(Dobbs) He Wears His Corruption On His Sleeve

60% of the American people believe this president is “not honest and trustworthy.” No wonder.

Aug 14

I’ve covered news in nations where corruption is not a dirty word. To the contrary, it is an acceptable means to an end: getting rich. It is not condemned. It is envied, it is admired. It means you have grabbed the proverbial brass ring. I sometimes covered Russia after the Soviet Union fell, and saw how well-connected Russians became oligarchs by getting access to opportunities most people didn’t have. Almost overnight they became fabulously wealthy. They grabbed dachas and yachts and cliffside manors in Monaco. They grabbed the brass ring.

We are now one of those nations, at least in the world of Donald Trump. And the amazing thing is, he doesn’t try to hide it. There are no coverups. He wears his corruption on his sleeve. It smells to the high heavens but he does it out in the open. He packs his pockets and rewards his friends. Corruption in his world means pay-to-play. Contribute to the Inaugural Ball. Contribute to the White House ballroom. Contribute to Trump Accounts. Contribute to Freedom 250. Your company in return will get rich, or richer, from federal contracts. How do you think Trump’s favorite swimming pool contractor in Florida got the $14 million+ job on the Reflecting Pool?

When you roam around the internet and read about historians’ rankings of the most corrupt presidents, the top three names on almost everyone’s lists are Warren Harding, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump. Yet unlike Trump, Harding’s and Nixon’s corruption wasn’t to pack their pockets.

Harding presided over a corrupt administration that came to be remembered for the Teapot Dome scandal, where members of his cabinet took bribes to give favored companies lucrative leases in the Teapot Dome oilfield in central Wyoming.

Harding wasn’t directly implicated as a financial beneficiary.

Nixon’s corruption was about power, epitomized by the Watergate scandal, where burglars working on his behalf broke into Democratic Party headquarters in Washington to plant hidden microphones and photograph documents. Then Nixon politicized everything from the FBI to the IRS to scare his tormentors and told a long string of personal lies to try to cover it up. He resigned in disgrace.

But Donald Trump? The corruption on his watch is all about him and his bank accounts. His family’s too.

Exhibit A: As Forbes Magazine reported one month ago, his windfall from the presidency since returning to the White House in 2025 was $2.4 billion, and that was only in that first year.

Most of it came from his investments in crypto, which he once called “a scam against the dollar” until he discovered how many dollars he could make, and rolled back government regulation. Just days before his inauguration last year, he released his official “$TRUMP” meme coins, and collected royalties of nearly a third of a billion dollars. The investors in $TRUMP coins suffered as their values went down the tubes, but the president prospered.

Exhibit B: His $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS— which ultimately he controls— for failing to protect his and his two older sons’ first-term tax returns from public exposure. That was phony on the face of it. Although he claimed “reputational and financial harm” and “public embarrassment,” it should be noted that he won the presidency back anyway, so how badly was he really hurt? In mid-May he dropped the suit in exchange for his $1.8 billion taxpayer-paid “anti-weaponization” slush fund to reward his supporters for being “treated unfairly” by the federal government. Eventually he backed down on that one…. maybe…. but he didn’t drop an addendum which promised Trump and his sons immunity from IRS audits or penalties, which probably was the whole purpose of the exercise.

Sweet deal.

Exhibit C, which arguably is the worst of them all: enriching insider traders while enriching himself. Trump is the biggest shareholder in Trump Media, which owns his social media website Truth Social. That’s where he posts his most momentous announcements— about the Iran war, about shifting tariffs, about agreements that don’t stand up, about insults to one-time allies— rather than on the website of the White House. That alone is a form of corruption, because every new set of eyes on Truth Social is a new piece of profit for Trump.

But that’s not enough for the profiteer-in-chief. Two weeks ago, Truth Social launched a service called Truth API (Application Programming Interface) to give an advance peek of his announcements to anyone willing to pay. It costs $100,000 a month, or $1.2 million a year. What do investors get in return? Early notice.

The CEO of Trump Media tried to assure us that it’s all on the up-and-up, because “our customers will get published and publicly available posts fractionally faster” than everyone else. “Fractionally faster?” Who’s he trying to kid? Major traders have AI algorithms that can interpret and act on the announcements in a fraction of a second, which gives them a leg up on their competitors. Reportedly, so far, more than ten companies have signed on for these “fractionally faster” notices, which means more than $12 million a year for Truth Social’s coffers, much of it bound for Donald Trump’s pockets. And potentially huge jackpots for those customers.

So when the president puts out a post like this and a commodities trader knows about it before almost anybody else, which means he knows that oil prices are going to drop before almost anybody else, what’s he going to do with it?

Or, when the president puts one out like this, what’s the oil or fertilizer trader going to do?

In April last year, a week after introducing his huge “Liberation Day” tariffs against most of America’s trading partners, Trump put an announcement up on Truth Social declaring “a 90 day PAUSE,” and said there would only be “a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff” of 10 percent. The S&P 500 stock index closed up 9 percent. It was its best day since the economy came back after the financial crisis in 2008.

This year, whenever our erratic president has made announcements on his website about the Iran war— either “We’re on the verge of an agreement” or “We’re going to send them back to the Stone Ages”— the markets have moved up or down. A research firm called Fundstrat says that his statements have given the S&P its five best and five worst days since his inauguration.

A lawsuit was announced Wednesday, filed by the Freedom of The Press Foundation and The Intercept, to try to prohibit Truth API. It argues that the president “stands to gain financially by giving ‘market-moving’ government information to those who are willing and able to pay his personal company.”

How is this any different than flat-out insider trading, which is a crime? What’s more, as Senator Elizabeth Warren said last week at a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee, “This is a brazen scheme to profit off the presidency.”

At the outset of his first term, Donald Trump told the American people that because he already was rich, he would not accept the presidential salary of $400,000 a year and instead would donate it to some of his favorite non-profits, and he has. But even that is a shell game. As Forbes points out, by profiting off the presidency to the tune of $2.4 billion last year alone, he has made 6,000 times that much.

[Salon] He Wears His Corruption On His Sleeve

(Dobbs) He Wears His Corruption On His Sleeve

60% of the American people believe this president is “not honest and trustworthy.” No wonder.