Talking Points Memo: The Corruption Will Be Endless

By Josh Marshall:

Trump himself is instinctively corrupt. I don't think requires much argument. He took a substantial amount of the campaign money he raised and ran it through his own companies. He practiced textbook self-dealing with his family foundation. Many of his private businesses were no better than glitzy cons and he developed a reputation for cheating partners, even if in many cases doing so in ways that didn't explicitly violate the law. He is placing his own children into prominent positions organizing his administration. His version of a "blind trust" is one in which his children and heirs administer his companies on his behalf while he is President. His companies are not 'public companies' in the corporate governance sense. But the vast majority of his companies' activities are carried out in public - hotels, golf resorts, licensing businesses, consumer businesses. None of this can really be blind even if there were any attempt to make it so. Trump and his children are in the process of building a real life version of the cartoonishly caricatured fantasy of the Clinton Foundation he created for his followers on the campaign trail.

Trump is so thoroughly corrupt in his dealings that it is probably fair to say that he doesn't even recognize the concept of self-dealing as being a problem in itself. They say hypocrisy is the tribute which vice pays to virtue. In Trump's case there isn't even much hypocrisy. In every case we've seen him discuss it, he sees self-dealing and self-enrichment as a normal, meritorious way of doing things.

His followers almost all tend to be grifters, in many or most cases people who bet all on Trump when he seemed like a longshot because both professionally and metaphorically they had nothing to lose. Those people will want a bonanza and I suspect they'll get it.

I should add here that if ridiculous amounts of public corruption is the worst we get from the Trump administration I will, frankly, be profoundly grateful. Profoundly grateful. I fear and expect things that are far, far worse.

The Full Story (November 13, 2016)