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Sydney Morning Herald
6 days ago
- Health
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘A place of killing': The US aid agency sowing chaos in Gaza
The aerial photographs show five narrow lanes made of high metal fences wedged between two artificial mounds of earth and topped with barbed wire. Inside, hundreds of people are crammed under the baking sun. The sight of ordinary Gazans corralled into cages is not the image Israel's reputation managers were after. But, just over a week into its controversial new aid delivery scheme to bypass Hamas using a US contractor, that is what they are faced with. That, and viral videos of civilians running for their lives to the sound of gunfire, amid accusations – bitterly denied by Israel – that more than 20 were shot dead by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) on Sunday as order disintegrated at a distribution centre in the south of the Strip. One man who spoke to The London Telegraph said he found the centre 'terrifying' and 'like a prison', but that he was forced there – kilometres from his temporary home – out of fear that his children would starve. Another called it 'a place of killing'. Fuelling the international criticism is the nature of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the American company created to deliver the new system, with persistent suggestions of CIA involvement, opaque funding and concealed Israeli control. This has been enhanced by condemnation from the UN and other large aid NGOs, which want nothing to do with the GHF and accuse it of politicising aid. After Sunday's alleged shooting, and new claims of gunfire killing more than 20 people overnight, the project's credibility is on a knife-edge. Loading From Israel's point of view, the new system makes perfect sense. The government argues that under the previous model, which it cut off entirely at the beginning of March, Hamas robbed the aid trucks blind – the UN denies this – then sold the food, fuel and medical supplies back to civilians, thus cementing their control over the population and financing their terror infrastructure. By contrast, the new arrangement requires people to travel to four purpose-built distribution centres in the south of the Strip where – it was promised – they would be screened to make sure they are deserving civilians and not terrorists. The idea, in principle, is that while the IDF provides a wider blanket of security, Gazans themselves do not interact with Israeli soldiers, but deal directly with the foundation staff and associated security contractors. Some reports suggest these contractors are paid more than $US1000 a day. 'Places of killing' The UN and legacy NGOs, which used to deliver aid into communities through more than a hundred drop-off points, say this offends basic humanitarian principles, trapping people between starvation and a long and dangerous journey. Omar Baraka, 40, from Khan Younis, said: 'We go to dangerous red zones, the army asks us to walk for several kilometres. 'There is no order in the place, it's very chaotic. 'Tens of thousands of citizens go there. The organisation delivered aid in the first two days, then the centres became places of killing.' Salem Al-Ahmad, an 18-year-old high school student, has ventured to the GHF site on several occasions to try to pick up flour for his family. 'The situation required getting food and saving yourself from death,' he said. 'Anyone who gets aid has to run back quickly, about three kilometres, because the army starts shooting to empty the area of civilians. 'I found a lot of food lying on the ground because it is difficult to carry and run with it. I only had 1kg bags of flour so I could run from the gunfire.' Israeli government officials and their supporters in the press argue that, despite the chaotic scenes, the early days of the new scheme represents a triumph. This is because it shows Gaza's civilian population has passed through the 'fear barrier' – in other words, it shows they are now prepared to defy the terror group's commands not to engage with the GHF. There is certainly evidence that Hamas has tried to put obstacles – some physical, others in the form of propaganda – between the Gazan civilians and the new aid system. It is far less certain to what extent the group has been behind the scenes of chaos at the new distribution centres themselves. Critics say that the scenes of disorder are simply a function of a desperate, starving population and inexperienced aid distributors. Aside from gunfire, flashbangs and smoke grenades have been thrown. Meanwhile, multiple people say that no serious attempt at screening is made. On Monday night, UN human rights chief Volker Turk told the BBC the way humanitarian aid is now being delivered is 'unacceptable' and 'dehumanising'. 'I think what it shows is utter disregard for civilians. Can you imagine people that have been absolutely desperate for food, for medicine, for almost three months and then they have to run for it or try to get it in the most desperate circumstances? Mr Turk told the BBC World Service's Newshour program. Aside from the practical difficulties the new system imposes, it has been accused of serving Benjamin Netanyahu's agenda by forcing the population into the largely levelled south of the Strip, leaving the IDF clear to execute Operation Gideon's Chariot, which, sources have said, will see a similarly widespread demolition of property. Loading Some have even questioned whether the GHF model is a crucial component of an attempt to realise Donald Trump's 'riviera' vision for Gaza, which would see the population displaced ahead of a comprehensive redevelopment. While the president himself now appears lukewarm about the scheme, there are some in Israel's government – notably Defence Minister Israel Katz – who allude to it often. Aside from its performance on the ground, the origins and make-up of the GHF and its partner organisation, Safe Reach Solutions (SRS), continue to provoke comment. The latter is headed by Philip Reilly, a CIA veteran, who is said to have played a role in training the Contra rebels in Nicaragua in the 1980s, and was then the first agency officer into Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks, where he went on to be station chief. SRS previously had the contract to police traffic and people along a main north-south road in Gaza during the January-March ceasefire. A recent investigation by The New York Times suggests that an informal network of powerful individuals in both the IDF and the prime minister's office, known as the Mikveh Yisrael Foru, had been aiming towards a parallel aid system that cut out the NGOs since December 2023. It claimed that the group had identified Reilly as its candidate to lead such a mission as early as January last year, and that the January contract was a key step in convincing Netanyahu to hire him for the aid distribution job. The GHF is a separately registered company, although it was registered by the same lawyer and previously had the same spokesman. A $US100 million donation to the GHF got tongues wagging in Israel that this was really the work of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency – indeed, the former defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said as much. The GHF denies this, saying the donation was from a Western European country, but declined to name which one. 'Tired from malnutrition' Jake Wood, a former US Marine, quit as chief executive of the foundation the day before aid distribution operations began, claiming it violated 'humanitarian principles'. He had previously said: 'I would participate in no plan in any capacity if it was an extension of an IDF plan or an Israeli government plan to forcibly dislocate people anywhere within Gaza.' Back in Rafah, Ahmed Musa, a 34-year-old from Khan Younis, spoke of despair at Sunday's events. 'I left at dawn to go to the American aid centre in the Mawasi area of Rafah,' he said. 'I went there under duress, as I have four hungry children who are tired from malnutrition. 'The scene was terrifying,' he added. 'I sat and cried bitterly over my helplessness that I did not receive anything. But I will try again.'
The Age
6 days ago
- General
- The Age
‘A place of killing': The US aid agency sowing chaos in Gaza
The aerial photographs show five narrow lanes made of high metal fences wedged between two artificial mounds of earth and topped with barbed wire. Inside, hundreds of people are crammed under the baking sun. The sight of ordinary Gazans corralled into cages is not the image Israel's reputation managers were after. But, just over a week into its controversial new aid delivery scheme to bypass Hamas using a US contractor, that is what they are faced with. That, and viral videos of civilians running for their lives to the sound of gunfire, amid accusations – bitterly denied by Israel – that more than 20 were shot dead by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) on Sunday as order disintegrated at a distribution centre in the south of the Strip. One man who spoke to The London Telegraph said he found the centre 'terrifying' and 'like a prison', but that he was forced there – kilometres from his temporary home – out of fear that his children would starve. Another called it 'a place of killing'. Fuelling the international criticism is the nature of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the American company created to deliver the new system, with persistent suggestions of CIA involvement, opaque funding and concealed Israeli control. This has been enhanced by condemnation from the UN and other large aid NGOs, which want nothing to do with the GHF and accuse it of politicising aid. After Sunday's alleged shooting, and new claims of gunfire killing more than 20 people overnight, the project's credibility is on a knife-edge. Loading From Israel's point of view, the new system makes perfect sense. The government argues that under the previous model, which it cut off entirely at the beginning of March, Hamas robbed the aid trucks blind – the UN denies this – then sold the food, fuel and medical supplies back to civilians, thus cementing their control over the population and financing their terror infrastructure. By contrast, the new arrangement requires people to travel to four purpose-built distribution centres in the south of the Strip where – it was promised – they would be screened to make sure they are deserving civilians and not terrorists. The idea, in principle, is that while the IDF provides a wider blanket of security, Gazans themselves do not interact with Israeli soldiers, but deal directly with the foundation staff and associated security contractors. Some reports suggest these contractors are paid more than $US1000 a day. 'Places of killing' The UN and legacy NGOs, which used to deliver aid into communities through more than a hundred drop-off points, say this offends basic humanitarian principles, trapping people between starvation and a long and dangerous journey. Omar Baraka, 40, from Khan Younis, said: 'We go to dangerous red zones, the army asks us to walk for several kilometres. 'There is no order in the place, it's very chaotic. 'Tens of thousands of citizens go there. The organisation delivered aid in the first two days, then the centres became places of killing.' Salem Al-Ahmad, an 18-year-old high school student, has ventured to the GHF site on several occasions to try to pick up flour for his family. 'The situation required getting food and saving yourself from death,' he said. 'Anyone who gets aid has to run back quickly, about three kilometres, because the army starts shooting to empty the area of civilians. 'I found a lot of food lying on the ground because it is difficult to carry and run with it. I only had 1kg bags of flour so I could run from the gunfire.' Israeli government officials and their supporters in the press argue that, despite the chaotic scenes, the early days of the new scheme represents a triumph. This is because it shows Gaza's civilian population has passed through the 'fear barrier' – in other words, it shows they are now prepared to defy the terror group's commands not to engage with the GHF. There is certainly evidence that Hamas has tried to put obstacles – some physical, others in the form of propaganda – between the Gazan civilians and the new aid system. It is far less certain to what extent the group has been behind the scenes of chaos at the new distribution centres themselves. Critics say that the scenes of disorder are simply a function of a desperate, starving population and inexperienced aid distributors. Aside from gunfire, flashbangs and smoke grenades have been thrown. Meanwhile, multiple people say that no serious attempt at screening is made. On Monday night, UN human rights chief Volker Turk told the BBC the way humanitarian aid is now being delivered is 'unacceptable' and 'dehumanising'. 'I think what it shows is utter disregard for civilians. Can you imagine people that have been absolutely desperate for food, for medicine, for almost three months and then they have to run for it or try to get it in the most desperate circumstances? Mr Turk told the BBC World Service's Newshour program. Aside from the practical difficulties the new system imposes, it has been accused of serving Benjamin Netanyahu's agenda by forcing the population into the largely levelled south of the Strip, leaving the IDF clear to execute Operation Gideon's Chariot, which, sources have said, will see a similarly widespread demolition of property. Loading Some have even questioned whether the GHF model is a crucial component of an attempt to realise Donald Trump's 'riviera' vision for Gaza, which would see the population displaced ahead of a comprehensive redevelopment. While the president himself now appears lukewarm about the scheme, there are some in Israel's government – notably Defence Minister Israel Katz – who allude to it often. Aside from its performance on the ground, the origins and make-up of the GHF and its partner organisation, Safe Reach Solutions (SRS), continue to provoke comment. The latter is headed by Philip Reilly, a CIA veteran, who is said to have played a role in training the Contra rebels in Nicaragua in the 1980s, and was then the first agency officer into Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks, where he went on to be station chief. SRS previously had the contract to police traffic and people along a main north-south road in Gaza during the January-March ceasefire. A recent investigation by The New York Times suggests that an informal network of powerful individuals in both the IDF and the prime minister's office, known as the Mikveh Yisrael Foru, had been aiming towards a parallel aid system that cut out the NGOs since December 2023. It claimed that the group had identified Reilly as its candidate to lead such a mission as early as January last year, and that the January contract was a key step in convincing Netanyahu to hire him for the aid distribution job. The GHF is a separately registered company, although it was registered by the same lawyer and previously had the same spokesman. A $US100 million donation to the GHF got tongues wagging in Israel that this was really the work of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency – indeed, the former defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said as much. The GHF denies this, saying the donation was from a Western European country, but declined to name which one. 'Tired from malnutrition' Jake Wood, a former US Marine, quit as chief executive of the foundation the day before aid distribution operations began, claiming it violated 'humanitarian principles'. He had previously said: 'I would participate in no plan in any capacity if it was an extension of an IDF plan or an Israeli government plan to forcibly dislocate people anywhere within Gaza.' Back in Rafah, Ahmed Musa, a 34-year-old from Khan Younis, spoke of despair at Sunday's events. 'I left at dawn to go to the American aid centre in the Mawasi area of Rafah,' he said. 'I went there under duress, as I have four hungry children who are tired from malnutrition. 'The scene was terrifying,' he added. 'I sat and cried bitterly over my helplessness that I did not receive anything. But I will try again.'
The Age
26-05-2025
- Business
- The Age
The Trumps are monetising the presidency like never before. But where is the outrage?
When Hillary Clinton was US first lady, a furore erupted over reports that she had once made $US100,000 from a $US1000 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 US President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos agreed to finance a promotional film about first lady Melania Trump that will reportedly put $US28 million ($43 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? Furore? 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 monetise the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House. The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism have been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $US320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $US500,000 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 $US200 million, more than all 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 normalisation 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 behaviour in Washington. Loading 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 per cent, the public never cared' and '20 per cent, 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,' White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. '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 $US5.1 billion in March, a full $US1.2 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 criticised anyway, so it made no sense to hold back any more. '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 per cent 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 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 profit making, with some preferring to concentrate on economic issues. Senator Christopher Murphy has been leading the charge in the other direction, making floor speeches and leading news conferences 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 mobilisation 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 favour 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 represented '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. Loading 'He's not trying to give the appearance that he's doing the right thing any more,' said Fred Wertheimer, founder of Democracy 21 and a long-time 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 labelling 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 funnelling money into his family coffers have interests in government policies. Some of the crypto investors who attended his dinner on 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 meme coin after buying more than $US40 million worth, earning him a spot in an even more exclusive private VIP reception with the president before the dinner. The US 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 US 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 aeroplane 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 $US2 billion deal in the United Arab Emirates, just a couple of weeks before his father and Trump travelled there for a presidential visit. Wertheimer said the accumulation of so many conflicts put 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.'
Sydney Morning Herald
26-05-2025
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
The Trumps are monetising the presidency like never before. But where is the outrage?
When Hillary Clinton was US first lady, a furore erupted over reports that she had once made $US100,000 from a $US1000 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 US President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos agreed to finance a promotional film about first lady Melania Trump that will reportedly put $US28 million ($43 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? Furore? 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 monetise the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House. The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism have been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $US320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $US500,000 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 $US200 million, more than all 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 normalisation 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 behaviour in Washington. Loading 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 per cent, the public never cared' and '20 per cent, 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,' White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. '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 $US5.1 billion in March, a full $US1.2 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 criticised anyway, so it made no sense to hold back any more. '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 per cent 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 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 profit making, with some preferring to concentrate on economic issues. Senator Christopher Murphy has been leading the charge in the other direction, making floor speeches and leading news conferences 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 mobilisation 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 favour 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 represented '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. Loading 'He's not trying to give the appearance that he's doing the right thing any more,' said Fred Wertheimer, founder of Democracy 21 and a long-time 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 labelling 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 funnelling money into his family coffers have interests in government policies. Some of the crypto investors who attended his dinner on 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 meme coin after buying more than $US40 million worth, earning him a spot in an even more exclusive private VIP reception with the president before the dinner. The US 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 US 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 aeroplane 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 $US2 billion deal in the United Arab Emirates, just a couple of weeks before his father and Trump travelled there for a presidential visit. Wertheimer said the accumulation of so many conflicts put 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.'
AU Financial Review
05-05-2025
- Politics
- AU Financial Review
White House to pay migrants $1500 to leave US
Washington DC | Pushing forward with its mass deportation agenda, President Donald Trump's administration said Monday that it would pay $US1000 ($1545) to immigrants who are in the United States illegally and return to their home country voluntarily. The Department of Homeland Security said in a news release that it would also pay for travel assistance — and that people who use an app called CBP Home to tell the government they plan to return home will be 'deprioritised' for detention and removal by immigration enforcement. AP
