President Donald Trump and his family have long been dogged by allegations they are abusing the presidency for personal enrichment — and this time around, their schemes are bigger and more brazen than ever, Heather Digby Parton wrote in a scathing analysis for Salon published on Friday.
None of this is anything new, she noted — a series of legal cases under Trump's first term challenged him with violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, as a lot of foreign government activity around Trump properties appeared to be naked schemes to enrich him and his family for favor.
For instance, she noted, the federal government "spent massive amounts of taxpayer money ferrying Trump around to his commercial resorts, where he essentially sold access to members and promoted his own properties while in the world spotlight." Then there was his hotel in Washington, D.C. where foreign dignitaries spent obscene amounts of money for his personal benefit, and cases in which "foreign governments rented out entire floors in Trump office buildings and left them empty."
These sorts of schemes are abounding under Trump's second term, Parton warned, and other members of his family are cashing in on the action as well.
Now, she wrote, "it's no holds barred, straight-up grift and corruption in the billions, featuring foreign governments, sleazy scam artists and a big play in the arcane world of cryptocurrency." For example, Eric Trump is "putting together real estate deals with the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, countries whose relationships with each other may be fractious but are all crucial to U.S. foreign policy," while Donald Trump Jr. "is running around Eastern Europe dining with prime ministers and striking deals for new Trump hotels within government properties."
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But perhaps the biggest grift, she said, is all the Trumpworld action around cryptocurrency — and not just Trump's own memecoin that he is using as an access lottery to dine with him.
Trump's children, along with Trump's diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff, founded World Liberty Financial, which is seeking to get government support for their "stablecoins" as a financial instrument, just as Trump pushed a pro-crypto bill in Congress, the GENIUS Act, to benefit that company. Congress looked set to pass the bill, wrote Parton, but after The New York Times reported the Trump family's personal stake, "Democrats who'd previously backed it balked (along with a couple of Republicans) and this week the bill failed in the Senate. Apparently the stench of Trump at both ends of this deal — as the regulator in chief and the financier being regulated — was just too pungent."
The bottom line, Parton concluded, is that these days if you're doing business with America, "you'd better be prepared to pay the Trump family and their associates for the privilege. Bring your checkbook — or, better yet, your crypto wallet. That's how business is done these days in the shining city on a hill."