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Trump Says the Corrupt Part Out Loud

It’s infrastructure week, but for bribery.

By Jonathan Chait

February 11, 2025

Amid the flurry of changes to the face of American government—the president may
or may not have the right to unilaterally eliminate agencies; engaging in insurrection has been decriminalized while prosecuting it has become grounds for
termination; wars of conquest are now on the table—you could be forgiven for missing the news that bribery is basically legal now, as long as you support, or
are, Donald Trump.

Consider the Trump administration’s actions yesterday alone: The president officially pardoned Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor who served eight years in prison for corruption, and his Department of Justice suspended its prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams for allegedly soliciting bribes from Turkey, despite extremely compelling evidence. (Adams has denied the allegations.) Trump fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics, the chief official making sure government employees comply with ethics requirements,
including those concerning conflicts of interest. And he directed the Justice Department to cease enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prevents American businesses from bribing foreign officials.

Not bad for a day’s work—but Trump wasn’t done. Today, the administration told
The New York Times that Elon Musk’s financial disclosures would not be made public, allowing the shadow president to direct vast swaths of government policy
with enormous stakes for his personal fortune without the public knowing the precise areas of overlap.

A running joke in the first Trump term was “Infrastructure Week,” a recurring
attempt by the administration to focus media attention on a subject (passing an infrastructure bill) that had no real policy meat to it. This time around, Trump
has quietly put together a policy theme—call it “Corruption Week”—for which he
has actually delivered the goods. Whether Trump did this intentionally [he did] or just had numerous pro-corruption initiatives coincidentally stacked up on his
desk is hard to say. What seems clear, however, is that Trump genuinely believes
in corruption as a normal and acceptable way to do business.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/trump-bribery-corruption-legal/681658/

Trump = corruption. Always was, always will be. But Trumpswabs think this is the
way to "make American great again." It isn't.

--
Every Republiscum/QAnon accusation is, in fact, a confession

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