Can Donald Trump help it if so many people feel like giving him gifts, expecting nothing in return?

As any informed person knows, Donald Trump’s already unprecedented corruption is reaching new levels of completely straightforward graft:

Donald Trump launched a memecoin a few days before the inauguration of his second presidential term. Its sole purpose, to Trump, is unambiguous and unmistakable: It is a vehicle for him to become richer. Likewise, its only conceivable value to literally any other person or entity on the face of the earth is also quite clear: It is a way to buy favor from the president of the United States. Its very existence is an announcement: Here is how you pay President Donald Trump for stuff.

In a similar vein: The royal family of Qatar intends to give Donald Trump a luxury airliner, a Boeing 747-8 reportedly worth something in the neighborhood of $400 million. Strictly speaking the Qataris are [world’s most exaggerated air-quotes] donating [/air-quotes] this plane to the Defense Department to serve as Air Force One, and then at the end of Trump’s term the DoD will [air-quotes so theatrical that I audibly blow out all the ligaments in both of my arms] donate [/air-quotes] the plane to Trump’s presidential library. The only and not even partially hidden reason for the state of Qatar to do this is as a way of purchasing favor from the president of the United States, a guy whose entire personality is a cheaply gilded “For Sale” sign.

The national political desk of the New York Times, however, wishes to inform you that this is simply by definition not corruption:

Is this stuff corruption? You might consider that a silly question, since corruption is all it can be and since none of the participants in it seem all that interested in pretending it is anything else. Everybody everywhere understands this. Nobody anywhere has to pretend not to understand it, except perhaps for the people reporting on it for the New York Times.

not to add to the dogpile, but the reality here is often the opposite. tacit corruption can easily be worse because it's more deniable and a lot more lucrative

[image or embed]— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper.com) May 12, 2025 at 7:20 AM

Sorry, but Anthony Kennedy being the median vote on the Supreme Court for a few years did not in fact give him the power to arbitrarily redefine the term “corruption” in all contexts for all eternity. And the fact that the federal courts have apparently nullified the emoluments clause doesn’t mean we have to accept this as the only possible interpretation, let alone let this preempt any other colloquial definition of the term.

I must say I don’t recall any of this hyper-technical apologetic hairsplitting when the Times was, say, going through its endless array of Clinton Foundation nothingburgers.