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Trump’s second term has been so lurid in its corruption that it was genuinely hard to narrow this list down.
As longtime readers may recall, I’ve always wondered if Donald Trump truly intended to win the 2016 election. Howard Stern asked him why he wanted to take the world’s hardest job when he “only had about 10 good years left before he ‘starts to drool’ on himself”—which now seems pretty prophetic. Weeks into his first term, Trump was already giving melancholy interviews about how he missed his old life. It really seemed that his first presidential run was a goof that went sideways, to the detriment of all of us.
But as for his effort to reclaim the Oval Office? I’ve never wondered why he wanted back in. The second time out, he ran on a combination of desperation to avoid jail, a desire for revenge, and unmitigated avarice. He pretty much ran on a platform of looting the country and punishing his perceived enemies. With the gift of immunity from the Supreme Court, he spent the first year of his second term taking bigger swings at double-dealing, committing more brazen acts of corruption. There are far too many examples to do an exhaustive, let alone authoritative, list of crimes. But these are the ones that stuck with me particularly in a year of misrule.
The UAE crypto bribe: It’s not every day one of TNR’s staff writers gets to compare a scandal to Teapot Dome, but that’s how Tim Noah described the shady dealings that went down between Trump and his shadowy backers from the United Arab Emirates, who—in what’s been characterized as the largest cryptocurrency transaction in history—made a $2 billion stablecoin purchase in World Liberty Financial, which is essentially the president’s personal crypto slush fund. With quid like that, you knew that a sizable pro quo was to come. Sure enough, Trump permitted the UAE to import a larger quantity of U.S.-produced AI computer chips than it was allowed under the Biden administration. Simple enough scandal to understand, right? Well, as Noah later noted, the business press seems to not get it.
Plane and simple corruption: So, it’s kind of hard to do the whole “nothing to see here!” routine when the nothing is a luxury 747 that your Qatari friends want to off-load on the president. Trump tried to sell this gift as the new Air Force One, a generous gesture in return for all the money the United States has spent providing security for our nominal Gulf allies. The plane became the subject of a long-simmering dispute, as Democrats have attempted to block it from being used as Air Force One. Regardless, as Alex Shephard noted, the debasement in this arrangement exceeded the mere quid pro quo: “Trump wants to be treated as a king, and Qatar is playing ball.”
Death of USAID: Russell Vought, Elon Musk, and their wrecking crew of DOGE bros spent the first half of the year visiting destruction upon the civil service; the damage done is something we’ll all be feeling for a long time. But the most damnable part of their legacy may be the dismantling of foreign aid agencies like the United States Agency for International Development. A Boston University study found that the agency’s demise had “already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.” “We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed ‘public man-made death,’” wrote the Harvard School of Public Health’s Atul Gawande.
Bombs over Latin America: It’s giving Wag the Dog, if you ask me. The administration, seemingly hot to bring back neoconservative military conquest, soft-launched its latest regime change war in Venezuela by making indiscriminate attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific waters off of Central America. These attacks, all undertaken without a jot of congressional oversight and on the dubious premise that the boats were packed with fentanyl bound for the United States, were murderous on their own. But the news that the military was ordered to strike an already stricken boat in a “double tap” attack to kill any survivors has raised the specter of war crimes—and in a way that even many Republicans don’t seem ready to countenance.