Limitless Corruption

The Attorney General of the United States is approving a patently unconstitutional $400 million personal gift to the President of the United States from her former client, the Qatari royal family, with whom the Trump organisation signed a sea side golf club development deal less than two weeks ago. The gift is one of the world’s most luxurious private jets, intended to replace Air Force One, but which will remain Trump’s if he leaves office. What are the Americans doing about it?

It is not clear in what democracy governed by the rule of law any of this would be considered anything other than a career-ending bribe. But this is Trump, where such blatant corruption is just another day at the office. There are no limits to his grift.

What is clear is that the United States is no longer a democracy governed by the rule of law. After the arrest of the mayor of Newark, New Jersey for protesting outside an ICE detention centre, the Trump administration has publicly floated the notion that they are seeking to suspend the writ of habeas corpus — that is, the right to challenge your imprisonment in court — on the basis that the United States is being ‘invaded’. The last time this happened was during the American Civil War.

In order to stem this ‘invasion’, the Trump administration has been renditioning planeloads of “illegal” immigrants and refugee claimants to a Latin American terrorist detention centre, while welcoming the first white South African “refugees” into the country this week.

What is shocking is not so much the blatant white supremacy of their immigration and law enforcement policies, but the fact that there have been no consequences for the obvious nepotism, corruption, and stock market manipulation.

It took a foreign government gifting the president a full-on decked out private 747 for Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, the closest thing the Americans have to a leader of the official opposition, to consider thinking about ways to cause minor delays to Trump’s agenda.

And the Republicans, the ‘party of law and order,’ are overwhelmingly refusing to oppose anything Trump does, no matter how thoroughly it uses their constitution for toilet paper.

May 12, 2025

There seems to be a view among American opposition leadership that this is a purely political issue that will naturally resolve itself in the mid-term elections next year. After watching Canada and Australia reject Trumpist leaders in our recent national elections, there is a feeling that Americans will eventually exercise their vote to resolve the issue and bury this episode of American history as if it never happened.

As Winston Churchill is often credited with saying (though there’s no proof): “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.”

The problem is that the president and his entourage have such a low opinion of norms, the Constitution, the rule of law, and the very legitimacy of elections themselves (unless they win them, of course), that this is an extremely dangerous approach.

The president is so corrupt as to be a kleptocrat, robbing the American people and the American state blind. The rest of the world sees it and cannot understand why it is allowed to continue. Trump sees the lack of meaningful resistance and knows that the results of even an obviously unfair and stolen election in the future will be accepted as presented if the Republicans appear to win, as their opponents do not have the stomach for the fight needed to restore their democracy. Dictators are deposed, not defeated.

The Democrats need to tie up Congress in doing nothing other than discussing and prosecuting Trump and every member of his administration’s corruption. Every single unqualified appointment needs to be filibustered, examined, challenged, and rejected. Every single corrupt act needs to be aired out in public.

Every act of corruption, every bribe, every game played to play the world stock market, every sale of a seat at the president’s dinner table, every pay-for-play visit to Mar-a-Lago, every Trump organisation transaction that conflicts with Trump’s official duties needs to be the subject of its own separate articles of impeachment.

The Republicans must be forced to actively defend each one of those acts, on its own, on the record, for all to see, over and over and over again. Eventually, the American people will either decide they want their democracy back, or make it clear that ‘owning the libtards’ truly is their most important consideration, and forego any pretence of democracy or the rule of law.

If Trump is ever allowed to board that plane and call it Air Force One, the answer to that choice will already be clear.