Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich says Donald Trump’s blatant use of the presidency as a personal cash machine is pushing the country down a dangerous path.
Trump, 79, has never been wealthier: Since taking office in January, his fortune has surged by billions, reaching $7.3 billion as of September, according to Forbes.
Among the president’s many new revenue streams, none has been more lucrative than his various schemes peddling crypto. In May, he pushed his $TRUMP meme coin at a secretive dinner, where those who invested the most in the cryptocurrency were granted access to the president.
“This is pure corruption,” Reich, 79, told The Daily Beast Podcast’s Joanna Coles. “Let’s not beat around the bush.”
“When history is written about this administration, one of the first lines and the first paragraph is going to be about the extraordinary payoffs that were made to Donald Trump,” Reich said. “And crypto has opened the floodgates to that kind of currying of favor. It is a scandal.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
Reich, who served in the Clinton Cabinet, said the Securities and Exchange Commission should be scrutinizing Trump, who has also accepted a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar, where he maintains personal business interests.
But Reich dismissed the regulator’s chair, Paul Atkins, as a “Trump lapdog,” noting reports that Atkins himself holds millions in crypto-related assets.
When reached for comment, an SEC spokesperson told the Daily Beast, “As part of the Senate confirmation process, Chairman Atkins’ financial holdings were thoroughly reviewed by both the SEC’s Ethics Office and the Office of Government Ethics. The Chairman has fully complied with all of the divestiture requirements set forth in his Ethics Agreement, and has scrupulously complied with applicable obligations. He does not own crypto-related assets. Partisan attacks will not deter the Chairman and his colleagues from working to deliver on President Trump’s goal to secure American economic leadership.”
Reich also argued that the country is experiencing a “failure of the leadership class,” noting that “fear” has descended on business figures, media moguls, university presidents, and religious leaders.
“You’ve got a lot of people who have shown absolutely no courage—or even worse… they’re competing to kiss Trump’s derrière,” said Reich. Case in point: the tech lord dinner at the White House earlier this month, where Silicon Valley billionaires—including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and Apple CEO Tim Cook—lavished praise upon the president.
Reich told Coles he witnessed similar dinners during his own White House tenure. The difference under Trump, he said, is that business leaders fear earning this president’s wrath “because he’s such an authoritarian and he’s so unpredictable.”
Reich predicted that sycophancy and appeasement will ultimately backfire on business leaders, because Trump will “come back asking for more.”
“And the problem is, as long as he is able to divide and conquer, then everybody really becomes much, much weaker,” said Reich, who taught as a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley until his recent retirement, which was documented in the film The Last Class.
Reich warned that while the Constitution may provide “bulwarks against a rogue government,” the nation doesn’t have a foolproof “set of mechanisms to guard those constitutional guarantees.”
Meanwhile, he says, the “leadership class” of people in “positions of responsibility” has thus far failed to push back against the president’s assaults on ethical and democratic norms.
Reich, who has long sounded the alarm on America’s growing wealth inequality, said the concentration of wealth at the very top means corporate executives may lack motivation to challenge the “divider-in-chief.”
“They are people who have a lot at stake. And if I were being very cynical… I’m not sure they have a deep dedication to democracy,” Reich said. “I wish they had more backbone… This is a time where everybody in this country who has any degree of responsibility must exercise real courage. History is not going to be kind to these people if they don’t.”
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