THE NEW YORK TIMES
Jamelle Bouie
Trump Holds the American People in Total Contempt
Opinion Columnist
To say that President Trump is corrupt is to somehow understate the size, scope and magnitude of his corruption.
It is as if you were to describe a modern thermonuclear device as a “bomb.” That is true enough, but it is not quite the truth. It does not capture the nature of the thing in full.
So it goes for Trump’s corruption, which is so vast as to be a new phenomenon in American politics. The president and his family have leveraged his office to the tune of nearly $4 billion. They have received hundreds of millions of dollars from a network of branded cryptocurrency assets. Investors include large corporations, foreign nationals and state actors hoping to curry favor with the administration.
One such actor, according to The Wall Street Journal, was Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, brother and national security adviser to the president of the United Arab Emirates. Tahnoon’s investment fund purchased a half-billion-dollar stake in the Trump family’s crypto fund, World Liberty Financial, just days before Trump’s second inauguration. Tahnoon has since successfully lobbied the White House for Emirates access to America’s most advanced A.I. chips, with a large portion going to Tahnoon’s A.I. company.
Or consider the president’s pardons. Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, a crypto firm, was convicted in 2023 for violating the Bank Secrecy Act. After Trump returned to office, Zhao — whose company donated software to World Liberty Financial so that it could start its own cryptocurrency — lobbied for a pardon. In October of last year, Trump granted the pardon, raising the possibility that Zhao could recover his court-ordered fines — $4.3 billion to the U.S. government as punishment for allowing criminal actors to use Binance for a broad array of illicit transactions, including child sex abuse, illegal narcotics and terrorism.
To tie the two stories together, in May 2025 a different investment company also linked to Sheikh Tahnoon, MGX, announced that it would buy a $2 billion stake in Binance using the cryptocurrency provided by World Liberty Financial. This deal could net the Trump family up to $80 million a year in interest.
Trump’s various projects — his monuments to himself — also appear to be little more than state-sanctioned opportunities for graft. The president has collected hundreds of millions of dollars from wealthy donors and large corporations for his proposed ballroom, presidential library and triumphal arch. Tens of millions of dollars marked for the library are unaccounted for, according to a report in The New Republic.
Last but far from least is the president’s $10 billion lawsuit against the I.R.S., for damages for leaking his tax returns to the public in 2019 and 2020. According to a recent news report, lawyers for the president are in talks with the I.R.S. to settle. This is tantamount to presidential looting of the Treasury, little different than if Trump had stolen the money outright.
Regardless of whether Trump suffered actual harm from the release of his tax returns, the fact of the matter is that it is a profound violation of the spirit of public service — to say nothing of the oath of office — to sue his own government for cash. And for his officials to then arrange a settlement would be unconscionable. As with nearly all of this president’s most transgressive moves, it shows total contempt for the American people.
Here, it is worth looking at the worst of presidential corruption before the advent of Trump, if only to dismiss apologists who claim that his bad conduct is not out of the ordinary. These examples come from “Presidential Misconduct: From George Washington to Today,” an edited volume based on a report commissioned by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 as it investigated the Nixon administration.
Despite the general reputation for graft that pervades the 19th century, it is hard to find anything like the personal corruption of Trump, even among Gilded Age presidents like Grover Cleveland and Rutherford B. Hayes. Most corruption was limited to the lower ranks of each administration. It was Columbus Delano, in Ulysses S. Grant’s Interior Department, who was accused of issuing fraudulent land grants. And Green B. Raum, commissioner of the Pensions Bureau under Benjamin Harrison, who accepted loans from pension lawyers in exchange for favorable treatment.
Looking through the 20th century, there is, of course, the administration of Warren G. Harding, infamous for its rampant corruption. Charles Forbes, head of the Veterans Bureau, was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the government and sentenced to two years in prison. Albert Fall, secretary of the interior, eventually went to jail for secretly leasing private oil drilling rights in the scandal known as Teapot Dome. Harding himself did not appear to be personally corrupt, although the sordidness of his associates tarnished his reputation.
Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his sons jobs in his administration, and Dwight D. Eisenhower accepted gifts for use on his Pennsylvania farm. Lyndon B. Johnson, who spent his life in politics, was heavily scrutinized over his personal fortune, amassed as an elected official. But as The New York Times noted in 1964, “The records of the Johnson family enterprises and of the F.C.C. have been thoroughly combed, not only by Republican researchers but also by reporters for such competent periodicals as The Wall Street Journal and U.S. News & World Report, without turning up any credible evidence that Mr. Johnson has ever misused his political influence to enhance his personal fortune.”
To walk through subsequent presidents is to get a similar picture. Is there gross misconduct? Yes. After all, Richard Nixon was forced to resign. Was there graft and petty corruption among other higher and lower officers in each administration? Also yes.
But do we see anything like the self-dealing and naked personal enrichment of Trump and his family? No, we do not.
Another way to put this is that corruption was a largely incidental occurrence in previous presidential administrations. As the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote in the preface to the original House Judiciary report, “Though all the presidents had allegations — many of them, the realities — of misconduct to cope with in their administrations, for the great majority of them the problem was a minor concern among many larger concerns.”
With Trump, however, the misconduct is the concern. You might even say that his corruption, like his cruelty, is the point.
Corruption of this sort may, in fact, be inherent to the authoritarian enterprise. Look abroad to those leaders, or former leaders, who rode to power on promises of national greatness and ethno-religious domination of minorities. What drives them? Not ideology or rhetoric as much as their drive to steal anything that cannot be tied down. Viktor Orban’s bromides on “Western civilization” were little more than a cover for a glorified looting spree whose beneficiaries, it should be said, included influential American conservatives. Vladimir Putin has spent decades siphoning Russia’s wealth into his pockets. And populists in Latin America and elsewhere in Europe have been caught, again and again, with their hands in the national cookie jar.
Trump is a type, one of many figures around the world whose nationalist, patrimonial political movement is little more than a cover. As his presidency begins to crumble around him, we should expect him to focus all the more intently on enriching the Trump family at the expense of the American people.
We should heed the wisdom of the founding generation. To them, corruption was poison, a cancer that ate at the foundations of self-government. A state so stricken was bound to succumb to political death.
With Congress in the hands of a prostrate Republican majority, there is little the opposition can do at this moment to strike back at the president’s corruption. But this may not be true for much longer, and when the time comes, Democrats should work to take back his ill-gotten gains and hold his enablers and co-conspirators responsible for their actions.
The other option, to look forward, let bygones be bygones and ignore the transgressions of the recent past, is a one-way road to ruin.
No comments:
Post a Comment