One of the forgotten stories of Donald Trump’s first term came around this time five years ago, when the then-president tried to arrange for a G7 summit to be held at one of his struggling businesses. Even by his standards, it was quite brazen.
Trump, in no uncertain terms, told some of the world’s most powerful leaders that if they wished to participate in an international gathering, they would have to spend quite a bit of money at one of the venues he owns that was short on customers. The Republican had already earned a reputation for welcoming money from foreign governments, but this represented an escalation: Trump was insisting upon money from foreign governments.
To be sure, he ultimately backed off, but the effort was part of an ugly pattern. As The American Prospect’s David Dayen recently explained in an op-ed for The New York Times, “Mr. Trump’s entire term in office was marked by profit-taking schemes and uses of public funds for personal benefit.”
Unfortunately, we can keep going down the same road: Trump also issued corrupt pardons to those who engaged in corruption. Members of his Cabinet faced so many corruption allegations that it was difficult to keep track of them all. For all intents and purposes, the result was effectively the first modern pro-corruption administration.
It’s nevertheless a safe bet that his second term in the White House will be considerably worse.
Indeed, less than a week after Election Day, there’s already some unsettling evidence coming to the fore. The New York Times reported, for example, that the president-elect “has not yet submitted a legally required ethics pledge stating that he will avoid conflicts of interest and other ethical concerns while in office.”
Mr. Trump’s transition team was required to submit the ethics plan by Oct. 1, according to the Presidential Transition Act. While the transition team’s leadership has privately drafted an ethics code and a conflict-of-interest statement governing its staff, those documents do not include language, required under the law, that explains how Mr. Trump himself will address conflicts of interest during his presidency.
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, noted that Trump’s transition team was supposed to sign an agreement with the General Services Administration by Sept. 1. That didn’t happen.
Why does that matter? Because, while that would’ve released millions of dollars in funding to cover transition costs, it also, as the Times’ report noted, would impose a $5,000 cap on donations to the transition team and require the public disclosure of all its donors.
“By refusing to sign that agreement, Mr. Trump effectively faces no limit on contributions and does not need to name his donors publicly,” the article added. “Money raised by the transition is not regulated by any other government agency.”
Those looking to bribe the president-elect, in other words, wouldn’t have to place orders for overpriced wristwatches. But wait, there’s more. The New York Times also reported on Howard Lutnick, the CEO of a financial services firm called Cantor Fitzgerald, whose influential new role is raising eyebrows. As co-chair of the transition team, Mr. Lutnick is in charge of identifying 4,000 new hires to fill the second Trump administration, including antitrust officials, securities lawyers and national security advisers who have global expertise. But Mr. Lutnick has not stepped away from running financial firms that serve corporate clients, traders, cryptocurrency platforms and real estate ventures around the world — all of which are regulated by the same agencies whose appointees he is helping to find.
Given Lutnick’s vast business interests, the Times added, it’s unclear how he might “keep from violating the transition’s own code of ethics.” Looking ahead, there’s little reason for optimism. Indeed, The New Republic’s Greg Sargent recently highlighted a broader context, noting that if Trump moves forward with plans to purge much of the federal workforce, replacing career civil servants with loyalists, Americans might soon see a dynamic in which independent officials “muzzle themselves, both in terms of putting out good government data that contradicts the Trump propaganda line, and in terms of not letting people know, blowing the whistle, when higher-ups, MAGA loyalists types, corrupt the agency.” I suspect that if a pollster were to ask Americans whether they’re comfortable with government corruption, the vast majority would say no. And yet, we’re about to experience a brutal elections-have-consequences moment when it comes to the corrupting of the executive branch of the federal government.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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