So if you could have driven a truck through US anti-corruption laws before, now you could tow an oil rig through them. Or even something as tall as a 47-metre Kremlin and as broad as a 600-hectare Zhongnanhai, as the Beijing leadership compound is known.
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US Democratic senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut detailed to the US Senate last week what he called “more than 20 examples of blatant corruption from just the first six weeks of the Trump presidency”.
So, did Trump – famous for his campaign mantra of “drill, baby, drill” – get his $US1 billion from Big Oil? The industry gave at least $US96 million to his campaign and affiliated political action committees, and nearly half a billion US dollars to the broader political system in total during the last political cycle, according to a report by environmental activists Climate Power.
But, because of the “dark money” avenues in US politics, we cannot know the total that the fossil fuel lobby gave the Trump political-industrial complex.
But we do know that corruption opportunities are in fashion in Trump 2.0, and growing fast. For instance, there’s the Trump meme coin known as $TRUMP, launched two days before he resumed power in January. A meme coin is just a meme; it’s a speculative object with no intrinsic worth and no practical value. But it’s become very valuable to some people.
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“Donald Trump’s crypto project made at least $US350 million from the launch of his memecoin, a windfall that is likely to fuel concerns over conflicts of interest arising from the token,” reported the London Financial Times in an investigation published last week.
The people running the Trump scheme put 200 million of the meme coins up for sale. Buyers paid money into a “liquidity pool” connected to the “coin”. Such pools are designed to provide a secondary market for the object. Within 18 days, Trump-connected digital wallets had taken $US350 million from the pool, the FT reported.
“Investors and ethics experts have said the sale of crypto tokens would in effect allow a way to channel anonymous donations to the president while also exploiting retail investors,” the newspaper explained. “The president’s personal profit is unclear.”
Trump-linked accounts still hold another 831 million of the meme coins that have yet to be offered for sale. They have a notional market value, at today’s prices, of some $US10 billion.
Beyond Trump himself, his donor and crony Elon Musk also has some promising avenues for covert financial inflows.
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Once again, we are indebted to the Financial Times for its reporting. It ran a piece at the weekend with the headline: “Chinese investors privately take stakes in Elon Musk’s companies”.
It began: “Wealthy Chinese investors are quietly funnelling tens of millions of dollars into private companies controlled by Elon Musk using an arrangement that shields their identities from public view, according to asset managers and investors involved in the transactions.”
According to the FT, Chinese investors are channelling money into xAI, Neuralink and SpaceX, concealed by use of special purpose vehicles, widely used entities often used to contain a specific financial or corporate risk.
“How can someone in Musk’s position have so many connections to China but still be a good person to reform the US government?” poses Derek Scissors, a senior fellow of the think tank American Enterprise Institute. An excellent question.
With so many potential vehicles for venality, the American people will simply have to trust in the personal honesty and integrity of Donald Trump. Surely unimpeachable.
Peter Hartcher is international editor.
