In October, a Trump benefactor gave $130 million to stave off what would have been a major political liability and cover the paychecks for service members during the government shutdown. The office space Eleanor Roosevelt once occupied has been unceremoniously bulldozed to make way for a gargantuan ballroom, also being funded by corporate “donations” from the likes of BlackRock, Booz Allen Hamilton, and tech giants like Apple and Amazon. The sticker price of the project has soared from $200 million to $350 million. To add insult to injury, the donors will likely write off their bribes to the latest Trump event venue as charitable contributions, as economist Dean Baker laid out. The president is working to intervene in negotiations around the sale of Warner Brothers–Discovery to ensure that his longtime supporters, the Ellisons, are able to add on to their growing media empire. And that’s just the past couple of weeks!
It’s not for nothing that my colleagues at the Revolving Door Project have had more than enough material for a biweekly rundown in our Corruption Calendar. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington also recently published a timeline tracking national and state corruption since January 20.
While Trumpian corruption is striking in frequency, scale, and just how routine it is starting to feel, this administration was the logical endpoint of the long-standing tradition of elite impunity. The second Trump administration is a striking monument to governmental misconduct, but the ground was broken long ago, with both parties laying the foundation. For the past half century, corporate and white-collar crime have gone largely unenforced. This was the result of both a widespread shift in views of governance (à la the Reagan Revolution) and a coordinated plan orchestrated to enable private wealth to hijack our democracy, as David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher documented in their new book “Master Plan,” building on a podcast of the same name.
5 corporations in a trenchcoat pretending to be a democracy