An analyst says that President Donald Trump's planned ballroom and the corrupt, private donations to fund it should outrage people, saying it's "like bringing a fistful of cash to a brothel."
The Atlantic's Jonathan Chait described on Monday how "by traditional standards, this would constitute a massive scandal" and compared it to "a similar scandal" about a decade ago under the Clinton Foundation, and why the ballroom — expected to cost more than $300 million — is so different.
"The greatest difference is that Trump’s moves to benefit his friends and hurt his enemies are out in the open, which makes the quid pro quo element far cruder. If donating to a Clinton charity was like buying your date a nice dinner in the hopes of getting lucky, donating to a Trump charity is more like bringing a fistful of cash to a brothel," Chait writes.
"After the 43rd president left office, he established a charitable foundation to undertake good works: disaster relief, public health, and other largely uncontroversial endeavors," Chait writes.
"But the Clinton Foundation became a political liability after reports suggested that it created a potential conflict of interest. Bill Clinton may have retired from elected office, but Hillary Clinton harbored widely known ambitions to run in the future. So the wealthy people and companies that donated to the foundation might have been hoping for access to and gratitude from a potential future president."
The writer examines some of the recent praise of the president's ballroom plans, including recent editorials from The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and New York Times writer Ross Douthat. These assessments each point to viewing the White House improvements as necessary.
He says that he can "sympathize with the mainstream media’s inability to properly capture the breadth of Trump’s misconduct. The dilemma is that holding Trump to the standards of a normal politician is impossible."
He calls out people who support the president's corrupt moves to gather private money to fund the space — and that destroying the East Wing isn't even the worst thing that Trump has done.
"Still, although holding Trump accountable to normal expectations of political decorum may be impossible, surely we don’t need to praise him for merely committing normal-size scandals. The people losing perspective here are not the ballroom’s critics, but its defenders," Chait writes.