We Feel OK Saying Trump Is The Most Corrupt President Ever— But Is The USA The Most Corrupt Country?

Bruce Springsteen In Manchester

“This,” he said on Wednesday at the opening show of his European tour, “is happening now.” He had already started by lighting into the Trump regime in no uncertain terms: “My home, the America I love, is currently in the hands of a corrupt and treasonous administration.” I urge you to listen to the whole 5 minutes:

And as Springsteen was kicking off his overseas tour, Señor T was kicking off his… in Saudi Arabia, a tour about personal business and profit for the Trump Crime Family. Yesterday William Kristol noted that MAGA Mike defended Trump against corruption charges “by arguing that it was fine, because he was doing it all out in the open. ‘The reason that many people refer to the Bidens as the Biden crime family is because they were doing all this stuff behind curtains, in the back rooms. They were trying to conceal it… Whatever President Trump is doing is out in the open. They’re not trying to conceal anything… President Trump has had nothing to hide. He’s very up front about it.’ This defense is an admission. Johnson is correct that Donald Trump’s open corruption and lawlessness is fundamentally different from run-of-the-mill corruption and furtive law-breaking. The difference is that it is far more dangerous. After all, if you live in a nation where you expect laws and rules are mostly going to be enforced, you’ll do your unlawful things in private. And you’ll cover up what you’ve done. You’ll behave like Richard Nixon.”

But if you’re bolder than Nixon, if you think you can get away with more than Nixon did or more than Nixon even wanted to do, then you’re not going to bother with a little surreptitious law-breaking and a subsequent cover-up. You’ll test the limits of impunity.

Nixon was a dodgy character operating within a rule-of-law setting. That’s why Nixon was “Tricky Dick.” Trump’s not a particularly tricky politician. He’s much more like a crime boss. And he understands that you’re more powerful the more your criminality can afford to be demonstrated to others.

After all, a mob boss needs shopkeepers to see that they need to pay him protection money. A gangster needs it to be known that if you cross him, you’ll pay a price.

So if such a politician wants not just a bribe or two but a cascade of bribes, he has to let people know that he welcomes bribes, and that everyone is expected to offer bribes. Everyone also has to understand that they can get away with the bribes and benefit from them, and conversely that they’ll pay a price if they don’t step up.

And if you’re not just a mob boss but also the leader of an authoritarian movement, corruption is just part of the story. If you’re interested in autocracy and not just kleptocracy, if you’d like to replace the rule of law with your own personal rule and also to liberate your followers from the rule of law, then your ambitions are even greater.

An authoritarian project has to come out of the shadows to really succeed. The ultimate intimidation of many depends on some early and well-publicized assaults against a few. The harassment of individuals at the border, the assault on some universities and law firms, the targeting of some opposition figures— all of these acts need to be public and publicized to have the desired effect.

So the authoritarian wants people to understand that the Department of Justice is not operating under traditional norms and constraints, that it’s now more a department of political favors and retribution than one of justice and law. The authoritarian wants opponents and friends to know that political adversaries have been targeted.

His lawyers can’t say that in court, so an authoritarian has to straddle two worlds for a period of time. They use the legal system on the way to subverting it. The necessity of deception for at least a while is in tension with the desirability of publicity, and so clever sophistry is their halfway house on the way to brazen openness.

…We’re not yet all the way to authoritarianism. So when the system has been strong enough to push back, Trump and his apparatchiks fall back on all the usual dodges. Trump’s lawyers will argue in court that the president isn’t violating the Constitution. But the point ultimately is to undermine the Constitution. Trump’s lawyers pretend in court that the administration is not violating habeas corpus. But the point is ultimately to suspend habeas corpus.

“Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue,” François de La Rochefoucauld famously remarked. But at some point the authoritarian no longer wants to pay that tribute. He wants the very thought of virtue to be laughable, the notion of the rule of law to seem ridiculous. His authoritarianism seeks to rule in daylight.

And people like Mike Johnson call it a virtue.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) has been onto Trump as mob boss longer than most senators, or at least willing to take him on over it longer than most. And in an interview this week he said he wants Congress to have a say in arms deals with countries that have made investments in Trump’s personal businesses. “Let's be clear why Donald Trump has chosen these three countries as his first major foreign trip,’ he said. “It's not because they're the three most important countries in the world. He's going to these three countries because these are the three countries that are willing to pay him. They're literally putting billions of dollars in his pockets. And in exchange, they are asking for national security concessions. A country like Qatar is giving him a [very dodgy] $400 million plane, and of course Qatar is going to want something in return, perhaps some pretty advanced American weapons systems that we otherwise would be reluctant to put it into the hands of a repressive dictatorship in the Middle East. The UAE wants us to relax our export controls on semiconductors. That's a really dangerous thing because the UAE would likely pass along that technology right to China… This administration lies all the time, and what we see is that the biggest announcements that have come out of the Middle East relative to the United States in the last several weeks have not been announcements about broad policy concessions that they are making, but they are announcements relative to massive investments in Trump properties in Trump businesses.”

Or is Trump just trying to get everyone’s attention away from how he’s thrown in his lot with the crypto-cartel? “Imagine that someone in a position of great political power,” suggested Kyle Chayka, “created a hundred billion raffle tickets and made them available for public purchase. If you buy the tickets, eventually you will receive a reward: a proportional quantity of magic beans— and eventually each magic bean will be exchangeable for one United States dollar. What’s more, if you buy the raffle tickets early, you can get them for less than a dollar, perhaps for as little as five cents apiece. Not only will the raffle tickets eventually gain you more traditional currency; you can also vote on company matters with your raffle tickets and help manage the magic-bean supply, and the more tickets you purchase, the more say you have. Oh, and the creator of the raffle will keep a bunch of the tickets for himself, and much of the revenue generated by the magic-bean economy will also go back to him. This effectively describes the workings of a new cryptocurrency created by World Liberty Financial, a company affiliated with the Trump family, with President Donald Trump serving as its ‘Chief Crypto Advocate.’ The cryptocurrency, a so-called governance token called WLFI, is the raffle ticket, and another cryptocurrency, a ‘stablecoin’ called USD1, is the magic bean. World Liberty deals in the nascent industry of ‘decentralized finance,’ in which cryptocurrency instruments allow users to circumvent the traditional, regulated banking ecosystem for moving, storing, and lending money. Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that are pegged to a single currency value, such as one U.S. dollar, though they are not always so stable: Terra, a once successful stablecoin, lost its peg and suffered a collapse in 2022. Stablecoins fall nebulously within the bounds of the law, so long as they don’t appear to function as securities (as, for instance, stock in a publicly traded company does). A banner on the World Liberty website serves as a legal disclaimer: ‘World Liberty Financial does not consider the tokens to be securities.’ Donald Trump et fils quietly assumed a controlling stake of World Liberty, in January, through a company called DT Marks Defi. Though fine print specifies that no member of the Trump family is an ‘officer, director or employee’ of World Liberty, DT Marks Defi receives seventy-five per cent of its subsidiary company’s net revenue. (The remaining twenty-five per cent goes to Axiom Management Group, which is connected with two of World Liberty’s official leaders, Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman, a pair of self-described “crypto-punks,” whose other ventures include, in Folkman’s case, a company called Date Hotter Girls.)

Things sure have changed since then (2019). Someone showed him how he could rake in the cash. “Three days before his Inauguration, he launched a so-called meme coin, cryptocurrencies based on online notoriety that become de-facto pyramid schemes as early buyers sell off to later ones at higher prices. $TRUMP consists of a billion coins, eighty per cent of which were kept by Trump-related companies, and the remainder sold to the public. It reportedly made around three hundred and fifty million dollars in revenue in its sale and has a market capitalization of nearly three billion dollars; Trump’s business earns a fee for every $TRUMP transaction. The price of the meme coin is now down to less than a fifth of its all-time high, and the majority of its buyers have seen their purchases lose value. An official Melania Trump meme coin released soon after Trump’s has fared even worse. But $TRUMP was given a recent bump when Fight Fight Fight, a business associated with the Trump Organization and its crypto projects, ran a contest in which the two hundred and twenty largest holders of the meme coin won invitations to a gala dinner with Donald Trump, to be hosted at the Trump National Golf Club near Washington, D.C. (Black tie is optional.) The top twenty-five will get access to a more private reception with the President. The contest offers an explicit way to buy Trump’s attention, lending magic beans a new appeal as a lobbying tool. Many of the meme-coin investors are based abroad, and some have been unequivocal about their goal of influencing Trump’s agenda. (One Australian entrepreneur told the Times that he hopes to talk to the President about crypto policy; a Mexican buyer said that he would like Trump’s ear on tariffs.) On Tuesday, a small Chinese company that operates an e-commerce business on TikTok announced plans for a three-hundred-million-dollar purchase of $TRUMP and Bitcoin— at a time when the Trump Administration is considering whether to follow through on a TikTok ban.

The World Liberty operation has far vaster implications than the meme coin, however, because its stablecoin, which can be easily and reliably exchanged for U.S. dollars, creates something like an entire Trump-sponsored underground economy. It’s as if a new bank had opened under the sitting President’s name, and it was being sent large quantities of funds by various foreign businesses and political élites. Major buyers of WLFI have included Justin Sun, a Chinese crypto entrepreneur, who bought seventy-five million dollars’ worth, and DWF Labs, an Abu Dhabi-based cryptocurrency trading firm, which bought twenty-five million dollars’ worth. In March, World Liberty announced that it had sold more than half a billion dollars’ worth of its token. Earlier this month, another Abu Dhabi-based investment firm announced that it would use USD1, the stablecoin controlled by World Liberty, for a two-billion-dollar investment in Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.

Buying the Trumpian magic beans provides a way of purchasing influence, not unlike how foreign dignitaries could rent rooms at the Trump International Hotel in D.C. during Trump’s first Administration. But World Liberty makes renting hotel rooms look quaint by comparison. The more money that flows into WLFI and USD1, the more legitimate and valuable these currencies appear, and the higher their market capitalizations creep. Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin, has a market capitalization nearing a hundred and fifty billion dollars, with more than thirty billion dollars in daily trading volume. World Liberty aspires to create something similar.

The American public has been inundated with news of the Trump family’s self-enrichment for so long that many of their dealings now barely create a stir. Just this week, it was revealed that the Administration is preparing to accept the gift of a luxury Boeing 747-8 jet offered by the royal family of Qatar, to be used as a new Air Force One, at least until a new Air Force One is completed by Boeing. The Department of Defense will receive the jet, but when Trump leaves office it will reportedly be donated to his Presidential library, effectively turning the plane, worth four hundred million dollars, into a private possession— never mind that this arrangement would seem to blatantly contradict the foreign-emoluments clause, which prevents U.S. officials from accepting gifts from foreign leaders and governments. (Trump has dismissed ethical concerns by saying that declining a gift would be “stupid.”) In the realm of crypto, though, a backlash against Trump’s ventures may be mounting in Congress. Last week, some Senate Democrats balked at passing a popular crypto-friendly bill in light of the President’s naked profiteering. In a bit of almost farcical understatement, Senator Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming, recently told the Times, ‘The optics are challenging.’ But the Trump family has so far wagered correctly that no one will stop them.

Many people are frustrated because they feel pretty certain that neither Señor T nor anyone in his crime family will ever be held to account for turning the U.S. into a full-fledged kleptocracy. Has his team created some kind of legalistic plausible deniability? Señor T, you’re going to do it right out in the open— not despite the cameras, but because of them. Señor T, you’re going to sell state secrets and host your golf tournaments at the scene of the crime. Señor T, you’ll make the presidency a loyalty test to your brand and see who salutes. Trumpism isn’t a deviation from American corruption— it’s the logical next step when corruption stops fearing consequences.

MAGA Mike’s defense is a confession: Trump’s brazenness is the point. When the law doesn’t apply to the powerful, power becomes the law. And Trump, in true authoritarian fashion, is setting the precedent that criminality is fine as long as it’s accompanied by a smirk, a rally, and a red hat. So yes, he’s doing it out in the open. And what that means is we’re not looking at some clandestine scheme that might unravel in court or fade under sunlight. We’re looking at the normalization of kleptocracy, the public spectacle of a man robbing the vault while waving at the crowd— and the crowd cheers. If Nixon’s fatal sin was getting caught, Trump’s strategy is never pretending there’s anything wrong in the first place. And if we let that stand—if we shrug it off as just “Trump being Trump”— then we’re not just witnessing the decline of political ethics. We’re actively consenting to it.

And, no, Trump wasn't happy about being memorialized by The Boss this week, Trump let loose this morning, trying to define him as "highly overrated," "not a talented guy" and "dumb as a rock."