A year into his "administration" the sitting president is up to his surprisingly puffy eyelids in crooked grifts. I wonder what our nation of law and order and justice and so forth is going to do about that.
Sixty-four trade groups, foreign governments, Republican candidates and others stayed at or held events at properties linked to President Donald Trump during Trump's first year in office, a political watchdog group said in a report released on Tuesday.
The arrangements represented "unprecedented conflicts of interest" because Trump oversees the federal government and has not divested from properties he owns or that carry his name, Public Citizen, a nonpartisan group, said in the report.
To clarify, Donald Trump is collecting money from these people. He did not divest. He did not put his properties in blind trust. His sons are running the family business and Donald Trump is getting the profits. If fifteen foreign money launderers throw a wine tasting party in the penthouse as a way of reminding Donnie where he came from, Donald gets the dough. If a foreign government books a hotel ballroom to host a banquet rewarding Donnie for new policies that look the other way on some of their nation's human rights abuses, Donnie keeps da dough.
When Trump started his presidency his companies, under severe pressure due to wording in the United States Constitution that prohibits a president from receiving such considerations, made the begrudging promise that they would assuredly separate out those profits and donate them so that Donald Trump would not be violating the Constitution the moment he set foot in the office. But then they claimed that was to hard, and are instead Not Doing That.
So the sitting president is collecting cash money from foreign and domestic groups seeking to pay him cash money as means of rewarding him for, or prodding him toward, specific actions as president. This has never been tolerated before, in our modern history, because it is so obviously and deeply corrupt that not even the worst and most partisan lawmakers could look the other way on it. It has never even been attempted before, it's so transparently corrupt.
He is getting away with it now because Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell and Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan are supporting the grift. There is no other way to put that; they could demand he stop at any given moment of any given day and have quite specifically refused to do so. They have allied themselves with the new standard in which a president is free to take cash bribes from foreign sources, and have not deigned to explain their reasoning for this change to the rest of us.
Perhaps they believe he will cut them in on his meager winnings. Perhaps they sincerely do not care whether grotesque and corrupt activity takes place in the White House so long as the right judges get nominated and the right American laws get repealed. It doesn't matter what their motive is; it is a stone-cold given that they are enabling it by choice.