Corruption on an unimaginable scale

This story is authored by a reflexively centrist both-sides type, who wrote a bunch of stories about how Hunter Biden was engaged in a lot of sleazy attempted influence-peddling. Which he was, although it seems he never managed to actually peddle anything successfully to his father. Still, despite the author’s strong impulse to draw false equivalences, the Trump Stuff is just too much for him:

There’s so much news, and so many allegations about Trump that it becomes easy to tune it all out (both for his supporters and critics). News fatigue is real, and when we consume the news we are often fed content from organizations and individuals that share our politics. 

But, to state it plainly: After reviewing the evidence of the first 15 months of President Trump’s second term, I believe the president is profiting off the office and making foreign policy decisions based on business interests to a level we’ve never seen or even conceived of before, and apparently nothing is being done to stop it.

I can’t level that claim directly and unambiguously because we haven’t really had the basic facts adjudicated, since Republicans in Congress have opted for complete and utter fealty to Trump in every manner imaginable. There is no oversight, or accountability, or even the slightest inclination to ask about these actions in the majority party. The Trump administration has also dismantled many of the federal watchdogs responsible for prosecuting fraud, grift and corruption, so few of its actions have been probed in any meaningful way.

Instead of indictments, congressional investigations, or public hearings, the best we are left with is great reporting from journalists, the occasional leak from the administration, a right-wing writer here or there willing to say the real thing out loud, and then a whole lot of “Occam’s razor” questions like, “Which is likelier, that the person who made a massive financial bet on oil prices 20 minutes before Trump announced a ceasefire knew about it or just got extraordinarily lucky?” 

During President Joe Biden’s term, the Department of Justice could say, at least, that it had investigated the president’s son. Republicans in Congress also conducted a yearslong investigation into the Hunter Biden business ties and how they might link back to the president. Here, though, we have nothing; every story I’m about to point to has not produced even a unified statement of concern from, say, a half dozen Republican senators worried about government corruption. 

Remember, Hunter’s story was about drawing a $50,000/month salary while his dad was vice president and then allegedly trying to arrange some business ventures he might cut Joe Biden in on once he was out of office. Republicans’ yearslong investigation never turned up any hard evidence of the latter, though there was enough smoke I still think the story was plausible.

Today, we’re talking about the president’s children launching multi-billion dollar business ventures — several of them — while the president is in office, and then explicitly exchanging all manner of domestic policy victories, foreign policy concessions, and literal pardons in the construction of those deals. Trump himself has all but admitted this is happening. He told The New York Times that “nobody cared” when he tried to separate his family business from his administration during his first term, so he isn’t even trying now.

I have tracked these stories with one of my senior editors for the last year and a half. The list of things that have happened is so long and shocking when you see it all together that I’m not entirely sure how to present it. I’ve gone back and forth; maybe I should build a flow chart? What about a spreadsheet? Should this be a YouTube video, instead of a written piece? Will anyone actually read the entire thing? Can anyone actually process this level of self-dealing, corruption, and shadiness at once? 

Ultimately, I decided that the best I can do is try to write all these instances down in an engaging way that might grab your attention and wake us all up from whatever stupor we’re in. So… here goes.

[Incredibly long and detailed list of indescribably brazen multi-billion dollar corruption schemes carried out by Trump, his family, and his remora-like minions]

Summing up:

Together, this story paints a picture that I find impossible to deny: Trump is swimming in self-dealing, corruption, and quid pro quos. His defenders will note that other presidents have profited from the office before; this is true. They may further posit that rules like the Emoluments Clause are rarely enforced; this is also true. 

But they can’t or shouldn’t deny that we’ve never seen anything like this. We’ve never seen the scale, the brazenness, or the volume of the self-enrichment, corruption, and betrayal of ethics. Trump is using the presidency to make himself exorbitantly rich, even when the strategies to do so cost his supporters hundreds of millions of dollars, eliminate restitution for victims of fraud, or could impact critical foreign policy decisions like whether or not to continue a new war (that is costing taxpayers billions). Rather than drain the swamp, as he promised, the president is pardoning and freeing the swampiest denizens of Washington, D.C. (and the country), and signaling to the rest of them that they can insider trade, take money from donors, and enjoy all manner of bribes and self-dealing so long as they keep supporting and paying the man in the White House. 

He appears [ed.:!!!!]to be running the most corrupt administration in American history. [This is like saying Secretariat appeared to win the Belmont].

Worse yet, the evidence presented here is really just a look into only what we know has happened since January 20, 2025. Even with all my tracking, organizing, reporting, research and writing, I still can’t capture it all. To give just one example that broke since I began writing this: Trump has promised for months on end that his new ballroom was going to be privately funded through donations. He solicited private donations to fund it (which were also vehicles for people to win the president’s good graces) and collected that money. But then, just this week, the president announced that he’d also be asking Congress for $400 million to fund the ballroom. How does one quantify something like this? Corruption? Broken promises? Both? Something else?  . . .

Perhaps the trust in President Trump and the fun of it all has led so many of his supporters to ignore what is happening right in front of our eyes. Maybe the firehose of stories has overwhelmed his opponents to the point they don’t even know how to begin considering repercussions. But as we watch the president perpetrate a century of scandal in just 15 months, we’re left looking around in bewilderment at the response. Will the members of Congress who wrung their hands over Hunter Biden do something now? Are we ready for a future where we’ve normalized this level of grift? Is this kind of behavior no longer disqualifying?

As I sit staring at the blinking cursor in my “Trump corruption” Google doc, just waiting for the next tip to come in or the next story to ping across my feed, I can’t help but wonder — are there enough of us left who actually care?

Oh don’t worry kid, they’ll all “care” again, and soon enough. In fact I can put on my infallible Nostradamus cap and tell you the exact moment when: Noon on January 20, 2029. Depending on the breaks, as Gen. Turgidson might put it.

But snark aside, this is a useful curation of a completely unprecedented ocean of indescribable sleazy and apparently unindictable criminality. Look forward not back!