The Trumps ... 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.Baker's tone suggests that he believes there simply is no outrage about Trump's corruption, even though he acknowledges the reason why there are no official expressions of outrage:
Just last week, Qatar handed over a luxury jet meant for Mr. Trump’s use not just in his official capacity but also for his presidential library after he leaves office. Experts have valued 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Trump personally....
Yet a mark of how much Mr. 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.
There will be no official investigations because Mr. Trump has made sure of it. He has fired government inspectors general and ethics watchdogs, installed partisan loyalists to run the Justice Department, F.B.I. and regulatory agencies and dominated a Republican-controlled Congress unwilling to hold hearings.Baker quotes Paul Rosenzweig, who was a counsel to Ken Starr's investigation of Bill Clinton, who believes the public is indifferent:
“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 percent, the public never cared” and “20 percent, we are overwhelmed and exhausted.”But Baker also notes that the public does care about the plane from Qatar:
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 percent of Americans thought the gift “raises ethical concerns about corruption” ...And he quotes a Never Trump GOP lawyer who, I think, gets the situation exactly right:
“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 Mr. Trump.The #2 story on the Times site also focuses on Trump's corruption, although it's saddled with a disingenuous headline:
Why Vietnam Ignored Its Own Laws to Fast-Track a Trump Family Golf ComplexYes, why did Vietnam do that in the midst of Trump's tariff war? I can't imagine!
The story, written by Damien Cave, makes clear that Vietnam is rapidly expediting a bribe:
This $1.5 billion golf complex outside the capital, Hanoi, as well as plans for a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City, are the Trump family’s first projects in Vietnam — part of a global moneymaking enterprise that no family of a sitting American president has ever attempted on this scale. And as that blitz makes the Trumps richer, it is distorting how countries interact with the United States.There's a lesson here for ordinary Americans who oppose the Trump regime, and it dovetails with something I wrote a month ago.
To fast-track the Trump development, Vietnam has ignored its own laws, legal experts said, granting concessions more generous than what even the most connected locals receive. Vietnamese officials, in a letter obtained by The New York Times, explicitly stated that the project required special support from the top ranks of the Vietnamese government because it was “receiving special attention from the Trump administration and President Donald Trump personally.”
And Vietnamese officials have waved the development along in a moment of high-stakes diplomacy. They face intense pressure to strike a trade deal that would head off President Trump’s threat of steep tariffs, which would hit about 30 percent of Vietnam’s exports.
In April, I told you that anti-Tesla protests had received a surprising amount of media coverage, even in the early days of the Tesla Takedown movement, when demonstrations were small. I'd been at larger protests that got less media coverage. I told you this when the top story in America was Donald Trump's tariff war, which had just begun, and which drove stories about Trump's immigration abuses out of the headlines. The conclusion I drew was that the mainstream media is more interested in business than it is in human rights abuses or the erosion of democracy, or even the economic suffering of ordinary people. General-interest news sites devote a lot of resources to business coverage, and in addition, there are many, many standalone news outlets devoted exclusively to business. Business journalism appeals to well-heeled readers, so the press pays special attention to business.
Which means that even though we want to march against human rights abuses and transfers of wealth from ordinary citizens to the rich, even though we want to denounce the dismantling of important government services, even though we're angry about the theft of our personal data by DOGE, even though we're furious about cuts to scientific research and vaccine denialism, we might want to consider placing a little more emphasis on Donald Trump's corruption -- not because every other horrible thing he's doing is less important, but because the mainstream press is ready to cover Trumpian corruption as a business story. At the very least, The New York Times is ready to cover it.
Trump's unprecedented corruption is potentially a headache for businesspeople around the world, who are accustomed to thinking of America as a relatively honest country. That's why I think activists should focus more on how Trump is using his office to get richer. Peter Baker is practically begging us to express more anger about this, because the Times, and presumably other high-level media outlets, know how to cover it.
