Mapping Corruption: Donald Trump’s Executive Branch

By Jim Lardner

April 10, 2020 "Information Clearing House" - THE DEFENSE GOT ONE THING RIGHT at Donald Trump’s Senate trial. The case against him was thin, his team kept saying; and so it was, compared to the enormity of this administration’s other offenses.

Set aside the hate-mongering and the stream of conspiracy theories and demagogic bombast. Trump has sowed corruption of a breadth and brazenness unseen in the far-from-innocent annals of our nation’s history. In three years as president, he has transformed the executive branch into a giant favor factory, populated with the agents or willing partners of virtually every special interest. Add up all the routine, daily outrages—the quasi-bribery and quasi-extortion, the private raids on public funds, the handouts to the undeserving, the massive flow of cash, jobs, and freebies back in return—and Trump’s attempt to squeeze a little re-election help out of the fragile government of a desperate Eastern European country does not loom particularly large in the reckoning.

Adding it all up is a challenge, though. It’s hard to fathom the depths of the kleptocracy when there’s so much happening on the surface to divert us. The corruption most directly in our faces involves the looting and skimming and self-dealing of the president and his family. Our first hotel-owning president has inspired a parade of foreign diplomats and domestic lobbyists to pay tribute with overnight stays that are functionally indistinguishable from bribes. The Secret Service has blown over half a million dollars on golf carts protecting a leader who has spent nearly one out of every three days of his first term at one of his resort properties, which get free advertising on top of the revenue from lodging his guards and retinue. Ivanka Trump snags a valuable set of Chinese trademarks on the same day she dines with Xi Jinping. Kellyanne Conway hawks Ivanka’s products in TV interviews.

But the personal corruption of the Trumps themselves perversely masks the sliminess perpetrated by literally thousands of presidential appointees, from Cabinet officials to obscure functionaries. Amid all the distractions, it’s hard to focus on the more consequential crookedness and follow out the plotlines of all the sordid stories, and grasp the brutal consequences visited upon countless people. We lunge from scandal to scandal without ever filling in the bigger picture, or taking proper account of all the knaves, thieves, and corporate stooges and their handiwork.

Hard, but worth doing—an undertaking commenced here and continued and expanded online at https://prospect.org/mappingcorruption, with an interactive, agency-by-agency exhibit of the major offenses thus far committed. Only by traveling to the far corners of this swamp, looking through the muck, and drawing up a map of the territory—the stories both known and unknown—can we begin to understand our times.

CONSIDER THE ISSUE of immigration. At its mention, some Americans conjure up images of dark-skinned interlopers threatening to steal our jobs or live idly off our public services, while others are more likely to think of children cruelly separated from parents and desperate asylum seekers stuck in Orwellian turnaround. Either way, we tend to overlook a big central fact of today’s immigration policy: the huge sums of money drawn from the U.S. Treasury in the name of guarding our borders, and deposited into the coffers of a booming private-prison industry.