SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: “This isn’t just the most corrupt presidency in American history. It’s one of the most corrupt regimes currently on earth.”

https://x.com/cginisty/status/2053374037259153601

cginisty

Translated from French

 Trump’s corruption has never been more visible, nor as costly for Americans. A $400 million jet gifted by Qatar. $500 million from the Emirates four days before the inauguration. $4 billion in personal fortune gained in a single year. A conservative at The Bulwark thinks the American people are finally starting to do the math.

Mona Charen (@monacharen
) is an American conservative. What she writes this week in The Bulwark is the nonpartisan diagnosis of a woman who has observed American politics from the inside for decades.

 She sets the stage: “This isn’t just the most corrupt presidency in American history. It’s one of the most corrupt regimes currently on earth.”

 The Trump family has increased its net worth by about $4 billion since the January 2025 inauguration, with the total now approaching $6.2 billion, and the facts of corruption are piling up.

 Qatar gifted Trump a $400 million luxury jet. A gift. With no documented conditions, no public explanation, and not the slightest trace of embarrassment on either side.

 Four days before the inauguration, World Liberty Financial, the crypto company founded by Trump and Steve Witkoff, received a $500 million investment from the United Arab Emirates, representing 49% of the capital. Under Biden, they had been denied access to cutting-edge electronic chips due to their ties to China. They got them under Trump.

 To escape Trump’s tariffs, Vietnam approved a $1.5 billion Trump Organization project to build a golf course near Hanoi.

 Paramount paid $16 million to the future Trump presidential library. ABC paid $15 million.

 Amazon paid Melania $28 million for a documentary no one watched.

 Membership fees at the Mar-a-Lago Club have been raised to one million dollars, for a Mar-a-Lago where the Secret Service rents rooms, paid for by taxpayers, to protect its owner.

 And then there’s the lawsuit against the IRS: $10 billion claimed from the U.S. Treasury. A federal judge had to note in her order that Trump is simultaneously the plaintiff and the hierarchical superior of all the defendants. It’s, in Charen’s words, “a gigantic racket against American taxpayers.”

However, Mona Charen believes we may be at a turning point where this blatant and amply documented corruption over the past months could prove fatal for Trump today.

 Charen’s thesis is that corruption only becomes politically untenable when two conditions are met simultaneously: the economy deteriorates, and the corruption can no longer be presented as “partisan appreciation” because it’s too visible, too brazen, too documented to be denied.

Those two conditions are met today.

 In 2024, Americans made a conscious bet: Trump might be corrupt, but he would restore the prosperous economy of 2018. That bet is lost.

Gas is approaching $5 a gallon. Grocery bills have gone up. The economy is sliding toward recession. And the corruption is no longer deniable—not because its opponents are fighting it, but because Trump himself is staging it.

It’s Trump who uses an assassination attempt to promote his ballroom. It’s the Republican Senate demanding $1 billion in public funds to finance it. It’s Trump who tells his supporters they must “accept having fewer toys at Christmas” while his office is covered in gold leaf and Qatar gifts him a plane.

 “When gas is $5, the supermarket cart goes up, and the economy slides toward recession, the gold leaf stops being just an eccentricity.”

The corruption of this presidency is an almost acknowledged mode of operation by a Trump who considers himself all-powerful. What’s changing today is the economic context in which this model operates. Corruption tolerated in prosperity becomes unbearable in recession.

Link to the Bulwark article: