Well isn’t this special and unexpected… breaching the public trust or looting it. The RW talking point about crony capitalists cannot be selectively applied as the Orange Gasbag’s Rasputin, Steve Bannon, rails against the 2007-2008 banksters and ignores his new crowd of kleptocratic appointees.
Crony capitalism is a term describing an economy in which success in business depends on close relationships between business people and government officials. It may be exhibited by favoritism in the distribution of legal permits, government grants, special tax breaks, or other forms of state interventionism.
Kleptocracy (from Greek: κλεπτοκρατία, klépto- thieves + -kratosrule, literally "rule by thieves")[1][2] is a government with corrupt rulers (kleptocrats) that use their power to exploit the people and natural resources of their own territory in order to extend their personal wealth and political power. Typically this system involves the embezzlement of state funds at the expense of the wider population, sometimes without even the pretense of honest service.[3][4]
Trump’s brazen use of his office for personal enrichment signals something even more worrisome than four or more years of kleptocratic government.
It reveals how willing the new administration is to obliterate governing norms and how little stands in his way.
An expectation that elected presidents must forswear any financial holdings that could conceivably affect their judgment has been an unquestioned point of bipartisan consensus for decades. Jimmy Carter even directed his trust to rent the peanut farm he built, lest any pro-peanut bias taint his decisions in office, and he endured a special prosecutor’s lengthy investigation to ensure his complete divestment.
But a norm is not a rule, a point Trump has leaned on. “The law is totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest,” he told the New York Times. Disturbingly, this is legally accurate. The strict federal rules about financial conflicts of interest do not apply to the president, whose incentive to avoid self-enrichment is simply assumed. There is no legal mechanism that requires transparency or accountability. In essence, Trump is proposing that we, not he, enter a blind trust: He promises that he will never misuse his power, and we … hope he’s right.