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Miami Herald
3 days ago
- Business
- Miami Herald
As Trumps monetize presidency, profits outstrip protests
(News Analysis) When Hillary Clinton was first lady, a furor erupted over reports that she had once made $100,000 from a $1,000 investment in cattle futures. Even though it had happened a dozen years before her husband became president, it became a scandal that lasted weeks and forced the White House to initiate a review. Thirty-one years later, after dinner at President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, Jeff Bezos agreed to finance a promotional film about first lady Melania Trump that will reportedly put $28 million directly in her pocket -- 280 times the Clinton lucre and in this case from a person with a vested interest in policies set by her husband's government. Scandal? Furor? Washington moved on while barely taking notice. The Trumps are hardly the first presidential family to profit from their time in power, but they have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House. The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism has been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and is opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join, all in the past few months alone. Just last week, Qatar handed over a luxury jet meant for Trump's use not just in his official capacity but also for his presidential library after he leaves office. Experts have valued the plane, formally donated to the Air Force, at $200 million, more than all of the foreign gifts bestowed on all previous American presidents combined. And Trump hosted an exclusive dinner at his Virginia club for 220 investors in the $TRUMP cryptocurrency that he started days before taking office in January. Access was openly sold based on how much money they chipped in -- not to a campaign account but to a business that benefits Trump personally. By conventional Washington standards, according to students of official graft, the still-young Trump administration is a candidate for the most brazen use of government office in American history, perhaps eclipsing even Teapot Dome, Watergate and other famous scandals. 'I've been watching and writing about corruption for 50 years, and my head is still spinning,' said Michael Johnston, a professor emeritus at Colgate University and author of multiple books on corruption in the United States. Yet a mark of how much Trump has transformed Washington since his return to power is the normalization of moneymaking schemes that once would have generated endless political blowback, televised hearings, official investigations and damage control. The death of outrage in the Trump era, or at least the dearth of outrage, exemplifies how far the president has moved the lines of accepted behavior in Washington. Trump, the first convicted felon elected president, has erased ethical boundaries and dismantled the instruments of accountability that constrained his predecessors. There will be no official investigations because Trump has made sure of it. He has fired government inspectors general and ethics watchdogs, installed partisan loyalists to run the Justice Department, FBI and regulatory agencies and dominated a Republican-controlled Congress unwilling to hold hearings. As a result, while Democrats and other critics of Trump are increasingly trying to focus attention on the president's activities, they have had a hard time gaining any traction without the usual mechanisms of official review. And at a time when Trump provokes a major news story every day or even every hour -- more tariffs on allies, more retribution against enemies, more defiance of court orders -- rarely does a single action stay in the headlines long enough to shape the national conversation. Paul Rosenzweig, who was a senior counsel to Ken Starr's investigation of President Bill Clinton and later served in the George W. Bush administration, said the lack of uproar over Trump's ethical norm-busting has made him wonder whether longstanding assumptions about public desire for honest government were wrong all along. 'Either the general public never cared about this,' he said, or 'the public did care about it but no longer does.' He concluded that the answer is that '80%, the public never cared' and '20%, we are overwhelmed and exhausted.' 'Outrage hasn't died,' Rosenzweig added. 'It was always just a figment of elite imagination.' The White House has defended Trump's actions, brushing off questions about ethical considerations by saying that he was so rich that he did not need more money. 'The president is abiding by all conflict of interest laws that are applicable to the president,' said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary. 'The American public believes it is absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency. This president was incredibly successful before giving it all up to serve our country publicly.' But saying that he is abiding by all conflict of interest laws that are applicable to the president is meaningless since, as Trump himself has long noted, conflict of interest laws are not applicable to the president. Moreover, he has not given it all up; in fact, he is still making money from his private business interests run by his sons, and independent estimates indicate that he has hardly sacrificed financially by entering politics. Forbes estimated Trump's net worth at $5.1 billion in March, a full $1.2 billion higher than the year before and the highest it has ever been in the magazine's rankings. The president's sons scoff at the idea that they should limit their business activities, which directly benefit their father. Donald Trump Jr. has said that the family restrained itself during his father's first term only to be criticized anyway, so it made no sense to hold back anymore. 'They're going to hit you no matter what,' he said last week at a business forum in Qatar. 'So we're just going to play the game.' There have been some burgeoning signs of public pushback in recent days. The gift of the Qatar plane seemed to break through to the general audience in a way that other episodes have not. A Harvard/CAPS Harris poll released last week found that 62% of Americans thought the gift 'raises ethical concerns about corruption,' and even some prominent right-wing Trump supporters like Ben Shapiro and Laura Loomer voiced objections. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who campaigned with Trump last year, expressed misgivings this week during a podcast with Shawn Ryan, a right-wing influencer, who mentioned all of the Trump family business deals that seemed to coincide with the president's recent trip to the Middle East. 'That stuff kind of worries me,' Ryan said. 'Well, it seems like corruption, yeah,' Carlson agreed. But while several dozen demonstrators protested outside Trump's golf club the other night, Democrats are split about how much to focus on Trump's profitmaking, with some preferring to concentrate on economic issues. Sen. Christopher Murphy, D-Conn., has been leading the charge the other direction, making floor speeches and leading news conference denouncing what he calls 'brazen corruption.' 'It is unlikely he is going to be held accountable through traditional means,' Murphy said in an interview. 'There are going to be no special counsels; there's going to be no DOJ action. And so it's really just about public mobilization and politics. If Republicans keep paying a price for the corruption by losing special elections throughout the next year, maybe that causes them to rethink their complicity.' Trump had long promised to 'drain the swamp' in Washington after years of corruption by other politicians. When he first ran for president in 2016, he excoriated the Clintons for taking money from Saudi Arabia and other Middle East monarchies with an obvious interest in currying favor in case Hillary Clinton won the presidency. But that money went to the Clinton Foundation for philanthropic purposes. The money Trump's family is now bringing in from the Middle East is going into their personal accounts through a variety of ventures that The New York Times has documented. Johnston said the Trumps represent 'an absolute outlier case, not just in monetary terms' but also 'in terms of their brazen disregard' for past standards. 'While we might disagree as to the merits of policy, the president and figures in the executive branch are expected to serve the public good, not themselves,' he said. Trump made a nod at those standards in his first term by saying he would restrict his family business from doing deals overseas. But since then, he has been convicted of 34 felony counts for falsifying business records and held liable in civil court for fraud while the Supreme Court has conferred immunity on him for official acts. In his second term, Trump has dispensed with self-imposed ethical limits. 'He's not trying to give the appearance that he's doing the right thing anymore,' said Fred Wertheimer, founder of Democracy 21 and a longtime advocate for government ethics. 'There's nothing in the history of America that approaches the use of the presidency for massive personal gain. Nothing.' Congressional Republicans spent years investigating Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, for trading on his family name to make millions of dollars, even labeling the clan the 'Biden Crime Family.' But while Hunter Biden's cash flow was a tiny fraction of that of Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Jared Kushner, Republicans have shown no appetite for looking into the current presidential family's finances. 'The American public has had to inure itself to the corruption of Donald Trump and his presidency because the president and his Republican Party have given the American public no choice in the matter,' said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former appeals court judge who has become a critic of Trump. Trump evinces no concern that people funneling money into his family coffers have interests in government policies. Some of the crypto investors who attended his dinner Thursday night acknowledged that they were using the opportunity to press him on regulation of the industry. According to a video obtained by the Times, he reciprocated by promising guests that he would not be as hard on them as the Biden administration was. One guest at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, that night was Justin Sun, a Chinese billionaire who became one of the largest holders of the $TRUMP memecoin after buying more than $40 million, earning him a spot in an even more exclusive private VIP reception with the president before the dinner. The Securities and Exchange Commission in 2023 accused Sun of fraud, but after Trump took over the agency put its lawsuit on hold even as it dropped other crypto investigations. As for Bezos and Qatar, each has reason to get on Trump's good side. In his first term, Trump, peeved at coverage in The Washington Post, which is owned by Bezos, repeatedly pushed aides to punish Bezos' main company, Amazon, by drastically increasing its U.S. Postal Service shipping rates and denying it a multibillion-dollar Pentagon contract. Trump also had denounced Qatar as a 'funder of terrorism' and isolated it diplomatically. He has not targeted either Bezos or Qatar in his second term. The president has not hesitated either to install allies with conflict issues in positions of power. He tapped a close associate of Elon Musk as the administrator of NASA, which provides Musk's SpaceX with billions of dollars in contracts. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who previously worked as a lobbyist for Qatar, signed off on the legality of Qatar's airplane gift. Zach Witkoff, a founder of the Trump family crypto firm World Liberty Financial, and son of Steve Witkoff, the president's special envoy, announced a $2 billion deal in the United Arab Emirates, just a couple of weeks before his father and Trump traveled there for a presidential visit. Wertheimer said the accumulation of so many conflicts puts Trump on the all-time list of presidential graft. 'He's got the first 10 places on that,' he said. 'He's in the hall of fame of ripping off the presidency for personal gain.' But he said the public would eventually grow upset. 'I think that's going to catch up with him. It's going to take some time, but it's going to catch up with him.' This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Copyright 2025
Daily Mail
18-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
How Donald Trump profits from White House deals during second term
The high-water mark for corruption in the American presidency has long been awarded to Republican Warren Harding who died in office in 1923 after just two years in the White House. He will forever be linked with the 'Teapot Dome' scandal in Wyoming. Harding and several members of his cabinet enriched themselves by hundreds of thousands of dollars (many more millions in today's money) when state lands were leased to private oil companies in return for gifts and kickbacks. In the century since Harding died, cashing in on the presidency to accumulate riches has never really been a thing. Donald Trump is changing all of that. The sins of previous presidents have generally been committed in secret, away from prying eyes. In contrast, the riches are being assembled by Trump and his offspring in plain sight. Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, said Trump was showing a different side in his second incarnation as President, saying he 'now feels liberated to wear his corruption on his sleeve'. At no time has this been more evident than in last week's visit to the Middle East. Diplomacy was part of the rhetoric with his promotion of Saudi Arabia and Syria joining the Abraham Accords – the recognition and trade deals between Israel, the UAE and Morocco. The business of the U.S. has been at the forefront of the agreements reached, with $600billion of deals signed in Saudi Arabia alone, including a ground breaking AI deal for America's computer chip champion Nvidia. In parallel, the president's 'Dragons' Den' has been in overdrive. The pact making the headlines is Qatar's offer to gift the presidency a $400m jumbo jet inspected by Trump at Palm Beach in the weeks after the January inauguration. Much of the gilding, a key element in all of Trump's properties, is already in place. The president is seeking to skip around rules on gifts by arguing the plane is a loan until it becomes a heritage gift to his presidential 'library' after he leaves office. The precedent cited is a retired version of Air Force One, which is on loan from the US military. It is on permanent display in the Ronald Reagan Library, where it is a star attraction. If Ronnie was entitled, why not the 47th president? Less in the public eye are his sons Donald Jr and Eric, who have secured their own Middle East deals. A luxury Trump-branded hotel is scheduled for Dubai. A high-end residential tower is to be built in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and a golf course and villa complex is to be constructed in Qatar. Son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was instrumental in forging the Abraham Accords, and his wife Ivanka have secured $3.5billion of investments in a new private equity fund from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. Luxury hotels, real estate and golf courses are at the core of the Trump family businesses and are a slow burn as they take time to come to fruition. Trump and his family's adventures in cryptocurrency offer a faster payoff. Trump made no secret of his determination to bring crypto into the mainstream of finance before he took office. He rid Wall Street of Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Gary Gensler, who was keeping approvals for cryptocurrencies at bay. And he has disbanded the unit at the U.S. Justice Department bringing prosecutions against crypto cheats and firms shielding terrorist finance. Crypto legislation making its way through Congress is less about protecting consumers and more about approving the Wild West of crypto traders, miners and exchanges. Crypto is the gift which keeps on giving for the President and his family. American Bitcoin, a crypto miner backed by his sons Eric and Donald Jr, is heading for a multi-billion dollar Nasdaq listing. Another scion of the administration, Brandon Lutnick, son of the U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, has said he is forming his own Bitcoin acquisition vehicle. It has garnered support from tech investors Softbank and Tether. Trump's family have also struck crypto gold by attaching their names to pseudo-currencies. A group of traders allegedly scooped $100million by buying Melania Trump's branded crypto in the days before public disclosure. One of the attractions for crypto investors is the use of anonymous wallets, which make transactions hard to trace. It has become a favored source of cash for money laundering and terrorist financing. There has been no suggestion that Trump or any of his family are engaged in such nefarious action. But there is recognition that crypto mining, exchanges, market-making and trading have proved a shortcut to wealth accumulation. A tame Republican-controlled Congress and defanged US Justice Department mean that so far, many of Trump's activities, which in the past might have been considered scandalous, have passed by unchecked. Monetizing the Trump family property and crypto fortunes is proving to be a leitmotif of the president's second term in office.
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
On This Day, April 7: Scandinavian Star ferry fire kills 159
April 7 (UPI) -- On this date in history: In 1862, Union forces under the command of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant defeated the Confederates at Shiloh, Tenn. In 1922, under the direction Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall, petroleum reserves at Wyoming's Teapot Dome Oil Field were leased without competitive bidding to private companies. A Senate investigation ensued, leading to a bribery case that would become known as the Teapot Dome scandal. In 1933, less than a month after President Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to permit the manufacture and sale of beer, the Volstead Act was modified to allow for this request. In 1947, auto pioneer Henry Ford died in Detroit at the age of 83. In 1896, he built his first self-propelled, gas-engine vehicle, and in 1903 incorporated the Ford Motor Company. He is credited for developing the first affordable, mass-produced car, the Model T, and pioneering the assembly line. In 1990, arson fires aboard the ferry Scandinavian Star killed 159 people in Scandinavia's worst post-war maritime disaster. In 2009, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il was re-elected to a third five-year term despite failing health since a reported stroke in August 2008. He died in 2011. In 2011, a 23-year-old former student returned to his public elementary school in Rio de Janeiro and opened fire with two revolvers, killing 12 children and injuring 12 others before shooting himself in the head as police closed in. In 2012, broadcast journalist Mike Wallace, the CBS 60 Minutes icon, died in New Canaan, Conn. He was 93. In 2017, the United States fired 59 Tomahawk missiles into a west Syrian airfield from where it was believed President Bashar al-Assad's regime launched a deadly chemical attack that killed and injured hundreds of civilians. In 2018, forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad launched a gas attack in the town of Douma, killing some 40 people. In 2022, the Senate voted to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman to serve as justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Donald Trump is speedrunning the history of presidential scandals
Every president has their share of misadventures, but only a few are so scandalous that their names echo through history: Teapot Dome, Watergate, Iran-Contra. It's still early, but the odds are good that the second Donald Trump administration will end up with a few scandals of its own, building on the exact behaviors that got past presidents in trouble — including Trump in his first term. Just two months in, Trump and his associates have already attempted to usurp congressional power over spending, brokered norm-breaking legal deals and sought to skirt ethics rules designed to stop self-dealing. Any one of these actions would have led to major problems for a president in the past; to try them all at once is like speedrunning the history of White House scandals. Here's a quick look at how Trump's behavior echoes past scandals: The scandal: Congress passed a law barring Andrew Johnson from firing the secretary of war without its consent. When Johnson tried to remove him anyway, lawmakers impeached him, though they fell one vote short of conviction in the Senate. It was the first impeachment of a president in U.S. history. Why it was bad: Johnson was doing what Congress had specifically barred him from doing in a law that was passed over his veto. What Trump's doing: Congress passed a law in 2023 specifically barring the president from firing or transferring inspectors general without providing 30 days' notice to Congress and a reason for removal. In his first week in office, Trump fired 18 inspectors general without providing the required notice or reason. The scandal: Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall persuaded Warren G. Harding to transfer two large oil reserves to his department, then leased them to two oil tycoons without getting competitive bids. Fall was later convicted of bribery and became the first sitting Cabinet member to go to prison. Why it was bad: Government contracts are supposed to go through a competitive open bid process to guarantee that they aren't just handed out to allies of the president or other federal officials. What Trump's doing: According to a report in The Washington Post that cited unnamed sources, the Federal Aviation Administration is considering canceling a $2.4 billion contract with Verizon to overhaul the air traffic control system and giving it to Trump donor Elon Musk's Starlink. (SpaceX, the parent company of Starlink, posted on X that it has a lease agreement to provide satellite internet kits 'free-of-charge' and denied it is attempting to take over an existing contract but provided little detail.) The scandal: To block damaging material about his administration from coming out, Richard Nixon ordered the attorney general to fire a special prosecutor. When he refused and resigned, Nixon gave the same order to the deputy attorney general, who also refused and resigned, until the third-highest official agreed to do it. Why it was bad: While the president appoints the attorney general, the Department of Justice is supposed to remain independent in its decisions, especially when it comes to investigations involving the president or his associates and allies. What Trump's doing: The Department of Justice ordered federal prosecutors to drop a prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams with prejudice, meaning it could be brought back later. Seven prosecutors resigned rather than carry out the order in what was called the 'Thursday afternoon massacre.' Acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove said in court that the case was dropped because Adams could not communicate with federal immigration officials while being prosecuted. The scandal: Trump temporarily blocked the release of $400 million of congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine in an alleged attempt to get President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden that he hoped would help his re-election campaign. Why it was bad: Under the Constitution, Congress alone has the 'power of the purse,' or the ability to tax and spend money. Trump's reasons for withholding the aid were also politically motivated and would have corrupted Ukraine's justice system. What Trump's doing: Trump has again blocked the release of congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine. While he has not been accused of having any personal political motivation this time, he has been pressuring the country to negotiate a peace agreement with Russia and sign a deal that would give the U.S. access to the country's mineral reserves. This article was originally published on
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Musk's Government Teardown Isn't About Cutting Waste — It's a Land Grab
In one of the opening scenes of the award-winning movie There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis' protagonist, Daniel Plainview, stands with his adopted son, little H.W., atop his shoulders, giving the movie's famous 'I'm an oil man' speech. Plainview uses H.W. as a prop to soften his image, describing himself as a family man, running a family business, as he lobbies to win new contracts for lucrative oil leases out West at the dawn of the gusher age. The movie is loosely based on Upton Sinclair's Oil, a novel depicting the corruption and exploitation that characterized the American oil industry at that time. Sinclair drew his inspiration from the Teapot Dome scandal of the Warren G. Harding administration, a scandal some historians still deem the largest political corruption scandal in American history. Harding's Secretary of the Interior, Albert Bacon Fall, sold several Naval petroleum reserves, including those at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, to private oil companies without competitive bidding, in exchange for personal kickbacks, making Fall a very, very wealthy man. Data is the new oil. Swap in President Trump for Harding and Elon Musk and his young son X for Daniel and H.W., and this, my friends, is the Teapot Thunderdome. Anyone who still views Musk's project to be about improving government efficiency or modernizing government technology or eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse is not playing with a full deck. This is a land grab. Musk has seized nearly every major data repository in the federal government and may now access the Social Security numbers, employment records, banking information, and tax returns of the majority of Americans. If you are a veteran, use Medicare, or have applied for Social Security Disability Insurance, he may have a chunk of your medical history too. The value of this treasure trove of data is hard to calculate — but given Musk's keen interest in amassing enough data to build an artificial intelligence empire with his AI platform, Grok, it is safe to assume he has a pretty good idea. It certainly exceeds the $300 million he spent to put Trump in office. It's not just your personal data he's after either. This is corporate espionage in broad daylight. Musk and his DOGE boys now have access to the business and technology ideas of America's best and brightest. They are thumbing through tens of millions of new business applications at the Small Business Administration in a terrifying game of Shark Tank in reverse. We can only assume the United States Patent and Trademark Office will be their next stop, if they are not there already. Musk has also ransacked the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau where he'll find detailed information on the future competitors of his new digital payment platform collaboration with Visa, X Money. Over at the Food and Drug Administration he'll find immensely valuable information from clinical trials evaluating the safety and efficacy of medical devices, like those of the competitors to his new brain chip company, Neuralink. Meanwhile, Musk is after larger and more lucrative federal contracts for his companies, Starlink, Space X, and Tesla. The fruits of his labor are already bearing: The Federal Aviation Administration announced this week that they'll use Starlink to upgrade its IT systems. Further, he can axe the regulators tasked with keeping an eye on companies. To date, Musk has shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and helped Trump fire labor law enforcers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, both of which have investigated Musk's companies for illegal hostility and harassment of their workers. The Teapot Dome scandal was a wakeup call for policymakers, and they strengthened and passed a number of laws in its wake. Albert Fall became the first Cabinet secretary to go to prison. The Supreme Court ruled that Congress had the power to compel testimony and Congress strengthened the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, regulating campaign finance. Congress also gave the Ways and Means Committee the ability to obtain the tax records of any taxpayer, power they used to eventually secure the public release of Trump's tax returns. Toward the end of There Will Be Blood, Day-Lewis' Plainview lectures his rival, played by Paul Dano, on the cutthroat nature of the oil business. He explains that if they both have a milkshake, but Day-Lewis has a straw that reaches Dano's milkshake, 'I drink your milkshake,' making a loud, exaggerated slurping sound. 'I drink it up,' he concludes. Elon Musk is drinking America's milkshake. We must stop him before he drinks us dry. More from Rolling Stone GOP Leaders Advise Lawmakers to Simply Stop Hosting Town Halls: Report Who Is the Anonymous Data Expert Telling Elon Which Cuts to Make? Trump Eviscerates a Bedrock Public Health and Environmental Protection Law Best of Rolling Stone The Useful Idiots New Guide to the Most Stoned Moments of the 2020 Presidential Campaign Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence
