Corruption on an unprecedented scale

Bill James used to repeat what Dick Stuart said about hitting 66 homers for Lincoln in A ball in 1956 — it was so far outside the expected norms that rather than moving him to the top of the organizational prospect pipeline the Pirates basically wrote it off as a fluke. I don’t by any means think that this is the only explanation for why scandals that would destroy any other presidency get no traction against trump, and some of the factors are less benign, but I do think it’s part of the explanation [gift link]:

This summer, Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, paid a visit to the coast of Sardinia, a stretch of the Mediterranean Sea crowded with super yachts.

On one of those extravagant vessels, Mr. Witkoff sat down with a member of the ultrarich ruling family of the United Arab Emirates. He was meeting Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a trim figure in dark glasses who controls $1.5 trillion of the Emiratis’ sovereign wealth.

It was the latest engagement in a consequential alliance.

Over the past few months, Mr. Witkoff and Sheikh Tahnoon had become both diplomatic allies and business partners, testing the limits of ethics rules while enriching the president, his family and his inner circle, according to an investigation by The New York Times.

At the heart of their relationship are two multibillion-dollar deals. One involved a crypto company founded by the Witkoff and the Trump families that benefited both financially. The other involved a sale of valuable computer chips that benefited the Emirates economically.

While there is no evidence that one deal was explicitly offered in return for the other, the confluence of the two agreements is itself extraordinary. Taken together, they blurred the lines between personal and government business and raised questions about whether U.S. interests were served.

In May, Mr. Witkoff’s son Zach announced the first of the deals at a conference in Dubai. One of Sheikh Tahnoon’s investment firms would deposit $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Witkoffs and Trumps.

Two weeks later, the White House agreed to allow the U.A.E. access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced and scarce computer chips, a crucial tool in the high-stakes race to dominate artificial intelligence. Many of the chips would go to G42, a sprawling technology firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon, despite national security concerns that the chips could be shared with China.

Those negotiations involved another key White House official with ties to the tech industry and to the Middle East: David Sacks. A longtime venture capitalist, Mr. Sacks serves as the administration’s A.I. and crypto czar, a newly created position that has allowed him to shape tech policy even as he continues to work in Silicon Valley.

I had lost track of the David Sacks character arc, but bagman to Middle Eastern dictatorships certainly seems apropos.

Trump won the presidency for the first time because of a widespread perception that his opponent was more corrupt. And the typical allegation/implication of corruption was something along the lines of “something happened at the State Department while Clinton was Secretary, and we’re not saying what happened was bad, or that it happened because someone donated money to Clinton’s foundation, and indeed we’re not saying that Clinton did anything at all, but anyway shadows have been raised and questions have been cast.” But it basically doesn’t matter; once it has been established that Both Sides or Corrupt the relative level of corruption doesn’t seem to matter.