Accusations of pay-to-play corruption aren't stopping President Donald Trump from making big money off of his presidency. In fact, far from backing down, Trump recently raised the price of his meet-and-greet opportunities to astronomical heights.
Trump came under fire last week from members of his own party for a "private VIP reception" for the top 220 purchasers of his $TRUMP meme coin, which allowed Trump to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars.
Not stopping there, Trump has now raised his fee for an in-person meeting with no guaranteed "return on investment," a government affairs exec told The New Yorker.
In a new piece, reporter Evan Osnos wrote, "Even seasoned practitioners of Washington pay-to-play have been startled by the new rules for buying influence. In December, a seat at a group dinner at Mar-a-Lago could be had for a million-dollar contribution to MAGA Inc., a super PAC that serves as a war chest for the midterms."
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But Trump has pushed the envelope once again, with the outlet reporting, "More recently, one-on-one conversations with the President have become available for five million."
The executive continued, “What if he’s in a bad mood? You have no clue where the money is eventually going.” Another lobbying veteran described the frank exchange as “outer-borough Mafia sh--.”
"Trump has sold influence so briskly that the political machinery cannot keep up," the report said. "After he was offered a four-hundred-million-dollar gift from the government of Qatar—an airplane so opulent that it was dubbed the “palace in the sky”—Dan Pfeiffer, a former White House communications director, called it 'the most brazenly corrupt move by any President in U.S. history, and it’s not close.'"
But naked corruption doesn't seem to be a problem anymore, with MAGA stalwarts touting Trump's transparency as justification for his actions.
The report concluded that since Trump re-took the presidency, "the flood of cash swirling around the White House" has "swamped whatever bulwarks against corruption remained in American law and culture."