In the last few weeks, we have been inundated with new stories of Donald Trump's personal corruption. These are not stories about politics, though they continue to be framed as such. They are not disputes about how government should function or what its priorities should be, though the impact to both those things is immeasurable. There is no ideology at stake, no heated partisan rivalry, no pundit wars-by-proxy, no new "test of executive power" or judicial spirit-channeling that upends a century or more of established law on behalf of corpses who know better.
No, these are stories only about Donald Trump personally engaging in corrupt acts in the pursuit of personal profit, to the detriment of both government and society. Nothing else. No on the other hand to be had.
The first is one we've known for a while. Donald Trump continues to buy stocks in companies before promoting them on his social media platform, "Truth Social," or announcing new government policies that benefit those companies.
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The President of the United States has been using his position to do pump-and-dump runs on corporate stocks. He is blatantly using his advance knowledge of government policy announcements to frontrun those stocks; he may in some cases be manipulating those policies to goose the fortunes of companies he invests in.
One example cited by CNN was Trumpâs purchase of between $200,000 and $500,000 worth of Nvidia shares days before announcing in an April 15, 2025 Truth Social post that âall necessary permitsâ for the chip giant to âbuild AI supercomputersâ in the US would be âexpedited and quickly delivered.â [...]
On February 10, according to financial disclosures, Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares in Dell. Just over a week later, during a speech in Rome, Georgia, Trump urged Americans to âgo out and buy a Dell computer.â In late May, Dell scored a five-year Pentagon contract worth nearly $10 billion.
Frontrunning the entire stock market for personal gain is not, and never has been, a presidential duty. There is no partisan spin to it. There is not a federal officials should be allowed to pocket millions or billions of dollars via insider trading coalition pairing off a no they shouldn't one; it is recognized by nearly everyone in the country, including most of the elected officials who have attempted it, as a form of fraud. It was made double-underline illegal by the 2012 STOCK Act, and to the extent that there are any caveats that allow the Sitting Damn President To Do It Anyway, they stem more from congressional cowardice than the Constitution's own vagueness on the matter.
But it is unambiguously corrupt, because the moment a president is allowed to use his insider policy knowledge to Bet On Stonks is the moment that presidents are allowed to manipulate new policies for the sake of his Stonks, placing every one of the country's national interests subservient to the investment brokerage being run out of the Oval Office. There is no better place to run a pump-and-dump scheme touting specific stocks or even whole industrial sectors than the United States presidency, a role in which your every mumble is broadcast around the world and analyzed by four-pundit panels convened solely for the job.
Buy a stock; tell the world how much you love the stock and tell them, directly, that they should be buying more of it; when the stock rises because the Actual Sitting President Of The United States is telling people it's a good deal, cash out and move on.
It didn't get any less corrupt just because Donald Trump was installed over someone else. It is being excused, however, and the general rationale offered up for ignoring it is that Donald Trump is so uniquely odious as an individual, so completely detached from morality and ethics and even the most minimal sense of decency that the rest of us walk around with, that he literally cannot be expected to function within those bounds. It is impossible for him; asking him to run the office without doing a steady string of crimes and moral outrages would be like asking a seagull not to shit.
It is, for him, biological, or so say his supposed allies, and so the entire rest of the world must make allowances to account for our unexpected elevation of this conscienceless troglodyte unfamiliar with human laws and societies.
The second recent development is closely tied to the first. Having decided that playing the stock market is one of his most consequential in-office duties, it stands to reason that Trump would then seek to monetize the corruption that stems from his corruption.
Nobody gets to ride for free: If you want special access to the sitting president's latest stock plays, you're going to have to pay Trump for the privilege.
Trump Media, the company behind Truth Social, is selling Wall Street faster access to the "most market-moving" posts on the US President's social media platform. On Thursday, Trump Media announced plans to launch "Truth API," a licensed real time data feed for businesses that provides "the fastest access to Truth Social's most influential accounts." It goes live on August 1st. [...]
In a statement, interim Trump Media CEO Kevin McGurn said that "markets already move on Truth Social posts," and that the company expects Truth API "to become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue."
There are no accounts on "Truth Social" other than Trump's own that anyone on Wall Street gives two shits about, so the $100,000 per month fee that Wall Street firms can pay has the near-exclusive benefit of getting Trump's social media posts delivered to them slightly sooner than they are delivered to you, which allows the participants to frontrun stocks that Trump himself frontruns, getting a piece of whatever market action Trump creates.
So it is a corruption turducken; Trump uses his advance knowledge of new government policies to place bets on the company stocks that will be most impactedâor manipulates those policies to favor companies he has already invested in. Then he charges the brokers who sell you the stocks a special monthly fee to know what stocks he's boosting before you know what stocks he's boosting, allowing the brokers to buy them up just before the day trader brigades swarm the market to buy those stocks, at which point the brokers sell to the day traders and pocket the instant profits, and Trump gets to grift from literally everyone involved in the process, from the original policy-dependent companies to the brokers to the day traders to the 401k plans.
It's not a particularly clever plan. It's _only corruption, with no other purpose, and it relies solely on Trump's own expectation that nobody in any other position of power will dare hold him to account for it.
And then there's The Rest. From The New York Times.
The lead investor in a South Korean aluminum company that has challenged Commerce Department penalties on certain exports from South Korea to the United States made a $2 million payment last year to President Trumpâs holding company.
That payment was allegedly a "nonrefundable development fee" relating to an allegedly "still-unannounced golf course project," whichâto translate for those uninitiated in the ways of businessâis how one funnels a bribe through lawyer-speak. The "nonrefundable" part means that the Trump family gets to do absolutely nothing, in exchange for the money; both sides agree that in premise maybe the company gets to open a new golf course with the global antichrist's name on it, or maybe it doesn't, but the Trumps are not obligated to do anything in particular to make this come about because there's a special nonrefundable clause in which all parties agree that if Donald wants to use the money to gild Barron's new car there's not a damn thing the aluminum company financier whose aluminum company has suffered after the United States rudely noticed that it was acting as a passthrough for bringing Chinese-made aluminum into this country without paying the required tariffs, not that that has anything to do with this, heavens no, can do about it.
And this might have been a big deal, not a one-hour story, but $2 million is not even one thousandth of the total cash Trump has grubbed up in just the last eighteen or so months.
Trump has close to 30 different ventures with foreign businesses around the world, according to the Times, creating issues that were unheard of in any previous presidential administration.
Trump has made a whopping $2.2 billion in his second term as president from cryptocurrency, foreign real estate, stock trading, and other ventures.
When you put it like that, $2 million seems hardly worth mentioning. The sitting "president" has been raking in so much money selling branded memecoins that paying him a petty $2 million on top of that could almost be considered an insult. Not as much of an insult as not paying him $2 million would be, but still.
None of this, though, amounts to partisan politics. None of it is policy; all of it is the corruption of policy for the purposes of personal gain. There is nothing inherently "Republican" about using a federal office and federal powers to line your pockets at the expense of everyone else's. All of these things are either high crimes or misdemeanors or, most often, both things jumbled together. To the extent that the Constitution supposedly bars holding sitting presidents and only sitting presidents criminally liable for such things, it does so with the explicit assertion that Congress itself will hold the trial.
At any other point in history, that would have happened already. It was considered a given that no matter how much of an amoral, unethical, grifting lout an elected official might be, you were not allowed to explicitly use your government desk as a personal profit center.
Reader, look up Teapot Dome. It was widely considered the most consequential corruption scandal in United States history. It was described in every United States history textbook I was ever given; there was the Revolution, and the Civil War, and all the rest, and then nestled somewhere in the back half was a page or several on this single corruption scandal so appalling that high school students a hundred years on would still be getting quizzed on it.
Look up the Watergate scandal. I seldom had a school textbook new enough to know of it, but it has become the post-Teapot Dome measure of all subsequent scandals.
Look them up right now. Until this one petty man slouched towards Washington to be reborn, those were considered the most grievous acts of corruption in United States history.
Now pick up any national newspaper, any edition, any day of the week, and read about what our current government figures have been doing as of that day.
What is the difference, between then and now? Why was bribe-taking and a penchant for crimes considered the worst sorts of scandals for a century, while open stock market manipulation and memecoin-laundered bribery are now brushed aside as not a scandal at all?
This is the reason.
There you go. That's all you need to know. There is one reason and only one reason why the Trump White House and Trump personally can engage in all previously barred acts of corruption, and it is because Congress, this particular Congress, this particular Republican-led Congress led by House Speaker Mike Johnson and a leadership team that is not just content with corruption, but are willing to act as co-conspirators to enable it, will lift no finger even when Donald Trump (1) engages in stock market schemes inside the Oval Office, (2) offers a subscription service to learn government policies before anyone else might, (3) receives multi-million dollar payments from both foreign and domestic policy supplicants, and (4) take-your-pick.
Donald Trump, Mar-a-Lago troglodyte, is a manufactured creature. He is not a biological oddity that cannot help but shit where he eats. He is not a natural disaster. He is a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, alleged defrauder of banks, obvious defrauder of the public, insurrectionist, and he is allowed to be all those things inside the White House solely because Congress has made the choice to be exactly that corrupt, measure-for-measure, for the sake of their own power and profit.
Textbooks of the future will include a picture of Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and it will not be for any reason he will find pleasant.
Donald Trump is nothing. He is a nothing. If he did not luck into a father worth stealing from and a reality show premised on bombastic reflex, he would never have become anyone of note and would likely have ended up in a prison cell at least half a dozen times already. He exists as the shadow-puppet of these intractable crooked assholes who will suffer the country to absorb anything so long as they still retain their own ability to be photographed in front of a flag and a row of important-looking books.
Look at this greasy huckster masquerading as a man of consequence. Tom Cotton, the man who would have street protesters face military execution but who cannot bear the thought that a man who directed a mob to storm Congress and made off with national security secrets could not also do day trading inside what remains of the White House.
The House Majority Whip is Tom Emmer. Tom Emmer likes cryptocurrency and attempts to subvert United States elections. You could do twelve Teapot Domes a week on Tom Emmer's watch and he genuinely would not give a shit.
Tom Emmer's most recent official act was complaining to the Canadian ambassador that their (climate-fueled) wildfire smoke was obnoxiously crossing the U.S.-Canadian border without U.S. permission. His most famous previous stunt was posting a video of himself firing a machine gun under the caption "#FIREPELOSI," just days before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband was severely injured in a home invasion by a far-right conspiracy theorist looking to kidnap and "interrogate" her.
These are the figures who have decided that Donald Trump is allowed to steal as much money as he wants, by whatever mechanism he wants, and that the whole of his administration is now allowed to break Every Law while they instead busy themselves with demands that the international community do something about the jet stream.
[O]nce the president signs the bills into law, those are the legally binding funding levels for each program. This year, as in years past, Congress made some of the cuts the president proposed while rejecting others that it thought unwise.
But what happened next was different this year. Rather than implement the laws Congress passed and he signed, Trump has directed some agencies to implement cuts Congress rejected.
For example, his budget request proposed eliminating the Community Development Financial Institutions program. Congress provided the funding anyway. Trumpâs Office of Management and Budget used a technical tool called an âapportionmentâ to block $289 million of these funds from being spent â largely disregarding Congressâs decision to reject the presidentâs proposed cuts.
Similarly, Trump proposed cutting funds for the Smithsonian by more than $60 million. Congress rejected that cut and increased Smithsonian funding to account for inflation. Voughtâs office then unlawfully forbade the Smithsonian from spending any money Congress appropriated beyond the presidentâs budget request.
In both cases, Vought likely has been emboldened by the Impoundment Control Actâs lack of penalties for unlawful withholding of funds.
It is possibleâonly possible, not a foregone conclusionâthat disgusted Americans will strip these figures from House leadership by sending a new Democratic Party majority to the House after the midterm elections. It is possibleâbut highly unlikelyâthat the Senate might change hands as well.
And if both those things somehow happened, and the Democratic majorities set forth to impeach Trump for any five or three or two of the hundred-plus reasons to do it, he would still not be removed from office so long as Republican senators like Thune and Cotton and the others remain corrupt and defiant themselves. Those are the rules.
So there is no outcome here that absolves Thune, Cotton and the others from the responsibility to Not Be Crooked. The current White House is a monster of their own making; they can unmake it anytime they want, and know it, and are refusing to do it anyway either because they are themselves either crooks or cowards. There is no other reason for inaction, and none of the flag-posers have even offered one.
That is the lesson that needs to be taken from all of this. Donald Trump is nothing. Donald Trump is an imbecile. Donald Trump may be the only organism on Earth who is biologically incapable of not doing crimes, and in the same way that moths are incapable of ignoring streetlights, but that did not by itself create a new carveout exempting particularly stupid and criminal presidents from doing particularly stupid and criminal things.
It is all a choice, and Republicans could fix it.
Anytime.
They.
President Donald Trump raked in record-high revenue of over $117 million from overseas business interests last year, according to a CREW analysis of his recent personal financial disclosure. Money coming from a slew of new overseas developments is primarily responsible for the growth in revenue. Those developments bring with them a raft of new conflicts of interest to a degree that is unprecedented even for Trump, in addition to preexisting conflicts. In just the first year of his second term, he has come shockingly close to the at least $149 million in foreign revenue he reported during the entirety of his first term in office.
I know; I keep beating this same drum. But it is pointless to expect Donald Trump, a man who has never had a single redeeming quality or done a single virtuous thing, to abide by laws and customs he is too stupid to even understand. You would not put an alpaca in that office and then act appalled when it peed on the furniture. You would not put an industrial robot arm behind the Resolute Desk, then start grousing that its speeches are not up to snuff.
Every single Republican excuse for Trump's behavior boils down to an assertion that the man is too hopelessly corrupt to refrain from the corrupt acts every past president avoided, so he shouldn't be expected to. They are right on the first count. The second part is of their own tawdry invention, and was invented solely because Johnson and the others wanted to invent it.
It doesn't work that way. If Trump cannot do his own duties, then Congress has the duty to remove him whether Republicans like it or don't.
They are the reason the government is awash in corruption. Not Donald Trump. Not Russell Vought. Not the remnants of "DOGE."
It will be Mike Johnson's official portrait that gets laid out on the pages of future high school textbooks, right alongside Trump's own. Students will have to read the captions of included editorial cartoons to find out which caricatures were meant to represent the otherwise-forgotten Thune or Cotton.
The corruption is inside the Congress, not inside the White House. The White House could be scrubbed clean with a handful of votes; it is Congress that has turned one dementia-addled buffoon into a crisis that will shape America for the next grubby century.
Donald Trump should have been impeached yesterday, and for a tenth of what he has done.
That it has not happened, specifically because the Republican Party has prevented it from happening, is now the greatest government scandal in United States history. And there is no close second.
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