For the Trump Family, Corruption Seems Second Nature

< the presidency|250||>

To say that Donald Trump is the most corrupt president we’ve ever had is an empty comparison because there’s no one remotely close enough to warrant a comparison. As his second presidency progresses, he views himself untethered, free to do whatever he pleases.
We have seen this coming. He has twice said,

“I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the President of the United States.”

So he thinks nothing stops him from financially rewarding the January 6 insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol to steal the presidency for him. And recently he said,

“My own morality, my own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

That was his rebuff to the constraints of international law, but it applies generally given his total lack of any morality. It’s what tells him that what others consider corrupt is simply his due.

We covered the abject corruption of the $1.8 billion so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund as well as Trump’s bid to pay himself $230 million in taxpayer money for the audacity of the government indicting him for his attempted overthrow of the election and for stealing government documents, so here follows a selection of other misdeeds from Trump and family.

corruption on a breathtaking scale

Overseeing a $1.3 trillion empire in the United Arab Emirates and brother of its president, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan has for a time yearned to be in the A.I. game. He lobbied the Biden administration to gain access to the most advanced U.S. computer chips but without success. His companies were viewed as too involved with China and such electronic firms as Huawei.

Trump’s election to the presidency made all the difference. Unknown until The Wall Street Journal broke the story this February, four days before his inauguration, emissaries of the sheikh signed a deal to pay $500 million for 49% of the Trump family’s then fledging World Liberty cryptocurrency venture. Of the half billion dollars, $187 million was to be siphoned off for Trump family entities, just for being Trumps, and $31 million would go to World Liberty co-founder and Trump pal Steve Witkoff and family.

But that’s not all. In March 2025, World Liberty launched USD1, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar. Buyers’ funds would be backed by U.S. treasuries and other cash equivalents. In May, the U.A.E. unannounced that rather than spend dollars directly, it would buy $2 billion of the stablecoins to purchase a stake in Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. Running the transaction through World Liberty would give the Trump and Witkoff owners about $80 million a year in interest from the money invested in Treasuries. Over the objections of government ethics experts the funds flowed into World Liberty in April.

And so, what followed? Unsurprisingly, in May Trump gave the go ahead for the U.A.E. to have 500,000 of the A.I. grade chips Tahnoon had long sought. Considering the possibility that Abu Dhabi might share the chips with China, it said that national security risk matters less to Trump and the opportunist Witkoffs than their insatiable greed.

like father, like son

In November, the Pentagon announced it would loan $620 million to Vulcan Elements, a two-year-old North Carolina rare-earth magnet company. Three months before, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital company had taken a stake of undisclosed size in the company. Don and the Pentagon said he wasn’t involved in the loan; the company said there was no political favoritism. Innocence on all sides.

Days ago, a ProPublica investigation discovered that it was the White House that asked the Pentagon to loan the money. Adviser Peter Navarro, a friend of Don Jr., had made the request. Dozens of companies are being considered for funding by the Pentagon in its belated realization that it must expand procurement to more than a few giant suppliers, but Vulcan was the only funding initiated by the White House, an official at the Pentagon told ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Not only that, the Pentagon was pressured to put the loan through in just weeks. “The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” another Pentagon official told ProPublica,

“While the rare earth magnet startup was only valued at about $200 million when Don Jr.’s firm invested in it, today, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that the startup is now valued at nearly $2 billion”,

Jen Psaki reported on Ms Now.

gotta dance

Trump’s peculiar ballroom mania started out (after destroying the East Wing) as a $200 million
Digital rendering of ballroom, referred to as “East Wing Modernization”, with dwarfed White House in background.

structure for which taxpayers would pay “not one dime of government money.” So who would pay for it?

“It’s a private thing, yeah, I’ll do it, and we’ll probably have some donors or whatever”

… was Trump’s suspect answer. The press release for the project said, “President Trump, and other patriot donors, have generously committed to donating the funds.”

Trump then doubled the building’s size to 90,000 square feet to accommodate a thousand guests, dwarfing the White House itself, and exploding its budgeted cost to $400 million. Yet the president was still saying in March, “This is taxpayer-free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents.”

Trump only only bothered to seek approval of his project from the Commission of Fine Arts after excavation had begun. He got the commission’s sign-off by firing its previous members and replacing them with his own.

Then, a month ago, after the shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner, Senate Republicans grafted $1 billion onto an immigration enforcement bill supposedly to fund “security adjustments and upgrades”. A billion? Far more than the ballroom itself? The money would not pay for the building, they said. But building construction and any build-in of security measures occur simultaneously, so it’s a safe bet that construction and security costs will commingle and mostly be labeled as security in any post facto accounting. Symptomatic is that Trump is playing up security, talking of plans for sniper ports and a drone port on the roof. It’s becoming a fort. And where’s the donor list?

Democrats are wise to Republicans shifting the cost of Trump’s vanity project to taxpayers and will not vote for it.

Trump chose the contractor for the once private project, but if the highly controversial $1 billion passes in Congress, this will be a no-bid choice of vendors in yet another Trump breach of law.

hyping his portfolio

No president has ever actively traded in the stock market while in office. Every president since Reagan has either transferred their assets to a blind trust managed by independent trustees or sold off their shares to preclude conflicts of interest.

All senior federal officials must file disclosure forms quarterly that report their financial holdings and activity. Trump’s for this year’s first quarter was jaw-dropping. His accounts showed more than 3,700 trades with total buy and sell volume between $220 million and $750 million stock (the disclosure forms ask only for ranges not exact dollars).

The Trump Organization protests that the President’s holdings are held in a trust managed by his children with trades executed by third-party financial institutions with sole authority over investment decisions.

Strange, then, that Trump seems to know what stocks the trust holds. Palantir Technologies has billions of dollars in contracts with the Trump administration and a $1.3 billion contract with the Pentagon. Trump’s account made nine buys of Palantir stock worth up to $680,000 in the first quarter and even promoted the stock on Truth Social. He has done the same — promoted companies after his trust bought their stocks — with Apple, Dell and other companies, even TKO, the parent company of UFC, which is about to stage a “freedom fight” on White House grounds.

In Dell’s case, his portfolio added in February between $1 million and $5 million in. He told us, “Go out and buy a Dell computer…They make a great product.” Last week it was announced that Dell had secured a $9.7 billion Pentagon contract. The share price surged.

Trump’s unbounded avarice is rife with conflicts like no president before him.

patronage

From his first days in office in 2017, Trump profited handsomely not only from foreign entities wishing to gain favor by patronizing Trump-owned properties, but from his engineering the use of those properties by the government, with we taxpayers thereby paying the tab to Trump businesses.

Foreign government figures made it a point to stay at Trump hotels in New York, Las Vegas, and D.C.’s converted post office, where, for example, Malaysia paid for a $10,000-a-night suite for its prime minister. A study of only the first two years of Trump’s first term (the current administration throttled access to further years’ data) showed China alone spending $5,572,548. Trump at a campaign rally showed what was to come:

“Saudi Arabia, I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”

Political groups can hardly say no when Trump pressures them to stay at his golf club estate at Bedminster, New Jersey, and his golf clubs in Doral, Florida, and Sterling, Virginia. Mar-a-Lago is the place to go to lobby for an audience with the president, who has raised the cost to join several times to the current rate of $1,000, which is only the beginning of what members spend on food and drink

Trump has his Secret Service detachment staying at these facilities. In two analyses, watchdogs and congressional investigators tallied up to $628,000 in one and up to $2 million in another that the Secret Service paid to Trump-owned hotels, clubs, and golf properties over the four years of Trump’s first presidency. The Secret Service had to pay $53,000 to Trump interests for his golf trip to Aberdeen, Scotland, with room rates of $900 a night. That’s taxpayer money Trump is grifting.

Trump has steered the G20 summit to Doral this November. He says he’ll charge everyone at cost. Who is to decide what cost is?

Flack Anna Kelly at the White House assures us:

“President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public — which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media. There are no conflicts of interest.”

draining the pool

Painting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is yet another no-bid contract award in violation of federal law, the Competition in Contracting Act. Trump simply called his pool guy. “He does incredible work with swimming pools”.

He drew upon an emergency exemption to avoid bids, as if turning the pool blue for the 250th anniversary which no one but Trump thought should be done was an emergency. The $6.9 million cost quote has since doubled. Just as he destroyed the East Wing and paved over the Rose Garden, Trump ignored protocols for cost reviews and aesthetic approvals for the pool conversion, treating the nation’s capital as his “imperial realm” as The New York Times put it.

the ultimate grift

Trump launched a meme coin, $TRUMP, before last year’s inauguration and put out the word that the top 220 buyers would be invited to a dinner he would host at his Virginia golf club, and the top 25 among them would be asked to visit him at the White House.

A bidding war ensued among those wishing to gain access to Trump 2.0. Winners such as Justin Son, who reportedly paid some $40 million for Trump’s coin, came from the world over, many of them major crypto players from Asia seeking to get regulatory rulings that would allow their entry into the U.S. marketplace. Sun had been under investigation by the SEC and DOJ for securities fraud but after Mr. Trump took office, the probes were dropped.

Buyers were not making campaign contributions. The money went directly to Trump. The president was profiting by selling access. The Constitution bans a president from receiving foreign gifts or money without congressional consent but who is there in this administration to hold this president to account? And the president (also the vice president) is exempt from conflict of interest law. The Supreme Court has decided in recent years that bribes paid to office holders are really just “gratuities” for public service.

So what became of $TRUMP? By this February, more than 810,000 buyers had lost $2 billion on the coin. Its price dropped precipitously not long after it hit the market. But those who bought the coin on issue and quickly sold it to gullible Trump fans saw huge windfalls. Fifty-eight investors who bought the coin each earned at least $10 million, data showed. The Trump family and business partners made about $100 million in original sales and trading fees from the venture according to The Times and The Week.

the company he keeps

Changpeng Zhao owns Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange. In 2023 he pleaded guilty to money laundering and spent four months in a U.S. prison. Binance was not allowed to operate in the U.S. but Mr. Zhao, who was anxious to get a pardon from Trump, became very helpful to World Liberty, the Trump-Wickoff firm that created the stablecoin USD1. Binance provided some of the underlying technology for the stablecoin gratis. Binance makes money by charging transaction fees when cryptocurrency changes hands, but it waived the fee for traders who wanted to convert other stablecoins to USD1. Zhao ran USD1 promotions. Accounts holding USD1 were eligible for weekly rewards from the $40 million “grand prize pool”. Binance began to pay outlandish percents in interest. USD1 ownership zoomed. This February the total crossed $5 billion.

The upshot of all this favoritism for Trump’s business? Mr. Zhao got his pardon last October and Binance, with restriction in certain states, now operates in the U.S. Both sides say there were no quid quo pros, everything at arm’s length, no conflicts of interest.

Once again The Journal is on the case. In May it reported that Iran had run some $850 billion through Binance over two years to keep money flowing to its military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Foreign law-enforcement tracked money flowing through Binance accounts to Iranian entities associated with the regime as recently as this May. Binance denied this and filed a lawsuit against The Journal.

double dip

Acting Attorney General and Trump appointee for the post, Todd Blanche, has decreed that tax audits of the entire Trump family and businesses up to the present day must end and any I.R.S. tax claims cancelled. Makes one wonder what tax liabilities is Trump hiding and has had his dissolute AG sweep away?

Well, here’s something: Trump built a 92-story skyscraper on the Chicago River some 20 years ago that proved to be a money loser. On his 2008 tax returns he declared the building “worthless” in the throes of the Great Recession for reason of sales lagging too far behind his ability to cover debt. Trump wrote off $651 million in losses that year. The Times and ProPublica reported this in an investigation two years ago.

Then, says the reporting, he moved the asset into a partnership he controlled where he wrote off another $168 million pertaining to the building across a ten year span. The I.R.S. dispute accuses him of double-dipping — writing off the building against his tax obligations twice.

We can picture Trump asking Todd Blanche, who has stooped to criminality to get that attorney general nomination, to do him the favor of thinking up some wording that will save him an estimated $100 million in this Chicago corruption caper. We see only Blanche’s signature, not that of I.R.S. chief Frank Bisignano. How is it that Blanche decides I.R.S. policy?