Donald Trump has been forthright and transparent in his desire to enrich himself with his cryptocurrency memecoin profiting off of his high public office. Trump is beyond shame, but this corrupt debasement of the Oval Office is accepted by so many who should know better, including his fellow Republicans.
Unlike the hundreds of other crypto coins that have been launched in the largely unregulated crypto casino, though, this one allows attendees to in effect directly pay the president of the United States.
Hundreds paid big bucks to join Trump at a dinner at his Virginia golf club, many of them flying in from overseas and explicitly telling reporters that they had paid to play, hoping to influence the president. Even factoring in fees alone, Trump’s family has made more $320 million off the coin even as it gears up its World Liberty Financial crypto project.
Trump has only gotten more and more brazen as he’s played chicken with our anti-corruption standards and won every time. During his first term, there was relatively widespread and bipartisan consternation over foreign officials spending lavishly at Trump’s hotels and other properties. Such self-dealing, which seemed extravagant then, now appears quaint.
No longer do foreign oligarchs, officials and others trying to curry favor with the man that can move global markets limit themselves to club memberships or expensive hotel rooms. No, now they just give the cash directly to Trump via an industry that Trump’s own slavish officials are tasked with regulating.
This would all be offensive enough had the MAGA contingent not pretended to care about corruption over the last several years, fixating on whatever morsels of ostensible evidence they could drum up to demonstrate that former President Biden and his son Hunter were involved in corrupt and nefarious foreign dealings.
Despite gobs of taxpayer funds going into congressional and Justice Department inquiries into this supposed corruption, there was never nearly enough evidence to remotely suggest that the Bidens were making big profits off of Joe Biden‘s office.
The public hardly needs such detailed investigations into Trump self dealing because he’s happy to just do it all out in the open. Trump seems genuinely bewildered that anyone would have a problem with him, for example, accepting a free $400 million jet from a foreign government that is slated to go to his personal foundation upon his exit from office, telling reporters that it is actually very smart to take extravagant gifts from Gulf monarchies.
It’s almost hard to blame Trump himself for all this, given that he’s been open and upfront his entire life about the fact that he sees the world purely in transactional terms and sees everything through the lens of what he can get out of it. He’s written books to this effect, built an entire public persona around the notion that either you personally profit or you’re a sucker and a loser.
We reserve the bulk of our scoring for all of the supposedly oversight entities that let it happen, and the craven hypocrisy from the members of the party that Trump has now fully taken over. If they continue to stand by and let Trump rake in the dough from openly corrupt dealings, they have no ground to stand on to ever again criticize supposed public corruption.
