Kleptokratie 2

Alle Kabinettsmitglieder schärfen engagiert das Profil der US-Administration, aber Einzelmaßnahmen wie eine geschickt terminierte Investition des Crusader-in-Chief oder dubiose Deals in Dänemark verblassen im Vergleich zu den Ambitionen des Präsidenten, der sogar zwischen seinen Amtszeiten an seinem Lebenswerk gearbeitet hat:

Special counsel Jack Smith gathered evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump took many top secret documents that related to his worldwide business interests, and investigators considered this a likely motive for Trump concealing them at his Florida club after he left the White House, according to newly released case records. [...]

Trump’s reason for taking hundreds of pages of classified documents when he left office in January 2021 — and then concealing them when the Justice Department subpoenaed him for their return in May 2022 — has been one of the larger mysteries of the case. FBI agents conducting an unannounced search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022 discovered hundreds more pages of top secret records that Trump and his lawyers had failed to return to the government after claiming they had fully returned all classified materials.

Dass Korruption in diesem Fall auch verfasssungswidrig ist –

President Donald Trump’s instinct for self-enrichment is a horrific exemplar of what the Founders hoped to prevent: a president profiting from public office. Trump’s ventures—intending to accept the gift of a Qatari jet, profiting from the sale of a self-referential cryptocurrency, auctioning off a chance to have dinner with him—all reflect his disregard for the Founders’ concern.

Two of the Constitution’s efforts to restrict conflicts of interest are direct and distinct prohibitions on profiteering by the president. One of these (in Article II, Section 1) was an absolute ban on domestic gifts to the president: Aside from compensation for his service, he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them. Emolument, a word first recorded in the 15th century, signifies a profit or gain arising from station, office, or employment. That is, making money off one’s position by, say, selling favors to fellow citizens (for example, the opportunity to dine with the president) is expressly prohibited.

The second prohibition (in Article I, Section 9) was conditional. Presidents may not accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State without Congress’s consent. In other words, the answer to the offer of a personal gift (such as the use of an airplane either during or after presidential service) is a constitutionally required no, unless Congress affirmatively authorizes it. Rejecting a gift is not stupid, as Trump suggested—it’s required by the law of the land, and for good reason.

In addition to these direct limitations on presidential conduct, also notable is that the impeachment clause (Article II, Section 4), which generally authorizes impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors names two (and only two) crimes specifically as grounds for impeachment: treason and bribery—receipt of a gift in exchange for an official act. Not all gifts are bribes, but some are, and those would be grounds for removal from office.

– ficht den erfahrenen, aber vor seinem Amtsantritt ziemlich erfolglosen grifter selbstverständlich nicht an:

The record of Trump real-estate and business projects is one of almost unbroken failure; from 1991 to 2009, his companies filed for bankruptcy six times . Few if any legitimate investors entrusted their money to Trump’s businesses when he was out of office. But since his return to the White House, Trump has been inundated with cash from Middle Eastern governments. Obscure Chinese firms are suddenly buying millions of dollars’ worth of Trump meme coins. So are American companies hard-hit by the Trump tariffs and desperately seeking access and influence. After Trump invited major holders of his crypto funds to dinner, Wired quoted a crypto analyst about the coin’s value proposition: Before, you were speculating on a TRUMP coin with no utility. Now you’re speculating on future access to Trump. That has to be worth a bit more money. [...]

The Trump family’s exploitation of the presidency, however, has no precedent in the Grants or the Roosevelts or any of the presidential families that followed.

One difference is scale. James Roosevelt made a lot of money by Depression standards, but he did not score dynastic wealth. The Grant relations got government jobs—very cozy, but again, not dynastic wealth. Billy Carter was paid $220,000, which, even adjusting for half a century of inflation, seems hardly worth the brouhaha. The Trumps, by contrast, are using the second-term presidency to accumulate billions of dollars.

The second difference is the degree of separation from the president himself. Hunter Biden traded on his father’s name, but the Republican-chaired committee that went looking into the matter found no link either to President Biden’s decisions or to his personal bank account. But President Trump remains the beneficial owner of the Trump enterprises nominally run by his sons. The ill-gotten gains flow directly to him.

The third difference is the utter lack of conscience in this presidential family. When George H. W. Bush ran for president in 1988, he wrote a letter to his sons warning, You’ll find you’ve got a lot of new friends. Those friends, the elder Bush predicted, would ask for favors. My plea is this: please do not contact any federal agency or department on anything. Franklin D. Roosevelt was not so strict. Yet when James’s business affairs blew up into a scandal, James published his income-tax returns, submitted to press interviews, and resigned from his role as a White House adviser. He moved to California, volunteered for active duty in the Marine Corps in 1940, and was decorated with the Navy Cross for valor in battle. As for Harding, he came to feel ashamed of his own presidency. According to Nicholas Murray Butler, the then-president of Columbia University and an important figure in Republican politics in the early 20th century, Harding confessed to him: I am not fit for this office and should never have been here. This is even more true of Trump, but Trump would never have the self-knowledge or grace to admit it.

Stattdessen wird jede, aber auch wirklich jede Gelegenheit wahrgenommen:

Trump 2.0 is just getting started, yet it already represents the high-water mark of American kleptocracy. There are good reasons to think it will get much worse.

Virtually every week, the Trump family seems to find a new way to profit from the presidency. The Trump Organization has brokered a growing catalog of real-estate projects with autocratic regimes, including a Trump tower in Saudi Arabia, a Trump hotel in Oman, and a Trump golf club in Vietnam. We’re the hottest brand in the world right now, Eric Trump recently proclaimed. In May, Qatar gave the White House a $400 million jet—a gift that looked a lot like a bribe but that Trump had no qualms accepting .

And that’s just the foreign front. Domestically, Trump has used flimsy complaints to go after media organizations, resulting in settlements that resemble shakedowns. Last year, he accused 60 Minutes of deceptively editing an interview with his Democratic presidential opponent, Kamala Harris. Legal experts saw the claim as weak. Rather than fighting it in court, however, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million, which will subsidize Trump’s future presidential library and cover his legal fees. Following a similarly dubious lawsuit, ABC sent $15 million to Trump’s library fund and issued a statement of regret.

Beyond the court, the president has peddled Trump perfumes, Trump sneakers, and Trump phones, shamelessly using the prestige of the presidency to boost his family’s income. And then there’s crypto: the $TRUMP meme coin, the pay-to-play dinners with investors, the paused prosecution of a crypto kingpin who had purchased $30 million in Trump-backed tokens.

The law is totally on my side, Trump said after his election in 2016, when he was asked about mixing his financial affairs with his new office. The president can’t have a conflict of interest. That statement is now alarmingly close to the truth. Thanks to last year’s Supreme Court ruling, Trump has presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for any official act. He has appointed an attorney general, Pam Bondi, who appears willing to do his bidding no matter the cost to the Department of Justice. He has gutted independent bodies that went after white-collar criminal networks, task forces that investigated kleptocracy, public prosecutors that chased public corruption, and regulation s that targeted transnational money laundering.

The list goes on. Trump’s Treasury Department effectively terminated America’s new shell-company registry. His DOJ dissolved task forces that seized stolen assets. The administration froze the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the bedrock of America’s antibribery regime. In sum, Trump has dismantled a network of agencies, laws, and norms that thwarted all kinds of kleptocracy, including the kind that enriches a sitting president.

Der ganze Aufwand macht sich bereits nach einem Jahr ausweislich der relativ oberflächlichen Berechnungen des Forbes-Magazins bemerkbar:

Donald Trump’s second term as president has so far paid off handsomely for the billionaire head of state. Whether striking deals in the Middle East, shilling his crypto coins or hosting luminaries at his properties, Trump has proven that he and his family are very much still in business. The president is now worth $6.5 billion, according to Forbes’ latest World’s Billionaires list, up by $1.4 billion from a year ago. He ranks 645th among the planet’s 3,428 billionaires, up from 700th in 2025.

For that, Trump can largely thank crypto dealings. He has netted an estimated $550 million over the past year from sales of crypto tokens issued by World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture he and his family launched in September 2024. Then he and his partners in the company—including his billionaire special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and his family—reportedly sold a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial to Aryam Investment, a firm backed by the United Arab Emirates' national security advisor and UAE royal family member Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. That put an additional $200 million in Trump’s pockets, Forbes estimates. [Gulf leaders] know how to deal with this American president, a former diplomat with experience in the region told Forbes last fall. They learned it the first time around, but he was himself constrained in how blatantly he could solicit money. He's unconstrained now. [...]

Other personal assets belonging to Trump have flourished as people aim to curry favor with him or at least show their support. That includes Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, which has benefited from politics more than any other property. Referred to as his winter White House, it’s where he’s meets world leaders (Zelenskyy and Netanyahu, among others) hosts allies (Musk, Changpeng Zhao) and launches missiles (Syria, Iran). Bought by Trump in 1985 for an estimated $10 million, Forbes now pegs its value at about $560 million, up nearly $370 million a year ago and more than triple its 2018 value. Meanwhile, Trump’s 10 golf courses in six states have appreciated substantially too, as supporters keep visiting and profits soar. Those properties are now worth about $550 million, up from $340 million last year.

Den halbwegs legalen Wertzuwachs der Golfclubs als Gegengewicht zu undurchsichtigen Kryptogeschäften und Bestechungsaufenthalten zu nennen, ist schon sehr wohlwollend, und ich würde davon ausgehen, dass ein größerer Teil der familiären Vermögenszuwächse nicht berücksichtigt wurde. Im Gegensatz zu Luisa Kroll bei Forbes hat Jamelle Bouie von der NYT-Redaktion eine Sondergenehmigung für ungeschönte Wortwahl erhalten:

To say that President Trump is corrupt is to somehow understate the size, scope and magnitude of his corruption.

It is as if you were to describe a modern thermonuclear device as a bomb. That is true enough, but it is not quite the truth. It does not capture the nature of the thing in full.

So it goes for Trump’s corruption, which is so vast as to be a new phenomenon in American politics. The president and his family have leveraged his office to the tune of nearly $4 billion. They have received hundreds of millions of dollars from a network of branded cryptocurrency assets. Investors include large corporations, foreign nationals and state actors hoping to curry favor with the administration.

Parallel demonstriert Mr. Trump, dass er mit regulärer Geschäftstätigkeit immer noch riesige Mengen Geld verlieren kann –

The company, which is majority owned by Donald Trump, has seen its stock plummet 84 percent under Nunes’ leadership, from its debut price of $58 back in 2024. The current share price of around $9.80 is arguably still optimistic for a company that has lost $1.1 billion since it went public, and recorded just over $10.6 million in revenue in the same time.

– was ja auch eine Form der Sozialisierung darstellt. Langfristig sollte sich also alles ausgleichen, wenn man annimmt, dass die nächste Trump-Generation nicht das Charisma, sondern nur das überbordende Selbstbewusstsein und die wirtschaftliche Naivität ihres Vaters geerbt hat.