When Hillary Clinton was first lady, a furore erupted over reports that she had once made $100,000 from a $1,000 investment in cattle futures. Even though it had happened a dozen years before her husband became president, it became a scandal that lasted for weeks and forced the White House to initiate a review.
Thirty-one years later, after dinner at US president Donald Trump‘s Mar-a-Lago estate, Jeff Bezos agreed to finance a promotional film about first lady Melania Trump that will reportedly put $28 million directly in her pocket – 280 times the Clinton lucre, and in this case from a person with a vested interest in policies set by her husband’s government. Scandal? Furore? Washington moved on while barely taking notice.
The Trumps are hardly the first presidential family to profit from their time in power, but they have done more to monetise the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House. The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism has been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million (€280 million) in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join, all in the past few months alone.
Just last week, Qatar handed over a luxury jet meant for Trump’s use not just in his official capacity, but also for his presidential library after he leaves office. Experts have valued the plane, formally donated to the Air Force, at $200 million – more than the worth of all foreign gifts bestowed on all previous US presidents combined.
Trump last week hosted an exclusive dinner at his Virginia club for 220 investors in the $TRUMP cryptocurrency he started days before taking office in January. Access was openly sold based on how much money they chipped in – not to a campaign account, but to a business that benefits Trump personally.
By conventional Washington standards, according to students of official graft, the still-young Trump administration is a candidate for the most brazen use of government office in American history, perhaps eclipsing even Teapot Dome, Watergate and other famous scandals.
“I’ve been watching and writing about corruption for 50 years, and my head is still spinning,” said Michael Johnston, a professor emeritus at Colgate University and author of multiple books on corruption in the United States.
Yet a mark of how much Trump has transformed Washington since his return to power is the normalisation of money-making schemes that once would have generated endless political blowback, televised hearings, official investigations and damage control. The death of outrage in the Trump era, or at least the dearth of outrage, exemplifies how far the president has moved the lines of accepted behaviour in Washington.
[ Maureen Dowd: Trump is a pro at quid pro quoOpens in new window ]
Trump, the first convicted felon elected president, has erased ethical boundaries and dismantled the instruments of accountability that constrained his predecessors. There will be no official investigations because Trump has made sure of it. He has fired government inspectors general and ethics watchdogs, installed partisan loyalists to run the justice department, FBI and regulatory agencies and dominated a Republican-controlled Congress unwilling to hold hearings.
As a result, while Democrats and other critics of Trump are increasingly trying to focus attention on the president’s activities, they have had a hard time gaining any traction without the usual mechanisms of official review. And at a time when Trump provokes a major news story every day or even every hour – more tariffs on allies, more retribution against enemies, more defiance of court orders – rarely does a single action stay in the headlines long enough to shape the national conversation.
The president’s sons scoff at the idea that they should limit their business activities, which directly benefit their father
Paul Rosenzweig, who was a senior counsel to Ken Starr’s investigation of president Bill Clinton and later served in the George W Bush administration, said the lack of uproar over Trump’s ethical norm-busting has made him wonder whether long-standing assumptions about public desire for honest government were wrong all along.
“Either the general public never cared about this,” he said, or “the public did care about it but no longer does.” He concluded that the answer is that “80 per cent, the public never cared” and “20 per cent, we are overwhelmed and exhausted.”
“Outrage hasn’t died,” Rosenzweig added. “It was always just a figment of elite imagination.”
The White House has defended Trump’s actions, brushing off questions about ethical considerations by saying he was so rich that he did not need more money.
“The president is abiding by all conflict-of-interest laws that are applicable to the president,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary. “The American public believes it is absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency. This president was incredibly successful before giving it all up to serve our country publicly.”
But saying that he is abiding by all conflict-of-interest laws that are applicable to the president is meaningless since, as Trump himself has long noted, conflict-of-interest laws are not applicable to the president.
Moreover, he has not given it all up; in fact, he is still making money from his private business interests run by his sons, and independent estimates indicate that he has hardly sacrificed financially by entering politics. Forbes estimated Trump’s net worth at $5.1 billion in March, a full $1.2 billion higher than the year before and the highest it has ever been in the magazine’s rankings.
The president’s sons scoff at the idea that they should limit their business activities, which directly benefit their father. Donald Trump jnr has said the family restrained itself during his father’s first term only to be criticised anyway, so it made no sense to hold back any more. “They’re going to hit you no matter what,” he said at a recent business forum in Qatar. “So we’re just going to play the game.”
There have been some burgeoning signs of public pushback in recent days. The gift of the Qatar jet seemed to break through to the general audience in a way that other episodes have not. A Harvard/CAPS Harris poll released last week found that 62 per cent of Americans thought the gift “raises ethical concerns about corruption”, and even some prominent right-wing Trump supporters such as Ben Shapiro and Laura Loomer voiced objections.
But while several dozen demonstrators protested outside Trump’s golf club last Thursday night, Democrats are split about how much to focus on Trump’s profitmaking, with some preferring to concentrate on economic issues. Senator Christopher Murphy from Connecticut has been leading the charge in the other direction, making floor speeches and leading news conference denouncing what he calls “brazen corruption”.
“It is unlikely he is going to be held accountable through traditional means,” Murphy said in an interview. “There are going to be no special counsels; there’s going to be no DOJ action. And so it’s really just about public mobilisation and politics. If Republicans keep paying a price for the corruption by losing special elections throughout the next year, maybe that causes them to rethink their complicity.”
Trump had long promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington after years of corruption by other politicians. When he first ran for president in 2016, he excoriated the Clintons for taking money from Saudi Arabia and other Middle East monarchies with an obvious interest in currying favour in case Hillary Clinton won the presidency. But that money went to the Clinton Foundation for philanthropic purposes. The money Trump’s family is now bringing in from the Middle East is going into their personal accounts through a variety of ventures that the New York Times has documented.
Johnston of Colgate University said the Trumps represent “an absolute outlier case, not just in monetary terms” but also “in terms of their brazen disregard” for past standards. “While we might disagree as to the merits of policy, the president and figures in the executive branch are expected to serve the public good, not themselves,” he said.
Donald Trump evinces no concern that people funnelling money into his family coffers have interests in government policies
Trump made a nod at those standards in his first term by saying he would restrict his family business from doing deals overseas. But since then, he has been convicted of 34 felony counts for falsifying business records and held liable in civil court for fraud, while the supreme court has conferred immunity on him for official acts. In his second term, Trump has dispensed with self-imposed ethical limits.
“He’s not trying to give the appearance that he’s doing the right thing any more,” said Fred Wertheimer, founder of Democracy 21 and a long-time advocate for government ethics. “There’s nothing in the history of America that approaches the [current] use of the presidency for massive personal gain. Nothing.”
Congressional Republicans spent years investigating Hunter Biden, the son of president Joe Biden, for trading on his family name to make millions of dollars, even labelling the clan the “Biden Crime Family”. But while Hunter Biden’s cash flow was a tiny fraction of that of Donald Trump jnr, Eric Trump and Jared Kushner, Republicans have shown no appetite for looking into the current presidential family’s finances.
Trump evinces no concern that people funnelling money into his family coffers have interests in government policies. Some of the crypto investors who attended his dinner acknowledged that they were using the opportunity to press him on regulation of the industry. According to a video obtained by the New York Times, he reciprocated by promising guests that he would not be as hard on them as the Biden administration was.
One guest at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, that night was Justin Sun, a Chinese billionaire who became one of the largest holders of the $TRUMP memecoin after buying more than $40 million, earning him a spot in an even more exclusive private VIP reception with the president before the dinner. The Securities and Exchange Commission in 2023 accused Sun of fraud, but after Trump took over, the agency put its lawsuit on hold even as it dropped other crypto investigations.
As for Bezos and Qatar, each has reason to get on Trump’s good side. In his first term, Trump, peeved at coverage in the Washington Post, which is owned by Bezos, repeatedly pushed aides to punish Bezos’s main company, Amazon, by drastically increasing its US Postal Service shipping rates and denying it a multibillion-dollar Pentagon contract. Trump also had denounced Qatar as a “funder of terrorism” and isolated it diplomatically. He has not targeted either Bezos or Qatar in his second term.
The president has not hesitated either to install allies with conflict issues in positions of power. He tapped a close associate of Elon Musk as the administrator of Nasa, which provides Musk’s SpaceX with billions of dollars in contracts. Attorney general Pam Bondi, who previously worked as a lobbyist for Qatar, signed off on the legality of Qatar’s aircraft gift.
Zach Witkoff, a founder of the Trump family crypto firm World Liberty Financial, and son of Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy, announced a $2 billion deal in the United Arab Emirates, just a couple of weeks before his father and Trump travelled there for a presidential visit.
Wertheimer said the accumulation of so many conflicts puts Trump on the all-time list of presidential graft. “He’s got the first 10 places on that,” he said. “He’s in the hall of fame of ripping off the presidency for personal gain.” But he said the public would eventually grow upset. “I think that’s going to catch up with him. It’s going to take some time, but it’s going to catch up with him.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
