Corruption beyond parody

"The best things in life are free
But you can keep 'em for the birds and bees
Now give me money (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want)
That's what I want, yeah (that's what I want)
That's what I want"
         Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford, 1959, covered by The Beatles, 1963

He's not hiding the grift. He's bragging about it.

No grift, no self-dealing, no outrage is too much.

I read the news today, oh boy. Trump's financial disclosure, released Tuesday, shows more than $1.4 billion in crypto income for 2025: $635 million from selling his own meme coin, over $594 million from World Liberty Financial, the venture he runs with his sons, and $196 million more from cashing out a stablecoin company. Trump's trusting fans, the investors who bought the meme coin at launch have mostly been wiped out — it peaked near $74 and now trades around $1.68.

Then there's the pardon. Changpeng Zhao, who built Binance into the world's largest crypto exchange, pleaded guilty to money laundering violations, paid a $4 billion fine, and served 
four months. Around the same time, an Abu Dhabi state fund put $2 billion into Binance — paid in a stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, the Trump family's crypto company. Zhao received a full, unconditional pardon from Trump. Republicans in the House and Senate could cry foul. They don't.

 The Wall Street Journal notices

Don Jr. and Eric Trump bought into a shell company that merged with a stake in a tungsten mine in Kazakhstan — a deal that surfaced right after Kazakhstan's president met with their father, backed by $1.6 billion in U.S. government support. Separately, they're behind Powerus, a drone company founded about a year ago that landed a Pentagon contract and is now pitching interceptor drones to Gulf states under fire from Iran.

The Trump Organization has more than twenty foreign developments in the pipeline. In Vietnam, farmers were pushed off their land to clear space for a Trump resort. In Serbia, the government fast-tracked a Trump Tower in Belgrade developed by Jared Kushner using emergency procedures that got the country's culture minister arrested. Licensing fees from the UAE alone topped $20 million in the latest filing. None of this requires imagination. It's in the disclosures.

Qatar gave Trump a Boeing 747-8 worth roughly $400 million, and as of today it's flying as Air Force One. The Constitution has an Emoluments Clause: Foreign governments cannot hand gifts to a sitting president. The administration's answer was to donate it to the Air Force on paper and note that Trump gets to keep it for his library when he's done.

Teapot Dome cost a cabinet secretary his freedom. Nixon's slush fund was a few hundred thousand dollars and the cover-up ended a presidency. Grant's cronies skimmed whiskey tax revenue, and seventh graders learned about this blot on Grant's record in Mr. Graves' history class a century later. This was wrongdoing, disreputable. The public knew it as such, so the men involved tried to hide it. 

What's different now isn't just the size, though the size is staggering. What's different is that nobody is hiding anything. The crypto income is on an official disclosure form. The pardon was announced from the White House. The mine deal, the drone contracts, the foreign towers — reported in real time, defended on camera, shrugged off by a Republican Congress that has decided this is simply how the man does business.

Openness and shamelessness isn't innocence. It is the opposite. It reveals both the brazen corruption of Trump, and the corrupt standards of the people who could put a stop to it by threatening impeachment -- but who are silent. As few as five Republican House members could join Democrats and make an impeachment a reality. Impeachment sends a message to Trump and the public that this is wrong. It is the power Congress has that would get through to Trump that this corruption is wrong, unacceptable, un-American.  And that we are better than this.

But we aren't. There won't be any consequences from Republicans who speak up, and Trump knows it. They are more afraid of him than they are of the damage to the country and the judgment of history.

Schoolchildren are watching and learning.

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