President Donald Trump is breaking precedent in an important way, according to two experts — he is unprecedented in his corruption.
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“Past presidents of both parties have recognized that the Oval Office is a public trust, not a business opportunity,” wrote The Hill’s David Wippman and Glenn C. Altschuler on Sunday. “President Trump has shattered that norm. Since returning to office, he and his family have raked in more than $4 billion. Much of that comes from investments in cryptocurrency, real estate, and licensing ventures that benefit directly from President Trump’s policies.”
He added, “Although the federal conflict of interest statute does not cover the president, every occupant of the White House since Watergate has recognized an ethical obligation to separate public office from personal financial interests. Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush used blind trusts. Barack Obama and Joe Biden didn’t need to, because their assets consisted largely of diversified investments, pensions and book royalties.”
Wippman and Altschuler described how Trump has weakened regulations to prevent conflicts of interest, heavily profited from cryptocurrency, used his power to enrich his hotels and golf courses and accepted deals which personally benefit him from the governments of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. They even described him from profiting by major media and technology companies settling frivolous litigation he filed instead of contesting them.
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“Last month, in what critics called ‘the most blatant example of presidential corruption in modern times,’ Trump settled his own suit against the IRS,” Wippman and Altschuler wrote. “The settlement included a $1.776 billion ‘anti-weaponization fund’ Trump could use to reward supporters and immunity for him and other family members from any claims the IRS might make against them. Political blowback forced Trump to abandon the fund, perhaps permanently, but not the exemption from prosecution. It’s impossible to know whether any specific policy decision reflects greed rather than the public interest. But that is precisely the problem. When citizens cannot be confident the government is acting on their behalf, they lose faith in the political process.”
Trump’s personal profiting from the presidency was evident as recently as Sunday. The New York Times reported Trump and his sons are profiting from the administration striking a deal with Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in November over tungsten mine access.
“Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history,” wrote The New York Times’ Paul Sonne and Eric Lipton on Sunday. They later added that “around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment company controlled by Mr. Lutnick’s family and overseen by his sons Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, helped one of the lead investors working with Dominari on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity. Such rounds of fund-raising typically net Cantor millions of dollars in fees.”
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