You Thought Trump Was Corrupt Before? Just You Wait.

His first term was just a warmup.

Official White House photo by Shealah Craighead

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On January 11, 2017, Donald Trump held a press conference to allay the concerns of anyone worried that he might face financial conflicts of interest as president. Standing before stacks of file folders holding reams of paper, he explained that while he would not be divesting himself of ownership in the hundreds of LLCs that comprise the Trump Organization, he was turning over management of the company to his sons Eric and Don Jr. “They’re not going to discuss it with me,” he said, and “these papers are just some of the many documents that I’ve signed turning over complete and total control to my sons.”

It was one of many moments in which you couldn’t prove definitively that Trump was lying, but he obviously was; of course he would still be involved in the company, and the unmarked folders contained what appeared to be stacks of blank paper. The reason it’s worth recalling today is that he felt it necessary to at least pretend that he would not be using the presidency to enrich himself.

He is no longer bothering to pretend. There will be no Potemkin press conferences this January and no implausible claims of integrity. The corruption to come in the next four years will be far, far worse than what we saw in Trump’s first term. The White House is open for business.

How Trump will get paid

The avenues for those wishing to line Trump’s pockets are different today than they were eight years ago. Back then, if you wanted to pay Trump off, you had to do it through his existing properties. Trump’s Washington hotel became a deposit slot for Republicans showing their loyalty, companies looking for favorable treatment, foreign governments (China was the biggest spender), and individuals seeking jobs or a pardon — patronize the hotel’s restaurants and bars, reserve a bunch of suites and conference rooms, and it was just like handing him a wad of cash. 

But Trump no longer owns that hotel. You can still spend at his other resorts, or buy a membership at Mar-a-Lago, for which the price has been raised to $1 million (before he ran for president it was just $100,000). There will probably be more foreign licensing deals, in which Trump gets paid millions to allow a developer in another country to slap his name on a hotel or golf course. During the 2024 campaign, Trump hawked a series of trashy memorabilia items, from Trump bibles to Trump sneakers to Trump trading cards to Trump watches , and given that he just debuted Trump guitars, we can be sure he’ll keep moonlighting as a QVC-level junk-peddler while in office. 

But that’s the small-time stuff. Trump is clearly on the lookout for new ways to get paid, the latest of which is the bold frontier of bunco that is cryptocurrency. Back in 2021 he said it “seems like a scam,” but at some point he realized that while he was right about that, as an experienced grifter he had to get in on the grift. So first he partnered with a couple of young douchebros — one ran a site called Date Hotter Girls, and the other is famous for posting a video in which he says that in crypto, “You can literally sell shit in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin, for a billion dollars if the story’s right, because people will buy it.” With these promising young entrepreneurs, Trump created something called World Liberty Financial; so far it has been less than successful in raising the hundreds of millions it had sought, perhaps because, as one writer described it, “it is so clearly a way to scam people out of their money.” 

Worry not, though — Trump knows that in crypto, the opportunities to separate the rubes from their money are almost endless. Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, is reportedly looking to buy a crypto exchange; whether that will happen is unclear. What we can predict, however, is that he and his agents will continue looking for ways to get rich off crypto, all while Trump ensures that it goes unregulated, so it will remain possible to sell shit in can to the deluded and the gullible (the crypto industry spent $130 million in this election getting its favored candidates into office). 

TMTG itself is another key avenue for corruption. The company’s stock is insanely overvalued; in the first nine months of the year, it lost $363 million on microscopic revenues of just $2.6 million, or about what a single McDonald’s brings in. Trump owns a little over half the shares in the company; on paper his stake is worth over $3 billion. If someone wanted to drive up the price by buying a bunch of the stock, that would be a big favor to Trump. Is no one going to try?

And then there is the possibility of straight-up bribery. Trump has been liberated by the Supreme Court to commit any crimes he likes so long as they involve “official duties,” and official duties are precisely what potential bribers are looking for. If the Saudis or anyone else were looking for some special consideration from the U.S. government, they could literally hand Trump a briefcase full of cash, say “Here is the bribe we discussed,” he could reply “Thank you for this bribe, I will now alter American foreign policy in exchange,” and he would still be immune from prosecution. 

Elon Musk, having spent $200 million to get Trump elected and already being rewarded with a hand in shaping all government policy — including those that affect his billions in federal contracts and the 20 separate investigations and reviews of his companies — could gift Trump with a few million dollars (or hundreds of millions) in Tesla shares. Trump could also sell pardons, while promising to pardon the purchasers. 

He might not go that far. But he will be utterly without constraint from either the law or those around him, free to indulge his every whim. And you can bet there are entirely new paths of influence and payoffs we haven’t even contemplated that Trump and his band of creative swindlers will devise.

How Trump redefined corruption

The danger of corruption is two-fold. First, the corrupt official will warp policy in ways that are inimical to the interests of the public and the country, in order to reward himself and those who pay him or help him in some other way. Second, the fact of his corruption can poison the entire system, spreading like a virus. Corruption breeds more corruption, the system fails the public, and the public loses faith in the ability of that system to solve problems in the future. 

This is what Trump has done and continues to do. In fact, destroying faith in the system has always been one of his key goals. When evidence of his wrongdoing emerges, he does not really claim innocence. He doesn’t try to convince us that he’s a faithful husband and someone who treats women with respect, or that he’s an honest businessman, or that he pays the taxes he owes. Instead, he tells us that everyone is just as bad as him. Everyone abuses women, everyone cooks the books, everyone is on the take, and therefore his transgressions are barely worthy of note. If anything, they demonstrate his power and irresistible will, proof that he is deserving of the worship he receives from the weak and small-minded. His corruption becomes meaningless because corruption has lost all meaning. 

Ask yourself what would happen if Trump was caught taking an unambiguous bribe. Republicans on Capitol Hill would rush to his defense, arguing that it was barely worth talking about. “The Supreme Court settled this question, the president has immunity,” they’d say. “Why are we even talking about it?” The conservative media would simultaneously proclaim it to be a hoax and proof of Trump’s genius. Elite mainstream news organizations would report that Trump is “refusing to be bound by traditional norms,” or “pushing the envelope,” and that “he has brought a new transactional approach to the presidency.” In a few days the media would move on to the next crazy story, and before you know it everyone would forget that it ever happened. 

That’s what we’re headed for. Trump was already the most corrupt president in history, and what he did in his first term was just the warmup.