It’s impossible to believe that people see that and think this guy is on the level. It’s just absurd.
Peter Baker at the NY Times writes:
When Hillary Clinton was first lady, a furor erupted over reports that she had once made $100,000 from a $1,000 investment in cattle futures. Even though it had happened a dozen years before her husband became president, it became a scandal that lasted weeks and forced the White House to initiate a review.
Thirty-one years later, after dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Jeff Bezos agreed to finance a promotional film about Melania Trump that will reportedly put $28 million directly in her pocket — 280 times the Clinton lucre and in this case from a person with a vested interest in policies set by her husband’s government. Scandal? Furor? Washington moved on while barely taking notice.
The Trumps are hardly the first presidential family to profit from their time in power, but they have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House. The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism has been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join, all in the past few months alone.
Just last week, Qatar handed over a luxury jet meant for Mr. Trump’s use not just in his official capacity but also for his presidential library after he leaves office. Experts have valued the plane, formally donated to the Air Force, at $200 million, more than all of the foreign gifts bestowed on all previous American presidents combined.
And Mr. Trump hosted an exclusive dinner at his Virginia club for 220 investors in the $TRUMP cryptocurrency that he started days before taking office in January. Access was openly sold based on how much money they chipped in — not to a campaign account but to a business that benefits Mr. Trump personally.
By conventional Washington standards, according to students of official graft, the still-young Trump administration is a candidate for the most brazen use of government office in American history, perhaps eclipsing even Teapot Dome, Watergate and other famous scandals.
“I’ve been watching and writing about corruption for 50 years, and my head is still spinning,” said Michael Johnston, a professor emeritus at Colgate University and author of multiple books on corruption in the United States.
Yet a mark of how much Mr. Trump has transformed Washington since his return to power is the normalization of moneymaking schemes that once would have generated endless political blowback, televised hearings, official investigations and damage control. The death of outrage in the Trump era, or at least the dearth of outrage, exemplifies how far the president has moved the lines of accepted behavior in Washington.
He’s missing something in this equation. As Tapper points out in that exchange with Mike Johnson, e just had four years of “the Biden crime family” and “Hunter’s laptop” bullshit from the GOP Congress and their propaganda networks. The mainstream media didn’t go after it with the fervor of Clinton’s cattle futures and Whitewater, but it was hanging out there as “a problem” with special counsels and endless investigations.
So, yes, it’s changed. But that because it’s ok if you are a Republican. It’s especially ok if you are Trump because well… that just how he is, dontcha know? They’ve decided that if you are openly accepting bribes and shaking people down to line your pocket in the White House, it’s fine. For Trump. But you can bet that any Democrat who did such a thing would cause a political earthquake.
This double standard has existed for so long that the Republicans have realized they can just say “fuck it we’re going for it”, knowing that nothing will ever be done about it because their base doesn’t care and the press will report it but it won’t make any difference.