Donald Trump ran a corrupt campaign, and he’ll be a corrupt president. It’s one of those things that everyone seems to know and recognize, but still needs to be stated plainly, especially as the procedural pomp of a presidential transition threatens to overwhelm the fact that he’s bringing an unprecedentedly large array of ethical transgressions into the White House. And while the capacity for corruption in a Trump administration seems boundless, what’s particularly unnerving is the fact that Trump doesn’t really seem to care much that everyone knows he’s corrupt.
Under normal circumstances, political corruption is something an elected officials goes to great lengths to conceal. Evidence of it typically has to be carefully extricated from elaborate cover-ups. Not so with Donald Trump. Our newly elected president doesn’t even care to go through the motions of concealing his venality. He flaunts it. Just look at the way he ran his campaign.
According to the latest Federal Election Commission filings, Trump directed close to $3 million in campaign funds towards Trump-owned properties between Oct. 20 and Nov. 28. Tag Air, Inc., the Trump-owned company that operates his personal jet, raked in $2,055,786 in travel expenses. A small galaxy of Trump-branded properties — various hotels, golf resorts, and restaurants — collected an additional $777,672.83.
This was one of the running themes of the Trump campaign prior to his election, and past campaign finance reports showed much the same pattern: millions of dollars in campaign cash being funneled towards the Trump family’s businesses. It’s a sort of self-dealing that is slightly different from the variety Trump admitted to engaging in via his non-profit charity. And it’s done with an eye on plundering as much campaign cash as possible. The Huffington Post documented that Trump jacked up the rent at his Trump Tower campaign offices the moment he started taking public donations. As the election drew near, Trump held a non-campaign campaign event at his new hotel in Washington.
There was no legitimate reason for Trump to conduct as much campaign business through his own properties as he did, and plenty of very good reasons to avoid doing so: namely, to avoid the appearance of being massively corrupt. But, again, Trump doesn’t care. He knows all this stuff will show up in public filings, and he knows people like me will write about it. At the same time, he’s confident that, as a wealthy and powerful individual, he’ll skate without anyone giving him too much grief.
And, as Ryan Cooper observed Friday, Trump is largely justified in that outlook. The idea of “accountability” for elites — be they in government, finance, the media, wherever — has been hollowed out by wagon-circling and a persistent impetus to look the other way. There’s also an element of partisanship to this as well, which Trump will benefit from tremendously from.
The Republicans who control Congress are already shutting their eyes and closing their ears to the brightly flashing and loudly blaring signs of corruption exploding from Trump’s orbit. House Speaker Paul Ryan has stated in plain terms that he just doesn’t care about the web of conflicts in which Trump is ensnared. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, the chair of the House Oversight Committee who had been planning a sustained blitzkrieg of inquiries into a Democratic president-elect, now finds himself cured of the desire to investigate. House majority leader Kevin McCarthy, who once boasted of the political damage wrought by the investigations conducted under his watch, now frets that congressional inquiries have “harmed the ability for people all to work together.”
Trump has enablers in the legislature who will keep their mouths shut so long as he signs bills to cut taxes and shred the safety net. He’s had tremendous success at manipulating the press into focusing mainly on his Twitter feed and other public pronouncements. He won a presidential campaign through open deceit and racism, and defeated challenges to his behavior through bravado and gaslighting. Put simply: He’s probably feeling pretty untouchable at this point.
So why shouldn’t Trump do whatever he can to use his immensely powerful position to secure as much financial benefit as possible for himself and his family? He’s already proven that he can get away with it in plain sight.
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