Photo: Alex Brandon/AP Photo
If much of Donald Trump’s second term seems unprecedented, there are still ways in which he is merely parroting the destructive actions of his predecessors. He is not the first president to attempt to jail and deport legal residents merely for holding political opinions he doesn’t like. He is not the first president to flirt with suspending habeas corpus. Trump is dangerous, but other presidents have wrought havoc, too. George W. Bush launched two deeply unnecessary wars that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
What does seem genuinely new, even by the standards of America’s warped history, is the unabashed corruption. No president, really, has favor-traded like Trump. No president has ever tried to blatantly enrich himself like this while in office. No president has ever hung a for-sale sign over the White House — not like this, anyway. Trump is poised to accept a $400 million luxury jet from the Qatari royal family, which feels like something of a capstone to his latest corruption binge. He would be able to use the plane while in the White House and transfer it to his presidential foundation when he’s out of office. Trump’s inaugural committee also gobbled up $239 million from wealthy business interests who are desperate to curry favor with such a nakedly transactional president. The amount far outstrips the $107 million Trump raised for his committee back in 2017, and since there is no way to spend so much cash on dinner and events, it appears Trump might have a slush fund for the rest of his life.
And then there’s his crypto hustle. Before he returned to power, Trump launched a meme cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, which allows investors around the world to enhance his net worth. The Trump family has reaped millions on transaction fees alone; its own reserve of the digital coin is worth billions, at least, on paper. He has auctioned off access to himself through sales of the coin: Top buyers get a private dinner at one of his golf courses, and more moneyed holders can take a tour of the White House. The contest has only inflated the coin’s value, though it has, quite literally, no practical usage.
Trump is far more unrestrained than he was during his first term because the Supreme Court ruled last year that presidents have immunity from criminal prosecution for their official actions. He has no fear of impeachment as long as Republicans control the House. Given the GOP stranglehold on the Senate, there’s no guarantee a Democrat-run House in 2027 — the likely scenario — will impeach him like they did in the first term. Impeachment, as a political strategy, was a dud, with Republicans in the Senate refusing twice to convict Trump. He was able to portray himself as a political martyr and forge onward.
Shame and protest won’t work on Trump. The reality is that the corruption will continue or even expand over these next three years unless Trump pays some serious political price. He does respond to polls, and he certainly pays attention to the markets, as evidenced by his partial retreat on some of the “liberation day” tariffs that rattled investors across the globe. Trump’s sliding popularity likely played a role in Elon Musk’s retreat from the federal government, since DOGE was widely hated and Musk himself became one of the most reviled celebrities in America.
For now, however, there isn’t much of a backlash over the Qatari plane gift. Democrats are outraged, as well as anyone who cares about ethics in government, but political corruption is always one of those issues that is disliked in theory yet tolerated in practice. Voters care about their immediate well-being. They want a strong economy and relatively cheap goods. They want a housing market that is not so constrained. They’re slowly rebelling against Trump because the economic conditions are worsening, and the cuts to the federal government are impacting them directly.
Trump enriching himself, though, will not penetrate the public consciousness in the same way — not for now, at least. Part of the trouble is that even Trump’s supporters assume that he is at least slightly corrupt. If he’s a scammer, he’s their scammer, and his brazenness almost seems like a form of honesty because he doesn’t, unlike other compromised politicians, attempt to hide it. He’s openly bragging about the Qatari plane, insisting he needs to show off for other world leaders. His hustler persona will always have appeal; if he’s taking advantage of others, that means, in theory, he’s not being hustled, though it’s obvious enough gifts can sway him. In his first term, he didn’t care much for crypto at all. Once it became a moneymaking opportunity for him — and once he realized, during the campaign last year, a lot of billionaires would back him if he deregulated the industry wholesale — he pivoted. And that’s what’s most disturbing, arguably, about Trump: his utter lack of core convictions. Every bit of him is on offer to the highest bidder.
Is he setting a dark precedent for future presidents? Will tomorrow’s Republicans and even Democrats decide they too can turn the presidency into an obscene get-rich-quick scheme? Maybe. We won’t know until tomorrow comes. In the meantime, we must endure a breadth of corruption no previous generation of Americans has ever known.
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