The Trump Kleptocracy 2025 – More Graft, No Guardrails!
In Trump’s second term, evidence suggests corruption will be worse, not better
Story by Steve Benen. November 11, 2024
@RalphHightower: Donald Trump is ethically and morally bankrupt! He does not give a damn about government corruption that fills his pockets.
During Trump’s first season of “The Apprentice: White House 2017”, Trump tried to host a G7 conference at one of his struggles properties:
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Trump’s G7 gambit isn’t like his other emoluments problems (it’s worse)
When Trump’s DC hotel hosts foreign officials, it’s passive. When Trump tells G7 leaders they must pay his struggling business, it’s active.
Oct. 18, 2019, 10:50 AM EDT
By Steve Benen, Steve Benen
“In case it’s not clear from my freaking out, this G-7 thing is an escalation. It may look from the outside like it’s been corruption all along – because it has been – but participating in a contract award to yourself is different by orders of magnitude. This is a red line crossed.” – Walter Shaub the former director of the Office of Government Ethics
Trump, in no uncertain terms, told some of the world’s most powerful leaders that if they wished to participate in an international gathering, they would have to spend quite a bit of money at one of the venues he owns that was short on customers. The Republican had already earned a reputation for welcoming money from foreign governments, but this represented an escalation: Trump was insisting upon money from foreign governments.
President-elect “has not yet submitted a legally required ethics pledge stating that he will avoid conflicts of interest and other ethical concerns while in office.”:
- Mr. Trump’s transition team was required to submit the ethics plan by Oct. 1, according to the Presidential Transition Act. While the transition team’s leadership has privately drafted an ethics code and a conflict-of-interest statement governing its staff, those documents do not include language, required under the law, that explains how Mr. Trump himself will address conflicts of interest during his presidency.
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, noted that Trump’s transition team was supposed to sign an agreement with the General Services Administration by Sept. 1. That didn’t happen.
Why does that matter? Because, while that would’ve released millions of dollars in funding to cover transition costs, it also, as the Times’ report noted, would impose a $5,000 cap on donations to the transition team and require the public disclosure of all its donors.
“By refusing to sign that agreement, Mr. Trump effectively faces no limit on contributions and does not need to name his donors publicly,” the article added. “Money raised by the transition is not regulated by any other government agency.”
Those looking to bribe the president-elect, in other words, wouldn’t have to place orders for overpriced wristwatches.
But wait, there’s more. The New York Times also reported on Howard Lutnick, the CEO of a financial services firm called Cantor Fitzgerald, whose influential new role is raising eyebrows.
- As co-chair of the transition team, Mr. Lutnick is in charge of identifying 4,000 new hires to fill the second Trump administration, including antitrust officials, securities lawyers and national security advisers who have global expertise. But Mr. Lutnick has not stepped away from running financial firms that serve corporate clients, traders, cryptocurrency platforms and real estate ventures around the world — all of which are regulated by the same agencies whose appointees he is helping to find.
Given Lutnick’s vast business interests, the Times added, it’s not known how he might “keep from violating the transition’s own code of ethics.”
Looking ahead, there’s little reason for optimism. Indeed, The New Republic’s Greg Sargent recently highlighted a broader context, noting that if Trump moves forward with plans to purge much of the federal workforce, replacing career civil servants with loyalists, Americans might soon see a dynamic in which independent officials “muzzle themselves, both in terms of putting out good government data that contradicts the Trump propaganda line, and in terms of not letting people know, blowing the whistle, when higher-ups, MAGA loyalists types, corrupt the agency.”
kleptocracy • Merriam-Webster’s definition:
noun
klep·toc·ra·cy
klep-ˈtä-krə-sē
plural kleptocracies
Definition
: government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed
also : a particular government of this kind