The Dictatorship
Trump has changed his tune on conflicts of interest. That’s a bad sign.
Donald Trump’s first term as president was plagued by unprecedented conflicts of interest. This time around, the possibilities for corruption are worse, and we risk billionaires and foreign governments around the world thinking of U.S. policy as up for sale to the highest bidder.
When Trump ran for president in 2016, he deployed the rhetoric of anti-corruption and voluntarily adhered to at least some ethics norms. He promised to “drain the swamp,” leaning in part on his status as a billionaire to depict himself as immune to interest groups. He declined his presidential salary. He did not fulfill promises to completely self-fund his campaign, but his own expenditures and his rhetoric were significant and a part of his political brand. He said he sold all his stock.
It’s possible Trump’s second term will make his first look like a paragon of ethical governance by comparison.
As we all know, this was far from adequate for walling off Trump from conflicts of interest. He refused to divest from the Trump Organization, conducted official government business at his own properties and allowed special interest groups to hold events at them. Ultimately Trump was able to enrich himself using his position, and his vast business holdings allowed foreign governmentsor anyone with money, to try boosting his company’s bottom line as a way to try to extract or sweeten policy decisions. As Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington put it in 2021, Trump’s donation of his presidential salary “was merely a fig leaf to cover up four years of brazen corruption.”
It’s possible Trump’s second term will make his first look like a paragon of ethical governance by comparison.
Notably, Trump hasn’t been emphasizing, however questionably, independence or ethics. He apparently doesn’t feel an obligation to even pay lip service to the principle of insulation from special interests. And that might be a harbinger of things to come.
As The Washington Post reports in an excellent overview, this time there will be many more ways for Trump to enrich himself using the White House. Trump’s financial situation has changed since the end of his first term. The Trump Organization has a variety of large, ongoing international deals, including properties in Saudi Arabia and Oman, which could influence his policy outlook in the Middle East. He owns billions of dollars’ worth of shares in his social media company Truth Social, and he has said he will not be selling them. He has a cryptocurrency business.
Truth Social, in particular, creates a new setup for generating possible conflicts of interest for Trump. “The ability to influence Trump’s net worth with relative impunity goes up when there’s a publicly traded stock associated with him,” Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a public interest watchdog, told me. Think about it this way: It’s a lot easier for somebody to buy and sell shares (or hire someone else to) of a publicly traded company and say it’s purely about money — and not political influence — than it is when dropping a ton of cash on events at Trump properties. In other words, people can help enrich (or hurt) Trump’s wealth with a more robust kind of plausible deniability. And it’s logistically easier as well.
And as Trump contemplates hiring the first-ever crypto czar for the White House, there is no way to rule out that Trump’s decision-making on regulating the industry won’t be influenced by his own financial interest in the industry.
Trump is also on stronger legal footing than during his first term. Not only does long-standing legal doctrine make it difficult to block Trump from enriching himself using the presidency, but the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling makes it even harder. If Trump were to craft policies in response to bribes or implied bribes from donors or foreign governments, he will know that the Supreme Court just said that if a president is exercising the powers of the presidency, he or she cannot be held criminally responsible. Hauser says that Trump likely views the ruling as a powerful “get-out-of-jail-free card.”
On top of all this, it’s hard to imagine Trump not feeling emboldened by his serial successes as a political escape artist. He has returned to the White House after two impeachments, an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results with a violent mob, 34 felony convictions, a verdict finding him liable for sexual abuse and many other transgressions of civic norms and human decency. At this point, with the wind at his back and the courts on his side, Trump is set to take what he wants and do so with impunity.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for BLN Daily. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Blue Light News, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter here.