Molly Riley/The White House
President Donald Trump in the newly renovated White House Rose Garden, September 2025.
It seems that every week, we all get to be needled by something new coming from the Trump Administration.
If you’re bored with talking about Ukraine, for example, Donald Trump will rile you up by deploying the National Guard to Washington, D.C. If you can’t seem to summon any anger over his appointment of former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, you can fixate on the announcement that he’ll be hosting the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony in December. Trump is a provocation machine, and he will provide.
This week, it was my turn to froth at the mouth over his corruption. And not just his corruption, but that of his entire family’s businesses. It’s also not just the business of it that bothers me, but the sheer energy he spends on perfecting the practice. Corruption is Trump’s full-time job, or at least it’s the gig he’s most committed to.
The Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., which he sold in 2022, was his 2016 version of playing footsie with fraud. Collectively, we muttered the phrase “emoluments clause” a lot in those years during his first term in office. Foreign diplomats knew they should stay at that hotel, just as local supplicants knew they should use it as a meeting place. The grift was as high as the thread count on the bedsheets.
The 2025 version is Donald Trump Jr.’s new social club, which he calls Executive Branch. Presumably he named it that because “Pay Here to Access the President” was too long for a sign.
This brick-and-mortar form of stealing is almost quaint. At least it’s a social club that employs staff—assuming the Trumps don’t skirt the payroll. Honestly, if you want to get boxed in by competing Cybertrucks in the parking lot, go for it! Thankfully, we regular folk aren’t required to join.
I don’t know why this social club pierced a rage-hole in my gut, because it’s probably the gentlest version of Trump 2.0’s money con. The breathless innovation of thievery in the last couple of fiscal quarters has been stunning. The Trumps are like a unicorn start-up, but for corruption. It’s like they “disrupted” an industry, but that industry is anchored in money grabbing.
Remember when, back in March, they used the White House as a Tesla showroom? Those were the old, heady days of the Elon Musk-Donald Trump bromance, when corruption benefited both of them. In Trump’s world, sharing the corrupt spotlight was practically socialism!
It didn’t stop there, because Trump was also given a luxury jet by Qatar. Correction: Qatar bought an American-made plane from Boeing only to give it to Trump and receive credit for gifting him an American-made plane.
You know who else gets American planes from Boeing? A good portion of the U.S. government and military. We already have that relationship on lockdown! Why couldn’t the Qataris just go to Five Below and get a basket of coloring books—something more suitable for Trump’s skill level? Instead, they needed to spend $400 million to get Trump’s attention, which is really hard to do at Five Below. I doubt that corruption involving discount retailers will get you a seat at Trump’s table.
The chef’s kiss on this multitiered corruption cake is, of course, cryptocurrency. A financial tool with no underlying value, crypto has even less value as a meme coin administered by Trump, who makes cash from it whenever some hopeful suitor makes a trade. (As of June, according to Forbes, Trump had made about $430 million from crypto.)
Like I said, Trump is the Albert Einstein of corruption or the Sir Isaac Newton of stealing. I don’t think the nation’s founders ever anticipated this level of corruption. If it were any other field, Trump’s aptitude would be impressive. He could have solved the health care crisis already if he’d devoted this much brain power to, I don’t know, his actual job of helping the American people.
I’m keeping my eye on the midterm elections, because if there’s anything to be done about this situation, it involves electing reasonable people who will write and adopt laws against such brazen fraudulence. Until then, please don’t follow my lead. Choose your rage tantrums wisely, because we need to keep our energy going a little while longer.