The Trump administration is already the most corrupt in history, and by a wide margin

I know younger Americans might find this difficult to believe, but there was once a time when the United States could go for weeks at a time without a presidency-defining corruption scandal. There were stretches when things got so boring that the press was reduced to critiquing presidential fashion choices or had to fill television time speculating on the implications of hosting something called a "hip hop barbecue."

It wasn't paradise, by any means, but it was presumed that even the most alarming presidencies would generally limit themselves to one impeachment-worthy scandal per term, perhaps two tops, because once you go beyond that it's not really a "corruption scandal" anymore, it's just a president being a corrupt sack of crap while living it up in a mansion the rest of us pay for.

Which brings us of course to the Donald Trump administration, because reasons.

On Saturday, MSNBC broke the news that current Trump administration "border czar" Tom Homan was caught accepting a literal goddamn bag of cash in a September 2024 FBI sting—and that the reason nobody heard of it until now is because Trump's widely crooked Justice Department shuttered the investigation into Homan soon after Trump took office. The New York Times followed up with more details surprisingly quickly, given how hush-hush one might presume this would have been just a few hours earlier.

Again: Tom Homan was caught in an FBI sting with a literal bag of cash.

The cash payment, which was made inside a bag from the food chain Cava, grew out of a long-running counterintelligence investigation that had not been targeting Mr. Homan, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the case.

Mr. Homan’s encounter with the undercover agents, recorded on audiotape, led him to be investigated for potential bribery and other crimes, after he apparently took the money and agreed to help the agents — who were posing as businessmen — secure future government contracts related to border security, the people said.

The Times and MSNBC versions differ a bit in the telling, mostly because the Times, as usual, spends much of their story promoting the White House nothing-to-see-here claims while MSNBC spends more words on, you know, the implications of a top Trump ally accepting a literal goddamn bag with $50,000 in bills inside in exchange for agreeing to funnel government contracts to the givers if he just happens to land another government position in another Trump term.

As of the current moment, there seems to be no explanation of what happened to the FBI's $50,000 in presumably-marked bills after Tom Homan took the literal goddamn bag of money and drove off. And there doesn't appear to be even a pretense, from Kash Patel, Todd Blanche, Emil Bove, or the other administration officials responsible for killing the case, as to why Tom Homan's Super Legitimate Consulting Business needed his clients to give him a literal goddamn bag of cash rather than accepting a f--king check.

Was that common, in Homan's business? His was the kind of low-key consulting firm that welcomed big ol' bags of cash, for clients that preferred to walk around with 500 individual $100 bills stuffed down their pants? That's not worth a follow up question, huh? All right.

From the reporting, what seems to have happened was this. Less than 2 months before the presidential election, an FBI sting operation recorded Homan accepting a

literal
goddamn
sack
of
cash

in exchange for steering government contracts to the would-be clients if he got the opportunity to do so. But there was some argument within the FBI as to whether accepting the cash was, by itself, sufficient proof of criminal intent, and Homan was left to dangle while agents waited to see how and if he followed through on the illegal contract-passing. Trump won the election; Trump indeed again invited Homan to become a top architect of border operations; Homan gained the power to steer contracts to firms who paid him to do it. (The FBI might have also held off to see whether Homan would add tax evasion to the list of potential charges, since it's still not clear whether Homan ever wrote down "$50,000" on the proper Literal Sack Of Money IRS form.

But the FBI failed to consider the possibility that on gaining office, convicted felon Donald Trump would fill the Department of Justice with brazenly criminal nutjobs who would devote every moment of their time to blowing up investigations into Trump-allied crooks and firing all the FBI agents who'd once been devoted to such things. They failed to imagine that anyone half as transparently crooked as Kash Freaking Patel would get shoved into the building, and that's on them. Live and learn.

While we await an explanation of just how it is Tom Homan could get caught pocketing $50,000 of FBI sting money only to have Kash Patel and Todd Blanche kill the investigation, that's not even the most scandalous Department of Justice story to come out since Friday. The second is the Trump administration's removal of the U.S. attorney overseeing the Trump-demanded "investigations" of two of his self-proclaimed enemies.

The sin? Not being willing to forge crimes by Trump's enemies when the evidence showed no crimes had happened.

Administration officials informed Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, that he would most likely be fired, but there appeared to be a last-ditch effort by some in the Justice Department to protect Mr. Siebert and the situation remained in flux, those people said.

Mr. Siebert has recently told senior Justice Department officials that investigators found insufficient evidence to bring mortgage fraud charges against Ms. James and has also raised concerns about a potential case against Mr. Comey, according to officials.

President Trump has long viewed Ms. James and Mr. Comey as adversaries and has repeatedly pledged retribution against law enforcement officials who pursued him. The president, who has publicly called Ms. James “a crook,” has in the past expressed frustration that a prosecution against her was not moving ahead, according to a person briefed on his remarks.

This is ... genuinely insane. What's wildest here is that nobody bothered to pretend that there was any non-crooked reason to remove Siebert. Trump is a whiny little piss-baby and a lifelong crook, he's long past any ability he once had to paper over his corruption with plausible sounding excuses, and the man threw a tantrum because he doesn't care whether there's evidence of a crime or not, he expects "his" crooked Justice Department to announce each of his enemies did a crime, invent some half-assed or entirely forged evidence to implicate each, and publicly ruin and/or jail them.

He's done his best to surround himself with the kind of fellow crooks who would arrest political enemies purely on his say-so, but career government officials—even Republican ones!—still keep balking at the "do crimes for Dear Leader" step, which has resulted in mass purges of any official with integrity and their replacement with either (1) nobody or (2) the six or so biggest crooks in the administration taking on those duties in a prolonged sort of how-many-oranges-can-I-juggle clown skit.

The Times reports Attorney General Pam Bondi as one of the people who allegedly disfavored Siebert's firing, a detail that suggests that even Bondi would rather keep administration corruption on the down-low rather than having President Dumbass announce it at press conferences and from his personal phone. Or it may be even less ass-covering than that, because Siebert was indeed forced out that same day. It was framed as a resignation, rather than a presidential firing, which matters exactly zero percent.

Now, if Siebert wanted to prove his firing was absolutely 100% corrupt, he wouldn't have to work very hard for it. And that's my introduction to the third once-presidency-ending scandal inside the Justice Department during THIS ONE DAMN WEEKEND.

Readers, the President of the United States accidentally published what seems to have been intended as a private message to Pam Bondi ... on his social media feed. And the message is a brazenly crooked demand, to his attorney general, that a list of named political enemies get prosecuted more quickly.

Jeebus McCrackers, even Richard Nixon wasn't quite stupid enough to put "Hey DOJ, I need you to falsely prosecute my political opponents NOW!!!" on a f--king Times Square billboard. But Trump did the 2025 equivalent, and he quite possibly did it in part because he has dementia and is now foggy on which apps to use to send notes on which criminal conspiracies.

But we know his post was a mistake because shortly after Trump posted his demand that "Pam" speed up the corruption, that post was deleted again. Oops?

So, just to underline this point yet again, a sitting president being caught red-handed ordering his attorney general to undertake or speed up investigations/prosecutions of his political opponents has been, historically, a 100% no-nonsense impeachable-right-now offense because up until this lifelong criminal and multiply accused rapist became Mike Johnson's personal god-king it was understood, very very understood, that a "president" reaching down to order specific criminal investigations of his perceived enemies was among the crookedest actions it was even possible for a president to take. It was unthinkable. It would be easier for a president to survive a recording in which he was handed a literal goddamn sack of money than it would be to survive this.

So what will happen now? Well, that's the thing. There's the obvious thing, and then there's the far more likely thing.

In ordinary times, if the Republican Party was not itself nothing more than a crime syndicate wrapped in a flag, impeachment proceedings would start on Monday and the Senate would remove President Crook and his minions in short enough order. This is all far, far over the edge of the even plausibly acceptable; this is the sort of corruption that, had any Democratic or independent official done it, resulted in mobs of angry Republican-backing militia members burning down government buildings.

But this is not ordinary times, and the Republican Party is a fascist party with a singular goal of exercising unconstrained power no matter which laws need to be bent for it.

You cannot look me in the eye and tell me that self-professed Jesus admirer Mike Johnson, the current Republican House Speaker, is even one quarter-turn less crooked than Pam Bondi, Tom Homan, or Trump himself is. It's a nonsensical argument. We would not be here, we would not even be close to being here, had Johnson, Sen. Mitch McConnell, and a Republican coalition consisting of pretty much All Of Them had not excused and immunized their party's rancid corruption even through a violent would-be insurrection.

We are living through the most corrupt period in American history precisely because House and Senate Republicans have backed and brushed off the corruption. Tom Homan getting caught in an FBI sting only to have the case vanish when presidential bag man Emil Rove got a sniff of it? FBI agents being fired en masse for investigating and prosecuting Jan. 6 violence? Donald Trump sending mash notes to his attorney general insisting his political adversaries are "guilty as hell" of something and need to be retaliated against "NOW!!!"?

None of that happens without Mike Johnson. Or James Comer. Or Jim Jordan. Or John Thune. Or Susan Collins, or Lisa Murkowski, or the collected sneering crookedness of the Fox media empire. It is Republicanism itself that has turned corrupt; Trump, an idiot whose behavior has gotten even more inconsistent and corruption-minded as his brain dissolves in what by all appearances is a dementia-laced fog, only did what he has done the rest of his life: He saw an opportunity, and he exploited it.

We've often observed that Trump is nearly unique in American history in that he appears to have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He has no endearing hobbies, no compassion for animals, no skillset that does not revolve primarily around exploitation of others, not even the barest of apparent fondness for his family. The man has not one good quality.

Or so we have said, but it turns out the man may be the best judge of character who ever lived. Trump has the unparalleled ability to find the worst and crookedest Americans—people willing to bend whatever needs bending on his behalf—and surrounds himself with them. How is it possible to staff an entire White House and not run across a single public official with courage or dignity, even by accident? How is it even possible for Trump to have surrounded himself with so very many people who end up with prison sentences after meeting him?

There are only two possibilities. Either Donald Trump is the most adroit judge of hidden human failings to ever appear in this world ...

... or the Republican Party, and conservatism in general, is so stuffed to the gills with corruption that it never mattered who Trump surrounded himself with; every last House Republican, conservative strategist, and protofascist think tanker was already a crooked piece of shit before they ever got his call.

I don't know which of those two scenarios is closer to the truth, but I expect Mike Johnson and John Thune do. There is no Trump without Republican indifference to his crimes; he would be in a very comfortable low-security prison right now, or wearing the most gaudy ankle bracelet ever crafted while tooling around Mar-a-Lago under house arrest.

The biggest question of all, though, is how we ever recover from a Justice Department that is, plainly, openly, and provably, crooked. It has been poisoned irrevocably; hundreds of the most skilled prosecutors have been ejected for being not crooked, and the rest continue to be winnowed out according to their tolerance for the crookedness that now infests the place. What happens?

And what happens to a House and Senate that has proven, over and over again, to have collaborated in unprecedented, nation-threatening corruption rather than opposing it? Congress has proven itself unfit; it is incapable of serving the role the Constitution describes for it.

Just how many literal goddamn bags of money has the FBI been handing out to the people that govern us, if Tom Homan wandering off with a $50,000 sack of it isn't considered a scandal worth anyone's time?

The best scenario remains the same as it was when Trump did his first impeachable act, his tenth, and his twentieth. A handful of Republican senators and House members reject the corruption, perhaps even declaring independence from the party if that is what it takes to rein in this particular criminal and his allies. And we have been waiting for that to happen for a very long time, and through any number of acts—from renditions to illegal military orders to a full corruption of Justice—that no person with conscience could possibly ally themselves with.

And yet: Here we are.