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Under Trump Regime, America Is Wide Open For Corruption

Is America open for corruption now? Unabashedly? Nakedly? Are we tossing aside not just our hard-won victories over infectious diseases but also the more than hundred-year battle against fraud, bribery and graft?

Honest, clean government doesn't follow automatically from democracy. Before civil service reform, the wealthy or well-connected were able to line their pockets by bribing public officials. The Credit Mobilier scandal, which featured bribes to a dozen congressmen paid in the 1860s by railroad executives, was just one example of a widespread plague.

But just as we were able to defeat smallpox, measles and diphtheria with sensible public health initiatives, Americans were able to beat back public corruption. Reformers, calling themselves Mugwumps and Progressives, animated by opposition to the spoils system, passed laws demanding transparency, requiring a nonpartisan civil service, and paying salaries to public servants so that they would no longer have to rely on a percentage of fees or taxes collected.

And what do you know, it worked! American public administration became much more efficient, the nation became a better place in which to conduct business, and — one almost blushes to extol this in our era — there was a net increase in justice and fairness.

Public corruption is never completely vanquished of course. Look no further than former Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez's gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in his bedroom. (He claimed not to trust banks.) Clean government requires constant vigilance from the police, prosecutors and the courts. It requires a consensus in society that this is crucial, and journalists on the lookout for tales of venality and malversation. There are also tons of civil society groups dedicated to this. They're known affectionately as "goo-goos" for "good government guys." They do more than guard against corruption; they're also committed to good policy and implementation. And all of that helps to make the United States a first world nation.

Or it did.

In his first month back in the White House, Donald Trump is yanking the rug out from under open, honest government and signaling a complete reversal to a time of rank corruption. There may be no historical analogue to the level of corruption Trump is inaugurating.

One reversal is even conveniently labeled. Trump has issued an executive order to Attorney General Pam Bondi to cease enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which forbids American companies from paying bribes abroad. Correspondingly, he has shut down the units in the FBI, State Department and the Department of Homeland Security that were thwarting foreign influence operations in American elections.

Trump has fired 17 inspectors general from federal agencies. Those IGs provide independent oversight and serve to unmask government abuses. If the DOGE project were even remotely sincere, Trump would be adding and empowering more IGs, not firing them. No, the presence of truly independent watchdogs is a threat to the Trumpist project, which is permitting agencies to be used to reward friends and punish foes.

That reward/punish metric was the operating principle in the case of New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Toss out the principle of blind justice (so antique) and bring on the distortion of the prosecutorial power for nakedly political ends. Pause the Adams prosecution in return for assistance in rounding up illegal immigrants, but leave the sword dangling over the mayor's head (the government asked that the criminal case be dismissed "without prejudice," meaning that it could be reopened at a later date) to compel total obedience.

The Office of Special Counsel was created in the post-Watergate era to oversee whistleblower complaints, prevent prohibited personnel practices and enforce the Hatch Act, among other duties. (Despite the similar name, it is entirely separate from special counsels, like Jack Smith, who are appointed by the Justice Department.) Trump attempted to fire the current special counsel, Hampton Dellinger, but his firing has been stayed by a court, for now. The director of the public integrity section of the Justice Department was not so fortunate. He was reassigned, and three "anti-kleptocracy" units crucial to targeting the assets of foreign corrupt actors in several countries were shut down.

It is all friends/enemies now. Trump just ended a database on police misconduct. Police misconduct, after all, may be useful in the coming months and years.

Trump extended his personal reach to Brazil, where fellow coup plotter Jair Bolsonaro is on trial for siccing a mob on his own capital. Trump's company is suing the judge in the case, accusing him of illegally censoring right-wing voices. The unmistakable signal: We like coup plotters as long as they're Trump pals. A fortiori the Jan. 6 insurrectionists Trump pardoned en masse. Not so much as a nod toward making individual evaluations.

Trump pardoned Rod Blagojevich, withdrew felony charges against Rep. Jeffrey Fortenberry (R-NE) and had the DOJ attempt to drop criminal charges against Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN).

And it's hard to know where even to begin to describe the walking conflict of interest that is Elon Musk, who, with no transparency, is reportedly terminating all manner of government agencies and offices, including many that touch on his business interests.

Trump's America no longer fights the old foes of good government. It has hung a giant neon sign on our door proclaiming Open for Corruption.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her new book, Hard Right: The GOP's Drift Toward Extremism, is available now.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

There's One Word To Describe What Trump Is Doing

As Americans struggle to grasp President Donald Trump's reversal of American foreign policy, which abruptly overturned decades of cooperation with other democracies to contain authoritarian aggression, many observers have faltered.

Describing what Trump has done strains the usual vocabulary of analysts, who are still not fully prepared to confront this administration's insidious purposes

Yet there is a word familiar from Trump's first term that now defines precisely what he and Russian President Vladimir Putin are up to. That word is "collusion."

For most of the past decade, nothing provoked more anger in Trump and his associate than that word, which evoked a sinister and secretive connection dating back to his first presidential campaign or in some versions much earlier. Rumors circulated widely about his alleged status as a longtime asset of Russian security services, beginning in the Soviet era, or his supposed vulnerability to gamy blackmail by those same agencies, or his desire, eventually well documented, to build a "Trump Tower" in Moscow.

And during that 2016 campaign, copious evidence emerged that not only had the Kremlin wanted Trump to defeat its nemesis Hillary Clinton, but its leadership had enacted a whole series of "active measures" to ensure that result.

Under Putin's direct orders, Russian agencies pursued a broad strategy of online hacking and disinformation. Based in Putin's hometown of Saint Petersburg, the Internet Research Agency launched a barrage of social media designed to promote Trump and denigrate Clinton, influencing millions of Americans during the election cycle with fabricated stories. Hackers working for Russian military intelligence invaded the databases of the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign, releasing reams of stolen files and emails through WikiLeaks and other outlets to create embarrassment and distraction.

It could not have been more obvious that the Trump campaign welcomed and encouraged Putin's election interference. Donald Trump Jr., then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and numerous other campaign aides met or contacted the Russians on as many as 200 occasions to pursue their shared objective. Even the sycophantic campaign chair Steve Bannon blurted that this pattern of behavior struck him as "treasonous."

Whether all this activity amounted to treason or not, the FBI and congressional investigating committees found enough evidence of espionage and other crimes to justify the appointment in May 2017 of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate "Russiagate."

In addition to firing former FBI Director James Comey, Trump did everything in his power to thwart the Mueller probe, including the abuse of his pardon power to silence Manafort, former adviser Roger Stone and others. As Mueller reported in 2019, Trump's manipulations helped forestall indictments charging conspiracy between the Trump campaign and its friends from Russia, although Mueller indicted three Russian organizations and 26 individual Russians.

The inability to charge Trump or his associates for conspiring with the Russians to influence the election in no way mitigated Mueller's finding that the Trump campaign had welcomed the Kremlin efforts and expected to benefit from them — a finding corroborated by the Republican-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's five-volume report on the same matter, released in July 2019.

Nevertheless, Trump and his minions in the Republican propaganda machine obscured all the damning details to proclaim full exoneration — and Trump himself constantly repeated the phrase "no collusion," usually in all capital letters and punctuated as an exclamation, to insist that "Russia, Russia, Russia" was nothing more than "a hoax." Ever since then, he and his apologists have frequently and ludicrously declared that he was in fact history's toughest negotiator with the Kremlin, without a blush.

But now, behind the thin scrim of "peacemaking" in Ukraine, we see the noxious flowering of collusion in its fullest form.

From the Pentagon to the State Department to the White House, the direction of U.S. policy is unmistakable: to deprive the Ukrainians of sovereignty and freedom while bringing them under the Russian heel as quickly as possible. Among those advancing Russia's interests is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who boobishly capitulated in advance of the so-called negotiations.

Hegseth was surpassed only by Trump himself, who consulted secretly with his pal Putin while excluding Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy from the process, then insulted and threatened the Ukraine leader publicly.

This nefarious initiative has expanded in many directions, from Vice President JD Vance's threats against our European allies and his promotion of neo-Nazism in the German election to Elon Musk's use of his Starlink satellite system as an instrument of blackmail against Ukraine. Where it will go is terrifying to contemplate, but we can at least give it an accurate name.

It is nothing less than collusion between an American president and a hostile foreign dictator — and it is the most brazen betrayal in our history.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Conway Sees 'End Of Constitutional Order' When Trump Defies Courts

George Conway predicted that Donald Trump would engage in a constitutional showdown that could spell the end of U.S. democracy.

Vice President J.D. Vance argued Sunday that federal courts “aren’t allowed” to limit the president's “legitimate power," after a judge temporarily blocked Elon Musk and other political appointees from accessing sensitive data and payment systems at the Treasury Department. Conway told MSNBC's Morning Joe the issue would likely force a constitutional clash.

"J.D. Vance is an embarrassment to the law school that I attended," Conway said. "But the fact of the matter is, he's telling us something that we should have already known, and last week I said it. They are not going to obey court orders, they have decided that they are going to push the boundaries on executive power by basically infringing on the Article 1 power of Congress, and they are violating statutory, they're violating the text of the Constitution in the birthright citizenship issue.

"They are violating the text of statutes by having DOGE run around and do all the things that they've been doing, the executive orders, there's no reason that this government that has decided not to obey the laws and the Constitution of the United States is going to obey a court order and, as you know, having practiced law there's really only one way that courts can enforce their orders when somebody is being contumacious and refusing to obey an order, and that's to send the U.S. Marshals out to take somebody in and to hold them in contempt or to otherwise enforce court orders."

"Well, who does the U.S. Marshals Service work for?" Conway added. "The U.S. Marshals Service is part of the United States Department of Justice. It reports to Donald J. Trump, and what's going to happen here, mark my words, is that at some point, they are going to basically tell the United States Marshals Service, do not enforce any of these orders, we will not obey them, and you are not to enforce them and, once that happens, I mean, I hope it doesn't happen, but I know in my heart that it will, our 236-year experiment in the federal rule of law, in democratic self-governance for the United States of America, in American constitutionalism, is essentially over."

Conway didn't see any institutional bulwark against Trump's abuse of the rule of law.

"The only recourse is to go out on the streets and march," Conway said. "That is the only recourse. The courts have no mechanism to enforce their orders other than through the United States Marshals Service, and that's through the Department of Justice, thus through the executive branch. The reason why we obey court orders is because the executive branch complies with court orders. If the executive branch does not comply with court orders and makes a point of saying that we will not comply with court orders, the rule of law, as far as the federal government is concerned, is over, and that is something we need to start focusing on and discussing, because that's where these people will go."

"There is no logical stopping point for them, and this is, you know, the only recourse will be for people to get out and say, we want the rule of law, we want a government that obeys the law, and that's going to require people to go out on the streets, because that is, there is no other alternative," he added.

Watch the video below or at this link.

- YouTube

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

In A Democracy, There Are No Permanent Defeats

In 1994, Republicans won a sweeping victory that cost Democrats control of the House and Senate for the first time in 40 years. Republicans took an eye-popping 54 seats, leading many to conclude that this was a permanent political realignment.

Two years later, Bill Clinton won reelection with 379 electoral college votes to Bob Dole's 159.

A loss, however painful, is not the end of the world. Every election result is provisional. There are multiple examples in recent memory of the American electorate delivering victories to a party and then swiftly reversing course. Following George W. Bush's 2004 success (in which opposition to same-sex marriage was thought to have played a big part in GOP turnout), Democrats fretted that they might need to change their approach to social issues if they ever hoped to return to power. Two years later, Republicans lost control of the House. Two years after that, in 2008, the country turned to Barack Obama, handing Democrats control of the Senate as well. In 2010, the GOP triumphed, gaining 63 seats in the House, yet in 2012, Obama won reelection comfortably.

This is not to minimize the seriousness of the mistake voters have made this year, just to keep some perspective. There are many turns of the wheel.

The Democrats will do themselves some good if this loss causes them to reconsider their boutique views on immigration, public safety, trans athletes and other matters, but the thumping rightward shift in the electorate between 2020 and 2024 suggests to me that this election really came down (mostly) to inflation, with a side of immigration, rather than an embrace of Trump or Trumpism.

Most voters decide based upon their own financial condition. This year, 68 percent of voters rated the economy as "not so good" or "poor." Yes, the other economic indicators were great, but 75 percent said inflation had inflicted moderate or severe hardship on them. Compared with Biden in 2020, Harris lost ground with nearly every demographic — urban, suburban, rural, you name it.

It's impossible to gauge how big a part racism and sexism played in Harris' performance; few will admit such motivations. Harris performed a bit worse with Hispanic women than Biden did. Was that closet sexism? Doubtful. Nor does it seem plausible that so many young women who voted for Biden switched to Trump out of misogyny. Only 26 percent of voters were satisfied (19 percent) or enthusiastic (seven percent) about how things are going in the country, whereas 43 percent were dissatisfied and 29 percent were angry. This underscores the importance of people's personal financial condition. They will hire a creep if they think he'll improve their personal prospects. Most voters neither understand nor particularly care about the rule of law or foreign policy (beyond war and peace).

Much will change before the next election — and yes, there will be more elections. The winning party nearly always overreads its mandate and goes too far, prompting a backlash at the polls. The president's party typically loses seats in off-year elections, so expect a rebuke in 2026.

But Democrats cannot just wait for the election cycle to solve their problems. There are a number of lessons they should take to heart from this year's results: 1) the abortion issue has run its course as a motivator in national elections; 2) Hispanic voters cannot be taken for granted as part of the Democratic coalition; 3) woke postures like taxpayer-funded sex change operations for incarcerated immigrants are toxic; and 4) big federal spending programs don't deliver immediate political dividends.

Of all people, Joe Biden should have understood that passing big bills like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act would not be noticed by voters in time for 2024. He was vice president when the Affordable Care Act passed and witnessed that not only was Obama not rewarded for it, but Democrats lost the House in 2010. Only much later, after it had been fully implemented and people began to enjoy the benefits (and Republicans failed to come up with an alternative), did the program become popular.

Both the IRA and the infrastructure bill, ironically, contain lavish spending for rural and Trump-friendly parts of the country that will begin to come online just in time for Trump to take credit for them. The legislation may or may not have been good policy, but it's important for Democrats to recognize that passing big bills doesn't translate into votes — at least not right away.

The Democratic Party has suffered a setback, not a wipeout. The country remains closely divided. Democrats still hold nearly half the seats in the Senate and (depending on the races still outstanding) nearly half of the House. Twenty-three states have Democratic governors. Democratic officeholders need to gird their loins for the avalanche of lies, scandals, outrages and betrayals that a second Trump term is sure to deliver. They must prepare to educate voters about the consequences of Trump's tariffs (which are taxes), deportations, tax cuts, vaccine misinformation and whatever other insane policies emanate from MAGA Washington.

There's a place for autopsies and wound licking, but it's soon time to move forward.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

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Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

Under Trump Regime, America Is Wide Open For Corruption

There's One Word To Describe What Trump Is Doing

Conway Sees 'End Of Constitutional Order' When Trump Defies Courts

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In A Democracy, There Are No Permanent Defeats

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