What Trump's Corruption Will Cost Us

He has ascended to new heights of graft. The effects will be profound.

When news broke that Qatar is planning to give President Trump a luxury 747 jet to use as Air Force One, an obvious question presented itself. We’ve known that Trump has been frustrated by the delays in getting the next generation of presidential planes into service. But the problem isn’t that there isn’t a plane lying around, it’s all the work involved in turning an ordinary jumbo jet into Air Force One, which must be equipped with sophisticated communications and defensive systems. Presumably, outfitting this jet with that equipment will take just as long. So why would the government need a plane from Qatar?

Then the answer came: Under the agreement being discussed, Qatar would give the plane to the U.S. government, then after Trump leaves office, ownership would pass to Trump’s presidential library foundation. Which means it will be his to use for as long as he likes.

In other words, a wealthy foreign government is giving Donald Trump a personal gift worth $400 million.

Trump has leveled up the graft

Looking back now, most of what Trump did in his first term seems remarkably small-time — often illegal and unconstitutional, yes, but limited in its ambitions. For instance, he visited his own properties hundreds of times during his term, often overcharging the Secret Service for the rooms they had to rent from him. The bill came to $1.4 million. He also set up his Washington, DC hotel as a kind of payment window: If you were someone seeking a presidential pardon, a corporation looking for favorable regulatory action, or a foreign government looking to smooth relations, you would reserve rooms or event space there, putting a few thousand bucks in his pocket to show the proper tribute.

All that befit a man who never met a two-bit grift he didn’t want to get in on, which still remains true; he’ll take the $400 million plane, but still find time to work out a deal for the next Trump Bible or whatever piece of junk he can slap his name on. But in the first term there were still constraints, imposed by people around him telling when he had gone too far. When he tried to hold a G7 meeting at one of his resorts, it was considered so crass that he gave in to the pressure and withdrew the suggestion.

Now there are no limits. Before taking office he released a meme coin that is little more than a way for people to give him money; when you buy the worthless token, you both increase the value of Trump’s holding and hand him fees, hundreds of millions of dollars of which have been generated so far. In a move of head-spinning shamelessness, he decided to literally hold an auction for the right to be in his presence; the 220 people who buy the most of his coin will be able to attend a dinner with him, with the top 25 getting a “V.I.P. reception” and a White House tour.

Who will be attending, we don’t know. But we do know the identity of some of the other people and entities who have put money in his pocket. The United Arab Emirates, for instance, made a deal through a company it backs to buy $2 billion of stablecoin cryptocurrency issued by World Liberty Financial, the scammy crypto firm the Trump family created. The arrangement will make the president’s family tens of millions of dollars.

Everywhere you look, there are more deals that look so much like outright bribes that in any other administration they would generate investigations, enormous news coverage, and calls for impeachment. For instance, unless you’re a Trump corruption obsessive you may not know the name Justin Sun. In 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission brought charges against him for various forms of crypto fraud, but once Trump was elected, Sun bought $75 million worth of World Liberty tokens. Lo and behold, Trump’s SEC — now being run by a crypto advocate — halted the investigation into Sun and asked a judge to set the case aside.

Why has Trump been able to do this?

If Trump had the ability to amp up his corruption to this level in his first term, he would surely have done it. But he didn’t, and it’s only partly because it took him a while to realize just what the opportunities were (notably, he went from saying crypto “seems like a scam” to realizing that it is in fact a scam, and as a lifelong scammer he wanted in on it). Corruption on this scale requires a support network of unethical toadies and toothless or absent rules.

In the first category, Trump has made sure to appoint to every key position people who believe that their leader should be free to engage in all the graft he likes. So when the Qatari plane idea came up, Attorney General Pam Bondi had a memo prepared assuring the White House that the deal is A-OK:

Both the White House and DOJ concluded that because the gift is not conditioned on any official act, it does not constitute bribery, the sources said. Bondi's legal analysis also says it does not run afoul of the Constitution's prohibition on foreign gifts because the plane is not being given to an individual, but rather to the United States Air Force and, eventually, to the presidential library foundation, the sources said.

What a relief, because you know an attorney general as independent and committed to the rule of law as Pam Bondi wouldn’t just tell Trump what he wants to hear. The fact that she was a registered lobbyist for Qatar earning a tidy $115,000 a month only shows how knowledgeable she is about this matter.

Then there’s the Supreme Court, which in a series of recent cases has all but defined corruption out of existence. At this point, a public official would practically have to put up a billboard proclaiming “I am taking a bribe” for them to rule that a bribe had been taken. More important, however, was their contemptible decision in Trump v. United States, in which the six conservative justices ruled that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for just about anything they do while in office.

I can’t prove this, but I believe that this decision had a profound effect on Donald Trump’s psychology. Not only did it free him from the specter of prosecution for many of his crimes, it sent him a message: You can do whatever you want. A man who always chafed at even the slightest impingement on his ability to lie and cheat and scam his way through life now had the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. It told him that he was subject to no limits. Now, at last, he could be who he always dreamed of being.

This is just the beginning

For all we are appalled by Trump’s behavior, the effects may be far more consequential than we realize. People complain all the time about corrupt politicians, and we have certainly had them. In fact, contrary to what people believe, corruption is almost certainly worse at the state and local level than in Washington, where there are many more rules and far more press scrutiny on what those politicians do. But on the whole, ours is a society relatively free from corruption when compared to much of the world. You don’t, for instance, have to pay a bribe to a petty official to get your trash picked up. To the extent we keep a lid on public corruption, it’s because we have systems in place to police it and a general agreement that it would be bad for everyone if it were allowed to run rampant.

That norm of honesty is what Trump attacks so directly. Just as he encourages his followers to be sexist and cruel, he encourages everyone to grab what they can, laws and rules and basic ethical standards be damned. The president really is a role model, and unlike just about every corrupt official our country has ever produced, he isn’t even trying to hide how corrupt he is. It’s right out in the open for all to see. His message isn’t that he’s clean, it’s that everyone is dirty, so grab what you can.

That’s what makes it so dangerous. By the time these four years are over, domestic and foreign interests who want some policy favor — a tariff waiver, a change in regulation, an arms sale — will probably have deposited billions of dollars directly into Trump’s pockets. “I could be a stupid person and say, ‘Oh no, we don’t want a free plane,’” he said by way of explaining why he’ll take the Qatari jet. As far as he’s concerned, if you don’t cash in on public office, you’re just a sucker. After two terms of graft, to too many people it will just seem like common sense.

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