The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
The only time I ever worked on a political campaign, decades ago, I did opposition research on a Republican senator from New York named Alfonse D’Amato. He had a scandal-ridden background, most notably due to his proximity to a kickback scheme in Long Island in which public employees were forced to pay 1 percent of their salaries to the local GOP machine. (He denied wrongdoing.) He also was tied to a corruption scandal involving federal contracts doled out by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. (He denied wrongdoing.) He also had been chummy with at least one mob-related crook—and maybe more. (He denied wrongdoing.) Add to all that, a string of other sleazy controversies.
But none of this ever stuck to D’Amato, who cultivated the reputation of a street-savvy, give-you-a-wink rogue. Through his 18 years in the US Senate, he survived various allegations and investigations and was reelected twice. He was pure Teflon. It took me a while to figure out why.
I finally got it and derived the White Tablecloth Theory of Dirty Politics. If you’re out at a nice restaurant, sitting at a table with a white tablecloth, and you spill your red wine, everyone notices. There’s a big ugly stain that’s hard to ignore. But if the tablecloth is already dirty and marred by previous wine spillage and you knock over your glass, well, one more stain doesn’t matter. It blends right in.
Trump has engaged in record-setting levels of corruption, as he mixes his business interests with his day job. It’s as if the presidency is a mere side hustle to his main gig of maximum personal enrichment.
D’Amato had so many stains on his record that by the time I started digging and finding additional ones, it just didn’t matter. The new revelations hardly stood out; they became part of the existing mélange. This dynamic continued throughout his political career. With his image as a guy who played perhaps a bit too loose and too fast, yet another disclosure of improbity didn’t change anything.
He was nothing compared to Donald Trump. But watching the president these past few months, I kept thinking of the Tablecloth Theory. Trump has engaged in record-setting levels of corruption, as he mixes his business interests with his day job. It’s as if the presidency is a mere side hustle to his main gig of maximum personal enrichment. His trip to the Middle East this past week was more a venture of Trump, Inc. than a presidential mission. His Trump Organization is developing projects in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—the three nations on his Mideast tour—while hooking up with firms tied to these Arab governments.
His family business is also cutting lucrative crypto deals with Arab partners. As my colleague Russ Choma recently reported, Eric Trump, who runs the Trump Organization now, was recently in Dubai and announced that
MGX, a UAE-based investment fund, would invest $2 billion in crypto exchange Binance using a “stablecoin” created by the Trumps’ crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. The deal could net the Trump family hundreds of millions, as the transaction lends enormous credibility and liquidity to their crypto business. MGX isn’t just any UAE-based investment fund. It’s chaired by Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser and brother of the Emirates’ ruler, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
Let’s not forget the Saudi investment fund that kicked in $2 billion when Jared Kushner started his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, which subsequently attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in backing also from Qatar and the UAE.
Never has a president been so financially intertwined with foreign governments. No wonder he praised Mohammed bin Salman, the murderous ruler of Saudi Arabia, as a “gentleman.” After all, he’s helping Trump and his family make millions. And, as we all know, Trump agreed last week to accept a $400 million gift airplane from Qatar. Any slice of this would have been unthinkable for an American president in the past. But not with Trump. The latest grift is just another drop on an already huge pile of grift.
Remember how the media and the right went nuts when President Bill Clinton hosted coffees at the White House for Democratic donors? Now Trump is using access to the White House as a way to line his own pockets.
Which includes the new crypto ventures he recently started, and there’s not just one. He and his family own a 60 percent stake in World Liberty Financial (WLF), which was launched in September. It manages two digital currencies: $WLF1, which is known as a “governance” token, and $USD1, a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. Whenever either coin is purchased, used, or transferred, WLF gets a fee. So, anyone—a foreign official, an oligarch, a crook, an overseas or domestic corporation seeking preferential treatment, an office seeker, a pardon seeker, a Trump buddy—can put moolah right into Trump’s grubby hands and curry favor with him by purchasing or using either of these coins. Best of all, these transactions can be anonymous. Ca-ching! There’s never been an easier way to bribe a president—or for a president to collect bribes.
Then there are the meme coins that both Trump and his wife, Melania, set up around the time of his inauguration: $TRUMP and $MELANIA. They, too, generate income from transaction fees. The early action on these coins brought in at least $350 million for Trump and $64 million for Melania. More recently, Trump established a contest with the prize of a White House visit for whoever buys the most amount of his pump-and-dump meme coin. Remember how the media and the right went nuts when President Bill Clinton hosted coffees at the White House for Democratic donors? Now Trump is using access to the White House as a way to line his own pockets. And his social media company is looking to go public. Even though it loses a ton of money, Trump stands to gain $3 billion from that deal.
Don’t forget that as president, Trump is in charge of regulating—or not regulating—the crypto industry, and the decisions his administration makes on this front could lead to greater riches for him and his clan.
What we’re seeing is not a conflict of interest, but a congruence of interests. Trump has merged the US government with his business. It’s a cavalcade of corruption. It’s out in the open. It’s brazen and blatant. It’s orders of magnitude shadier than the false allegations (backed by Russian disinformation) that Republicans and right-wing media and operatives have hurled at Hunter and Joe Biden.
If Al Capone were alive today, he would look at all this, smile, and say, “I’m going into politics.”
Unfortunately, no conflict-of-interest rules apply to the president. (They cover other government officials.) But would such rules slow down Trump’s unprecedent money-grab? He’s waving the blood-red tablecloth and shouting, “What are you going to do about it?” The founders’ remedy for a run-amok president was impeachment. They didn’t count on a political party becoming a personality cult committed to defending an autocrat-wannabe.
There’s simply too much sleaze for reporters to keep up with. I’ve only skimmed the surface here. And the White House wants to make it harder to cover Trump’s transgressions. When Business Insider recently ran an article headlined “Don Jr. is the new Hunter Biden,” which examined Junior’s venture capital fund and the conflicts it presents, the White House threatened to go after the publication’s owner, Axel Springer, the German media conglomerate, which also owns Politico.
If Al Capone were alive today, he would look at all this, smile, and say, “I’m going into politics.”
For more than 100 days, Trump has been assaulting American democracy, trampling the rule of law, and running a corrupt autocratic regime. A few Democrats are trying to call attention to his greed spree—which ought to be a bigger focus of their opposition. Sens. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Rep. Sam Liccardo of California have introduced legislation to prevent federal officials—including a president—from using their position to profit off cryptocurrency. Murphy said:
The Trump meme coin is the single most corrupt act ever committed by a president. Donald Trump is essentially posting his Venmo for any billionaire CEO or foreign oligarch to cash in some favors by secretly sending him millions of dollars. It’s almost unbelievable until you remember this president will do whatever it takes—even selling access to the White House—to make himself richer. This is not normal, and we won’t let him get away with it.
Trump has already gotten away with too much. It seems the most important lesson he learned from his first term was not to leave any money on the table. And now he doesn’t give a damn how dirty the tablecloth gets.
