Behind the fatal Trump flaw MAGA can't even defend
Want to take down Trump? Demonstrate how corrupt he and his oligarch buddies are.
I’ve spent a good chunk of my adult life doing international relief work for a nonprofit based out of Europe. From the mass slaughter in Darfur to the famine following the Civil War in Uganda to deeply impoverished rural Russia and Southeast Asia to hunt clubs in Colombia where young men shoot “feral” children for sport, I’ve seen horrors few can even imagine, much less would want to live through.
The one consistent and defining characteristic of the countries where I’ve lived and worked is the corruption.
I had a meeting with the Haitian Ministère de la Santé Publique et de la Population, the equivalent of our HHS Secretary, about our organization building a facility there for orphaned children; his first request, within ten minutes of our meeting, was for a $15,000 cash bribe (I passed).
The guy running the office of the Ugandan Embassy to Kenya wouldn’t issue a visa for me to travel into that country for three days in a row until I gave him a bribe. When flying back from Entebbe, in the war-ravaged airport with no electricity or water, bullet-holed ceiling tiles dangling and fire scars on the walls, three soldiers wearing ragtag uniforms confronted me at what would have been a customs checkpoint. The guy in the middle — the largest and oldest — grabbed the clip of his AK47 and pulled it down so the barrel was resting three inches in front of my nose.
“How much money do you have?” he asked. I told him I had a few thousand shillings, maybe $50 worth. “Give us half,” he said, and, as I was digging through my pocket, added, “You know, we could kill you right now and nobody would ever know.” The two guys with him snickered as I handed over the cash and they split it three ways.
A traffic cop in rural Central America got a wad of cash out of me in exchange for not taking me to jail for going 3 MPH over the limit. I’ve had government officials in The Philippines, Peru, and Thailand “suggest” (although not demand, like Haiti) that they’d be happy to help us do our “good works” if there was something in it for them.
They were all “transactional,” the word our media likes to use to describe Trump’s bribe-seeking behavior and negotiating style.
Give Prince MBS cover for murdering Jamal Khashoggi and your son-in-law gets two billion dollars. Help fund and facilitate a Trump resort in the Middle East and get US weaponry. Publicly grovel before Trump and you have a better chance of getting what you want than President Zelenskyy, who failed to bring gifts because he simply wanted to buy (with his country’s own cash) air defense systems (that Trump is still refusing to sell).
And now we get the most recent grotesque example: Vietnam just announced they’re going to facilitate a billion-dollar Trump resort in the hopes it’ll cause Donald to back off on his tariffs. As The Wall Street Journal noted yesterday:
“Vietnam, which has a surplus of more than $120 billion with the U.S. and saw tariffs on its goods rise to 46% on ‘Liberation Day,’ shows how anxious countries are to stave off the duties. … It pushed through the authorization of Starlink, the satellite internet service owned by Elon Musk, a close Trump adviser. And it accelerated the approvals for a $1.5 billion Trump resort.”
When a Chinese billionaire wanted to get out from under an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for alleged securities fraud and market manipulation, he simply “invested” $30 million in World Liberty Financial, a Trump family-affiliated cryptocurrency company that passes 75% of its revenue to Trump himself; the SEC investigation was quietly quashed.
Trump’s corruption isn’t limited to international businessmen and deals, either; give him large enough campaign contributions or other gifts and you’ll get deregulation, government contracts, and even favorable legislation here in the US.
He’s not just open about it; he brags about it. Remember when he told a roomful of oil industry executives that if they gave him enough money he’d go full-on “drill, baby, drill” and gut environmental regulations and green projects? That was just one example of many.
Every other democracy in the world, for example, does your taxes for you and then lets you know their math so you can check it. In several European countries it’s so simple it’s basically a postcard; you only respond if you think they’re in error. The US is the only developed country on Earth where there’s a billion-dollar industry preparing people’s tax returns for them.
For example, in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland returns are pre-filled and can be approved via text message or an online portal in minutes. In Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and France tax forms are similarly filled out in advance by the government; you just sign and mail them back. And in Estonia, widely seen as a digital government pioneer, filing taxes takes minutes and is done with a simple online form that a fifth grader could complete.
Here in the US, Democrats thought this was a fine idea — it would save time and money for both taxpayers and the IRS — and so rolled out a program where people with few deductions could simply file their taxes online for free.
Republicans, however, being on the take from the billion-dollar tax preparation industry, objected; they didn’t want the financial gravy train to stop because that would mean less of the money charged us for tax prep would end up in their campaign coffers, not to mention the fancy trips, meals, and other lobbying benefits they can get.
So, the Trump administration announced this week — after tax prep company Intuit “donated” $1 million to Trump’s “inaugural” slush fund — that they’re killing off the free filing option; going forward, pretty much everybody must either learn enough tax law to deal with the IRS themselves or pay a tax preparation company.
So, how the hell did we get here?
Between the 1930s and the 1980s — when the Tillman Act and other campaign finance laws were in effect and enforced — Congress and the Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations got a hell of a lot done for the average American citizen and worker. They included:
Social Security, the right to unionize (Wagner Act), the minimum wage, restrictions on child labor, mandatory overtime pay, the TVA that brought electricity to Appalachia, the FHA that made housing affordable, the SEC that protected small investors, two different GI Bills, the National School Lunch Act, the interstate highway system, Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that funded new schools across the nation, Head Start, Food Stamps, the Truth in Lending Act, OSHA, the EPA, WIC (Women and Infant Children), Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Wilderness Act, etc., etc., etc.
Since the Reagan Revolution, however, when five Republicans on the Supreme Court declared in the 1978 Bellotti decision (written by Lewis Powell himself) that money is free speech and corporations are persons, very little has been done by Congress to help average people.
Instead, we’ve seen over $37 trillion in tax breaks for billionaires and giant corporations since 1980, the suspension of enforcement of our antitrust laws in 1983, and continuous efforts by Republicans ever since then to block any legislation that might help the average person.
This laid the foundation for Trump’s shocking level of corruption today, and taught GOP legislators to look the other way as their colleagues slipped one loophole after another into existing laws to make life easier for the morbidly rich and harder for you and me.
For example, last month was the 22nd anniversary of my radio program. During that entire time, I’ve run a contest for anybody who can name even one single piece of legislation from the past 40+ years (since Reagan) that was:
— authored by Republicans,
— principally co-sponsored by Republicans,
— passed Congress with a Republican majority,
— signed by a Republican president,
— and benefited average working people or the poor more than it did the GOP’s donor class.
Outside of a feeble-attempt bill to regulate spam callers during the first Bush administration and legislation reversing the Osage Allotment Act of 1906, nobody has ever won the autographed book prize.
It’s estimated that as much as a quarter of the entire GDP of corrupt autocracies like Hungary and Russia ends up in the pockets of a few hundred oligarchs and high government officials.
A 2017 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that corrupt Russian billionaires hold as much as $800 billion offshore, equating to nearly half of Russia’s GDP at the time. Hungary is now rated the most corrupt nation in all of Europe, with a huge crop of oligarchs while average people slip into poverty.
Trump is now taking us down that same road, and it’s so tragically obvious that countries like Vietnam, seeing his avaricious behavior, are eager to jump on the gravy train.
Alexi Navalny nearly deposed Vladimir Putin with his Anti-Corruption Foundation, simply by revealing Putin’s billion-dollar country home and sweetheart deals with the nation’s oligarchs and largest industries.
The Achilles heel of autocrats is most often their corruption; when revealed, it infuriates average people and voters. And now it’s here, as a new report from Public Citizen reveals:
“Corporate enforcement plummeted the first time Trump took office, and the current administration has already halted or dropped more than 100 enforcement actions against corporate misconduct.”
The most recent absurdity, following Jeff Bezos giving Melania Trump $40 million for rights to Amazon to produce a fawning “documentary” about her (so much for the anti-trust and labor law enforcements against Amazon), is Trump’s suggestion this week that Warner Brothers/Discovery could escape his FCC’s ire if they gave Don Jr. his very own hunting show.
Democrats and the media would do well to reprise the modern-day equivalent of Senator Proxmire’s famous “Golden Fleece” awards for the most egregious examples of corrupt government dealings.
Even all-in MAGA cult members don’t like to be played for suckers, and that’s pretty much all that Trump is doing (while trying to distract us with his deportation theater).
It’s time to wake America up, before we end up like the countries in which I used to work. Believe me, as someone who’s been there and seen that, it’s not a future any of us want for our nation or our children and grandchildren.
