by Rick Wilson
No, Trump, a man who is sui generis in so many shitty ways, has taken the White House and the nation to new lows when it comes to corruption. Far from draining the hated swamp, the Trump administration careens from one scandal to the next. America watches transfixed as one after another personage is fired or quits, investigations are launched into all kinds of possible wrongdoing, and lobbyists carry on in a rumspringa that a Hollywood screenwriter would find absurdly overdrawn.
Democrats, who too often focus on policy, not the players, are finally catching on. With the 2018 Democratic takeover of the House, the oversight function of the legislative branch is getting a long-needed workout. Instead of chasing deep-state demons as Fredo Nunes did during the first two years of the Trump administration, the Democrats are finally investigating the extraordinary degree and depth of corruption that orbits Trump. They’re moving too damn slow, but they are moving nevertheless.
The grifter demimonde cashing in on Trump should come as no surprise. His lawlessness and contempt for ethics is a feature, not a bug. He ran as “too rich to be bought” but governs as “hey, sailor, wanna date?” While the scammers have always been a part of political fundraising, this Trump generation is exceptionally shameless. Trump’s venality and willingness to fleece the GOP rubes doesn’t repel them—it’s what attracts them.
Democrats must understand that corruption is always a killer app in politics, parting even hard partisans from candidates. The referendum against Trump is in part an anti-corruption message, highlighting through clear narratives and illustrations that Trump is a tool of K Street and that the D.C. corruption that swing state voters associate with their own misfortunes is more extreme and corrosive than ever. If Democrats can’t tell Americans a tale of how greed, corruption, and self-dealing define Trump’s Washington, they need better writers.
FOUR MORE YEARS: A DEEPER AND MORE FETID SWAMP
Trump’s followers, sycophants, clingers, and the joyous corps of lobbyists have an obvious plan for 2020 and beyond. It’s a plan that works on one assumption: Get while the getting is good. Eat, drink, and snatch all the federal largesse we can, for tomorrow we may die, or be indicted.
Whether it’s lobbyists for Wall Street banks, big coal, the payday-loan industry, private prisons, or any other number of economic vampires, the Trump kakistocracy really does have something for everyone: nepotism, cronyism, pay-for-play, backroom deals for donors, abuse of power, lying to Congress, threats and intimidation, and, as a bonus, monetizing cruelty to children. And the first term was just a preview.
The next four years will make the Trump administration’s first four pale in comparison. The kleptocratic festival of crony capitalism, lobbyist giveaways, consumer-screwing protections for predatory lenders, environmental rapine, immigration cruelty, and fiscal insanity in his first term was a warmup act. In the second, all the political restraints are off.
Trump, who ran for president to reboot his failing brand and faltering image, has monetized every moment of his occupancy of the Oval Office to sell hotel rooms and golf course memberships. He’ll be looking for the big cash-out in ways no prior president ever could. Trump Tower Pyongyang, here we come.
Trump and his scavenger spawn Don Jr. and Eric will spend the next four years working every angle they can to springboard his postelection empire of middle-tier resorts into every third-world satrapy with a decent beach and lax extradition standards.
Corruption is a disease. In healthy societies, it’s a chronic but mild ailment. With a moderately balanced diet and exercise plan, and occasional treatments, it’s bothersome but rarely fatal. It’s why governments (hey, even ours) have laws against self-dealing and nepotism, government ethics watchdogs, mandatory conflict-of-interest reporting requirements, and bright lines on using government office for personal enrichment. Those things function as an ethics immune system that sends T-cells racing to the source of infections and diseases and fighting back.
We no longer live in a healthy political society.
Trump’s fluke win put him in the most powerful office in the land, and alongside his Large Adult Sons and his older daughter, the Trump enterprise has cashed in, bigly. Trump himself is, of course, still intimately involved with the family business.
The endless revisions of his con-in-law Jared Kushner’s financial and personnel security reports point to how that side of the Trump family business is monetizing government. Did Kushner’s backing of a Saudi/UAE blockade of Qatar pressure Brookfield Asset Management—which just happens to be largely owned by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund—into making a deal to save the Kushner family’s fortunes? Given Jared’s repeated evasions and revisions to his financial disclosures, we will likely never know. I, for one, would be shocked to find gambling going on here in Casablanca.
As for Trump’s financial disclosures, to say nothing of his elusive tax returns, the degree to which any sane person puts the slightest credibility in them is a key marker on the sucker scale. You’d have to be as dumb as Deutsche Bank to believe them, but there have been no punishments, no sanctions, no consequences. Given the House Democrats’ unwillingness to hammer Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin for ordering the cover-up of Trump’s tax returns and for refusing to comply with black-letter law on this matter, Trump knows the second term is his time to pillage. What’s Congress going to do? Send a strongly worded letter?
Trump will lie, punt, sue, and evade on every financial disclosure; he’ll spend a second term more comfortable than ever with monetizing his position. He’ll allow his sons to continue their domestic development games with a nod and a wink to various foreign powers. Jared will be Jared, and Ivanka will reboot her international branding operation. Every major meeting and summit will be held at a Trump hotel or resort, and feature, as did both the 2019 state visit to Britain and the G20 summit in Japan, the Imperial Trump Family on full display.
For the Trump crime family, the next four years will be a lavish opportunity to extort every last thing they can get out of everyone who comes on their political radar. The “fuck you, pay me” mentality of the Trump enterprise will become even more vivid, and the menu of prices for government services will become more apparent. “You want to invade Kraplakistan? Sure, buy two dozen F-35s, and be sure to throw in Eric’s commission, and we won’t say a word.”
Trump is a demonstrably cheap date on the corruption front, apparently hoping to make it up on volume. You don’t think that foreign governments, international criminals, and expat oligarchs from around the globe buy blocks of Trump condos and fill wildly overpriced D.C. hotel rooms and event spaces every night just because they read a Yelp review praising the linens and spa services, do you? You don’t think that people like Cindy “Happy Ending” Yang are buying memberships to Mar-a-Lago because the omelet station is to die for, right?
Donald Trump is sending a signal, loud and clear, that he’s for sale, satisfaction guaranteed. Far from the Greatest Negotiator Ever, he’s the easiest lay in White House history. In the second term, foreign and domestic powers will start cashing in their chits, and the losers will be the American people.
As a demonstrably weak and not very bright man, Donald Trump has proven throughout his personal and business history to be an easy mark for those types of approaches. His second term will be an era when his raw, unending greed further compromises the presidency and the nation. Far from the incorruptible, swamp-draining billionaire his yahoos imagined, Trump is a pay-to-play, small-ball narcissist who is vulnerable to emotional and financial bribery.
The consequence-free corruption of the first term will slide into a second, where it will become normalized and mainstream. It’s another short slide from there to an American political system in which corruption, self-dealing, and criminality become the central tendency of government.
If the president is for sale, so is everyone else, and—spoiler alert—nations where endemic corrup
tion takes hold aren’t stable, prosperous, or small-d democratic for long.
Trumpism corrupts, and absolute Trumpism corrupts absolutely, so expect more unsubtle stories of political payoffs by powerful interests. In 2019, sanctioned Russian oligarch and Putin bestie Oleg Deripaska mysteriously announced that his firm, Rusal, would build a new aluminum plant in the United States, in Mitch McConnell’s home oblast of Kentuckistan.1 It struck one columnist and some Senate Democrats as a remarkable coincidence that McConnell blocked bipartisan efforts to stymie Russian election interference in the 2020 election shortly thereafter.2
Expect many, many more examples of Trump donors being handed the keys to the kingdom and free rein over the various satrapies in which they take a monetary interest. As a note, a coal lobbyist now runs the Environmental Protection Agency, a pharma lobbyist runs the Department of Health and Human Services, and, for a time, a defense lobbyist ran the Department of Defense. All this happened when Team Trump still had to think about reelection.
Expect more cabinet and subcabinet members to dwell in limbo as “acting” this-or-that. By naming “acting” secretaries of departments and having those departments staffed by armies of “acting” minions, Trump can avoid ever having his hires truly vetted and examined for conflicts of interest.
As for the Trump 2020 campaign, its leadership will be a ripe target for both foreign and domestic interests. Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Michael Caputo, Roger Stone, and the rest of the 2016 dog’s breakfast of scumbags were all eagerly hustling for cash from anyone and everyone who would stroke a check.
Why should the 2020 team be left out? Anyone who can influence Trump by saying “X loves you and they’re donating to the Trump slush fund—I mean campaign fund, sorry” will suddenly find themselves with many new best friends. The majority of the Trump folks today look at the few who got prison time as outliers. They’ve seen the money made by Trump 2016 veterans, and nothing drives their behavior like the lure of the long green.
“It won’t happen to me,” they think. “I’m dealing with a reputable Russian oligarch.”
Tweets from Donald Trump’s Second Term
@realDonaldTrump: Because the Wall has been so powerful, so big, so effective at STOPING Terrorist MS-13 child solders, I have Ordered the creation of the TRUMP DOME over all of America. The TRUMP DOME will truly make America RESPECTED.
@MIT: Delete your account.
@BreitbartNews: SPACE DOME ALMOST COMPLETED. Trump Dome will stop all aliens!
@Drudge: MS-13 SPACE CARAVAN APPROACHES!
THE CRAZY RACIST UNCLE ACT…ISN’T AN ACT
As much fun as it is to mock Donald Trump’s daily rage-tweeting, self-fellating, and bald-faced pathological lying, it’s increasingly clear Trump is not a well man. This is not simply President Munchausen. The Republican excuses of “It’s just an act” are going to wear thin when Trump wakes up one morning and demands to see the pretty nuclear fireworks because Ecuador or Monaco or Brigadoon offended him in a dream. In the summer of 2019, Denmark barely ducked a rain of radioactive fire after refusing to sell Greenland to Trump.
Of course, the idea that Trump was a wild card, an unpredictable bullshit machine, was held dear to the hearts of many Washington Republicans hoping to deflect attention from his spectrum of pathologies by pretending to possess some secret decoder ring. They hoped they could wink-and-nod it away as an artifact of his mystic deal-making prowess or his keen insights into human behavior. For their own survival and sanity, they hoped and prayed the ignorant, crazy racist uncle act was just that—an act.
Spoiler alert: It’s not.
They—like much of America—discovered you can’t trust a word he says. It took a while for them to realize he wasn’t playing a dumb and dangerous liar; he is one, and always was.
It’s also time that we talk about Grandpa’s racism, because I’m pretty sure at this point it isn’t some clever strategy to lure in the white male non-college demo with a nationalist-populist message, and is actually just, well, straight-up racism.
The long arc of Trump’s racial rhetoric goes from Mexican “rapists” at the beginning of his campaign to “shithole countries” to “both sides” in Charlottesville to “invasions” at the southern border to calling a majority-black district of Baltimore “rat and rodent infested.” This president isn’t a subtle racist. He’s not the kind who wants to white-glove it with pretty rhetorical dressing about culture and heritage.
His endless attacks on immigrants, his quest for his illusory border wall, his lies about caravans and criminals surging over the borders are all of a piece; it’s part of repeatedly stoking his base with his racist air-raid siren. Trump-allied “conservatives” have tried to put a pretty face on white nationalism with policy conferences, gussied-up versions of The Daily Stormer, and an alt-lite media complex, but racial animus is still at the wretched heart of his filthy movement.
A lot of Trump’s arena events are a couple pointy white hats short of a Klan rally, and even when a chain of white nationalist gunmen slaughtered Americans in Gilroy, California, and El Paso, Texas, and at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, the beat went on. His overtly racist attacks on the “squad” of four Democratic congresswomen who all—quelle surprise!—happen to be women of color was swiftly followed by a blistering series of attacks on the late Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who—stop me if you’ve heard this—was African American.
I’ve written at length about Trump’s racial history, and the picture is hideously below the mark of what America deserves in a president; he’s an awful, dark stain on our history. What the first term makes abundantly clear is that it’s not an act, it’s not a strategy, and it’s not something the American people can bear. It is exactly who he is: a fucking racist. The referendum on Trump’s racism will play out in 2020, and well beyond, costing the GOP seats, status, and support for generations.
They have no one to blame but themselves.
IT’S ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE
Which leads us to what he looks like in a second term.
Cognitive decline is an ugly, hard reality for millions of Americans. As the Silent Generation slips into their final years, and the oldest Boomers join them, families all over America confront Alzheimer’s and many other tolls of aging. For many afflicted with a loss of memory and ability, this decline is a sad, steady reduction in the joys of life.
For Trump, it’s part of the reality show, though not one he wants to focus on. Comparing Trump now with video clips from a decade ago is chilling. The slippage in his verbal acuity is marked. His rages and explosions of temper aren’t part of an act; they’re no longer controlled or controllable. The nearest contemporary parallel was the second-term decline of Ronald Reagan. Americans sensed the terrible gravity of Alzheimer’s pulling at him, but he was still surrounded by largely competent people and was, on the whole, a healthy man. For all the disagreements Democrats had with him, Reagan could never be considered an impulsive narcissist with a hair-trigger temper and no concern for others. Reagan actually bothered to understand nuclear weapons and the risks they posed, unlike President Missile Parade. Trump’s lack of knowledge should terrify you as much as it does me, especially as his cognitive decline continues apace.
Given his hold over the cabinet, there’s no workable solution for this president’s combination of apparent mental infirmities and uncontrolled urges and racist fuckery, suggesting a second term will be more dangerous than the first.
The madness, the narcissism, the eccentricities, the pathological lying, the delusions of both persecution and grandeur are rationalized and normalized now. The remaining cabinet members are men and women who have capitulated, morally and mentally, to the realities of this president. It’s not leadership and policy that keeps them in line; it’s terror. They wake up every day knowing that the moment they move or speak aga
inst him, they’ll be fired, Twitter-shamed, dismissed as mere coffee boys, and victims of brutal news coverage from Ibn Fred’s Trumphadi media outlets.
Pulling off a Twenty-Fifth Amendment play against Trump based on his mental state is utterly justified, and utterly impossible, given the composition of bootlicks, yes-men, edge-case weirdos, and corrupt satraps in the clown-car Trump cabinet. Trained professionals have assessed and written about the increasing signs of dementia and instability in Trump; I’m just an amateur cognition specialist, but I keep expecting him to go full Cypress Hill on the White House lawn one day and ask the press, “Who you trying to get crazy with, ése? Don’t you know I’m loco?”
Today, he’s still bounded by a burning desire for reelection, and he knows at some level he has to pretend to observe the forms from time to time to throw America off the scent of his problems. That’s why after moments of national tragedy he gives hammy speeches where he seems like a glitchy Trump droid reading words off the screen.
Mumbling through teleprompter speeches one moment and veering off the next moment into wild ad-libs of stream-of-consciousness blurting, Trump is a shadow of even his 2016 self. We all know that cognitive decline is, tragically, a one-way street.
Don’t forget, kids: The crazy racist uncle act isn’t an act…and he still controls America’s nuclear arsenal.
Sleep tight!
Tweets from Donald Trump’s Second Term
@realDonaldTrump: Some lying liberal media who are FAILING BADLY and will soon be bankrupt like the Bezos Washington Post are reporting that Stephen Miller was arrested for making a suit from a woman’s skin and eating her. FAKE NEWS. He did NOT EAT HER! Stephen is doing a GRATE job!