The South Lawn of the White House had never seen anything like it. The president of the United States was posing for the world’s media against a backdrop of five different models of Tesla, peddling the electric vehicles with the alacrity of a salesman on commission.
“I love the product, it’s beautiful,”Donald Trumpsaid as he sank into the driver’s seat of a scarlet Model Y. With the Tesla CEO,Elon Musk, beside him, he went on to enlighten the American people that some Tesla models retail for as little as $299 a month, “which is pretty low”.
That same day, within hours of the White House’s makeover into aTeslashowroom, theNew York Timesrevealed that Musk had decided to invest $100m in political groups working for Trump. The massive injection of capital would enhance the nearly $300m Musk had already spent getting Trump elected.
A week after the commercial on the South Lawn, on 19 March, Trump’s commerce secretary, the billionaire investment banker Howard Lutnick, went onFox Newsand exhorted viewers to “buy Tesla”. “Who wouldn’t invest in Elon Musk’s stock?” he gushed. “He is probably the best person to bet on I’ve ever met.”
At the time Lutnick made those remarks, he had yet to divest himself from Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services firm he had led for 35 years. He was talking up stock in which he still had a vested interest – Cantor held $300m in Tesla shares, a stake that has since soared to$555m. And the commerce secretary was also bigging up his friend Musk, whose SpaceX and Starlink businesses are regulated by the commerce department that Lutnick now controlled.
Eight days in March, three friendly billionaires, one of them the world’s most powerful person, another the world’s richest person. Doing what friends do: scratching each other’s backs. Even though Musk later fell out with Trump – in a shocking social media spat that roiledUS politics– the imagery remains powerful and highly symbolic of Trump’s second term in the White House.
Between them they committed in those eight days acts that, had they occurred during any previous presidency – including Trump’s own first administration – would have provoked howls of protest concerning quid pro quo. Yet those eight days represent just a tiny slice of the graft and possible misconduct that is unfolding.
The gift by the Qatari government of a $400m luxury jetliner to be repurposed as Air Force One has become the paradigm of the blitz of ethical dilemmas unleashed by Trump. The Pentagon last monthaccepted possessionof the plane, which will be transferred to Trump’s presidential library once he leaves office.
That Trump doggedly accepted the Qatari “palace in the sky” despite widespread condemnation speaks volumes about how indomitable he feels at this moment. He has shrugged aside the rebukes even of devoted Trump supporters, including the rightwing commentatorBen Shapiro, who bridled at the transfer’s grubby appearance, calling it “skeezy stuff”.
It also shows Trump’s disdain for the US constitution, given the emoluments clause’s clear prohibition. Presidents are not allowed to accept high-value gifts from foreign governments without congressional consent.
Yet the luxury jumbo jet is also just the thinnest edge of a very fat wedge. There has been so much more that has flown, if not under the radar, then partially obscured from sight amid the ethical blizzard of corruption and influence.
There have been multimillion-dollar TV packages, real estate deals in Arab petrostates, dinners with the president going for $5m a pop, plum job offers for contributors to Trump’s inaugural fund, cryptocurrency ventures attracting lucre from secret foreign investors, “drill, baby, drill” enticements for oil and energy donations – the list goes on, and on … and on.
Trump and his team of billionaires have led the US on a dizzying journey into the moral twilight that has left public sector watchdogs struggling to keep up. Which is precisely the intention, said Kathleen Clark, a government ethics lawyer and law professor at Washington University in Saint Louis.
“They have mastered the technique of flooding the zone – doing so much so fast that they are overwhelming the ability of ethics groups and institutions to respond.”
Chris Murphy, the Democratic US senator from Connecticut, has delivered two long speeches on the floor of his chamber in which he has itemised Trump and Co’s most controversial transactions. The record already stretches to scores of entries, chronicling what Murphy calls Trump’s “efforts to steal from the American people to enrich himself and his friends”.
In an interview with the Guardian, the senator said that Trump’s was a “pay-for-play administration. That’s the underlying theme. You payDonald Trumpmoney, he does favors for you. That’s old-fashioned corruption.”
Clark’s analysis is even more pointed. “People talk about ‘guardrails’ and ‘norms’ and ‘conflict of interest’, which is all very relevant,” she said. “But this is theft and destruction. This is the looting of America.”
Trump signaled that he would be a president like no other at the start of his first term, when he became the only occupant of the Oval Office in modern times to refuse to divest his assets by putting them into a blind trust. Though presidents are not bound by conflict of interest laws applying to other elected officials, the norm has been for incumbents to set themselves high standards, the archetype being Jimmy Carter’s sale of his peanut farm.
Trump, by contrast, put his assets in a trust that remained under the control of his family, with him as its sole beneficiary. He incurred numerous accusations of first-term conflicts of interest, as foreign officials from20 countriesdescended on his hotels, whileSecret Service agentsin Trump’s security detail were made to pay premium rates, pouring at least $10m into his bank account.
Such unprecedented disregard for time-honored ethical boundaries was shocking at the time. Now it looks merely quaint.
“In the firstTrump administrationthere were ethical lapses,” said Danielle Caputo, senior legal counsel for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center watchdog organization. “With this new administration, there’s not just a disregard for ethics rules, there’s contempt.”
The conversion of political power into cash began even before Trump re-entered the White House. Weeks before the inauguration, Melania Trump sealed a $40m deal withJeff Bezosfor an Amazon Prime “behind-the-scenes” documentary on her life.
Trump banked millions of dollars of his own by leveraging his status as president-electto browbeattech companies. He settled disputes over the freezing of his then Twitter and Facebook accounts in the wake of the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, prising $10m out of his friend Musk, and $25m from Meta.
Trump used the months leading up to November’s election to test-run what, as Murphy noted, has become a theme of his second presidency – pay-to-play. He invited oil executives to Mar-a-Lago and, as theWashington Postrevealed, offered them a “deal” in which they would donate $1bn to his campaign and in return he would tear up profit-limiting environmental regulations once he was back in the White House.
He kept his promise: on day one of his new administrationhe dischargeda barrage of pro-fossil fuel actions.
Donors to his record-breaking $239m inaugural fund have also found Trump to be a grateful benefactor. Warren Stephens, an investment banker who gave $4m, was rewarded with the role of US ambassador to the UK; Jared Issacman, a billionaire pilot and close associate of Musk’s, gave $2m to the fund and was tapped to lead Nasa (he was abruptly yanked from the appointment last month after he wasreportedly discoveredto have been been donating to Democrats).
The pattern has continued into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Three months into the administration, Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr, launched an elite private members’ club namedExecutive Branchwhich commands a sign-in fee of a cool $500,000.
Its attraction? Access to cabinet members and top Trump advisers.
Not to be outdone by his own son, Trump himself has followed the same playbook at his Mar-a-Lago resort. In March, he began inviting business leaders to dine with him in group settings at$1m a seat.
Prefer something more intimate? No problem. One-on-one meetings are also available,yours for $5m.
For a seasoned observer such as Norman Eisen of the Brookings Institution, the sheer mass of problematic transactions puts the administration beyond the pale. “It’s over the line, unlawful, corrupt and unethical. It is un-American.”
Eisen has experience dealing with knotty ethical issues. He was special counsel for ethics during Barack Obama’s first year in the White House.
Obama notes in his autobiography, A Promised Land, that Eisen earned himself the title of Dr No, so strict was his approach to conflicts of interest. He would tell White House officials hoping to attend outside events that “if it sounds fun, you can’t go”.
Eisen told the Guardian that he prevented Obama from refinancing his family home in Chicago. “He was regulating the banking industry at the time, in the midst of the Great Recession.”
The contrast between such almost pedantic strictures and the free-for-all in today’s White House astonishes and dismays Eisen. “If my somewhat tongue in cheek motto for Obama was ‘If it’s fun, you can’t do it,’ then the motto of the Trump White House seems to be ‘If you can make a buck, grab it.’”
Exhibit one of such conduct, Eisen suggests, is the Trump family’s dive into the world of crypto. Shortly before the inauguration, they launched personal lines of meme coins, $Trump and $Melania.
Then they issued a new cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar, known as a stablecoin. Taken together, Eisen believes that the two crypto ventures from the family of a sitting president amount to “one of the worst and most shocking conflicts of interest in our nation’s history”.
Trump bragged on the campaign trail that he would turn the US into the “crypto capital of the planet”. He was more circumspect in front of his faithful followers about the big plans his sons were simultaneously developing to cash in on the currency.
Since his election victory, Trump has used his presidential status and executive power to boost not only the general standing of crypto but also his personal stake within it. One of his earlyexecutive orderscreated a “strategic bitcoin reserve” designed to bolster the industry.
At the same time, he eviscerated basic regulatory controls, halted federal crypto-related lawsuits and disbanded a taskforce trained to hunt down crypto criminals. “We have a president whose net worth now includes very substantial investments in cryptocurrency who at the same time is loosening regulations on the crypto industry,” Eisen said.
The unrivalled magnetism of the US presidency helped Trump to blast his nascent meme coin, a currency almost entirely reliant on hype, into the stratosphere. It rocketed from $6.50 on inauguration day to a peak of $73.
Then, when it predictably plummeted back down to below $10, he used his presidential allure brazenly once again to boost the coin. This time he announced a“private intimate dinner”for the top 220 $Trump investors, followed by an exclusive White House tour for the top 25.
The ensuing scramble for a seat at the presidential dining table reportedly earned the Trump family $148m.
The $Trump meme coin is an ethics regulator’s waking nightmare. There is little transparency around who is channelling money into it, and even less around the potentially nefarious motives of investors.
The same might be said about the Trumps’ other big crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, which was launched last September by Trump’s sons. The president himselfis listedby the company as its “chief crypto advocate”.
Sign up toThis Week in Trumpland
A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration
after newsletter promotion
Federal law sets tight rules against foreign parties donating to presidential campaign or inaugural funds. Yet there is nothing to prevent outside interests with connections to foreign governments engaging with World Liberty and its new product, the USD1 stablecoin.
One of its biggest backers is the Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun (best known for paying $6.2m at a New York art sale for a banana taped to a wall,then eating it). Before the inauguration, Sun pumped $75m into World Liberty. A few weeks later, the Securities and Exchange Commission paused aninvestigationinto him for alleged securities fraud.
USD1 is currently valued at $2.3bn, the lion’s share of which comes from a $2bn transaction by MGX, a firm which happens to be chaired by the intelligence chief of theUnited Arab Emirates. That a company with ties to the government of an Arab petrostate should be able to make such a giant investment in a crypto venture generating profit for the sitting US president and his family goes against the grain of decades of robust accountability work countering conflicts of interest.
“We’ve been pretty successful in this country rooting out corruption, or at least pushing it into the shadows,” Murphy, the US senator, told the Guardian. “Now it happens out in the open.”
And it doesn’t stop there. Over the past few months Trump’s second son, Eric, has been frenetically traveling the globe in search of real estate deals, throwing to the winds the pledge Trump made in his first administration to eschew any foreign business transactions.
In his second administration, Trump has made no such promise. All he has conceded this time, ina documentreleased by his lawyers in January, is that the Trump Organization will avoid cutting business deals with foreign governments.
Even that boundary has been pushed close to breaking point. Eric Trump sealed his first deal since Trump re-entered the White House in April.
It involves the construction of the Trump International Golf Club & Villas outside the Qatari capital, Doha, as part of a $5bn luxury beachside resort. The company managing the development, Qatari Diar, is owned by the sovereign wealth fund of the Qatari government.
Two weeks after the Trump Organization announced the deal, the president himself arrived in Doha as part of his three-country tour of the Middle East. He declared the trip a huge success, having drummed up trillions of dollars of business and investments for the US.
The Guardian invited the White House to comment on complaints that the president has blurred his public duties with his family’s personal profit-making activities to a degree never before seen in the US. A White House spokesperson replied with a statement which they asked us to print in its entirety, so here goes:
“There are no conflicts of interest. President Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children. It is shameful that the Guardian is ignoring the GOOD deals President Trump has secured for the American people, not for himself, to push a false narrative. President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public – which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media.”
The argument that there is no conflict of interest because Trump’s business is handled by his children, specifically his sons – Don Jr leading on crypto and his social media empire, Eric on real estate – is an interesting one. Sons seem to be de rigueur, to the extent that members of Trump’s inner circle who lack them might feel the need to borrow one.
Take other key figures in Trump’s cabinet, which is packed with so many banking and energy billionaires that it ranks as therichest presidential cabinetin modern history. Lutnick, the commerce secretary, who has a personal fortune of about $2.2bn, has been involved in various accusations of conflict of interest since he encouraged Fox News viewers to “buy Tesla”.
At the start of this year Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm Lutnick led for almost four decades, increased its investment in Strategy, the biggest corporate holder of bitcoin in the world. Cantor’s stake rose by several hundred million dollars to $1.3bn, research by the watchdogAccountable.UShas found.
At the same time, Lutnick was actively helping Trump create his strategic bitcoin reserve, a move that greatly strengthened the cryptocurrency.
Last month, Lutnick divested himself of his Cantor stake, but he did so by transferring his ownership to his two sons. Cantor isnow controlledby Brandon Lutnick, 27, and Kyle Lutnick, 28.
Or take Robert F Kennedy Jr, the vaccine-skeptic health secretary. Under intense pressure from Democratic senators, he agreed to divest his 10% stake in any payout from an ongoing lawsuit in which he is engaged against Merck over its HPV vaccine, Gardasil.
Government officials are not allowed under federal law to participate personally in official matters in which they have a financial interest. So what did Kennedy do? Hetransferred his stakein the case to one of his adult sons.
And then there’s Mehmet Oz, the multimillionaire physician better known by his TV name, Dr Oz, whom Trump put in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. As theWashington Posthas reported, Oz co-founded a health benefits company, ZorroRX, that helps hospitals save on prescription drugs.
This would have been an indisputable conflict of interest, because in his job as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Oz wields huge sway over hospital drug policies, and thus ZorroRX profits. Since taking up the position Oz, whose wealth is put at up to $300m, has divested himself of some of his investment portfolio and is no longer mentioned on ZorroRX’s website.
His fellow co-founder of ZorroRX, however, is still listed as the firm’shead of medical affairs. That’s his son, Oliver Oz.
Under federal conflict of interest law, there is no prohibition on adult children managing the interests of parents who hold public office. Yet the spirit of the law does force us to reflect on why so many Trump administration leaders are so fond of handing sensitive money-making portfolios to their sons.
“By giving over to your son, you are immediately raising questions about how separate you are going to be from the success of this business,” said Caputo of the Campaign Legal Center. “Will you be focused on what’s best for the public, or will you be guided in your decision-making by what would most benefit your family?”
In the last analysis, what matters most perhaps about the financial dealings of the Trump administration is what impact they are having on the American people. In particular, what is it doing to the 77 million voters who put their trust in Trump and sent him back to the Oval Office?
Trump returned to the White House partly on his promise to working-class Americans that he would “drain the swamp”, liberating Washington from the bloodsucking of special interests. Yet a review by the Campaign Legal Center found that Trump nominated at least21 former lobbyiststo top positions in his new administration, many of whom are now regulating the very industries on whose behalf they recently advocated.
Eight of them, the Campaign Legal Center concluded, would have been banned or restricted in their roles under all previous modern presidencies, including Trump’s own first administration.
They include Pam Bondi, the US attorney general. She approved the gift of the Qatari luxury jetliner as “legally permissible”, having herself worked as a lobbyist for Qatar.
Trump’s other great pledge was that he would put the wellbeing of “forgotten” working people before that of the vested elites. His appeal was pitched at the millions of rural and working-class Americans who have languished from mounting income inequality, the decline of manufacturing jobs in the globalised economy, and what he claimed was the negative effects of millions of undocumented immigrants.
Evan Feinman has witnessed personally and up close how this promise has fared in Trump 2.0. For the past three years, Feinman was busy leading a $42.5bn program created by Congress to bring affordable high-speed internet to every American home and business that needed it.
The project was vast and ambitious, on a par with the rural electrification drive that transformed the heartlands of America in the 1930s. Located within the US commerce department, its success is critical to the future prosperity of millions of Americans, especially those in hard-bitten rural areas of the sort that solidly backed Trump in the last election.
Studies have shown that giving families access to the internet improves the grades of school students, increases college enrolment and reduces the likelihood of households falling into debt. It also helps older Americans stay in their own homes and avoid residential care.
By the inauguration, the broadband project was well under way, with several states only weeks away from breaking ground and laying the cables. Then Lutnick took over the reins of the commerce department.
Within a days of his confirmation, Lutnick met with senior managers and informed them he wanted to scale back on the use of fibre optic and switch to satellite. According to an account of the meeting that was given to Feinman by someone present, Lutnick specifically inquired after his friend Musk, the CEO of Starlink, which provides internet services through low-Earth orbit satellites.
Days after that, Feinman was told he was being let go. His contract was up for renewal, and it wasn’t being extended.
“I was dismayed,” Feinman told the Guardian, insisting that his distress was not so much related to his own dismissal but out of concern for the Americans who would be harmed by the shift. By his reckoning, satellite internet would not only be slower than broadband, it would also be much more expensive – costing users an extra $840 a year in fees.
“For Americans in rural locations, that’s going to really hurt. Many of the president’s strongest supporters – up to hundreds of thousands of families who voted for Trump – are going to see slower, more expensive internet services, and all to the benefit of the wealthiest man on earth.”
According to some estimates, Musk’s Starlink stands to make $10bn to $20bn should the shift from broadband to satellite internet go ahead.
The episode has left Feinman “deeply saddened. I see my nation harming itself in ways that are inexplicable and entirely avoidable.”
He fears for rural Americans who will pay the price. “These are communities who put their trust in this administration. They are going to find that their trust has not been honored, and it will be to their significant future detriment.”