\n<\/p>\n
The White House has seen its share of shady deals. Ulysses S. Grant\u2019s brother-in-law used his family ties to engineer an insider-trading scheme that tanked the gold market. Warren Harding\u2019s secretary of the interior secretly leased land to oil barons, who paid a fortune for his troubles. To bankroll Richard Nixon\u2019s reelection, corporate executives sneaked suitcases full of cash into the capital.<\/p>\n
But Americans have never witnessed anything like the corruption that President Donald Trump and his inner circle have perpetrated in recent months. Its brazenness, volume, and variety defy historical comparison, even in a country with a centuries-long history of graft\u2014including, notably, Trump\u2019s first four years in office. Indeed, his second term makes the financial scandals of his first\u2014foreign regimes staying at Trump\u2019s hotel in Washington, D.C.; the (aborted) plan to host the G7 at Trump\u2019s hotel in Florida\u2014seem quaint.<\/p>\n
Trump 2.0 is just getting started, yet it already represents the high-water mark of American kleptocracy. There are good reasons to think it will get much worse.<\/p>\n
Virtually every week, the Trump family seems to find a new way to profit from the presidency. The Trump Organization has brokered a growing catalog of real-estate projects with autocratic regimes, including a Trump tower in Saudi Arabia, a Trump hotel in Oman, and a Trump golf club in Vietnam. \u201cWe\u2019re the hottest brand in the world right now,\u201d Eric Trump recently proclaimed. In May, Qatar gave the White House a $400 million jet\u2014a gift that looked a lot like a bribe but that Trump had no qualms accepting.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s just the foreign front. Domestically, Trump has used flimsy complaints to go after media organizations, resulting in settlements that resemble shakedowns. Last year, he accused 60 Minutes of deceptively editing an interview with his Democratic presidential opponent, Kamala Harris. Legal experts saw the claim as weak. Rather than fighting it in court, however, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million, which will subsidize Trump\u2019s future presidential library and cover his legal fees. Following a similarly dubious lawsuit, ABC sent $15 million to Trump\u2019s library fund and issued a \u201cstatement of regret.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beyond the court, the president has peddled Trump perfumes, Trump sneakers, and Trump phones, shamelessly using the prestige of the presidency to boost his family\u2019s income. And then there\u2019s crypto: the $TRUMP meme coin, the pay-to-play dinners with investors, the paused prosecution of a crypto kingpin who had purchased $30 million in Trump-backed tokens.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe law is totally on my side,\u201d Trump said after his election in 2016, when he was asked about mixing his financial affairs with his new office. \u201cThe president can\u2019t have a conflict of interest.\u201d That statement is now alarmingly close to the truth. Thanks to last year\u2019s Supreme Court ruling, Trump has presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for any \u201cofficial act.\u201d He has appointed an attorney general, Pam Bondi, who appears willing to do his bidding no matter the cost to the Department of Justice. He has gutted independent bodies that went after white-collar criminal networks, task forces that investigated kleptocracy, public prosecutors that chased public corruption, and regulation that targeted transnational money laundering.<\/p>\n
The list goes on. Trump\u2019s Treasury Department effectively terminated America\u2019s new shell-company registry. His DOJ dissolved task forces that seized stolen assets. The administration froze the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the bedrock of America\u2019s antibribery regime. In sum, Trump has dismantled a network of agencies, laws, and norms that thwarted all kinds of kleptocracy, including the kind that enriches a sitting president.<\/p>\n
Foreign agents are watching as America\u2019s anti-corruption regime crumbles. They see an extraordinary window of opportunity, and they know they\u2019ll have to act quickly to take full advantage. Succoring Trump and his family has already proved one of the fastest ways to guarantee favorable policy. Are U.S. sanctions hurting your economy? Consider building a Trump resort. Want to stay in America\u2019s good graces? Invest in Trump-backed crypto.<\/p>\n
All of this grafting is likely to accelerate. Consider the Qatari jet. The gift prompted plenty of hand-wringing in the United States, but also in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which saw their regional foe gain leverage over them by charming Trump. Don\u2019t think of the jet as the culmination of the president\u2019s greed; think of it as the new bar for bids to come. Any Middle Eastern dictator who wants to surpass Qatar in America\u2019s estimation now knows his price.<\/p>\n
In India, oligarchs and other government allies are opening Trump properties in rapid succession, while Pakistan recently announced a new national crypto reserve, signing a \u201cletter of intent\u201d to work with a Trump-backed group. Serbia and Albania have both recently vied for Trump\u2019s affections, each signing deals for luxury properties with his family. The incentive to out-bribe one\u2019s competition could soon take hold in geopolitical rivalries around the world.<\/p>\n
Perhaps most worrisome is the tacit permission that Trump granted foreign powers to directly bankroll U.S. politicians. This was the precedent he set when he strong-armed prosecutors into dropping the case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was accused of soliciting campaign funds from Turkey. \u201cYou win the race by raising money,\u201d Adams said. \u201cEverything else is fluff.\u201d One could imagine the president saying the same.<\/p>\n
Foreign regimes are beginning to see just how far their money can go in Trump\u2019s America. The highest bidder has never had so much to gain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The White House has seen its share of shady deals. Ulysses S. Grant\u2019s brother-in-law used his family ties to engineer an insider-trading scheme that tanked the gold market. Warren Harding\u2019s secretary of the interior secretly leased land to oil barons, who paid a fortune for his troubles. To bankroll Richard Nixon\u2019s reelection, corporate executives sneaked<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10537,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[574,3539,71],"class_list":{"0":"post-10536","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-corruption","10":"tag-trumps"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}