Back in 2019, Donald Trump pointed at Hunter Biden’s brief “cup of coffee” with a Chinese banker during a 2013 ride on Air Force Two and turned it into the single biggest line of attack he ran against Joe Biden for the next five years.
The grift! The corruption! The selling-out of America! Oh, the humanity!!!
Trump told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that Hunter “walked out of China with $1.5 billion” because his father was vice president, even though no evidence ever surfaced that the elder Biden touched his son’s business dealings, nor that Hunter ever pocketed anything close to that sum.
This week, Donald Trump landed in Beijing for a three-day summit with Xi Jinping with his son Eric and daughter-in-law Lara on Air Force One, alongside more than a dozen of the wealthiest CEOs in America: Elon Musk of Tesla, Tim Cook of Apple, Larry Fink of BlackRock, Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, and many others.
The Trump Organization, which Eric runs, has flirted with Chinese business deals for years, and Eric’s American Bitcoin company works directly with Chinese crypto-mining giant Bitmain.
Hunter Biden’s cup of coffee looks like a teetotaler’s glass of water next to this rolling roadshow of self-dealing, where every executive on board is openly there to negotiate his own deal while Beijing’s officials size up the willingness of the family of the most powerful man in the world to sell out America for a few billion dollars.
That’s the thing about Trump. He brags about corruption, lives on corruption, and treats every lever of the federal government as a personal slot machine, yet because he yelled “drain the swamp” loud enough in 2016, half the country still believes he’s the guy fighting the corrupt part of the establishment.
He isn’t fighting it; he is it, only stupider, more openly larcenous, and more contemptuous of the public good than anyone who’s ever held the office.
Consider what he’s done just in recent months.
In January, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and the Treasury Department, agencies he himself runs, over the leak of his tax returns during his first term while his own appointees were running the IRS. He’s suing himself, in other words, for damages he then expects his own Justice Department to pay him out of taxpayer money.
According to reporting in The New York Times and New Republic, Trump’s DOJ is now negotiating a settlement that may include dropping all IRS audits of Trump, his family, and his businesses, which would amount to a get-out-of-tax-fraud-free card signed by the very man whose taxes the IRS is required by law to audit every year.
ABC News is now reporting that he also wants $1 billion to give to the January 6 rioters. Perhaps as prepayment for his “army” that will attack people during this November’s elections?
This is naked corruption on a scale we've never seen. The federal government's now a personal piggy bank for one criminal man and his violent cult.
Senators Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren rightly called it “a shameless and transparent act of corruption that should make any American’s head spin.”
Trump’s corruption extends to his civil debts too. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals denied his motion to undo the $83 million defamation judgment won by E. Jean Carroll, whom a jury found Trump had sexually abused and then defamed.
Now Trump’s lawyers are floating a brand new theory: maybe the Department of Justice should substitute itself as the defendant under the Westfall Act, on the theory that defaming a woman he abused “is part of the official duties of the President of the United States.”
Because the federal government can’t be sued for defamation, this would vaporize Carroll’s judgment entirely and let Trump walk away free. Trump’s corrupted DOJ, naturally, is willing to argue it. That’s what happens when you corrupt the Justice Department into your personal law firm.
The same corrupt Justice Department is also doubling as Trump’s cortupt personal revenge machine. There’s been a fresh corrupt indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over a beach photograph of seashells that prosecutors claim, against all credulity, was a coded threat to kill Trump.
The DOJ corruptly raided John Bolton’s home and indicted him on classified documents charges.
They corruptly went after what they called the “Seditious Six,” the Democratic lawmakers who recorded a video reminding service members they have a duty to refuse illegal orders, until a grand jury embarrassingly refused to indict.
Senator Adam Schiff is being corruptly investigated by the DOJ for alleged mortgage fraud that his attorneys call “transparently false, stale, and long debunked,”
Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is under a corrupt investigation, New York Attorney General Letitia James is under a corrupt investigation, and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was under a corrupt investigation until even Trump’s corrupt Republican allies told him the optics were getting bad before the midterms.
That’s the corrupt behavior of authoritarian regimes, not constitutional republics. But corrupt Republicans appear just fine with all of it.
Meanwhile, the Trump family’s corrupt World Liberty Financial crypto empire has cleared something north of $5 billion in valuation after a flood of corrupt foreign and corporate money, including a $2 billion stablecoin deal from a state-owned Emirati fund that, as 60 Minutes reported, corruptly routed itself through a coin issued by the president’s sons.
Shortly afterward, Trump corruptly pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who had pleaded guilty to money-laundering crimes that included moving funds for Hamas, Iranian-linked terrorists, and child sexual abusers. He has apparently helped the Trump family business; former DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer called the Zhao pardon, simply, “corruption.”
And the corrupt $400 million White House ballroom? It’s funded by Lockheed Martin (with $33 billion in federal contracts in 2025 alone), BlackRock, Google’s parent Alphabet (after settling a $24.5 million lawsuit/shakedown with Trump), Palantir, Coinbase, and a parade of crypto firms, tobacco giants, and defense contractors whose names the White House corruptly tried to keep secret until a court ordered disclosure.
Every one of those companies has business in front of the federal government Trump personally oversees, and every check is a bribe by any honest definition of the word.
This corruption is the political opportunity of a generation, and I keep waiting for Democrats to wake up to it.
Péter Magyar just defeated Viktor Orbán in Hungary by running a Navalny-style anti-corruption campaign on the single through-line of criticizing the “state capture system” Orbán built with his billionaire cronies.
When I was working in Russia, I watched Alexei Navalny build his political career almost entirely around exposing the corruption of Putin and his oligarchs through his Anti-Corruption Foundation, the same foundation that got Navalny murdered for becoming too effective.
Back in the 1980s, working for a German relief organization in the Philippines, I watched Cory Aquino bring down the entire Marcos kleptocracy by running on corruption alone. They literally bumped me off the plane — several days in a row — in their rush to leave the country.
From Bolsonaro’s first Brazilian victory on the back of his “Operation Car Wash” call for clean government to Volodymyr Zelenskyy riding Ukraine’s anticorruption EuroMaidan “Revolution of Dignity” into the presidency, to Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Nast smashing the Tammany Hall machine, the anti-corruption frame has been the most reliably winning political message of the last 125 years all over the world.
It will work here, too. In fact, it’s already working: Trump’s “drain the swamp” lie was the cynical perversion of a real anti-corruption message, and that lie put him in the White House twice. Democrats now have the much easier job, because the corruption being exposed is real, vast, well-documented, and entirely on the other side.
But, and this is where Democrats keep tripping over their own feet, they have to be willing to clean their own house first.
When John Fetterman takes hundreds of thousands of dollars from AIPAC and its allied PACs and then joins Republicans to demand the US keep arming Netanyahu through a war that killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and ultimately dragged us into a hot war with Iran, that’s the kind of corruption that lets Republicans laugh in our faces every time we accuse them of being on the take.
And it’s particularly disheartening to younger voters who’re awakening for the first time to the impact of politics on their daily lives.
When Senate Democratic hopefuls Haley Stevens and Angie Craig accept tens of thousands of dollars from donors employed by the very corporations (Lockheed, Comcast, Microsoft, Coinbase) that are paying for Trump’s ballroom, the message we’re trying to send on corruption gets muddled.
When AIPAC openly brags that it’s the top donor to the Democratic Party and to the Black, Hispanic, and progressive caucuses on the Hill, that’s not a moral failure on AIPAC’s part: lobbies will lobby, and five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized it. But that doesn’t make it right.
If we want to win on corruption, we have to be willing to refuse it ourselves, or at least make overturning citizens United the declared number one priority of the entire party.
This doesn’t require unilateral disarmament, but it does require bold, public, and loud promises and the initial actions necessary to follow through on them.
Bernie Sanders has shown for decades that in some districts/states you can fund a serious national campaign out of small dollars alone, and a growing group of Democrats have followed his lead in refusing corporate PAC money. That ought to become the rule, not the exception, and it ought to start now, at least with primaries.
Every Democrat in America should be hammering the GOP’s corruption every single day from now through November 2026 and on into 2028.
Consider the opportunities:
— Eric Trump’s seat on Air Force One,
— the $10 billion settlement that’s about to flow from the Treasury into Trump’s personal pocket,
— the DOJ’s attempt to bail Trump out of his E. Jean Carroll debt,
— the revenge prosecutions of Comey and Bolton and James and Schiff,
— the Zhao pardon,
— the ballroom bribes,
— the multibillion-dollar crypto self-dealing,
— and the Kushner-family Saudi sovereign-wealth payouts are all sitting on the public ground in plain sight, and every Republican on a 2026 ballot owns every bit of them.
While we’re naming their corruption every day, we’d better be ready to name the corruption inside our own party too, because the Democrats who run on cleaning up Washington while taking AIPAC checks and ballroom-donor money will never beat Trumpism.
Only an honest, anti-corruption, small-dollar, working-class Democratic Party can do that, and it’s the kind of party Magyar, Aquino, Zelenskyy, and Navalny would all have recognized.
It’s still simple, easy, and powerful: “It’s the corruption, stupid.”
