A Crime Wave in the White House
Corruption & Self-dealing is fundamental to fascism
Our government, foreign policy, and trade policy are being transformed, not to benefit Americans but to benefit the president, his family, and his friends. Like an iceberg, I suspect we’re just seeing the tip when it comes to the kleptocracy installed by the Trump administration.
What is incredible to me is that all these GOP-types act like being a scammer or con artist is normal or good behavior. I know they weren’t raised this way. I know their preachers didn’t say lying, stealing, or coveting thy neighbor was the path to salvation. Somehow everything we (boomers) were led to believe was bad is now something to be proud of. The only (very widespread) behavior they’re not bragging about is sex or porno involving children, and at the rate these “good Americans” are being busted for this shit, it’s only a matter of time.
Lots of Democratic politicians get busted for breaking the law, but as NYC Mayor Adams proves, salvation is just an orange ass kiss away.
As a public service, I’m going to list many of these illegal, enabling, and unethical financial actions emanating from the White House. We’re becoming like China and Russia, where our leader’s conflicts of interests are simply woven into the processes of government and politics. People need to grasp the entirety of what’s going on in the background of the fascist machinations in Washington DC.
A substantial amount of the information in this post comes via an excerpt in The Atlantic from the soon to be released paperback version of Anne Applebaum’s book, Autocracy, Inc.
The budgetary process and the evisceration of government services will disproportionately affect marginalized communities by neglecting their health and safety needs. Through this budgeting process, the Trump administration will effectively determine whose lives are prioritized, and whose lives are expendable. And trust me, it ain’t us.
On top of that, there’s the kind of self-dealing going on in the White House that could have made the founding fathers blush. It’s being run like a mob operation, except that the mafia liked to keep their offers-people-couldn’t-refuse out of the press.
There may come a day where justice is brought to bear on the perpetrators and accomplices of Trump V.2; we’re going to have to recruit judicial assistance from around the world to resolve all these offenses in less than a generation.
I’ve broken down this self-dealing crime wave by category to aid in navigation.
Grand Theft America.
World Liberty Financial, a Trump family business, is a cryptocurrency exchange serving as a vehicle for anyone to pay indirect bribes. The company makes its money from exchange fees.
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Meme coins for sale. The Top 220 holders of the $TRUMP coin (street value = zero) will be invited to have dinner with the President and a VIP tour (originally of the White House) of an unspecified someplace. The Top 25 collectors will be treated to an exclusive reception prior to dining. Trump will discuss policy issues at the dinner, including "the future of crypto," according to promotional materials.
Virtually anyone, including foreign governments, government contractors, and people under federal criminal investigation, are being invited to see who can personally enrich Trump the most.
From Popular Information:
Immediately after the announcement, the value of the $TRUMP coin spiked from just over $9 to over $14. As of Sunday afternoon, $TRUMP is trading at around $15. (This still represents an 80% decline from its peak value of $75.)
Trump directly profits from this activity in several ways. First, companies controlled by Trump and the Trump Organization collect fees on every trade of $TRUMP. He has reportedly made hundreds of millions of dollars on trades of $TRUMP since launch and, according to an analysis by WIRED, made another $1.6 million in fees in 24 hours after the recent content announcement. Secondly, about 80% of all coins, 800 million in total, are owned by companies controlled by Trump and the Trump organization. Increasing the value of these coins by $6 each made Trump $4.8 billion richer, at least on paper.
Bloomberg News recently estimated that the Trump family crypto fortune is nearing $1 billion.
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Trump’s Inauguration slush fund raised $239 million. 140 different people or companies gave at least $1 million, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Toyota, Uber, Delta Airlines, JPMorgan Chase, Target, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
A $4 million donation by Warren Stephens was made the same day as the announcement he’d been picked to be ambassador to Britain. Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase was rewarded for its million dollars by way of the Securities and Exchange Commission dropping a lawsuit about its opaque transactional practices. Top donor ($5 million), poultry processor Pilgrim's Pride was rewarded via the withdrawal of a Biden-era rule requiring poultry companies to keep the levels of salmonella bacteria below a certain level in their meats to prevent illnesses commonly known as food poisoning.
From the New York Times:
The committee, known formally as the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee, is required by federal law to report the names of donors and the dollar amounts for contributions over $200 to the F.E.C. no more than 90 days after the Jan. 20 ceremony. It is not required to report how it spent the money.
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All in the family? This past weekend at the Willard Hotel, Donald Trump Jr., megadonor Omeed Malik and White House crypto czar David Sacks held an afterparty and launched a club for the ultrawealthy called the “Executive Branch.” The initiation fee is reportedly half-a-million dollars, and there is already a waiting list to join.
Aspiring members are tightly screened for loyalty to President Trump and promises to be a place for rubbing shoulders with cabinet members and West Wing officials, with no danger of running into reporters or Democrats.
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Get Out of Jail Free.
Trump fired 17 inspectors general, all people who were responsible for monitoring corruption and ethical violations inside the government.
Don’t Worry, Be Happy! So far the Trump administration has:
Suspended a civil investigation into Justin Sun, Chinese entrepreneur, pal to Steve Banon, and an adviser to World Liberty Financial, with a $75 million investment in the company.
Announced it would no longer enforce the Corporate Transparency Act. likely bringing an end to congressional efforts to end money laundering, tax dodging, and other lawbreaking by anonymous investors.
Suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits American and foreign companies from paying bribes to do business.
Disbanded a Justice Department task force set up to administer sanctions on Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.
The Justice Department has announced it will curtail investigations of cryptocurrency fraud and disband its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team.
Ordered a full work stoppage at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created to protect consumers from manipulation by banks and other financial institutions. (this has been suspended by court order, but it’s already too late)
Fired top officials overseeing ethics, whistleblower protections, and labor rights, including the heads of the Office of Government Ethics, the Office of Special Counsel, and the Merit Systems Protection Board.
Talk Is Cheap, Cash Is King
The White House may be angry about immigration, but it’s okay with foreign workers for Trump properties. The Seasonal Employment Alliance’s PAC staged its fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago this year, playing up intentional choice of the venue, and framing Trump’s businesses as an avenue for influence with the new administration.
Five days after the event, the administration released new seasonal work visas sought by the PAC’s supporters. And then President Trump’s Bedminster, N.J. country club filed a request with the Department of Labor’s Office of Foreign Labor Certification, seeking seven cooks and a bartender. Two days after that, it posted positions for nine servers.
Gosh, I wonder if any Americans could have qualified for those jobs? I guess it’s easier to keep people honest and productive by threatening visa cancellations.
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Over the course of Donald Trump’s second term, real estate developers will be working on opening a total of 19 Trump-branded projects in eight countries. The President’s companies will receive payments for licensing the Trump name over the course of many years. Other properties will pay for management deals by the Trump organization. We’ll never know how much money is involved because the man in charge has never released his tax returns.
Of course, US foreign policy will now be guided by doing what it takes to protect the President’s interests in overseas properties. And now that the Supreme Court has created a legal shield for the presidency, the sky will be the limit for corruption and conflicts of interest.
During his first term, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) tracked conflicts of interest, building a catalogue of nearly 4,000 conflicts between Trump’s business interests and his presidency. Their investigators concluded that he benefited from $13.6 million in payments from foreign governments during that period, representing an unprecedented violation of the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause.
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Wired has reported that guests are paying millions of dollars to dine with Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago, and business leaders are being targeted with advertisements that sell access to a one-on-one meeting with the President of the United States for $5 million.
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I’ll wrap up today’s listings with Fox News senior business correspondent Charles Gasparino telling his viewers on Thursday that “senior Wall Street execs with ties to the White House” had informed him that they were getting tips from the Trump administration on trade talks that could (and do) swing markets.
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The sorts of crime Donald Trump made a big deal about in his campaign have actually been declining for three years now. You know what’s not declining? Fraud.
Businesses and individuals lost $16.6 billion to online crimes in 2024, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. That’s the highest figure ever reported and a leap of 33% compared to 2023. In 2024, there were 859,532 complaints about potential online crimes, with the FBI saying phishing and spoofing complaints account for 193,000 of them, followed by extortion with 86,000 complaints. Investment scams, which often involve cryptocurrency, made up more than $6 billion of the total losses, with business email compromise scams leading to losses of $2.7 billion.
Guess what? The Department of Justice Consumer Protection Branch will be shuttered next fall, and staff will be reassigned to other, more important tasks like, perhaps, closing down universities.
Finally, there’s the overwhelming corruption of the Trump cabinet and coterie, which The American Prospect covers quite well:
“One of the overarching narratives of the Trump administration is the total handover of the levers of government to corporations, and particularly the empowering of corporate representatives to oversee the very companies they worked for,” says Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, the venerable and still-toothy ethics watchdog. “That is the defining story of this administration, and it’s been badly underreported and underappreciated due to the whole Trump circus. It’s more extreme than anything we’ve seen. It’s all-pervasive. It includes a lot of examples that look like parodies.”
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This week is May Day. Find a protest here, and go to it. Or make your own. See my Resistance Calendar, out a day early this week on Wednesday.
Florida Man Loses Canadian Election by Julia Métraux at Mother Jones
Riding the wave of Canadian nationalism that Trump evoked, the Liberal Party was able to maintain its hold on power. Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, meanwhile, running on a “Canada First” platform, had been endorsed by Canadian citizen Elon Musk; Musk holds a Canadian passport through his family, including his maternal grandfather, an enthusiastic supporter of apartheid who left Canada for South Africa in 1950. A formal petition to Canada’s House of Commons calling for Musk’s Canadian citizenship to be revoked has garnered more than 300,000 signatures.
Earlier on Election Day, Trump made a Truth Social post seemingly encouraging Canadians to vote for Poilievre—and again floating the idea that Canada should become America’s 51st state. Trump and Musk’s backing may not have helped Poilievre, who rejected Trump’s support in a post on X; many Canadians now see the Liberal Party as their best option against absorption into the US.
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Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? by D. Graham Burnett at The New Yorker
In this sense, generative A.I. might count as a conceptual win for my field. Historians have long extolled the “power of the archive.” Little did we know that the engineers would come along and plug it in. And it turns out that a huge amount of what we seek from a human person can be simulated through this Frankensteinian reanimation of our collective dead letters. What a discovery! We have a new whole of ourselves with which to converse now. Let’s take our time; there is plenty to learn.
But we’ll need vigilance, and a fighting courage, too, as we again take up this unending experience of coming into ourselves as free beings responsible for world-making. Because it is, of course, possible to turn the crank that instrumentalizes people, to brutalize them, to squeeze their humanity into a sickly green trickle called money and leave only a ruinous residue. The new machines are already pretty good at that. The algorithms that drive these systems are the same algorithms that drive the attention economy, remember? They will only get better.
What it is like to be us, in our full humanity—this isn’t out there in the interwebs. It isn’t stored in any archive, and the neural networks cannot be inward with what it feels like to be you, right now, looking at these words, looking away from these words to think about your life and our lives, turning from all this to your day and to what you will do in it, with others or alone. That can only be lived.
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As Measles Cases Surge, Mexico Issues a US Travel Alert by Javier Carbajal at Wired
The outbreak in Chihuahua is partly due to its proximity to Texas, which it borders to the north. A major outbreak has been ongoing in the US state since late January, and cases in Mexico have been linked to those north of the border. The United States has recorded 884 confirmed cases of measles this year, up from 285 in 2024, as well as three deaths from the disease. Of this year’s cases in the US, 646 have been in Texas.
To try to prevent the measles virus from spreading further throughout Mexico, its Ministry of Health has issued a travel warning for the United States and Canada, where cases have also risen sharply. The ministry advises travelers to make sure they are up-to-date with their vaccinations, practice social distancing, wear a mask, and frequently wash their hands.
Falling vaccination levels have also helped drive up Mexico’s cases, as they have in the US. In 98 percent of US cases this year, the patient—whether an adult or child—had no history of vaccination against measles. In early April, it was reported that a 31-year-old man unvaccinated against measles had died of the disease in Chihuahua.
Bravo
Bravo