Biggest financial corruption scandal in presidential history does not generate much news coverage
By 
Remember when Jimmy Carter had to sell his peanut farm?
President Donald Trump has purchased at least $103 million worth of corporate and municipal bonds since he took office in January, according to new filings from the Office of Government Ethics.
The documents, released late Tuesday, show that Trump began the bond-buying spree one day after he was sworn in on Jan. 20 and that it includes debt sold by companies, local governments and entities that could be directly affected by his sweeping agenda. All told, Trump made about 690 purchases from Jan. 21 through Aug. 1.
The active trading by a president of the United States is unprecedented, and it puts Trump in a direct position to benefit — or lose out — if any of the entities that own the bonds he has purchased succeed or fail. It’s also another example of Trump’s pursuing business endeavors and transactions to increase his wealth in office. . . .
Trump’s buying continued at a steady clip for months, including bonds from megabanks Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Citigroup worth at least $100,000 apiece.
Trump’s direct ownership of bonds from three of the country’s banking giants also comes as he considers an eventual replacement of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and weeks after he nominated one of his top aides, Stephen Miran, to a seat on the Fed’s board. The Fed can directly affect a bank’s profit by lowering or raising interest rates, along with myriad regulatory actions. As a Fed governor, Miran would have a direct say in many of those actions. . .
Trump purchases also included at least $500,000 of bonds apiece from chipmaker Qualcomm, mobile provider T-Mobile USA, Home Depot and UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest private health insurance company.
The filings also show that Trump bought at least $250,001 of Meta’s bonds. CEO Mark Zuckerberg attended Trump’s inauguration and donated $1 million to the event.
Likewise, Trump’s ownership in hundreds of municipal bonds puts him in line to benefit when those municipal entities pay back the debt, and it comes when the administration has been tightly controlling the distribution of funds from the federal government to local and regional governments.
Trump’s net worth is around $5.5 billion, according to the Forbes Billionaires List, up a staggering $3.2 billion since last year.
Typically, presidents divest their financial assets before or shortly after they enter office, but Trump has rejected that precedent and retained most of his empire since his first term.
A number of things are going on here:
(1) Each new Trump corruption story, even one as staggering as this one should be, has a kind of declining marginal effect on the public consciousness, because there’s so much and it’s so continuous that even people who are paying any attention — a small percentage of our so easily distracted polity of course — become desensitized to it all.
(2) A lot of Americans admire Trump not despite the fact that he’s a thief on a world historical scale, but because he is. There’s a lot of nihilism out there at this point, which is how he got elected in the first place.
(3) The high profile media in this country consist almost entirely of collaborators, enablers, prostitutes, and Stephen A. Smith screaming about something on SportsCenter.
(4) The Republican party now contains zero actual dissent to anything Trump does, no matter how shocking and depraved. The same holds for the Supreme Court. This creates an understandable sense of helplessness and exhaustion in the political opposition, such as it is, with the added feature that the formal leaders of that opposition are hopelessly out of touch establishment dinosaurs, who nothing short of dynamite can apparently remind what century they’re living in.