How Trump Corrupted the American Presidency in Every Imaginable Way
In the final stretch of his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to “drain the swamp” of corruption in our nation's capital. "I will Make Our Government Honest Again—believe me," he tweeted three weeks before Election Day. "But first, I'm going to have to #DrainTheSwamp in DC."
To hear him and his circle tell the story, his approach to the presidency was purely virtuous. "From a business standpoint, is the presidency beneficial?" Trump’s son Eric asked, rhetorically, in a 2017 Forbes interview. "If you're talking about existing assets, they're doing amazing. If you're talking about as a whole, we've made sacrifices in order to allow him—and he's made sacrifices in order to allow him—to take the biggest office in the world."
In mid-October of this year, Trump told reporters that leaving the business world for politics has cost him somewhere between $2 billion and $5 billion. There is no evidence that this math is accurate, and Bloomberg’s most recent estimate of his net worth, $3 billion, is actually up slightly from its 2015 estimate of $2.9 billion. Nevertheless, Trump says, it’s a price he is (hypothetically) happy to pay. “I don’t care,” he continued. “I’m doing this for the country. I’m doing it for the people.”
As it turns out, the same guy who stiffed curtain vendors and cabinet makers, scammed students with the now-defunct Trump University, and engaged in fraudulent tax schemes took a similar tack with the presidency. Throughout his tenure in the White House, Trump has leveraged the powers of his office—and the trappings associated with occupying it—to enrich himself at every opportunity. His properties are now the destinations of choice for anyone seeking to curry his favor, and the American taxpayer is among his businesses’ most dependable sources of income. At the same time, he has learned to abuse those powers to shield himself from accountability for his wrongdoing and attacked, bullied, and fired enemies both real and imagined with the imprimatur of the United States government.
https://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-corruption-timeline?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=pol&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_mailing=Thematic_Ballot_11062019&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9f8cb24c17c6adf0e5d24&cndid=25394153&utm_content=Final&utm_term=Thematic_Ballot_Subscribers
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