Critics say the scope of President Donald Trump’s corruption is both massive and undeniable with his $400 million dollar personal gift from the Qatari royal family coupled with China openly announcing it is buying about $3 million worth of Trump’s meme coin, which personally enriches himself and his family. New Yorker writer Isaac Chotiner also notes his family’s announcement of a new Trump Tower project in Saudi Arabia following the president’s well-publicized visit to Saudi Arabia.
The blatancy of the grift is curious for a president who routinely condemns the Washington “swamp.”
Princeton sociology professor Kim Lane Scheppeleexplained to the New Yorker how Trump and other tyrants like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro corruptly enrich themselves, unimpeded, while campaigning against corruption to their voters.
READ MORE: 'Cannot accept it': Senate Republicans give ultimatum to Mike Johnson
“A lot of autocrats run on anti-corruption platforms, but often what they actually do is change the kind of corruption that exists,” Scheppele said, adding that the kind of corruption that put people like Putin in power was low-grade sleaze, like a local clerk needing a bribe to give you a permit. Vladimir Putin and Orbán came to power punishing corrupt street-level bureaucrats while skimming off the top of massive state contracts and seeking favors or seeking rewards from people who needed at the very top of the system.
“That kind of corruption, where you give state contracts to your friends in exchange for taking something off the top, is not very visible” to the average voter, she said.
"Only sometimes it is, like when Trump or his billionaire advisor Elon Musk accuse welfare programs of paying people who are 150 years old while churning out federal budgets that “massively tilt tax benefits toward Trump and Musk,” she added.
“Also, if you look at Elon Musk, his fortune is largely from a basis in what were state contracts. And there have been reports about making the Federal Aviation Administration use Starlink, which he owns, or about firing the people who were investigating his companies. So, Musk stands to get massively more wealthy from exactly what he’s doing in his government capacity.”
Read more: 'Fully prostrate on the ground': Trump ripped for 'humiliating' display to Arab leaders
Scheppele added, however, that Trump’s “openness of the corruption is partly just a flouting of all the rules, for which [Trump] gets a lot of credit with his base anyway.”
Another tried and true tactic of successful immoral autocrats is to accuse their opponents of corruption and launch corruption investigations against other people, no matter how bogus. In 2019, Trump tried to force Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to open an investigation into the Biden family to disarm Biden as a political opponent.
“Trump accuses Biden of being corrupt, and then Biden turns around and says, ‘No, you’re corrupt.’ It sounds like it’s in a playground: ‘You started it.’ ‘No, you started it.’ And when that kind of thing happens, people who are listening just discount both sides.”
Accusing your opponents of corruption when you yourself are corrupt, even in the absence of any actual corruption on the part of your opponent, generates an audience tune-out, Scheppele says.
READ MORE: The backlash is here — and Republicans have no one to blame but themselves
“People say they don’t know who is more corrupt and ignore it all.”
Another tactic for successful strongman regimes, says Scheppele, involves surrounding yourself with a cadre of similarly swampy accommodators, people willing to let the corruption fester.
“One of the first things that somebody who really wants to be corrupt does is to corrupt the prosecutor, because they’re exactly who would enforce the law against them.”
When Orbán came to power, Scheppele pointed out that one of his first appointees was his loyal friend Péter Polt as the country’s chief prosecutor, who ignored all corruption on the Orbán side to pursue the other team’s fraud and minor offenses.
Read more: Frankly pathetic': World leaders treat Trump like a 'toddler' who needs a 'shiny toy'
Critics point out that Trump’s attorney general Pam Bondi, who as Florida AG dropped an investigation on the president’s Trump University scam after getting a $25,000 donation from Trump’s family foundation, OK’d the $400 plan from Qatar this month, despite clear restrictions on such gifts from the Constitution’s emoluments clause.
“They want to have people in those inner-circle meetings who have the same kind of stake in the system that they do. And if these other people are willing to go along with the corruption, well, that’s exactly who they want, because they have something on those folks as well as those folks having something on them,” Scheppele said. “It’s a kind of mutual-assurance pact. And this is a kind of discipline that holds the whole thing together. That’s how some states are organizing themselves now.”
Read the full New Yorker article at this link.