pre-Trump, and they will likely recall the Watergate scandal that toppled President Richard Nixon in 1974. Two years earlier, burglars hired by Nixon’s reelection committee had broken into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. They were caught. To prevent them from admitting their connection to Nixon, the president tried to mobilize government agencies to suppress the investigation and abused campaign funds to buy the burglars’ silence. Officials obstructed justice and committed perjury to protect the president. In the end, some 48 people were convicted of Watergate-related crimes.
But Watergate was a scandal produced by the struggle for political power. Nixon hoped that the Democratic headquarters might yield material that would help his reelection, and his associates organized the funds to pay the operatives who got caught. Power was the prize; money was only a means.
Watergate was about “corruption” in the sense of abuse of power, not in the sense of peculation and self-dealing. Nixon certainly cared about money, and he was willing to cut corners to keep it. The investigation into Watergate found that he had underpaid his income tax by $432,000 during his presidency. But the money was not gained by bribery or extortion, and the sums were relatively trivial. When Nixon left office, he was in desperate financial straits. He sold his vacation property in Florida and submitted to more than 28 hours of television interviews with the British journalist David Frost to earn a $600,000 fee and a percentage of any profits. He recouped his fortune largely from the nine books he wrote after leaving the presidency, not from ill-gotten gains stashed away during his time in office.
Money scandals, there have been. But the presidents at the center of them have almost always been motivated by misplaced loyalty to others, rather than their personal greed. Warren Harding was no moral exemplar: Sworn to enforce the nation’s laws on alcohol prohibition, he served liquor in the White House at the regular poker games he hosted. He was also a serial adulterer; one of his lovers claimed that he’d fathered a daughter with her. But even Harding’s harshest critics—such as Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice, who despised him—regarded him as lax and stupid, rather than corrupt. “Harding,” she wrote, “was not a bad man. He was just a slob.” Though not a crook himself, he was surrounded by crooks. His secretary of the interior was convicted of accepting bribes to lease government oil reserves to private interests, the scandal that became known as “Teapot Dome” after a landmark feature of the main oil field in question. Harding’s attorney general would later be twice indicted in another scandal, though the jury could not agree on a verdict at either trial, and was suspected of other wrongdoing too, including selling pardons to wealthy men.
Herbert Hoover, who served in Harding’s Cabinet, delivered the final verdict:
Harding had a dim realization that he had been betrayed by a few of the men whom he had trusted, by men whom he believed were his devoted friends. It was later proved in the courts of the land that these men had betrayed not alone the friendship and trust of their staunch and loyal friend but they had betrayed their country. That was the tragedy of the life of Warren Harding.
Ulysses S. Grant likewise indulged and protected crooks, including a close aide and friend, Orville Babcock. Babcock served as the equivalent of a chief of staff in the White House, and was accused of participating in the “Whiskey Ring,” as a criminal conspiracy to underreport liquor sales became known. Grant attested to Babcock’s innocence and helped him escape punishment. Yet Grant did not profit from the whiskey scheme, or from any of the other “rings” that tainted his presidency.
Not unlike Harding, Grant could be naively trusting of former comrades in arms. He believed that men who had been brave in war must also be honest in peace—and that anyone who claimed otherwise was a slanderer.
Again, neither Grant, nor Harding, nor Nixon operated a personal business from the White House. Other presidents and their associates did on occasion accept gifts unwisely. President Dwight Eisenhower lost his chief of staff because the man had accepted an expensive coat and a valuable rug from a favor-seeker. But the gratuities were small and personal, and seldom involved cash. No predecessor of Trump’s ever violated the explicit constitutional prohibition on accepting gifts of considerable value from a foreign power.
Many presidents have tolerated or endured profit-seeking by relatives. Plenty of political families have a Hunter Biden. Jimmy Carter ranks among the most financially scrupulous men ever to have held the presidency, yet he had his embarrassing brother, Billy, who was investigated by Congress for influence-peddling on behalf of the terrorist Libyan regime of Muammar Qaddafi (he was a registered lobbyist for Libya).
By one hostile tally, Grant bestowed government perks on 42 of his relatives, a degree of nepotism that helped make corruption an important issue in the election of 1872. The Republican senator and legendary civil-rights champion Charles Sumner was disgusted with Grant’s patronage and instead endorsed his opponent, Horace Greeley. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s son James also traded on his father’s position. In 1938, The Saturday Evening Post published a detailed exposé of James’s insider dealing.
The Trump family’s exploitation of the presidency, however, has no precedent in the Grants or the Roosevelts or any of the presidential families that followed.
One difference is scale. James Roosevelt made a lot of money by Depression standards, but he did not score dynastic wealth. The Grant relations got government jobs—very cozy, but again, not dynastic wealth. Billy Carter was paid $220,000, which, even adjusting for half a century of inflation, seems hardly worth the brouhaha. The Trumps, by contrast, are using the second-term presidency to accumulate billions of dollars.
The second difference is the degree of separation from the president himself. Hunter Biden traded on his father’s name, but the Republican-chaired committee that went looking into the matter found no link either to President Biden’s decisions or to his personal bank account. But President Trump remains the beneficial owner of the Trump enterprises nominally run by his sons. The ill-gotten gains flow directly to him.
The third difference is the utter lack of conscience in this presidential family. When George H. W. Bush ran for president in 1988, he wrote a letter to his sons warning, “You’ll find you’ve got a lot of new friends.” Those friends, the elder Bush predicted, would ask for favors. “My plea is this: please do not contact any federal agency or department on anything.” Franklin D. Roosevelt was not so strict. Yet when James’s business affairs blew up into a scandal, James published his income-tax returns, submitted to press interviews, and resigned from his role as a White House adviser. He moved to California, volunteered for active duty in the Marine Corps in 1940, and was decorated with the Navy Cross for valor in battle. As for Harding, he came to feel ashamed of his own presidency. According to Nicholas Murray Butler, the then-president of Columbia University and an important figure in Republican politics in the early 20th century, Harding confessed to him: “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.” This is even more true of Trump, but Trump would never have the self-knowledge or grace to admit it.
The Framers of the U.S. Constitution were haunted by many fears, but nothing terrified them more than corrupt foreign interference in the affairs of the young republic. They had read in their Thucydides and their Polybius how foreign bribery undermined the Greek city-states. The American Founders were keenly aware of their proximity to the empires of Britain, France, and Spain, each richer and stronger than the nascent United States. The emoluments clause of the Constitution, which forbade officeholders from receiving any kind of foreign gift without permission from Congress, was their safeguard to answer that terror of interference.
Today, the United States is rich and powerful. Rather than wait for a foreign government to offer emoluments, a corrupt U.S. president can extract them. The emoluments clause depends on congressional enforcement, backed by the ultimate sanction of impeachment and removal. And if Congress does not enforce it? Then public opinion remains the only sanction. Cynics deny that public opinion matters, but Trump is not one of them. His belief in how much popular disgust for corruption matters is precisely why he and his supporters worked so hard to promote dark legends about rivals: the Bushes, the Clintons, the Bidens. Those stories were not based on nothing, but the closer anyone looked, the less there was to see.
The Trump story, by contrast, is almost too big to see, too upsetting to confront. If we faced it, we’d have to do something—something proportional to the scandal of the most flagrant self-enrichment by a politician that this country, or any other, has seen in modern times.
The post Trump’s Golden Age of Corruption appeared first on The Atlantic.
