During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump declared, “It is time to drain the swamp in Washington, D.C. This is why I’m proposing a package of ethics reforms to make our government honest once again.”
The largest political spender at Trump businesses was Trump’s own presidential campaign, which spent nearly $3.8 million at Trump businesses since the 2016 election.
A year or so after his election, Trump gave up on ethics reforms and proclaimed, “By ending excessive regulation, we are defending democracy and draining the swamp.”
In fact, throughout his first—and, hopefully, only—term in office, Trump has turned the presidency into a huge swamp, rife with corruption.
“The Trump Administration is uniquely corrupt in a number of ways,” says Benjamin Waterhouse, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “There has been a violation of norms or standards of behavior which were once respected and are no longer respected. Broadly, the system doesn’t know how to deal with that.”
Financial scheming, questionable business deals, and charges of corruption have dogged Trump from his earliest days in the New York City real estate market. Two of the many issues concerning Trump’s corrupt business practices, in particular, stand out.
First, the New York state attorney general sued Trump and three of his children for illegally using his nonprofit foundation as a personal “checkbook” for their own benefit, including Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The foundation was dissolved by court order.
Second, in early July, the Supreme Court issued a split decision on subpoenas for Trump’s tax returns and personal financial records. The court unanimously rejected his broad claims of “absolute” immunity in a New York state criminal investigation but ruled that lower courts did not do enough to scrutinize Congressional subpoenas for similar records.
Trump, of course, is not the first U.S. President to be dogged with corruption scandals.
Andrew Jackson (1829–1837) introduced the “spoils system” by which approximately 10 percent of federal officeholders were replaced by his political loyalists. This system remained in operation (with a two-year exception) until the adoption of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 that established merit tests for office seekers (except top posts).
“Jackson had promised to root out corruption in Washington, D.C., so it’s fair to charge him with hypocrisy,” says David Huyssen, associate professor in American history at the University of York in the United Kingdom. “The presidential powers of appointment and the realities of the electoral system make the U.S. political and judicial systems structurally vulnerable to corruption. That’s the bigger problem.”
Huyssen adds that while Ulysses S. Grant (1869–1877) “was not personally corrupt,” he was President during two major scandals. One involved an elaborate system of overbilling, kickbacks, and political bribery set up by the Union Pacific Railroad. The other saw more than 100 federal, state, and local officials conspire to steal tax revenue from whiskey sales. Grant authorized the prosecution of those involved with the words, “Let no guilty man escape.”
Warren G. Harding (1921–1923) was undone by the appointment of friends to high administration positions who then engaged in corruption scandals. For example, his Secretaries of the Interior and Navy accepted bribes to lease the Navy’s oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming.
Richard M. Nixon (1969–1974) resigned to avoid impeachment during the Watergate scandal; his Vice President, Spiro T. Agnew, resigned when implicated in a tax evasion scheme. Huyssen flags Nixon’s “active, manifestly illegal use of office to gain political advantage and/or thwart the will of Congress.”
During the presidency of Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), an astonishing total of 138 administration officials were convicted, indicted, or subjected to official investigations for official or criminal misconduct. “It remains unfathomable to most reasonable people that Reagan was unaware of the Iran-Contra affair,” notes Huyssen. “If indeed Reagan knew, it might constitute the most corrupt act—in terms of abuse of power—of any President to that date.”
These Presidents set a standard by which Trump will be judged. And it is likely that history will judge Trump to be far more corrupt than any of his predecessors.
The extensive plunder during the Trump presidency can be divided into three categories: self- aggrandizement or emoluments; practices of individual administration departments and agencies; and the influence of lobbyists. Let’s look at them in turn.
Emoluments Violations
Trump appears to believe that being President permits him to personally benefit financially, which is actually something the Constitution explicitly forbids.
Last October, he proposed hosting the 2020 G7 summit at his own golf club in Miami. The proposal was withdrawn in the face of wide-scale opposition, with Trump blaming Democrats and the press for “Crazed and Irrational Hostility.”
“Trump businesses have become popular gathering spots for Republican candidates, business groups, administration officials, and Trump’s friends and family.”
The Constitution includes provisions often referred to as “Emoluments Clauses.” Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 is known as the “Title of Nobility Clause” and, in effect, forbids Presidents from conducting business while they are in the White House. It applies to both foreign and domestic activities.
This rule, also known as the Foreign Emoluments Clause, prohibits any government official from accepting any present, emolument, office, or title from any “King, Prince, or foreign State” without Congressional approval. And the Domestic Emoluments Clause in Article II, Section 1, Clause 7 bars Presidents from receiving “a Compensation” for services or “any other Emolument from the United States, or any of [the several states].”
In November 2019, Public Citizen issued a detailed report on expenditures and events at Trump businesses since his election. The nonprofit group founded by activist Ralph Nader reports that 371 entities held events and spent money at Trump businesses. These included 192 political candidates or political groups who spent a combined $8.3 million at Trump businesses since the November 2016 election, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records. Thirty of these spent more than $10,000 at Trump businesses, while 108 spent more than $1,000.
The largest political spender at Trump businesses was Trump’s own presidential campaign, which spent nearly $3.8 million at Trump businesses since the 2016 election, representing about 45 percent of total political spending at Trump properties.
The biggest beneficiary of political campaigns and groups’ spending was the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., where political groups have spent nearly $2.5 million since the 2016 election. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, and Trump National Doral golf resort in Miami, Florida, have each received about $740,000 in political spending.
Since the 2016 election, Public Citizen noted, “Trump businesses have become popular gathering spots for Republican candidates, business groups, administration officials, and Trump’s friends and family to mingle and hold political fundraisers and parties as well as farewell events for departing White House staffers.”
One illuminating incident involves Trump’s daughter, Ivanka. Following a 2017 meeting between Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping, Chinese officials then approved numerous trademarks for Ivanka’s branded products in 2018. Kellyanne Conway, then a top Trump adviser, also championed Ivanka’s products on Fox News.
“Go buy Ivanka’s stuff is what I would say,” she said from the White House briefing room. “I’m going to give a free commercial here: Go buy it today, everybody; you can find it online.”
Crooked Appointees
Plunder saturates the Trump Administration, as those chosen to lead individual departments use their positions for political ends and self-dealing. The August 2020 indictment of former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon on charges of fraud brought to eight the number of Trump associates who have been charged with crimes; seven have been convicted or pleaded guilty.
But that’s just the tip of the corrupt iceberg.
The American Prospect has carefully collected revealing information (with useful links) about the backgrounds of department executives and the questionable activities associated with various federal agencies.
Here are a few examples:
The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross with pocketing $10.4 million that rightly belonged to investment partners.
Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s then acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, canceled an investigation into World Acceptance Corporation, a South Carolina payday lender that had donated $4,500 to his Congressional campaigns. Those contributions were irrelevant, he said, “because I am not in elected office anymore.”
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, a billionaire and top Republican Party donor and fundraiser, has used her position to back private Christian schools and campaign for “school choice” while referring to public education as “a monopoly” and “a dead end.”
Ben Carson, Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, “revised” oversight of the Opportunity Zone program, which relies on tax incentives to spur development in low-income communities to produce greater benefits for billionaires and Trump friends and supporters.
A more recent example is the appointment of Louis DeJoy, a long-time Trump financial backer, as postmaster general, in charge of the U.S. Postal Service. The post office has existed since July 1775, a full year before the Declaration of Independence, and the USPS was established in 1971. He promptly reassigned or displaced at least twenty-three senior postal executives; ended overtime pay; set work shifts to a fixed schedule, rather than when mail is delivered; required states to send mail-in ballots by first-class mail, thus increasing election expenses; and removed mail-sorting machines from postal facilities.
DeJoy may have a personal as well as a political motive to hobble the USPS. He and his wife, Aldona Wos, have reported assets of between $30.1 million and $75.3 million in USPS competitors or contractors, according to a report in The Washington Post.
Lobbyists
Lobbyists play an oversized role in the Trump Administration, with former lobbyists heading a number of federal departments.
These include Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler, who formerly worked as a lobbyist for the coal industry; Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who was a lobbyist for Big Pharma; and Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, who represented mining, oil, and gas interests.
Shortly after taking office, Trump issued an executive order that undercut President Barack Obama’s ethics rules, making it easier for lobbyists to accept government jobs and for government officials to become lobbyists. ProPublica and the Columbia Journalism School assembled revealing profiles of 281 people associated with the Trump Administration who went through the corporate/government lobbying revolving door.
These include Colin Roskey, a former health care lobbyist who joined the Department of Health and Human Services as deputy secretary for legislation for mandatory health in January 2019. Prior to that, from January 2017 to December 2018, public records show he lobbied for at least twenty- seven clients on an array of issues related to public health care programs, such as prescription drugs. In October 2019, Roskey left his federal position to take a job with his old lobbying firm, Lincoln Policy Group.
Virginia Canter, ethics chief counsel for the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, assessed the current climate: “It suggests that lobbyists see themselves as more effective in furthering their clients’ special interests from inside the government rather than from outside.”
Direct spending by lobby groups is also on the rise. In 2018, The Economist reported, “businesses spent more than $3.4bn [billion] advancing their interests in the halls of government, 8.5 percent more than before the self-styled CEO President took office.” Influence was greatest in the health care, finance, and industrial sectors, with lobbyists investing more than $500 million in each sector.
In one example of how the game is played, the payday lending industry’s main lobbying arm, the Community Financial Services Association of America, spent roughly $1 million holding its 2018 and 2019 annual conferences at the Trump-owned Doral golf resort. Collectively, payday groups and companies gave $2.2 million to the Trump campaign and inaugural committees during the 2016 election cycle.
The ProPublica and Columbia University study notes that “the full extent of the lobbying industry’s influence is hard to measure because federal agencies decline to share details of recusals granted to officials who disclose potential conflicts with their new government roles.”
It’s likely that Americans will begin to get the full story of just how corrupt Trump and his administration really are only after he is no longer in office. That day cannot come soon enough.