TRUMP IS NO LONGER DOING PUTINISM WRONG

During Donald Trump's first term, it was clear that he was corruptly profiting from the presidency, but he wasn't doing a very good job of it. Sure, he'd overcharge the Secret Service for rooms at his properties, and host foreign dignitaries at his D.C. hotel, but he wasn't getting rich from it -- in fact, his properties had declining revenues, and Forbes says flatly that "Donald Trump lost money during his first term." By contrast, Vladimir Putin had his finger in so many pies in Russia that some observers believed he was the richest man in the world.

But now Forbes reports:

Donald Trump just had the most lucrative year of his life. The president is now worth a record $7.3 billion, up from $4.3 billion in 2024, when he was still running for office.

Rich people are buying Trump's crypto. Nations are approving Trump real estate projects. And CBS News reports on this grift:

Contribute money to the new White House ballroom President Trump is constructing and, in exchange, donors may be able to choose a Trumpian option: their names etched inside the White House forever. At least that's one option that has been discussed.

Also under consideration: listing donor names on a website....

Multiple companies have pledged to donate $5 million or more for what was projected to be a $200 million addition to the executive mansion....

Google, R.J. Reynolds, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, Palantir and NextEra Energy have donated, and so have firms in the tech, manufacturing, banking and health industries, sources told CBS News.

Lockheed Martin is among the companies that have pledged more than $10 million....

A White House official said nearly $200 million has been pledged so far, and fundraising is ongoing.

Apart from the fact that Trump has raised nearly the entire reported cost of the project and is still fundraising, which means he'll apparently pay none of the costs of the ballroom after pledging to cover the entire cost himself, this sure seems like a lot of money just to get your name on a website, or even tucked inside the ballroom. Muckamucks usually want their names right up front. David Geffen Hall. The Sackler Wing.

I assume that most or all of this money is going straight into Trump's pocket, and that taxpayers will be left to cover the cost of the ballroom when Trump is gone. (Cost overruns will be blamed.)

It's obvious that everyone who's giving money to Trump is doing it for the same reason that people give money to Putin: to stay on his good side, to get benefits from the government, to avoid the government's wrath.

I expected Trump to be good at kleptocracy in his first term, but he hasn't seemed to master it until now. Why is that? Is it possible that Trump's good friend Vlad actually sat him down and explained how to do corruption correctly?

Trump also seems to be mastering censorship Putin-style, in a way he didn't during his first term. Garry Kasparov, the Soviet-born chess grandmaster and Putin critic, reminds us of Putin's crackdown on news outlets and entertainers:

In his first annual address to Russia’s Federal Assembly, Putin laid out his vision of “freedom of the press”—that he would not allow the country’s media to be turned into “outlets for disinformation and a means of waging war against the state.”

... The government ratcheted up the pressure to pull shows that didn’t fit their narrative. One early casualty was Kukly (dolls), a puppet show that poked fun at Russia’s elites. NTV dropped a political talk show called Svoboda Slova (freedom of speech) after a pro-Kremlin team took over the network.

The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office summoned top editors and media executives to interrogate them over their finances.

Kremlin officials pressured upstart businessmen to sell their stakes in media conglomerates. Government agents raided network headquarters. The authorities strategically orchestrated mergers to ensure conformity and compliance, sacking “bad oligarchs” and installing “good oligarchs” in their place.

Independent journalists faced libel and defamation lawsuits.

Forget, for a moment, about the most high-profile assassinations of reporters and dissidents in Russia. Those would come later. The government’s campaign of procedural harassment and lawfare made it impossible for journalists and media executives to do their jobs right out of the gate.

It's possible that Trump didn't do any of this in his first term because he knew his government wasn't staffed top to bottom with loyalists. The loyalists running the country in Trump's second term are also radical rightists who seek to purge every institution in America of liberal or Democratic Party influence.

But those people don't really care if Trump gets rich off the presidency. That's not part of their agenda.

Which is why I suspect that Trump might have received tutorials on both corruption and suppression of free speech directly from the master.

Trump could conceivably have read accounts of how Putin consolidated power and got rich in the process -- but that's unlikely. We know Trump doesn't read.

Someone -- Putin or someone familiar with Putin's career -- showed Trump the roadmaps. And now he's following them.