President Donald Trump is an unimpressive person. He possessed no real intellect even before his cognitive faculties began to decline. His real-estate business career was mediocre at best, having inherited most of it from his father before going bankrupt multiple times. He lacks any real sense of ethics or integrity and often appears incapable of moral reasoning.
As an electoral candidate, Trump’s only real skill was disposing of ossified, entitled competitors: the Clintons, the Bushes, the unremarkable and uninspiring band of GOP primary challengers, and so on. Trump won in 2016 thanks to a fluke in the Electoral College and the luck of having an opponent falsely tarred by the FBI director on the eve of the election. He won in 2024 amid public backlash to inflation that he helped cause and after President Joe Biden stepped aside mid-campaign after the incumbent turned in a disastrous debate performance.
Having attained the White House twice through sheer luck, he has largely squandered the legacy of past generations. Trump’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic led to his defeat in 2020. He lacks the focus or interest to build sustainable policy achievements beyond harming his perceived foes. He lacks the basic capacity to transmute a GOP majority in Congress into permanent legislative accomplishments. Among our nation’s presidents, he will surely rank as the worst.
The only thing truly impressive about Donald Trump is his skill at corruption. This is not, strictly speaking, a good thing to be good at. Yet one cannot help but be awed at the talent that he possesses for abusing power and enriching himself. The last ten years have seen more innovations in corruption by Trump than the 240 years of American history that preceded them.
Take, for example, his latest scheme to enrich himself and others at the expense of everyone else. Trump owns a social-media company named TruthSocial on which he writes his infamous stream-of-consciousness posts. (He previously posted them on Twitter before its then-owners banned him for trying to overthrow the 2020 election in 2021.) These posts can provide an unusual level of insight into Trump’s thinking, and interpreting them has been a recurring feature of his political career.
Last week, TruthSocial announced an extraordinary new “product”: Truth API, a version of his social-media feed that gives subscribers “a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths.” (“Truths” are the hyper-Orwellian name that TruthSocial gives to posts.) In practical terms, it would allow Wall Street firms and other financial institutions access to Trump’s market-moving posts a handful of seconds before they reach the general public.
Why would anyone bother to pay for a few seconds’ advantage to read a Trump post? Because TMTG, the company that operates TruthSocial, can make money off of it. Imagine, for instance, that Trump announces higher or lower tariffs against U.S. trading partners, a new bombing campaign against Iran, or his decision to support or oppose a publicly-traded American company. A few seconds of lead time could allow firms with complex trading algorithms to cash in on market movements by Trump’s posts—all by handing him a small monthly slice of the profits.
Insider trading is not an unintended byproduct; it is the point. “Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” Kevin McGurn, the interim chief executive officer of TruthSocial owner TMTG, reportedly said in a press release. “Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths while advancing our strategy to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream.”
This is a longwinded way of saying that the president is cashing in on his own public comments. According to some reports, subscribers would be charged $100,000 per month for early access to the president’s posts. Trump personally holds a 41 percent ownership stake in TMTG himself, making him a direct financial beneficiary of his own actions as president. The scheme is functionally no different than if he asked for giant burlap sacks of cash from Wall Street executives in exchange for reading his executive orders the day before they are issued.
Trump has largely given up on anything resembling policymaking or governance during his second term. His legislative agenda is practically nonexistent, save for a constitutionally dubious bill to reshape American elections that is dead on arrival in the Senate. He has outsourced his foreign policy, which largely consists of being humiliated by the Iranian government over closures of the Strait of Hormuz, to Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Stephen Miller, Trump’s domestic policy guru, is largely running the mass-deportation portfolio without real supervision.
That gives Trump plenty of free time to devote himself to his two great loves. When it comes to remaking Washington, D.C., in his own image, Trump has had a mixed record of success. The Kennedy Center no longer bears his name thanks to a court ruling, while the ruins of the East Wing are slowly being built over into a gaudy ballroom. The administration also plans on erecting a giant marble arch to honor Trump himself outside Arlington National Cemetery; the next Democratic president will likely demolish it as soon as they can.
When it comes to corrupt self-enrichment, however, there are no obstacles or guard rails. He has stuffed the Justice Department with his former (and, in a way, current) personal lawyers to end its post-Watergate tradition of independence. The Supreme Court ruled two years ago that Trump enjoys “absolute immunity” for any crimes committed in connection with his “core constitutional powers.” This anti-consitutitional decision amounted to a blank check to collect bribes, kickbacks, and other forms of graft.
To that end, Trump has taken millions from various donors in exchange for pardoning a wide range of white-collar criminals. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that the rumored going price for clemency is at least $1 million. In one instance, Trump pardoned a Democratic member of Congress whose family had petitioned him for help and then lashed out at him on social media for not switching parties, implicitly suggesting a quid pro quo of sorts. (Texas Representative Henry Cuellar, the lawmaker in question, has denied any wrongdoing over his original bribery charges or the pardon he obtained from Trump.)
This is fairly unimaginative by Trumpian standards, of course. A more characteristic scheme is assigning a personal aide—Meredith O’Rourke, a fundraiser whom he reportedly calls his “princess of darkness”—to collect tens of billions of dollars in contributions from major corporations to various pet projects. The Journal reported last month that O’Rourke has taken to referring to Trump as “the boss” and telling the companies, many of whom have regulatory concerns in Washington, that “the boss wants this money.” Those companies have in turn donated hefty sums for the new White House ballroom, Trump’s planned presidential library, and more.
Then there is Trump’s tax immunity deal with the Justice Department. Earlier this year, Trump’s personal lawyers struck a bargain to create an “anti-weaponization fund” to compensate alleged victims of “lawfare” by the Biden administration. In real-world terms, it was a slush fund to reward his loyalists who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and faced criminal charges for it. (Trump pardoned all of them on his first week in office last year.) Trump himself also purported to obtain retroactive immunity for any tax-related crimes he or his family had committed before this year, under the guise of pushing back against the “weaponization” of his tax returns.
One of Trumpism’s basic dogmas is that Trump can commit no crimes and it is a crime to investigate him for them. Translating that dogma into legal language proved to be harder than expected. Rare bipartisan pushback from Capitol Hill led Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to seemingly back down from the fund itself, but not from the purported immunity agreement. Trump insisted that Blanche be confirmed as attorney general nonetheless, and Republican senators appear ready to fold on the matter as well. Corruption, like any disease, is spread by close contact.
It is impossible for an honest person to not be repulsed by Trump’s grotesque adventures in self-enrichment, to his near-total sense of amorality and lack of any belief in honest government. At the same time, there is something remarkable about the depths and lengths to which Trump will go to stuff a few more dollar bills in his shirt. It is like watching Barry Bonds hit home runs in the early 2000s—yes, obviously, it is all corrupt and tainted, but isn’t it incredible to see the outer bounds of the human experience? Isn’t it stunning to see what the most corrupt person in America can do when placed in the most powerful job in the nation?
That said, it’s worth noting that Trump’s genius for depravity still can’t hold a candle to the true GOAT of American political corruption. Richard Nixon and his cronies were breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters and kidnapping the attorney general’s wife in an era where Congress was powerful, most government officials saw themselves as public servants, and the Supreme Court regularly upheld our constitutional order. Imagine what a man of Nixon’s genuine brilliance could have accomplished if he played under today’s rules. It would be like watching Wilt Chamberlain score 100 points every night, but for bribery.
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