President Donald Trump has been engaged in a historic and ruthless level of corruption since his return to the White House last year, and according to numerous ethics experts who spoke with The New Yorker, it will require a level of reform amounting to "radical surgery" in order to prevent future presidents from doing the same thing.
In a piece published Monday, New Yorker staff writer John Cassidy laid out the ever-expanding scope of Trump's corruption in office, including his trading of stocks for companies with business before the U.S. government and, most damningly, his new $1.8 billion DOJ slush fund that would essentially loot the U.S. Treasury of taxpayer funds to line the pockets of the president and his allies.
For the report, Cassidy spoke with Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who also served as the chief ethics lawyer in the White House under George W. Bush, where he notably halted the hiring of a Goldman Sachs executive as Treasury Secretary, due to the conflict-of-interest laws their appointment would violate. When pressed about the current situation with Trump, Painter said that historical parallels were inadequate.
"[Former President Richard] Nixon had his issues, but I don’t think there is anything like this,” Painter said. “The President is specifically precluded from getting any financial favors from the Treasury while in office.”
Cassidy spoke with a variety of other experts in addition to Painter about what sorts of things would need to be done in order to protect the country from having to weather the corruption of a future president similar to Trump, and the answers suggested that vast, sweeping ethics reforms are in order.
"Painter told me that the first task is to make the President and Vice-President subject to the federal conflict-of-interest law, and require them to divest their conflictive assets," Cassidy detailed. "Another obvious and necessary reform is a ban on trading individual stocks, one that applies to Presidents and members of Congress alike."
Passing such a reform would require action from Congress that appears unlikely with Republicans in the majority. The alternative would be to impeach presidents who violate the rules against self-enrichment by the Executive Branch, but as Painter noted, "We already tried that twice and failed."
"Ultimately, then, it comes back to politics, where there are structural problems that run even deeper than Trump," Cassidy added. "In the post-Citizens United world, Presidents—Republican and Democrat alike—sit atop political parties and allied fund-raising entities that can gin up practically unlimited sums, which can be used to crush dissidents. (This month, in Kentucky, Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican willing to criticize Trump, was defeated in what became the most costly House primary on record.) The weight of money shifts the balance of power away from individual members of Congress, insuring that for many of them the default position is submission."
He continued: "What we’ve learned during the past decade is that when the Supreme Court puts democracy up for sale, Congress is utterly beholden to a President, and if that President is a malign actor, the U.S. Constitution is no longer fit for purpose. Trump is ruthlessly exploiting this weakness, but he didn’t create it. Assuming that the Republic does eventually get past him and his grifting, it will need radical surgery, not merely a reset."