Trump and the politics of corruption

Summary

Front Burner: "Trump and the Politics of Corruption"

Date: May 28, 2026
Host: Jayme Poisson
Guest: Zack Beauchamp, Senior Correspondent at Vox

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Episode Overview

This episode delves deep into the surge of corruption allegations surrounding Donald Trump’s second term as President of the United States. Host Jayme Poisson speaks with Zack Beauchamp about the political, legal, and ethical landscape of what critics call the most openly self-enriching U.S. presidency in modern times. The conversation frames Trump's administration within broader trends of "democratic backsliding," examining both the scale and brazenness of alleged profiteering, institutional decay, and the challenges this presents to journalism, governance, and opposition politics.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Trump Presidency and Corruption as the Defining Story

[02:14-04:55]

• Trump's personal net worth has surged dramatically since retaking office.
• Weekly high-profile scandals range from foreign gifts, real estate, and cryptocurrency, to lack of oversight for financial disclosure and trading.
• Beauchamp describes the administration as fundamentally about self-enrichment and unconstrained power.
  • Quote [03:23]:
    “The corruption is the most brazen example of this mindset at work. It exposes the fundamental logic of the Trump presidency, which is: everything should be for me... making me richer, accruing more power, or punishing my enemies.”
• The erosion of both formal and informal constraints around presidential behavior is a key theme.

2. A Week in the Trump Presidency: Scandal Deluge

[04:55-09:40]

• In one week:
  • Over 3,700 trades on Trump’s behalf involving companies with ties to administration policies (e.g., Nvidia shares after CEO accompanied Trump to China).
  • Creation of a $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded "weaponization fund" for those claiming persecution by government investigations—potentially channeling funds to Trump allies involved in January 6th.
  • Justice Department moves to shield Trump from IRS scrutiny.
  • Massive PAC contributions from corporations linked to policy favors.
• Journalistic Challenge:
  The sheer volume and openness of scandals make it difficult to give each the necessary public scrutiny.
  • Quote [06:30]:
    “What Trump has done is basically to avoid doing any cover-up because he’s doing everything out in the open.”
  • Quote [07:36]:
    “It was a settlement that gives Trump this amount of money to disperse as basically his payment for the IRS kind of acknowledging fault for its alleged persecution of him... This is basically the president settling with himself.”

3. The Culture of Brazen Rule-Breaking

[09:40-14:57]

• Wave of stock trades tied directly to administration policy.
• Absence of blind trust or even the appearance of insulating private enrichment from public office.
• Beauchamp argues that internal and external restraints have been obliterated—loyalty is required over legality or ethics.
  • Quote [10:44]:
    “It is about there no longer being anyone who can tell the president no... There’s this famous quote... ‘You can just do things.’ That’s basically been the principle of the White House so far.”
• The recklessness extends beyond corruption to whole-of-government rule-breaking, with little concern for public or political consequences.

4. The Role of Trump's Children and Familial Corruption

[15:26-19:57]

• Eric Trump’s role as the family business’s new spearhead: high-level involvement in ventures intersecting with major U.S. policy concerns.
• Historical norm: Presidential children generally avoid even the appearance of impropriety.
• Comparison to other regimes, like Hungary and Brazil, where family members handle the “off-books” enrichment.
  • Quote [16:52]:
    “One way to think about it is that the children are kind of an extension of the father, an agent here. Trump does have to run the country... but the Trump Organization has always been a family business.”
  • Quote [19:30]:
    “It really is a very common pattern in a country where there’s a leader who wants to take personal control over the state. It is not a common thing to happen in a healthy democracy.”

5. Most Damning and Significant Scandals

[19:57-24:55]

• Notable examples:
  • Unusual government contracts (e.g., painting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool).
  • Gold card visa scheme with almost no uptake.
  • Secretive, massive infusions of private money into the presidential library.
• "Most damning": The $1.8B "weaponization" fund, because of its brazenness and public nature.
• "Most important": The Trump crypto scheme (“World Liberty”).
  • Billions pour in anonymously, potential for direct policy purchases by foreign actors is enormous.
  • Quote [22:38]:
    “When you have an anonymous vehicle for donations of money directly to the president’s family, the potential for abuse is enormous... My guess is something really bad has happened there, but it’s almost impossible to know.”

6. Legal (Non-)Constraints: Supreme Court and DOJ

[24:55-28:17]

• Discussion of the 2024 Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity for “official acts”—doctrine is ill-defined and untested.
• Trump’s effective control of DOJ means prosecution for corruption is presently impossible.
  • Quote [25:15]:
    “I mean, it’s not [legal]. Is the truth of the matter, right? I’m sure much of this behavior is obviously illegal, but there’s two big barriers for it…”
• DOJ aggressively targeting critics (e.g., prosecuting James Comey over an Instagram post).
• U.S. system’s reliance on informal norms has made it vulnerable to “natural state” governance styles.

7. Democracy Theory: Natural State vs. Open Access Order

[28:17-33:56]

• Framework from "Violence and Social Orders" (Acemoglu, Robinson):
  • 'Natural state': Rule by elite, government as extension of rulers’ will.
  • 'Open access order': Rule of law, government operates under neutral principles, not personalistic ones.
• Trump’s administration is described as a “hybrid” between these, with open, personalistic, and self-interested governance.
  • Quote [32:21]:
    “What Trump is doing is reinjecting a very bald faced version of natural state logic into the governance of the American system. He’s really trying to make everything, the legal codes, regulatory systems, economic policy, even foreign policy, right about what the big man wants...”

8. International Comparisons and the Prospect for Consequences

[33:56-38:18]

• Hungary (Orban) and Brazil (Bolsonaro): Public outrage over corruption only translated into political consequences when economic conditions deteriorated.
• U.S. Democrats appear to be integrating anti-corruption messages more forcefully (e.g., Senator Jon Ossoff’s campaign in Georgia).
  • Quote [37:28]:
    “I think never in the history of corruption has so little effort gone into hiding so much graft. There’s the pardon factory... the president and his sons have been very busy taking money from foreign governments and foreign interests.”
• Electoral consequences depend on whether economic hardship can be convincingly tied to corrupt governance.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Jayme Poisson [01:09]:
  “We believe that taxpayer dollars in this country should be used to make life more affordable for the American people, not subsidize corruption of Donald Trump and his cartel.” (Quoting Hakeem Jeffries)

• Zack Beauchamp [03:23]:
  “Everything should be for me, whether it is for me for making me richer or for me for accruing more power, or for me for punishing my enemies. That’s the master for phrase of the Trump presidency — ‘for me’.”

• Zack Beauchamp [06:30]:
  “What Trump has done is basically to avoid doing any cover up because he’s doing everything out in the open... Without the cover-up, it’s actually very hard as a journalist to get readers to think that this is anything but normal procedures.”

• Zack Beauchamp [22:38]:
  “[World Liberty] is essentially something that somebody can pay into as much money as they want. And in theory, that payment is anonymous, but it is effectively donating money directly to a thing that only can pay out to the Trump family... Do I know that that’s happening? No... but I can’t rule that scenario out either.”

• Zack Beauchamp [25:15]:
  “It’s not [legal]. Is the truth of the matter. I’m sure much of this behavior is obviously illegal... The only people who have the capacity to prosecute this are in the Justice Department. And the Trump administration has paid special attention to purging attorneys and appointing political cronies to top positions there.”

• Zack Beauchamp [32:21]:
  “That’s the entire thing that’s going on here. That to me, is the thread that makes corruption and anti democratic politics part of the same tapestry... both of them are part of this very fundamental objective of making himself the decider.”

• Zack Beauchamp [37:28]:
  “I think never in the history of corruption has so little effort gone into hiding so much graft. There’s the pardon factory, they’re running out of DOJ donors and political allies straight to the front of the line. And then, of course, the president and his family’s net worth has increased by billions since he took office.”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Opening & Theme Framing: [00:21-01:09]
• Trump’s Net Worth, Scandals, General Frame: [02:14-04:55]
• Scandal Week Overview: [04:55-09:40]
• Culture of Rule-Breaking: [09:40-14:57]
• Trump’s Children and Familial Business Tangles: [15:26-19:57]
• Defining Scandals: [19:57-24:55]
• Legal Constraints & Supreme Court Ruling: [24:55-28:17]
• Natural State vs. Open Access Order: [28:17-33:56]
• Comparative Case Studies & Political Consequences: [33:56-38:18]

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Summary

This episode paints a portrait of a U.S. presidency awash in self-enrichment and openly transactional governance, with minimal legal or institutional checks. The breadth and blatancy of scandals—many announced publicly—make it hard for both journalists and the public to process them as aberrant rather than routine. Beauchamp’s analysis suggests the logic underpinning both Trump’s corruption and anti-democratic moves is fundamentally “natural statism”—a concentration of power aimed at personal advantage. While similar experiments elsewhere eventually succumbed to popular backlash (especially in poor economic times), the U.S. awaits its own reckoning, as both activists and pragmatic politicians try to define an electoral argument that links personal enrichment to declining national fortunes.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

This is a CBC podcast.

[A]

Hey, everybody, I'm Jamie Poisson. There's this old adage from the days of the Watergate scandal. Follow the money. And in Donald Trump's second term as President of the United States, it's become even more relevant. Some went as far as to diagnose last week as the most corrupt of Donald Trump's political career. From foreign investments to real estate, cryptocurrency, personal stock trades, taxpayer settlement funds, personal gifts, and presidential pardons, we are mired in a deluge of reports related to the ways in which his critics say Donald Trump is using the presidency to profit personally. Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries put it this way.

[B]

We believe that taxpayer dollars in this country should be used to make life more affordable for the American people, not subsidize corruption of Donald Trump and his cartel.

[A]

Zach Beacham is a senior correspondent with Vox. He joins the show to discuss the flood of corruption allegations surrounding Trump campaign, the politics of self enrichment, the ethics loopholes that make much of this possible, and whether the Democrats can turn this into a winning issue. Zach, it's really great to have you on the show.

[B]

Hey, I'm thrilled to be here. It's my first time as a Canadian permanent resident, which I now am, so this is going to be fun.

[A]

Welcome. You know, I was saying, I think the last time we talked to you were just kind of on your way to moving here. So it's, it's good to have you. It's good.

[B]

That's right. I'm here. I've lived through it all. I was there for the election and the heartbreaking events, at least for you guys, of the Olympics this year. So.

[A]

All right, let's talk corruption.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

It has been widely reported that since retaking office last January, Donald Trump's personal net worth has risen to an estimated $3 billion every week. There are what feels like presidency defining scandals that move in and out of the news cycle. Financial disclosure tied to President Trump is raising eyebrows. More than 3,700 trades in just three months.

[B]

There was the $400 million jet that Qatar apparently gifted to Trump personally. His own Justice Department quietly signed an agreement forever barring any audit of Trump, his family or his business interests.

[A]

You've written that Trump's self dealing and profiteering from high office has just become its defin story. And, and Talk to me about what it was that ultimately led you to that conclusion.

[B]

So the way I've been thinking about this, right, is the sort of the center of my beat. The thing I focus on the most is democracy, both in the United States and around the world. And I've been focusing on the Trump presidency really heavily through the lens of the way in which he is corroding democratic institutions. Right. And the damage that's being done to them. And, and the extent to which that damage poses like a real. Like a real chance to turn the United States into something that no longer is meaningfully democratic as a country. But in. In thinking through this and in covering it and covering other countries where there's been similar episodes of democratic backsliding, I've always known that the corruption has been hand in hand with democratic backsliding. For many authoritarian leaders, or would be authoritarian leaders, the entire point of. Of removing constraints on their own action is so they can engage in profiteering more cleanly, more easily. And it turns out that corruption here is playing a somewhat similar role. While it's a little bit tricky to assess, you know, Trump's psychological state, I mean, we have a lot of evidence about it, but we're always speculating to a degree. One thing that's clear is that his vision of the office is that he is the decider, and there are no constraints from either the people or the laws or the legislature about how he should operate. And any such constraints are illegitimate. And the corruption is the most brazen example of this mindset at work. It exposes the fundamental logic of the Trump presidency, which is everything should be for me, whether it is for me for making me richer, or for me for accruing more power, or for me for punishing my enemies. That's the master for phrase of the Trump presidency for me. And only by looking closely at the corruption can we understand exactly how this operates and, and what it means for the damage to America's democratic institutions.

[A]

Just. Just to give people a sense of the. The deluge of disparate scandals coming out of the White House right now, let's just look at some of the stories that broke. Just last week, we saw reports that Trump or his investment advisors made thousands of stock trades involving companies directly affected by administration. Take in video 15 separate trades, the biggest on February 10, when 1 to

[B]

5 million dollars in Nvidia shares were

[A]

bought on Trump's behalf.

[B]

That stands out because Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was one of the business leaders

[A]

that recently accompanied Donald Trump on his trip to China, we saw the creation of a nearly $1.8 billion taxpayer funded weaponization fund for people who claim they were victims of politically motivated investigations.

[B]

There are fears the compensation fund will be used to pay the pro Trump Rio who assaulted police on January 6, 2021.

[A]

It's expected to benefit Trump allies with little oversight. We learned that Trump's Justice Department was moving to effectively shield the President and his businesses from future IRS scrutiny tied to past tax questions. And then separately, a Trump aligned pack received millions from a tobacco company shortly before the FDA delivered a policy outcome the industry had been lobbying for. And again, this is just a single week, you know, and you were just talking about how important it is to look at this stuff. But like, as a journalist, what kind of challenges are you presented with in trying to communicate the scale of the threat of what is currently going on when there is just so much happening at once?

[B]

You know, it's funny that you started this episode with Watergate, because I thought you're gonna talk about another adage from around that time, which is that the COVID up is worse than the crime. Right. What really got Nixon in trouble wasn't just what he did to the dnc, you know, breaking into it. It's the way that he lied about it and tried to hide it. And eventually that all came to light and it was damning through all the reporting that came out at the time, the very famous story, right, Nixon's downfall. What Trump has done is basically to avoid doing any cover up because he's doing everything out in the open. Like none of this is is secret. It's all in documents. Sometimes that the White House will announce, like the fund that you were talking about, the fund that' $1.776 billion, get it? 1776, haha. For of reparations for victims of previous political persecution or weaponization, as they put it. That was not something they did in the shadows. It's something the Justice Department announced in a press release. Yeah, I mean, this we're talking here. I want to give a little backstory on this to understand how brazen it is. Right. Of this being the outcome of Trump filing a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, claiming that their audit of him was some kind of political malfeasance. And this fund is a settlement with allegedly. I say settlements in quotes because it doesn't resemble a normal legal settlement to a case, but it's a settlement that gives Trump this amount of money to disperse as basically his payment for the IRS kind of acknowledging fault for its alleged Persecution of him. The President controls at this moment both the IRS and the Department of Justice. Right. In general, there's no more firewall between the President and independent agencies. That's the explicit stated theory of the White House. And they've worked quite a bit to degrade agency independence. So this is basically the President settling with himself to the point where a judge in court said, wait, are you guys actually adversaries in this proceeding? Because you can throw out a legal proceeding if it's not sufficiently adversarial, which it wasn't. Right. Trump was kind of on both sides of this lawsuit, which means he's basically decided to award himself nearly $1.8 billion to pay out to his political allies who he believes has been persecuted. Had he hidden that, had there been some secret shuffling of cash and it appeared in the pages of the New York Times or perhaps in the past, the Washington Post, it would have been a tremendous scandal. Right. It would have been something that everybody focused on, like Trump caught red handed stealing money from the irs. But here he just takes the money openly as part of an obviously corrupt proceeding where he's basically suing himself or an agency he controls and. And people are angry about it. There's been significant amounts of coverage, but it doesn't have the same frisson of somebody getting caught that happened back in the Watergate area. So without the COVID up, it's actually very hard as a journalist to get readers to think that this is anything but normal procedures. Though there's some ev evidence this might. This one, because it's so brazen, might be breaking through, but I'll believe it when I see it in the polling data.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, you know, just. Just on that point of just how brazen and in the open all of this is. You know, we've talked previously on the show about his family's incredibly lucrative crypto empire and some foreign investments around that. And I mentioned those stock trades off the top. Recent disclosures revealed that Trump or his investment advisors made roughly 3,700 stock trades in the first quarter of the year involving companies directly affected by administration policy decisions. Companies like Nvidia, Intel, Oracle, Boeing, Palantir. Firms tied to military contracts and tariffs and AI policy. And usually presidents do place their assets in a blind trust to give even, like, the illusion of distance from public office and private enrichment. But just talk to me more about why you think that Trump and his inner circle seem so comfortable just being this brazen about it. Why not even pretend to follow the status quo here?

[B]

The truth is that this, this administration, specifically, as opposed to the first Trump administration, is characterized by two things. It is about there no longer being anyone who can tell the president no or wants to tell the president no, because if you do that, that's how you get fired and kicked out of the entire conservative movement more broadly. And second, there being a sense that you can do whatever. There's this famous quote that circled around the sort of online rights circles in Trump's early days. You can just do things. That's basically been the principle of the White House so far, is that they announce what they want to do and they're going to do it. And it doesn't have to follow normal procedures. It doesn't have to follow normal rules. So is the entire, entire ethos of Elon Musk's Doge Enterprise ended up mostly just shuttering USAID and destroying an agency that was legally mandated to exist by Congress and destroying it unilaterally because they wanted to, and they didn't need to follow the rules and spend the money as Congress appropriated it, or so they claimed. It's a really shocking example of this. And so there's not any concern about public backlash in a lot of these areas. It's not just about the corruption. It's not just. There's a. There's a specific calculation that people don't care. Care about this one issue. It's that they don't think people care about them breaking the rules at all, or at least they care so much about breaking the rules in this case for financial benefit, that it doesn't matter what the consequences are. Trump isn't up, isn't going to be up for election again, regardless of what he says about running in 2028. There's. There's no chance that the President's political fortunes really matter. And you see this in the way he's intervened in Republican primaries, too. You know, just the night before, we're keeping this. Ken Paxton won the Republican primary in Senate in Texas. Paxton is himself notoriously corrupt. He's hated for his corrupt dealings by other Republicans in Texas. And I know the attorney General thinks all the scandals that he's brought with him over the years are already baked in the cake, and people don't care. But I guarantee you I care. And I believe you care. I believe the character is on the ballot. And yet Trump endorsed him because Trump liked him. Trump saw him as the kind of person who got along with him. And now Senate Republicans are facing a very difficult race in a red state against a Democrat who the more establishment minded Republican John Cornyn probably would have beaten by a decent margin. But now I'd call it a toss up between Paxton and, and James Talarico, his alternative. So it's, it's just part of the general ethos of we don't care. And we add to that that just, I mean, very simply, Trump wants to get rich. He wants to be richer. This has been his whole life. Throughout, literally any point in Trump's personal history, a push for money and status has been at the core of who he is. And in the previous administration there was some constraint around that. Those adults in the room, there was not a sense of what rules they could break without there being consequences. Trump fretted that his first impeachment, or even before that, that the Mueller report was going to be the death of him politically because he thought that the rules applied to him. And they it turns out that the rules haven't been applied to him. The Supreme Court explicitly gave him immunity for official acts conducted while in office, whatever that means. So, yeah, he's just totally unconstrained. High interest debt is one of the toughest opponents you'll face unless you power up with a Sofi personal loan. A Sofi personal loan could repackage your bad debt into one low fixed rate monthly payment. It's even got super speed since you could get the funds as soon as the same day you sign. Visit sofi.compower to learn more. That's sofi.com p o w E R Loans originated By SoFi Bank NA Member FDIC Terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891 Imagine you've been charged with a crime and the only witness pointing the finger at you isn't even human.

[A]

I remember thinking, are you serious?

[B]

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[A]

I want to come back to the Supreme Court ruling, but I do want to ask you about the role of his children here. Maybe specifically Eric Trump, who's become deeply involved in a range of businesses tied to crypto, AI drones, foreign investment, some of which intersect directly with American national security policy and US Foreign policy. There are reports involving Chinese linked firms, Pentagon contracts, Gulf State investments. This is another enormous breaking of norms, right? Presidents children have historically largely tried to avoid even the appearance of these kinds of entanglements. You know, people will remember the kind of controversies surrounding the likes of Hunter Biden. Right. How would you characterize the role that you've seen Trump's children take on during his second term in office?

[B]

I was about to say the Hunter Biden thing. Republicans were very angry, and, you know, they had some cause to be concerned about some of Hunter Biden's choices about business. I think a lot of the stuff was inflated about Hunter for political gain, but certainly there were reasons to believe that he was trading on his father's name, reputation, and position to try to make money. And that is concerning behavior. Right. That's not that. That's a real problem. The problem is now that the Trump children are doing that and kind of always have. But now, in this especially brazen way, times a million, Eric Trump has been

[A]

traveling the world promoting Trump family crypto

[B]

ventures, and there's very little concern being aired about it. I mean, one way to think about it is that the children are kind of an extension of the father, an agent here. Right. Like, Trump does have to run the country. Right. He being president is a very demanding job, and he has to devote a lot of time to doing the things that are necessary as part of that job. Everything from. From conducting this war on Iran to deciding when and how to intervene in Republican primaries, to appearing at Cabinet meetings, even if he does appear to be a little sleepy in some of these meetings. The president's doing president things, and you just can't actively manage all of these business deals while you're doing president things things. But the Trump Organization has always been a family business. Right. And it is very hard to know when what Eric is doing is just, you know, a thing that Eric wants to do or whether it's something that is being done with an understanding that this is money that will be part of the whole family enterprise, which is to say, controlled by Donald after he's capable of accessing it. It's very, very difficult to understand that from the outside without sourcing in the Trump family that I personally do not have. Though I'd love to speak to some journalists who do, or if there's anyone in the Trump family who wants to talk to me, I can send you my signal. But there's. There's just no way to know what the ultimate purpose of this is. And by the way, this is another common feature in states where Democratic backsliding is happening. This is a very famous element of the Viktor Orban government, which is just ousted in Hungary. Right. Orban himself would claim not to be very wealthy, but he would outsource what are essentially his financial interests to friends and family members. And investigative reporters in Hungary would work to show the actual linkages here, with some estimating that Orban's off the books fortune made him the richest person in the country, but it was all outsourced and disguised to other people. Similarly, Jerry Bolsonaro in Brazil, he himself was not especially directly engaged in corrupt activities until maybe later, but his son, who is currently running for the Brazilian presidency, is currently implicated in a massive, massive corruption scandal. Flavio Bolsonaro, far right presidential hopeful Flavio Bolsonaro has been revealed through audio files released by the Intercept to have secretly negotiated for 134 million reais in financing from the owner of Banco Master bank, which embezzled an estimated 12 billion reais from investors before folding in November 2025. The money he told the press was for Dark Horse, a biopic currently in post production about Flavio's father. And this is what everyone told me. I was in Brazil earlier this year and they were like, yeah, Flavio is the guy who's running the family business. He's the one who is ensuring that they're profiting off of their father's political success. So it really is a very common pattern in a country where there's a leader who wants to take personal control over the state. It is not a common thing to happen in a healthy democracy. So that's not a great sign for America.

[A]

Yeah, there's lots of other examples that we could go through here, ones that even on their face seem kind of absurd. Like the plan to paint the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool American flag blue through a no bid contract awarded to a company with no previous federal history. Or even Trump's gold card and immigration scheme, which administration said would raise $100 billion and attract 80,000 buyers, which to date is reported to have seen exactly one applicant approved. There are all kinds of private money flowing into his presidential library fund, et cetera, et cetera. You have called corruption the defining feature of the Trump presidency. And to that end, I wonder what you see as the defining grift. Like which of all the scandals that we've run through today do you see as the most central or the most important or the most damning for the Trump administration. Or perhaps it's one we just haven't yet gotten to yet.

[B]

So. So great question. It's hard to say most because it's just like a web of things designed to make money. But I will separate out two Components of your question to answer the first is most damning, and I think that's going to end up being this slush fund. The 1776 billion thing is getting a level of attention that is unusual for Trump corruption scandals because it is so brazen, because it is so open in the way that he's raiding the treasury, and the amount of interest that you're getting from mainstream media, from members of Congress, I think it really has brought corruption on the agenda in a way that it hasn't been for the rest of the Trump presidency. But for my money, the most important one, and we're not talking about it very much anymore, because it's kind of old news. It really started in folks in 2024, is the Trump crypto venture, which is just absolutely wild. Right. There's a great episode of the Ezra Klein show, and he interviews the author of a book called Number Go up about the way that the crypto world works and how the Trump crypto scheme works in particular. I'd really recommend it for all the nitty gritty details. But the basic gist of it is that Trump's crypto vehicle, World Liberty, is essentially something that somebody can pay into as much money as they want. And in theory, that payment is anonymous, but it is effectively donating money directly to a thing that only can pay out to the Trump family through the way that it is structured or overwhelmingly pay out to the Trump family. So what you're doing when you're inflating the value of the various different Trump crypto offerings is you are just giving money directly to the Trump family, and they've gotten so much money as a result of this. So we're talking billions, right, going into the World Liberty vehicles, and it's untraceable. Right. We don't know who's donating it. We also don't know why they're donating it or what they're doing when they're donating it. Right. Like, let's say, hypothetically, I am the leader of a small oil rich Middle Eastern country that has some interest in the outcome of US Policy in the region, and I have a lot of money to throw around, basically just infinite amounts of money. And I'm already maybe doing business with Jared Kushner, but I think I want to sweeten the pot a little bit. Or we're at a crucial point in a policy dispute, and I'd really like to get in with the Trump administration. And so they call up, let's say Eric Trump and say, hey, Eric, you see all that money that just went into World Liberty, well, guess where it came from. And here's what we'd like in exchange for that. And I think you should go to your dad and maybe talk to him about that. Do I know that that's happening? No, I. I can't prove that that scenario is real. I'm saying that I can't rule that scenario out either. When you have an anonymous vehicle for donations of money directly to the president's family, the potential for abuse is enormous. I've outlined one scenario, but you could imagine people buying regulatory favors. You can imagine them buying pardons, you can imagine them buying any other sort of policy thing, getting their way out of Justice Department prosecution. Right. Truly, the possibilities for malfeasance are enormous. And my guess is something really bad has happened there. But it's also almost impossible to know, because the only people who would really know about it are the people who donated the money and the person in the Trump family or Trump Organization or White House that they spoke to. And so unless one of those people speaks to a reporter and not even a regulator at this point, Right, because you can't trust the independence of the agencies. But maybe somebody you know in a watchdog, an NGO or something like that, maybe some information's percolating there. I haven't heard it yet. And maybe it'll come out. This is the greatest scandal of the Trump administration that none of us knew about. That policy was literally being purchased in this opaque and shady way. But I don't know. And then that scares me.

[A]

You mentioned earlier the Supreme Court immunity ruling. Just talk to me a little bit more about that 2024 ruling and how much you think it has changed the. The governing landscape here. You know, a lot. A lot of people will just be wondering how on earth any of this is legal.

[B]

I mean, it's not. Is the truth of the matter, Right? It's this. I'm sure much of this behavior is obviously illegal, but there's two big barriers for it. You mentioned the Supreme Court, Right. And that's one of them. The ruling is confusing, Right? It's basically a doctrine that John Roberts invented out of thin air. So nobody really knows how it be applied. We've never had a test case for it, right, where the President is being prosecuted, and they rule on how their ruling applies, because at the time, they sent the cases against Trump down to lower courts to refile. It wasn't the end of those proceedings. What ended the criminal cases against Trump was his victory in the November election. So We've literally no idea whether Trump can be prosecuted under this ruling for any official acts of corruption. Right. They say the term is the president has immunity for, quote, unquote, official acts. Right. But what counts as an official act? And can corruption ever qualify as official? I mean, as a non lawyer, my answer would be no. Right. The entire point of corruption is it's not an official duty. It's a use of your powers for private purposes. I. E. Non official one. But I am not a Supreme Court justice. I have not invented tortured rationales to justify things the Trump administration is doing. So. So I don't know. Right. And that would create a lot of concern among prosecutors who would want to bring the case, because they don't know either, given how novel the doctrine is. The second issue is the more immediate one, which is that the only people who have the capacity to prosecute this are in the Justice Department. And the Trump administration has paid special attention to purging attorneys and appointing political cronies to top positions there. I mean, the Justice Department has become so politicized that Jim Comey, the former director of the FBI, is currently being prosecuted for an Instagram post in which he arranged seashells to say, 86, 47. Right. Which means, like, kick Trump out in restaurant parlance. Basically, they're claiming this is a criminal threat against the president's person as opposed to, like, an obvious act of political opposition to the White House, which is outrageous. Right. It's just totally crazy, and the case is not going to go anywhere. But the fact that they brought that in the first place is indicative of how thoroughly corroded the Justice Department's independence is, which used to be, especially since Watergate, this was a hugely important reform priority, securing its. Its autonomy from presidential interference. And so with. With the Justice Department compromise as an independent actor, there's not another federal prosecuting agency, there's no independent prosecutor like there are in some other countries. Right. That's designed to have oversight powers, independent of whoever is in charge of the chief executive. The. The US Allegedly had that, but it turns out it was a system that was based entirely on informal norms that the president has just chosen to stomp all over. And with that, there's just no prospects of Trump being held criminally liable in the near future, and not because of the Supreme Court, though that will be a problem once he's out of office. But while he's in office, it's just his control over the government means he's safe.

[A]

One of the most interesting frameworks that you've cited in helping make sense and contextualize. All of this is borrowed from the world of political science. This is a distinction between what is called the natural state and the open access order. And just. Can you walk me, walk me through this?

[B]

Sure. So this is from a very influential political science book called Violence and Social Orders, which is basically an attempt to describe, very ambitiously, the evolution of human societies over the course of time. And so the first term that you used, the natural state, is the author's term for various different kinds of regimes that were dominant for most of recorded human history. And this kind of system is one where the entire structure is oriented around a distinction between the ruling elite who control the state and those who are subject to, to their will and the rules that they impose. So in, in a natural state, there is no distinction between government and person. The persons of the elite group, however that elite group is defined to be, be it, be it some aristocrats, be it a monarchical family, be it some, be it maybe some kind of ruler, priests, maybe a warlord, or, or let's say slave owners in the American south, that those groups, right, they set the rules. And the rules are designed and bent around ensuring and protecting their own interests, both political and financial. And the rules, the rules that apply to everybody else are based basically on personal relationships and determinations, like, do you have an in with the big man and he'll give you personal dispensations if you break the law, or do you make the big man mad, in which case, whether or not your actions were legal under the letter of whatever legal code was created, you'll be punished because the big man says right. And this is basically the logic upon which the natural state operated. And most of human societies operated up until fairly recently. We're talking the last 200, 300 years of human development generally. And that's basically the advent of what they call open access orders, right? Which are societies in which the principle that governs them isn't just, you know, who you know, but what the rules say about how you should relate to things. The logic of personalism, of there being one decider or a group of deciders, is replaced by a logic of neutrality where the state treats all people, at least in a formal way, equally, and their conduct is judged and their outcomes are determined based on a series of procedures laid down in publicly accessible law. And so that they, they describe this as being an epochal shift in the sort of, I call the operating system behind different human societies. And the United States was supposed to be a Kind of textbook example of an open access order. And I think in a lot of ways it still works that way. It was always flawed, obviously. Right. Should just caveat that there's every, there's all sorts of evidence from declining, you know, intergenerational mobility, social classes, to the persistence of inequalities and life outcomes based on race. All of this is clear evidence that the US was sort of never as perfect as it might have seemed on paper, and yet it basically embodied that idea of it. These exceptions by the end of the 20th century, beginning of the 21st, were primarily exceptions to the general rule. And what Trump is doing is reinjecting a very bald faced version of natural state logic into the governance of the American system. Him, he's really trying to make everything, the legal codes, regulatory systems, economic policy, even foreign policy, right about what the big man wants and how he wants to apply it, regardless of, of what any words on paper say. So that's the entire thing that's going on here. That to me, is the thread that makes corruption and anti democratic politics part of the same tapestry. It's not that Trump is doing corruption in order to degrade democracy, though it does do that. And it's not that Trump is degrading democracy in order to enable his corruption, though it does do that. It's that both of them are part of this very fundamental objective of making himself the decider right, of making everything about what he wants and who he wants to punish and who he wants to reward, not based on rules, but just based purely on personal whim and feeling and political advantage. And that is the logic of, of the natural state. And we, we now in the United States live under a kind of hybrid between these two broad structuring logics of human societies. It's very weird because, you know, violence and Social Orders was written in 2009, before anyone was taking the concept of democratic backsliding in a country like the United States very seriously. And so they don't really talk about the transition back to a natural state. They talk about the transition away from natural state to open access order, but not the other way around. So we're seeing it happen. We saw it in some other countries to a degree, but I think the US version is especially bald faced because even in a place like Hungary, Viktor Orban was very careful to try to have a legalistic precedent for what he's doing, or at least a justification for it. He's very clever about that, actually. It was a big reason why his regime was able to mollify Hungarians for some long. But Trump is just bold, right? He just does things pretty openly. It's very clear that it's about just what he wants and not the law.

[A]

But isn't that what ultimately took Orban out? Like, didn't he just lose the last election because corruption was such, like, a central part of the campaign against him? And you could probably say the same of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Right? And does that tell you that there are consequences here?

[B]

The Hungarian example is a good one here, right? The corruption had been there all along. It just took a long time for it to catch up with people, for them, people to notice it in not only their everyday life and those few independent media outlets that persisted, but also for it to happen in a time of pretty terrible economic slowdown in Hungary. I mean, the living situation, the living standards in Hungary have degraded substantially. I mean, by some metrics, it's the poorest country in the European Union. And that was intimately linked to the corruption. So I think one of the most successful arguments that Peter Magyar, the opposition candidate who's now the prime minister, did on the campaign trail and what allowed him to get around government censorship and all the tools of this kind of authoritarian regime was to go out to talk to ordinary people and be like, the reason why you're poorer is because this guy has put all his friends in charge of all of the most productive industries because he's imposed policies that are designed to make him and his buddies wealthier, not to make ordinary Hungarians better off. And at a time where the economic situation had gotten really dire, that resonated with a lot of Hungarians. I think that's the most generalizable lesson, is that when corruption becomes a governing logic and, and the objective situations are bad enough, right? People don't ignore it anymore. They don't look over it anymore. It's not something they can just ignore because things are otherwise going okay. It. But. But when things start to go badly, that doesn't. Governments can win when the economy is doing poorly or when there's some kind of economic problem. But what helps oppositions is when they have a very clean and coherent story to tell about why the government is to be blamed for the circumstances that are happening. And in Hungary, that was the case. Right. Ma Jar was great at this incredibly effective campaigner. And I think that Democrats are already starting to try to apply those lessons. If you're, if you're interested, look at the way that John Ossoff, who's the Democratic candidate for Sen. He's A senator. Right now he's running for re election in Georgia. Is running his campaign campaign. Ossoff has gone really hard on corruption. I think never in the history of corruption has so little effort gone into hiding so much graft. There's the pardon factory. They're running out of DOJ donors and political allies straight to the front of the line. And then, of course, the president and his family's net worth has increased by billions since he took office. The president and his sons have been very busy taking money from foreign governments and foreign interests. And he's doing it in one of the purplest states in the country, like one of the most important swing states that there is, in a race that could very well decide who controls the Senate in 2027. So that Ossoff is betting his campaign on this being a signature argument in a state that's full of persuadable voters suggests to me that I haven't seen this, but there's probably some internal polling from his campaign that suggests that this, this is really working in their focus groups and their surveys. And my guess is that that has become especially true since inflation has gotten worse during the Iran war and gas prices have spiked and so on. I mean, and then the tariffs have hurt American consumers, not as much as Canadian consumers, obviously, but still to a meaningful degree. And it creates this very tidy narrative of Trump is doing whatever he wants, he's breaking the laws, he's just, you know, going to war because he wants to, ignoring Congress. And what he's done as a result of that is to make you poorer, and he's making himself richer in the process. I think if I had to bet, I would bet that, that Ossoff is going to win. I'm legally, by the way, sorry, I'm professionally not allowed to bet. We're not allowed to bet on prediction markets because it's allegedly biases are covered which would.

[A]

But just theoretically. Theoretically, you're to bet.

[B]

Yeah. If I were to bet, I would bet on Ossoff winning and this being a part of why he wins.

[A]

Okay, that feels like a good place for us to end today. Zach, this was great. Thank you for coming on, as always.

[B]

Hey, it's a pleasure, Jamie.

[A]

All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

[B]

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