Democrats need to hammer Trump on his unprecedented corruption | Steven Greenhouse

If the Democrats hope to maximize their chances of winning in this November’s elections, there’s a subject they need to scream far and wide about: Donald Trump’s immense and unprecedented corruption. The Democrats need to make clear to every American that Trump has shamelessly used his second term to increase his wealth by an astounding amount – by more than $2bn – all while millions of Americans are struggling to make ends meet, their struggles made worse by Trump policies that have pushed up inflation and gas prices.Every day through election day, the Democrats should convey loud and clear that America’s billionaire president has focused far more on making himself richer than on improving the lives of average Americans. Trump’s corruption and conflicts of interest are so vast and outrageous that many Americans have little idea how vast and outrageous they are: ranging from Trump’s making more than $1.4bn from crypto last year to granting pardons to criminals whose families have donated to Trump’s campaign to his sons’ investing in start-up companies that receive generous help from the Trump administration.Democrats should repeatedly hammer Trump for his greed, corruption and conflicts of interest the same way that Hungary’s opposition repeatedly attacked Viktor Orbán for his immense corruption – a strategy that caused Orbán’s popularity to plummet and caused Hungarian voters to oust their country’s authoritarian leader last April. Peter Magyar, Orbán’s challenger, defeated Orban by focusing on three issues the Democrats would be smart to focus on: the cost of living, the lack of economic opportunities, and the fact that their country’s leader and his family grew ever richer even as many people grew poorer.Trump’s corruption and continuous push for self-enrichment are by far the worst of any president in US history. “It is completely unprecedented,” Megan Gorman, author of All the Presidents’ Money, a book on the history of presidential wealth since 1776, told the New York Times. Gorman said Trump’s focus on enriching himself is “a betrayal of the American social contract: that those who lead the country prioritize country over self”. Norm Eisen, the White House ethics czar under Barack Obama, told the Washington Post: “It’s corruption on a scale that, to be honest, has few rivals in world history.”Before Trump won a second term, the Teapot Dome was considered the worst presidential financial scandal in US history. Every US high school student studies that ugly scandal, which occurred under Warren Harding (president from 1921 to 1923). But Teapot Dome is peanuts compared with Trump’s cornucopia of scandals. Harding wasn’t even involved in Teapot Dome, nor did he profit from it. It instead involved his secretary of the interior, Albert B Fall, who took $400,000 in bribes and gifts to lease government-owned oil reserves. In today’s dollars, those bribes and gifts would be worth about $8m – that’s chump change compared to Trump’s corruption. By enriching himself by $2.2bn last year, according to White House financial disclosures, Trump has in effect jacked up his wealth by about $8m every two days since returning to the White House.Trump’s corruption and conflicts have taken many forms. After originally denouncing cryptocurrencies as “a scam”, Trump, in a stunning about-face, worked with his sons to create World Liberty Financial, a crypto company that enriched him by $799m last year. Trump and his sons enjoyed a huge windfall when a member of the United Arab Emirates’ royal family paid $500m for a secret 49% stake in their company. Not long after, Trump agreed to do something the UAE badly wanted; he let the UAE buy leading-edge Nvidia AI chips, a move that some national security officials opposed because they feared that China would ultimately get many of those chips.Trump cashed in big-time in another way – he made an astounding $636m last year by selling $Trump meme coins, a speculative cryptocurrency with little practical value. Trump urged his fans to buy those coins, writing: “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING … GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW.” Nearly a million people, many of them Maga loyalists, lost a total of $3.8bn from investing in $TRUMP coins, which have lost 97% of their value since their peak.At the same time Trump has won big in crypto, his administration reduced regulations on crypto, disbanded its crypto enforcement unit, and terminated some legal cases alleging crypto fraud.The US constitution’s emolument clause prohibits presidents from accepting gifts from foreign states, but in a blatant violation of that clause, Trump accepted a retired $400m luxury Boeing 747 from Qatar’s royal family. Trump is already using it, and after his second term ends, it will go to Trump’s presidential library, and presumably his personal use. Trump has called the Qatari gift “the world’s most luxurious plane”, while senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut called the gift “the definition of corruption”.Trump has turned presidential pardons of criminals into an ethically dubious pay-to-play game. He pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of the world’s largest crypto exchange, after Zhao had quietly helped boost the value of the Trump family’s crypto company by nearly $2bn. Zhao had spent four months in prison after pleading guilty to money-laundering.Trump also pardoned Trevor Milton, founder of the Nikola electric vehicle company – he had been sentenced to four years in prison for defrauding investors. Before Trump granted that pardon, Milton and his wife had donated more than $1.8m to Trump’s campaign. Similarly, Trump pardoned Paul Walczak, a nursing home executive who pleaded guilty to stealing more than $10m in employee payroll taxes. That pardon came after Walczak’s mother attended a $1m Trump fundraiser.The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has vigorously defended Trump against allegations of corruption, saying: “Neither the president nor his family has ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, added that Trump “only acts in the best interests of the American public”.Trump’s repeated use of no-bid contracts also raises big ethical questions. Trump awarded a secret $500m no-bid contract to build the East Wing ballroom. His administration also awarded a $1.7m no-bid contract to a business owned by Trump’s longtime ally John Cafaro, who had given more than $300,000 to political committees tied to Trump. That no-bid contract was for installing a water-purification system for the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which had a huge algae bloom after the renovations Trump ordered. (In 2001, Cafaro pleaded guilty to conspiracy to bribing a congressman.)Trump’s sons are also cashing in on Trump’s power and presidency. After Trump helped persuade Kazakhstan’s leader to give a little-known US company access to the world’s largest untapped reserve of tungsten, a metal crucial for making missile warheads and AI chips, Trump’s sons Don Jr and Eric took an ownership stake in the project days before the deal was announced. The Export-Import Bank and a second federal agency have pledged to lend $1.6bn to the little-known US company that got access to the mine, which by one estimate holds up to $80bn worth of tungsten.Not stopping there, Don Jr and Eric have invested in a drone manufacturer that is seeking to sell drones to Gulf states that Iran has attacked and that rely on the Trump administration for military aid. In a move that Senator Elizabeth Warren criticized as “corruption in plain sight”, the Pentagon awarded a $24m contract to a startup company whose chief strategy officer is Eric Trump to test an android for the marines. Warren said: “Is the Pentagon just a cash machine for Trump’s kids now?” The Washington Post found that Don Jr and Eric have invested in more than a dozen defense-related start-ups and that those companies have generated at least $3.2bn in direct government business since Trump’s sons made those investments.Unlike previous presidents, Trump has refused to set up a blind trust for his holdings. That has raised serious concerns because Trump’s investment accounts made more than 21,000 trades last year, with many appearing to be timed to take maximum advantage of Trump’s public statements that moved the stock markets. (The White House defends the trades and says Trump’s investment accounts are managed by professional advisers who do not regularly communicate with him.) On 23 July, the day before Trump issued a plan that largely deregulated AI, his investment accounts bought up to $5m in stock each in numerous AI companies, including Broadcom, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia (he also purchased stocks unrelated to AI that day).In an unprecedented deal for a president – one widely condemned as corrupt self-dealing – Trump got his justice department to promise that the IRS would drop any existing audits of Trump, his family and his business while also dropping efforts to pursue back taxes from him even though, by some estimates, Trump owes more than $100m in back taxes. Last week, a federal judge denounced that deal as improper self-dealing.The list goes on and on. Indeed I could detail many more scandals and conflicts, including the Trump family’s pursuit of branding deals in Saudi Arabia and a South Korean aluminum company paying $2m to Trump’s holding company as it faced a trade investigation.If any previous president had done one-tenth of these things, the public would be up in arms. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress have inexcusably turned a blind eye to Trump’s corruption, giving him a pass on his unprecedented self-enrichment and self-dealing. And while Trump has enriched himself handsomely, he has enthusiastically backed legislation that cut Medicaid and food stamps to millions of struggling Americans, while also forcing up healthcare premiums for millions by blocking an extension of Obamacare subsidies.Importantly, the US public is growing increasingly upset with Trump’s corrupt shenanigans. An Economist/YouGov poll this week found that 49% of voters said they would use the word “corrupt” to describe Trump, while 19% wouldn’t describe him that way.Voters should remember all this corruption and unethical self-enrichment when they vote in November – and Democrats need to do their best to make sure that voters don’t forget. Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues