Only a fool would refuse to take a bribe, amirite?
President Donald Trump will host a gathering of VIPs at his private golf resort outside Washington, D.C., on Thursday. These are not diplomats or heads of state. They are rich people, foreign and domestic, who have put money into the Trump family’s pockets.
The dinner is for winners of a contest — the crypto traders who raced to become the top 220 holders of the president’s $TRUMP meme coin. According to one analysis, they collectively accumulated about $150 million of the crypto asset, which has no intrinsic value and is equivalent to a digital baseball card.
The contest has made Trump’s family crypto business money on each transaction. And it has swelled the president’s personal net worth, by driving up the price of the coin, which the family business holds massive reserves of.
The meme coin contest is just the latest example of Trump wielding the public office of the presidency for his private enrichment. In fact, sources with direct knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone that one of the lessons Trump took away from his previous stint in the White House is that he was wrong to leave a ton of money on the table as president.
The president himself has privately said this on multiple occasions in recent months and years, according to two people who’ve been in the room with him. In moments of casual banter, Trump has mentioned that it was “stupid” of other Republicans and advisers to convince him — at least on occasion — to side with government ethicists who cautioned him from obliterating the line between public good and private gain.
Wek now this is true because he’s said it publicly. As the article points out he said at the White House, “I mean, I could be a stupid person saying, ‘No, we don’t want a free, very expensive airplane.’”
Both in public and behind closed doors, Trump often repeats a new mantra: It does not matter how much lucrative new business the Trump Organization or his children engage in while Trump is the president, because he and his family are so wealthy that he doesn’t need that new cash flow or windfalls — and therefore, he must be unbribable. (For his part, Trump’s son Eric has abandoned concerns about the optics or appearance of corruption, telling The Wall Street Journal that his efforts to keep certain interests of the Trump Organization and the first Trump presidency separate went unrewarded. “I got very little credit for it,” he said. “We still kind of got stomped on.”)
Nothing to see here folks:
On Monday, Reuters reported that the Trump Organization and a local partner are considering building a skyscraper in Vietnam, after the country approved the Trump family empire’s plans for a $1.5 billion luxury residential development and golf club. Eric Trump attended the golf club’s groundbreaking ceremony on Wednesday with Vietnam’s prime minister. Vietnam is simultaneously working to negotiate a tariff deal with the Trump administration.
That’s just one of many foreign Trump Org deals like that all over the world. But sure, Trump’s unbribable. We’ve seen how stalwart he is in defending American interests above his own. The article goes on to list many more of them and they are legion.
And his old tricks from the first term are in full effect as well. The Wall St. Journal reports:
Donald Trump’s private clubs have emerged as a moneymaking venture for the president’s second term, and a hub for donors and favor-seekers alike.
It now costs a record $1 million to join Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida resort, according to people familiar with the membership fees, up from about $500,000 during his first term.
The initiation fee at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., rose to $125,000, surging from $75,000 in recent years, a person close to that club said. Another Trump golf club in Florida, near Mar-a-Lago, now charges more than $300,000 to join, according to people familiar with the matter.
Trump has encouraged Republican Party officials to hold events at his clubs, where he headlines official dinners and cocktail parties. The clubs have in turn also attracted a new clientele of donors seeking to influence policy in the White House, including cryptocurrency executives pushing for deregulation, advocates seeking pardons for allies, and business leaders looking for exemptions from tariffs, among others.
He makes this so easy for them. All they really have to do is give him a big juicy kiss and tell him how powerful and strong and handsome he is, hand him some cash and he’ll believe anything they say as long as it comports with his fascist worldview. That’s not hard.