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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. This episode is brought to you by indeed. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. That's Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs what is Donald Trump good at? Seriously, what is Trump good at? After winning an affordability election in 2024, the administration has not just failed to reduce prices. Inflation is now rising. After promising to restore working class employment through tariffs, the administration has overseen a period of declining blue collar job growth. After promising peace, the White House started a war with Iran after claiming at various moments during that war that this war was all about replacing the theocracy or bringing freedom to the Iranian people, or destroying Iran's military cap capabilities, or dismantling its nuclear program, or securing its resources. The President just signed a deal to end the war which does none of those things. Now, this might sound like Donald Trump is a failure. I do not think he's a failure, at least not in his own eyes. He has, by some accounts, been the most successful American president in history at one very specific thing making money. The New York Times estimated conservatively that the Trump family has made more than $1.4 billion in documented gains in their first 14 months in power. That is $100 million per month. Other estimates are billions of dollars higher. Now, this is not coming from someone who is against money. Unlike some people in my party. I'm not against people becoming billionaires. I'm not against increasing the salary of the American president or for increasing pay for many public officials in Washington and local government. I actually don't think there's anything wrong with making a bunch of money. But Donald Trump is not a CEO. He's not a startup founder running a company with shareholders. He's a constitutionally designated public servant who has sworn an oath to preserve, protect and defend the country. And he has objectively, objectively used his office to send his personal wealth skyrocketing even as his public approval plummets. Now, this is not just my conclusion. One of the fastest growing news organizations in the last few years is Tangle. In several analyses that map out the ideological bias of American news organizations, tangle consistently falls in the center. It might be one of the last news Sources that thinks down the middle. Objectivity is a virtue in today's polarized society. And its editor in chief, Isaac Saul, wrote this about Trump's remarkable ability to use the presidency to get hella. We have never seen anything like this. We've never seen the scale, the brazenness, or the volume of the self enrichment, corruption and betrayal of ethics. Trump is using the presidency to make himself exorbitantly rich, even when the strategies to do so cost his own supporters hundreds of millions of dollars. He appears to be running the most corrupt administration in American history. End quote. Today's guest is Isaac Saul. Now, one way we could do the next hour is to somewhat conventionally tick through the categories of Trump's corruption in a conventional Q and A. But I thought that might be really depressing. So we're gonna do something different this week because Isaac is, like me, a fan of Bill Simmons and the ringer's penchant for drafts. We're gonna do something that is either extremely fun, extremely depressing, extremely inappropriate, or maybe all three at once. We're going to draft the most corrupt actions of the Trump administration one by one to showcase the most venal, the most absurd, the most jaw dropping examples of the president transparently using his power to enrich himself, even as Americans cry out over and over that they're struggling to get ahead. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Donald Trump 2026 corruption draft. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain Eng. This episode of Plain English is presented to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, campaigns slow down, insights get buried, and opportunities get missed. That's why Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales and using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. To learn more, check out Accenture.com Spotify Isaac. Saul, welcome to the show.
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B
Thanks for having me, Derek, Glad to be here.
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A
It's really great to meet you. I've been a fan for a long time. I'm a fan. My wife is a fan. My wife's fandom is actually mildly annoying. There are times when I'm really struggling with a complex idea like some debate in the news and really trying to be fair and, you know, ski slalom my way down the middle in a way that's appropriate, but not both sides. Y and then right as I'm really struggling with a piece, you know, she'll turn over in bed with her phone and be like, you know, I just read the most amazing article about this on Tangle and it's really freaking annoying. So damn you, Isaac. But it's also nice now to sublimate that anger by welcoming you to the show. So thanks very much for both inspiring today's episode and for appearing here. I'm really happy.
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B
I love to hear it.
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A
So before we get into today's game, before we even explain the rules, I have a question about your approach to the subject. And it's a question that's also self directed. You've got a very careful brand. That brand is, I wouldn't even say bipartisan. It's anti partisan. Like you really bend over backwards to not take sides in complex debates. And I really wanna also emphasize that you don't aim for false balance either, right? You don't aim for this idea that all sides are always equally right in any debate. You resist that bullshit very effectively. But with that said, you have now published several multi, multi, multi thousand word pieces on the President's self dealing. Why is this issue of Trump's corruption so important to you?
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B
I think first of all, I am just built for it to offend my sensibilities. I mean, I think the things that frustrate me about government are typically around wasteful spending, corruption, obfuscating the truth from the public. And the Trump self dealing and grifting stories just hit all three of those right on the head. And there's something about the dynamic of the President doing this, the way he's been doing it, which is blatantly, openly, shamelessly, that has kind of just neutered it as a political issue. I mean, he's like inoculated the public from being angry about it, which is really remarkable. And it's kind of how I opened my first piece explaining. What I'm observing is just they're being so bold that it feels like people don't feel as if they could be really upset about it. And then I'm sitting here stewing over it because it's so over the top and egregious. And to me from my vantage point, genuinely seems like we're witnessing the most corrupt administration of all time. If you're judging it based on the kind of self dealing, enriching and grift and lies and nobody's really mad about it. And I was somebody who chased the Hunter Biden laptop story and the Biden family business dynamics and all these really critical and I think important stories that popped up over the last few years, last decade. And the people who cheered me on then, who are Trump supporters now, are just turning a blind eye to this. And that to me, was so frustrating that I felt like I had to write about it. And then when I read the responses, some of which were predictable and some which surprised me, I had to follow up and write about it again because I really wanted to compel people to see this is so important and we can't accept it because if we don't draw a line here, it doesn't stop with Trump. You know, we've observed this throughout history. Anytime the president of the executive branch expands power, crosses a new line, the next president, the next executive branch embraces that new power or crosses that line again without punishment. And I'm really worried that we're going to allow this and then it will become the new precedent.
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A
Tell me a little bit more about the response. Surely you have a lot of Republicans, a lot of MAGA readers. What did they say when they opened their newsletter that they consider a kind of objective from the heavens, kind of 360 review of the world, and it went so hard at their guy. What did they say?
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B
I think there were two overarching responses, one that I expected and one that I didn't really expect. The one I expected was just the cynicism, which I think is, you know, part of what has made Trump succeed. There are a lot of people out there, and I understand it, who prefer the guy who will roll a grenade into the room and blow everything up. And they don't really care about what's being built in its place. They're just so exhausted and done and cynical about the system we have and the governance we have that they're happy to see Trump kind of drive in on the flaming car giving everybody the double bird. You know, it's just, it's invigorating and I get that, cuz I get frustrated with our governance too. But the cynicism that I expected was just everybody in D.C. is corrupt. All these politicians are always self dealing. They're all like psychopathic, self interested people. That's why they're senators or congressmen or sitting in the White House. And Trump's just doing it less sneakily and with more pride than any of them did. And I expected that response and I was prepared to, to answer it, which is basically just. That's not true. I actually interview members of Congress and senators and people have been in the White House or working around the White House and when you get to know people in that way, you see some of them are corrupt and self dealy and psychopathically self interested. A lot of them are there to be in service and make the world a better place. Like the majority of people in Congress, I actually genuinely believe fall into that category. They are often the people we hear about the least, but they're there and they exist. And I don't think it's fair to label everybody that way. So I wrote a little bit about that. The thing that I was surprised by was the direct comparisons to other presidencies and really not letting go of kind of flattening them all into the same thing. The most common response, or one of the top three probably was people saying Barack Obama came into office worth a million dollars and a no name political activist who had kind of climbed into the Senate and now he's leaving as a ultra wealthy worth hundreds of millions of dollars, former president. It's so much worse that he came into office without money and left with money than President Trump who came in office rich and now it's just continued to get rich. And that answer surprised me a little bit, and I understood it. And the response for me was just, we know how Barack Obama got rich. It's not a mystery. Right? Barack Obama came into office and as his fame and celebrity grew and he was definitely a kind of, you know, we were all infected with the fame of Barack Obama. Whether you loved him or hated him, the world revolved around him in a similar way, to a lesser degree that it does around Trump. But he took book deals, he did speaking tours, he signed a deal with Hulu or Netflix after to do a documentary about his life. You know, he invested his money and
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A
he became ip you could even say, right. He was like Obama Inc. Was like Marvel or Lucasfilms. It was something that he could sell to a random House, to a Netflix. Yeah. It was, for people in entertainment, a very familiar path to wealth. Wrap up though, before we start the game.
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B
Yeah, I mean, there were books, there were TV shows, et cetera. And then he did the thing Trump doesn't do. He filed his tax returns. So we could all follow the trail. So if you actually want to know how President Barack Obama got rich, you can sit down and map it out. And there's no mystery there. And none of it's really corrupt. There's like one or two stories you might hear about, you know, a guy who helped, for instance, I think it was somebody helped negotiate the Hulu or Netflix deal that he landed after he was in office. And then that guy in his second term or between his two terms. And then during Obama's second term, that guy got some, like, obscure ambassadorship. It's like, okay, well, maybe Trump does stuff like that every day. That didn't even make it into my piece. So it's. It's so far down the ladder of quote unquote, corrupt that I have a hard time getting excited about it. But we basically know, and with Trump, as I'm sure we're about to talk about in this episode, the ways in which he's making money and the family's profiting is much more directly related to the work and power that he has as president. It's him pulling the levers of the federal government in order to enrich himself or his family. And that's the thing that I find so offensive. And it's the thing that's fundamentally different between him and former presidents that we've had. Nobody has ever done it at this scale. And again, with the kind of shamelessness that Trump has, and that's the thing I tried to remind my readers is like, he's not denying it. He's answering questions around saying, I tried to separate the business first term. Nobody cared. So this time, we're not even trying. I mean, he literally said that to the New York Times with a recorder running. And it's that sort of brazenness that has somehow hypnotized everybody into just not really giving a shit, which has just driving me a little bit insane, as I'm sure you can tell.
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A
So let's try to exercise your feeling of insanity by playing this game. We're going to have a snake draft, as I explained in the open, of the most egregious Trump scandals to date. And we are mostly focusing on his second term. So just the last 18 months or so, three rules that I want to go over before we get started. Rule number one. This is a snake draft. So you're going to start round one, I'm gonna start round two, and so on. I think we're gonna be able to make it through about four rounds. So four rounds times two. Eight corruption scandals that we'll be able to explicate for our audience. Rule number two, speaking of the word explicate, the name of this show is plain English. Our job is to both name and explain each corruption item for folks who don't know it. So, no, assuming deep knowledge on the part of our audience, you know, if I draft, you know, the Abu Dhabi spy chic foreign direct investment scandal of January 26th, I can't just leave it. This isn't like LeBron James, where I expect everybody to know what I'm talking about. Our job is to name the scandal and really unpack what it is that makes it corrupt and scandalous. And rule number three, corruption is not like murder. It's a broad category that can include a lot of different things. Bribery, embezzlement, which is a kind of theft, trading and influence using your political connections to take personal advantage, which is a theme I think we're going to revisit quite a bit in the next 45 minutes. Coordinated schemes to profit off of a group of people, which in some context is called racketeering. You and I are not lawyers. We are not trying to prosecute a legal argument here. We're not trying to indict in a legal manner the president for corruption. We're going to use our best judgment to relay reporting in the news about what Trump and his family have done. Anything else that you want to put on the table before we get started and have a draft of the Trump corruption scandals the last 18 months?
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B
No, I think that's a great framework to work from. The only thing I would add is when this hour is over, please remember that you and I will probably cover about a fifth or a sixth of the territory that we could have if we had unlimited time. And that's one of the things I really want to hammer home for the audience.
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A
And for those with more time, you should read Isaac's piece, which we're going to link in the show notes. It's absolutely fantastic. All right, first round of the Trump corruption draft of 2026. Isaac, it is your board. What's your call?
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B
All right, man. I thought long and hard about this, but I ultimately settled on the Trump meme coin rug pull. So I'll start in the spirit of plain English by explaining what a meme coin is, which is basically a cryptocurrency token that has no inherent value. A meme coin is something that sort of is like a social contagion. Create these tokens, they will get them on an exchange. And then other people who think the token is funny or there's some sort of, again, social contagion or momentum behind it will buy that coin. And as more people buy the coin, the price inflates. And the second part is the rug pull, which is a common thing that we've seen in sort of cryptocurrency schemes and scams over the last decade or so. That crypto has become really popular. There are a few different ways that rug pulls function, one common way is that a coin that is brought onto the market, brought onto the exchange, is tied to a more traditional token or coin that's already there. And then everybody buys the new coin. And then the people who started the new coin remove all of the traditional coin, which immediately deflates the value. They leave with all the money, and then everybody's stuck holding this meaningless coin. The other way a rug pull works, which is kind of related to what I believe the Trump administration or the Trump family did, is that one group of people owns the majority of the coin. And because they have that giant share so much liquidity, they can control the price of the coin by selling and removing some of that coin from the marketplace in coordinated fashion. And so what we saw with the Trump coin, which was literally named Trump, the token is a dollar sign and Trump's name, they brought it onto this exchange using Solana. They hyped it up before Trump came into office. So after he got elected, he was telling his audience, go buy the Trump coin. They're doing advertisements for it, they're releasing social media videos about it, and the price of the token skyrockets. Trump and these Trump affiliated entities are dumping a bunch of money into it. And then immediately after Trump takes office, the price of the coin starts to plummet. Many of the first early investors start selling off huge chunks of it. Some of them we can identify, some of them we can't because of the nature of cryptocurrency. And over time, those Trump affiliated entities start to sell off a bunch of the coin in coordinated fashion. And in the end, what we had was this coin, this token called Trump, and then also, by the way, a token called Melania, because she got involved as well and was actually promoting her own token with her own name. They skyrocketed in price, they hit their peak, and then they lost 96% of their value. So in a matter of weeks and at the end of the.
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A
Which means the people who put money into the bucket are losing 96% of the money. Right? It's the capital of Trump's supporters who put their money in the Trump coin bucket, who are the ones who are facing this 96% crash. Because to your point, the Trump family is eating up a lot of that excess capital. Explain a little bit about how that works.
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B
Yeah, exactly. So if you imagine that the price of the coin is $1 when it launches, and then the Trump family is buying up a bunch of the coin and artificially inflating the price to say, $10. And you're one of the people who buys it right, at $10, because you see, oh, my God, the price is going up. The President's telling me to buy it. The Trump family keeps buying more and more of the coin. They keep creating more and more of the social contagion and the hype. It goes up to $12 or $13, and maybe you make a few bucks in the very early days, and then all of a sudden they remove seven or eight dollars worth of their market share from the pie and they walk away with it. They cash out, they profit. The price comes all the way back down to $2. So when you invested at $10 and the price of the token was $10, that's now worth $2. And if you put $1,000 in, suddenly you have $200 and you've taken an $800 loss.
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A
And basically we're looking at a situation, right, where Trump investors, or investors in Trump coin collectively lost more than a billion dollars and the Trump family itself amassed, what is it, hundreds of millions
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B
of dollars of profit, over $400 million of profit between Trump and his family members and these sort of Trump affiliated entities that were putting money into this. And this is like very reliable Financial Times Bloomberg reporting, people who cover these kinds of stories for a living. And for anybody who's been around in the crypto space, it is just the most classic scummy version of how to execute a get rich quick scheme. And the price is in the basement and it's never coming back. I mean, they cashed out, they took their money. Trump never talks about the coin anymore. There's no more enthusiasm or momentum around it. And all the people who came in a day or two late, hundreds of thousands of his supporters, presumably based on the way the price fluctuated, are now stuck. As they say in the crypto industry, holding the bag broke with none of the money that they invested, and the President gets extremely rich.
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A
I'm jealous that you got the first pick, because I think this is obviously, obviously the first pick. And I have three contextual comments that I want to make here. Number one, crypto is complicated. But I think one way to understand what happened here is like Trump basically passed around a hat and he told his supporters, put money in the hat and maybe you'll get rich. And then they put money in the hat, and then he took the hat and they got wiped out and he got their money. Like, one can complicate this, but fundamentally, that is what happened. He said, put the money in the hat, and then he took the hat. The $400 million that the Trump family made off of this is very significant because when you look at some of the most famous scandals in American presidential history, for example, some American historians listening might have some familiarity with the Teapot Dome scandal. The Teapot Dome scandal involved a $400,000 bribe during the Gilded Age to lease federal oil lands. Actually, no, I'm sorry, it was under harding. That's about $7 million in today's dollars. So the Trump coin scandal, by a pure arithmetic accounting, is 20 times worse than one of the most famous presidential scandals in American history. Last. It's not just libs like me that are upset with this. This is what Ann Coulter said to the nation. Quote, I think this is the most corrupt presidency in US History with the money they are raking in with the NFTs and the meme coins. She's talking about Trump coin. I mean, it's so blatant, it's right there in front of our eyes. And the funny thing is, I don't care, as long as we get a wall in mass deportations, end quote. So, like, even the people.
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B
That's very Ann Coulter.
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A
Yeah, Even the people who support the President fundamentally on the policy basics are looking at this, saying, this is more or less the most corrupt thing that I've ever seen in American history. I'm glad you put that for number one. Are you okay with me taking the second pick in the first draft, or do you want to put a bow?
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B
I'm okay. The only bow I'll just put on is just to emphasize something you said right there, which is, the Teapot Dome scandal is something like anybody who makes it through eighth grade history, probably, they might not be able to explain what happened, but they know the name, like the echoes of it, have resonated throughout history. And yet, as you just said, from a pure mathematical perspective, it is a fraction of this single one scandal we've witnessed in the first 18 months of the Trump presidency. And that distortion that the Teapot Dome scandal is what it is and the Trump meme coin is something we can barely pay attention to for more than two hours, is something that makes me want to rip my hair out. But, yes, please, go on. It's your pick now.
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A
All right, in the first round, I am taking the pardon of Changpeng Zhao, AKA cz. And for those of you who don't follow this story, which also touches crypto, in November 2023, this gentleman, the founder of Binance, which was then the world's largest cryptocurrency Exchange pleaded guilty to federal money laundering charges as part of a multi billion dollar settlement between the DOJ and Binance. And there was incredibly strong evidence that this company, Binance, had turned a blind eye as known terrorists and cyber criminals and child abusers were making money off of their platform. He is sentenced to several months in prison, and the company is required to pay one of the largest corporate fines in American history. That is 2023. Fast forward to 2024, the year of the election, and Trump's family is building this crypto venture that you've just described. And who do they decide to build it with? Well, why not the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world at the time, which was Binance. So Binance helps the Trump family establish a cryptocurrency infrastructure that allows them to create shady deals with other individuals and foreign nationals. And what does Trump do as a thank you for Binance helping him build this entity? Again, maybe it's not a quid pro quo, maybe it's just entirely random, but he pardons cz. He offers CZ an absolute pardon. The founder and CEO of this organization that has helped the Trump administration essentially build this vehicle that you've already described, one way in which they've profited. So it's not just a corruption scandal whereby he's ripping off Americans. It's a corruption scandal where he is essentially gifting to the individual who helps him rip off Americans a presidential pardon. There is a second part to the story, which is my first, second round pick, but if you have some commentary on this one, I'd love to hear it.
- [27:43]
B
I would just add, I mean, one of the things that I think is really important is not to just ascribe everything to the fantastic journalism that's out there. And, you know, the FOIA requests and the, the leaks and all this stuff that sort of produces some of this gangbusters investigative journalism that helps bring some clarity to these issues. It's just to, to go to the President and say, why are you doing this? And, and there's no. This is the thing about this one. And it's a great pick. And, and it's one of the things about this one that's so frustrating is there was no, like, Trump didn't make the case to the public. Hey, the prosecution in this case was biased there. You know, he didn't even.
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A
He just, he claimed to not even know who CZ was. In one interview, he said, I pardoned someone that he claimed to not even know, despite the fact that the company he founded was instrumental in setting up perhaps the most lucrative financial instrument in the entire Trump family portfolio.
- [28:47]
B
Yeah. So there's two and there's two options there, which is one. It's a classic Trump tick to just pretend he doesn't know some. I mean, this is what I think it is. He's lying, he's pretending he doesn't know who the person is we've seen him do this with. So I barely know him. I have no idea who he is, whatever. And then we find out they all these ties. I think that's what he's doing. But the second option is he's being honest and he's just using the most powerful tool, like the most unchecked powerful tool he has as president, the power of the pardon, without even picking up a piece of paper and reading a one sheet on the guy's story to figure out whether it's worth a pardon or not. So he's just doing as he's told by some of the aides or family members around him, which is equally frustrating and alarming in this context. So either he's lying brazenly or he's doing exactly what he says and he's partying people who he has no idea who they are, which is just kind of hard to wrap your head around.
- [29:38]
A
This episode is brought to you by Fox One, where you can watch all 104 matches of the FIFA World cup live in 4K for just $19.99 a month with three days free. Build your own multi View Follow Player Spotlights Customize your audio and stay on top of the action with live stats, highlights and instant replays. Don't miss a moment. Watch the FIFA World cup live on Fox One. Offers are subject to change. See fox.com for complete terms and conditions. This episode is brought to you by Borishead. What if we told you the taste
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This episode is brought to you by Fox One, where you can watch all 104 matches of the FIFA World cup live in 4K for just $19.99 a month, with three days free. Build your own multi View Follow Player Spotlights Customize your audio and stay on top of the action with live stats, highlights, and instant replays. Don't miss a moment. Watch the FIFA World cup live on Fox One. Offers are subject to change. See fox.com for complete terms and conditions. All right, so we've wrapped up round one. You Trump coin me cz pardon. Moving on to round two. And I am halfway through a story that I'm trying to tell here. I've just told you and reminded myself that with the help of Binance, Trump created a kind of cryptocurrency dark money system that would allow him to attract capital from individuals and foreign nationals that would be difficult to trace and hard to prosecute. So that is the context for my pick for the beginning of the second round. So to kick off round two, January 31, 2026, the Wall Street Journal reports that a sheik who is the brother of the UAE president has secretly signed a deal for a 49% stake in Trump's crypto company worth $500 million, including almost $200 million, which will be paid up front to Trump family entities just before the inauguration. That deal was signed by Eric Trump, the president's son. From the Wall Street Journal, quote, the deal marked something unpreced politics, a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president's company. End quote. We're not done. That's the quid. This is the quo. When the Biden administration had resisted the UAE and other Middle Eastern countries efforts to get advanced AI hardware out of the fear that they would go on to sell those advanced chips to China, the UAE thought, well, what are we going to do? How can we get Trump to sell us the chips? Maybe we'll write him a check for $200 million. And in March, in fact, Trump granted the UAE the right to buy 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips that we had. So to sum up my last two sections, my last two selections, I should say the Trump family built a shadow payment system with the help of Binance, a company whose founder was convicted of money laundering, pardoned that founder to create a mechanism for foreign governments to transfer money to them in extralegal ways that would be hard to trace and hard to prosecute, and then used that bribe to both enrich itself and allow a Middle Eastern country to have access to the most valuable piece of technology that America makes, and that the previous administration was doing its best to keep out of Middle Eastern and ultimately Chinese hands. So, you know, Isaac, on a scale of zero to totally fine, where are
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B
you on this, generally, yeah, I'm not totally fine. And I would just throw in, I mean, everything you just said as a full package. You're good at what you do. Very well done and easy to understand. I hope for the audience just the sheer brazenness of what's going on. But the kicker in all of this is that then we started the war in Iran, and the UAE is an incredibly important player in that picture. I mean, this is one of the things that has. Has gotten some attention on this story is just their interest in the region and the way that they view Iran as a regional rival and all the intricacies of what they want out of the end of this war have had a. Even some conservatives looking at this story. Like, I'm not so sure about the relationship here and the involvement of Jared Kushner and the fact that he's at the table negotiating this deal. And I think it is sort of. It's bubbled up, the. The corruption element of it and the. The quid pro quo and the sort of appearance of something nefarious here, even for some of Trump's most ardent supporters, which I think is good because I think people should look at it. But it's just a great example of when you have the President using his business interests so closely with his federal White House granted power, and then something like a war starts and it's all tied up in a foreign national, you get into really sticky situations really quickly. Which we're experiencing now. Yeah, I mean, it's mind boggling hearing you say it.
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A
Yeah, not great. Well, this is why I was happy to have the second pick in the first round, because I wanted that. That mechanism of the snake draft that allows me to tell a two part story. So we are at the bottom half of the second round. We've got several really, really juicy items off the board. So I'm curious where you're gonna go next, Isaac. What is your second round pick?
- [35:33]
B
So my second round pick actually goes back to a pardon as well, which I think is a genre of its own of some of the stuff that we've seen. And this one involves Trevor Milton, who is the guy who founded Nikola, which, among other things, did electric vehicles and electric trucks, push them to market or tried to push them to market as one of their core products. And the reason I picked this one is because I think it's a great encapsulation of the kind of inside baseball Trump corruption that's been happening, happened in the first term, but also really, really has gone full throttle in the second term. And the story of Trevor Milton is pretty simple. He lied to a bunch of investors about basically everything involving his truck company, Nikola. He told them that he had fully operational trucks. In the most notorious example, he showed videos of these electric trucks to potential investors. It turned out later that the videos of the trucks being fully operational were actually him rolling the trucks down a hill and then taking video of them.
- [36:37]
A
I didn't know that detail.
- [36:39]
B
Yeah. Putting in really fantastic animated videos and awesome music. And he raised hundreds of millions of dollars for this company. He defrauded a bunch of investors. All of it eventually came out. He went to court, he was convicted. He owed over $600 million in restitution to individual investors and also institutional investors and shareholders. And all of this came to a head, and he was set to go to prison for some period of time, I think it was a year. He was out on house arrest at the time. But he decided, hey, I think I have an avenue out of this, which is, I will make myself friendly with a potential soon to be president. And so he donated $1.8 million to the Trump campaign. And then he hired an attorney whose last name was Bondi, not Pam Bondi, the soon to be Attorney General, but her brother. And once Pam Bondi was nominated and took the post of Attorney general, he used his brother and his connection to the White House to lobby the president for a pardon. And he didn't just get a pardon, he got a pardon, and he got all of the restitution that he owed to the victims of his scheme wiped out.
- [37:51]
A
So 701.
- [37:53]
B
Yeah, nearly $700 million. So if you're one of the people who he defrauded and you were, because of this conviction, going to get made. Going to be made, right, Going to be paid for what you were defrauded of, that was suddenly wiped out by the president's pardon and his decision to wipe out the restitution. I want to president's quote here, just so I get it right, because it has some echoes of the other pardon that we talked about. Why did Trump pardon him? Good question. The president was asked his response. They say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president. That basically sums it all up. The president was told by somebody near him the story he heard, one of your great supporters was unjustly prosecuted. You should issue him a pardon. He either decided to read about the case and thought, I don't really care if this guy defrauded a bunch of people. Or he just did what he was asked or did what he was told and issued the pardon. And it is this perfect conglomeration of victims being screwed over, a fraudster being let free, and Trump giving out a pardon based on this game of access. People give him money, they know somebody in his orbit, in this case Pam Bondi. They have a line to him, and that's the lifeline that they use to get out of jail or get out of owing $700 million in restitution. And everything about this just feels like this perfect little stew of some of the stuff that we've seen over and over again during this second Trump term.
- [39:25]
A
How much clearer does a quid pro quo get? How much clearer does it get? Like one guy pays Trump $1.8 billion, and then Trump says, I'm going to give you a pardon and remove $700 million that you are owed in restitution because you support me. It's all in the record. There's hardly even an effort to keep it secret. And again, for students of Americ American history, this is not the first time anything like this has happened. And you and I are not pretending that Trump is the inventor of bribery scandals in American history. I mean, if you go back through the history books, this might remind you of, say, Credit Mobilier, where railroad executives gave Congress members shares in a construction company to sort of prevent oversight of federal railroad subsidies. We'll give you some stock if you don't regulate us. Quid pro quo. In the whiskey rail of 1875, under Ulysses S. Grant, whiskey distillers were bribing government officials to avoid taxes. And then several people in charge of the ring who had made all this money from gifts from the whiskey companies received pardons from the administration. So again, there's a quid pro quo and then there's a pardon as a charity. To top it off, under Harding, again, incredibly corrupt president AIDS government resource aides, including Charles Forbes at the Veterans Bureau, were convicted of corruptly selling hospital supplies. So this is a history that goes way, way back. This is not the first time that there is clear wheeling and dealing out of the administration. But I do think that despite the fact that, yes, of course America is richer and today's billionaires and now single trillionaire are richer than people in the past, the money here is just different. I mean, $1.8 billion and 800, we're talking about $2 billion worth of either bribes effectively paid to Trump, or restitution wiped out as a result of the bribe. These are enormous numbers that are orders of magnitude bigger than anything we've ever seen in American history, even if you aggressively adjust for inflation. And so it's not just the facts of the crimes here. It is the sheer amount of money that is sloshing around and often sloshing into the president's coffers due to the rules of the Snake draft. You are up at the top of the third round with your third pick. Isaac, what's pick number three?
- [41:48]
B
All right, I gotta say, this was the first one that I really struggled over. And I kind of, no more bribes
- [41:54]
A
and no more clear crypto scandals.
- [41:57]
B
We're moving on. Thematically, I tried to make sure there was some diversity of the picks here. And also, as we talked about a little bit off air, I really tried to focus on the things that offended my sensibilities the most. And what I ultimately landed on for my third pick is the story of Powers, which is a drone company that Eric and Donald Trump Jr are invested in. And the reason I chose them is a little bit to do with what I talked about at the top of the show, which is the Hunter Biden story. You know, we. We had this. This very clear narrative that we all kind of talked about and picked at over the four years of the Biden presidency, which was, you know, the president's son, when Joe Biden was vice president, took this job at a Ukrainian energy firm and was profiting off this board role that he clearly didn't deserve. And he was there ostensibly to give influence, you know, from. From the energy firm to the United States. That was the narrative. And, and so in many ways, the narrative was accurate. Here we have something far more explicit at a much larger scale, which is Donald Trump Jr. And Eric Trump are investing in and becoming partners of or joining the boards of various drone companies that are then going on to sell those drones to the federal government, who their dad is at the top of. I mean, this is not. The vice president's son is off in Ukraine using his last name to get a board seat and get $50,000 a. This is millions and millions of dollars of federal government contracts going to companies like Powers that Donald Trump Jr. And Eric Trump are invested in. Bloomberg reported that the Air Force agreed to pay an undisclosed number of. For an undisclosed number of interceptor drones for power, specifically this drone called the Guardian 2. They've been pitching, while they're selling to the federal government and selling to the US army, they've been pitching these drones, drones to Gulf states who are currently being attacked in Iran. Now we haven't had an investigation into any of this, but it isn't hard for one to connect the dots there and think, oh, that's weird. It feels like if the Gulf states were being attacked by Iran and needed to defend themselves and they needed drones, that would incentivize drone companies or people who own the drone companies to want the war in Iran to go on. Because if there's a war happening, those countries feel less safe and therefore they need more drones. And if you are the person who sells drones, that's a really good way to make money. So one might surmise that the length of the Iran war being longer is good for the people who are selling drones. Now, again, we don't know what's happening in these negotiations, to what degree Eric Trump or Donald Trump Jr are involved, what kind of influence they have over their dad to continue the war when maybe he doesn't want to. But it's exactly the kind of reason that we have this very public allergic reaction to this kind of corruption. Typically in normal times, it's exactly the kind of reason this would be a huge story in normal times is the sort of conflict of interest becomes so overt that people get upset and they don't want to sit there and watch it unfold and they make a lot of noise about it. And then people like Donald Trump Jr. Eric Trump, back off. That's not what we have here. Paris is now trying to merge with a Florida golf course. And their plan, according to a lot of reporting from Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal, is then to sort of back that merger into a Trump affiliated golf course company. So then the Trump family will own the whole thing, the whole conglomerate. And they're going to go public. They'll make a bunch of money off going public. And that stock, I'm sure will probably fluctuate based on some of the happenings in the Middle east, some of the federal contracts that are coming down the pike. And it's not. The Powers company is not the only company, which is is pretty remarkable. There's also Unusual Machines, which is a drone component company which has also already announced $15.2 million worth of military linked orders that includes a direct purchase from the U.S. army. Don Jr. By the way, was placed on the board of Unusual Machines. And then after he was placed on the board a few months later, the announcement came that they had scored this massive $15 million order from a bunch of military linked companies or a bunch of military linked entities. So this is the world that we're living in now. Where the president's sons are investing in literal, like the military industrial complex, which, by the way, Donald Trump basically ran against in 2016 and again in 2020 and again in 2024, profiting off of it because there's a war happening that their dad started while also selling the company's products to the federal government, which their dad runs. And to just like the perfect beautiful cherry on top is. I watched them go on Fox News and get congratulated for the contracts that their companies had just landed by a Fox. I can't remember which Fox News host it was, but it was riot.
- [47:00]
A
Bartiromo, I don't know if we want to play the clip right now. Maybe I should have sent it to you. And the company's chief strategy advisor, Eric Trump, President Trump, Trump's son.
- [47:10]
B
Congratulations to you both.
- [47:12]
A
Thank you so much for being here. It's unbelievable. Maria Bartiromo brings on Eric Trump, who is just so happens to be an advisor to this company, Foundation Future, that's received a $24 million Pentagon contract. And she's like, hey, congratulations. This is absolutely fantastic news to you, Eric. I mean, it's like putting a child in the backseat of a car with a little toy steering wheel and being like, great job driving to work, buddy.
- [47:36]
B
Yeah.
- [47:37]
A
They hired you in order to execute this peddling of influence. That's exactly what it is. I'm glad you said everything that you said. So we're not suggesting this is the first time that someone close to the president or vice president has ever peddled influence. The fact that Hunter Biden was sitting on the board of burisma in the 2010s, earning a million dollars a year, that was a bad look. But he stepped down from Burisma in 2019. Joe Biden became president in 2021. That was $1 million a year. We are looking here at contracts that are at least 10 times larger foundation futures. The company that Eric Trump is sitting on the board of received a $24 million Pentagon contract. You talk about powers and unusual machines. Another $13 million contract. The Trump family took a stake in a Kazakh mining company that won a $6 billion contract from the Trump administration. We are talking about billions, plural of dollars, being funneled to companies with Trumps in or on the board of directors. And it's not just the examples that we're enumerating. Think about the signal that this sends for the next two and a half years. If you're a company that wants a Pentagon contract, well, you could build a good product. You know, it's a lot cheaper than building a good product, paying Eric Trump $5 million a year to be an advisor so that his father directs a contract toward your firm. I mean, the brazenness, the obviousness of this level of corruption and the frequency with which this formula is being played and replayed and replayed. That is what is such a big deal here to me. Any last words on Trump family enrichment before I give you my very different selection?
- [49:34]
B
The last word I'll just say is just imagine in your mind's eye for a moment, especially if you're listening to this and you're a fan of the presidents or maybe a supporter who's wavering a little bit in this moment and you're open minded to this. Just imagine that during the early days of the Ukraine war, when President Biden was suggesting that we must support Ukraine, they've been invaded by Russia, we need to arm them. He was trying to lobby the country to their side. We found out that President Biden's sons were actually getting contracts, being awarded contracts for weapons and drones that we were sending to Ukraine. And they were invested in the companies who were producing those drones and weapons and profiting from it. I mean, imagine the outrage in that
- [50:23]
A
moment, which wasn't even when we last hear about, about the money that the Trump family is making. We haven't even touched the question of competence. If the tiebreaker between a handful of companies that are drone manufacturers is not the quality of the drone technology, but rather the degree to which you are or are not paying my son millions of dollars a year, we're probably not making optimal decisions about Pentagon appropriations. I mean, potentially so. Anyway, it's bad. We'll put a bow on that. My selection at the end of the third round, very different. On January 24, 2025, Trump announced the immediate firing of 17 inspectors general, including those at the Department of Defense, State Department, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Veterans Affairs. He fired the heads of the Office of Special Counsel and the Office of Government Ethics. Those firings were done within a 30 day congressional notice period, which is required by a 1978 law. And so it was deemed by federal judges to be an illegal firing. But he continued to fire inspectors general throughout the next few weeks. This is not as interesting as anything else you and I have talked about. Almost every other story that you and I have mentioned would make a pretty good documentary or Netflix film. This would make for a very, very boring movie, right? The firing of inspectors general. But inspectors generals. Inspectors general. My God, that term. These are the nonpartisan officials that are enshrined with the duty to investigate, among other things, corruption within the executive branch. So it's not just that Trump has done all the things that we've said he's done and the many things that we haven't even articulated. It's also that within his first few hours as president, he fired the people in charge of pointing out to the public that he shouldn't be doing these things, and he did so illegally. And so this is not particularly interesting to talk about in terms of like, oh, my God, what a juicy scandal. It's kind of just so obvious that it is what it is. This is a corrupt president who within the first few hours of his administration, fired the very people in charge of. Of investigating corruption, period.
- [52:50]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's a great point, and I'm glad you included it. I didn't have it on my draft board because it does feel less interesting and spicy, but it's an important one. And I wrote this in my initial piece. A lot of people say, how could all of this be happening? Which is a very good question. And it's. More than a dozen inspector generals have. Inspectors general have been fired. The DOJ changes guidance on paring back the Foreign Agents Registration Enforcement, the Foreign Agents Registration Act Enforcement. Trump also suspended anti bribery enforcement laws. I mean, it's not even just the inspectors general. It goes down the list of all these things he did to make it easier to do this sort of thing without facing repercussions.
- [53:35]
A
Fourth round. And let's review where we are right now. Let me go, Let me get to my big board. So. So what we have off the big board is one, Trump coin. Two, the CZ pardon, three, the UAE bribe facilitated by the CZ pardon. Four, the Trevor Milton pardon. Five, the Trump family trading in influence in various capacities and through various companies. And six, the gutting of the government's mechanisms for identifying government corruption run to the fourth round. Number seven. In January 2026, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and the treasury, and he alleged that they violated his rights by leaking his tax returns to the press. This was not a crazy claim. In fact, the IRS contractor in question, a man named Charles Littlejohn, was convicted and sentenced to prison for leaking the president's financial returns. On May 18, 2026, a very important day to me because it's my 40th birthday. Trump dropped the lawsuit. And in exchange, the DOJ. His DOJ, the DOJ under Trump's control, just like the IRS, which is under Trump's control announced the creation of a $1.8 billion fund that Trump could essentially use to pay out to anybody that he wanted. The following day, Attorney General Todd Blanche added a separate provision that effectively barred the IRS from auditing any tax returns by the president before May 19, 2026 that involved Trump, the Trump family, and various affiliated companies. Trump essentially reached a settlement with himself to give himself $1.8 billion that he could use to give anybody that he wanted potentially to do anything that he wanted. He could pay people who he thought were wrong by the January six indictments and investigations. He could give it pot to someone else who wanted to essentially execute some kind of quid pro quo bribe from Trump. Why is this corruption not like other corruptions? Well, this is one where Republicans in Congress, some of them at least, did balk, and a federal judge froze the fund. A lot of Republicans spoke out and said, I don't feel entirely comfortable with the president using extralegal means to just whip up $1.8 billion out of nowhere that he can use, like his own personal piggy bank. And depending on various reports that you can look at, this fund is either dead or dormant. But the same way that, like, if you try to rob a bank and you get caught, like, that's illegal. It's not like, oh, you didn't rob the bank, so it's actually fine. You can go home. Like, it's actually legal to try and fail robbing a bank. It's bad to attempt brazen corruption and fail to execute on that corruption. So I wanted to make sure that I named this thing that was unlike everything else in the list, in fact, so bad that it got people within the president's party to stand up in a number larger than I have fingers on one hand and say, I'm not so sure that we want to be part of a party whose leader is essentially just inventing $2 billion slush funds that he can hand out to lawbreakers and potential business associates. How do we feel about the $1.8 billion slush fund?
- [56:51]
B
Yeah, I mean, it was a remarkable story when it happened. And I think to just even put in bold print what you just ended with there, this was, to me, the first evidence we've gotten in a really long time that the Republican Party is actually capable of reining this stuff in. And something to just make note of is a lot of the stuff that you and I are discussing on the show today. We have some sparse details for. Because there's effectively no oversight. And as you said earlier in your draft, part of that is because of what Trump has done, but a big part of it is because Congress has just refused to actually use its power to investigate any of the stuff that's been happening or to stop it in instances where they're able to stop it. And this was one of the very few examples where Trump seemed to actually step over the line with the Republican Party and with Republican senators in such a way that they finally stood up and said, no, this is too much. So I was glad to see the slush fund die. I agree with you that attempted robbery is still bad and I'm glad it's on the list and in the record.
- [57:57]
A
And finally, number eight, what is the final draft pick in today's 2026 Trump corruption draft?
- [58:03]
B
All right, Derek, I'll take us home. I have to say just honorable mention. I had this as number eight for most of the pre show. I switched it last. It's just we did just have a UFC fight on the White House lawn where Trump was advertising actual Trump gold coins. So like the sort of artistic nature of starting with the Trump cryptocurrency coins and ending with the real hard medallion coins that he's selling for $12,000. It was very attractive to me, but I gave it up because the real number eight draft pick that I have is the Trump Dell stock story, which I'm just going to share a quick timeline with you. In February, we know now President Donald Trump buys between $1 million and $5 million of stock in Dell Technologies. Between February and May, Trump repeatedly in rallies, in press conferences from the White House, in social media posts, encourages his supporters and the country to buy Dell stock because it's such a phenomenal stock, it's such a phenomenal company, they have to go buy it. Okay. Then in May, Trump discloses all of his stock trades that he's been doing for the first year and a half of his presidency. And we find out out for the first time that he bought between 1 and 5 million dollars of Dell stock. And then later that month, Dell announces it has landed a 9 billion with a B dollar contract with the Pentagon for software and cloud services for the next half decade.
- [59:35]
A
Incredible coincidence. Incredible coincidence.
- [59:37]
B
Unbelievable.
- [59:37]
A
Unbelievable investing acumen from the President. One has to tip one's hat.
- [59:41]
B
When President Trump bought dell, it was $126 a share. And after the announcement of the Pentagon deal, the shares Spike spiked to $466 per share. So we get this range of what the President might have spent on the Dell Stock. But just assuming he spent the upper end, $5 million is how much Dell stock he purchased, he would have profited from that single trade alone. $13.5 billion based on the timing of billion the share. Excuse me, $13.5 million based on the timing of his purchase. And then what happened after the $9 billion contract with the Pentagon? Again, as you just said, maybe the President is one of the best stock traders of all time and just this is an absolute 80 foot swoosh. I'm skeptical of that. I think the President knew exactly what he was doing. I think he understands the power of pumping up a stock. I mean, if the guy understands anything or pays attention to anything, it's the market. We heard it all this week at the G7 summit. Him talking about the way the market moved. Every time they made an announcement about the Iran war. He knows what's going on. And then they land the plane with this $9 billion Pentagon contract and he makes $13 million. I mean it doesn't get any more clear cut than that.
- [61:03]
A
No. What can you say? This is so incredibly straightforward that like to elaborate on this, to try to analyze it. It's ridiculous. It's so obvious what happened. You bought the stock, he said everyone should buy this stock. And then he gave $9 billion to the company, bought the stock in. I have nothing else to add about this except that it's not just Trump who's profiting off of insider trading. I think while the reporting here is a little bit more in the gray zone, and I want to be diligent and honest about the degree to which I report on the quality of the reporting here, it's pretty clear to me that between predictive markets and, excuse me, prediction markets is how it's actually called, um, it's pretty clear to me that between prediction markets and the stock market, you look at some of these gy gyrations and I strongly believe that the President is tipping off insiders on the oil markets in particular and prediction markets. If you look at the millions of dollars that have been made estimating timing of certain military events, estimating timing of certain announcements with regard to the flow or lack thereof of oil. You know, it's just the amount of insider trading and stock manipulation I think is quite hard to fully understand because it requires such extraordinary reporting to understand every single piece of stock that's bought with insider information.
- [62:23]
B
Yeah, again, it's so simple. But somebody making a three or four million dollars bet on a random Tuesday afternoon about oil prices and then 10 minutes later there's a truth social post about a ceasefire and the straight of Hormuz. I mean, I mean, it has to be happening. Otherwise we've just witnessed like six or seven of the most miraculously lucky people in the history of the country sort of showing themselves through predictive markets over the last six months. I mean, it's crazy.
- [62:52]
A
So the last thing I want to say here, we finished the draft. This is the draft. We're done. We will post the results online. I suppose you can vote on who you think has the best Trump corruption team or something, who's likely to win the in season tournament. I want to close with again, a piece of context. Other presidents have a Teapot dump scandal. Other presidents have a Credit Mobilier scandal. I don't like the Bill Clinton Mark Rich pardon. I don't like the fact that fail sons like Hunter Biden can earn a million dollars a year because their dads have a lot of political power. Trump is not the first person to do to sell his influence. If you look at the Gilded Age, my God, it was just decades of patronage machines. But in my view, what Trump has done is essentially taken each corruption scandal that I just named and used it practically as inspiration to do something 10 times bigger. Like he has his own Teapot Dome scandal and his own Credit Mobilier and his own Mark Ridge pardon scandals and his like, he's done it all. Like it's a straight flush of corruption. It's just unbelievable how many boxes here are not checked and it's barely been 18 months. I don't think it is fair to say that these scandals are having no effect. The president is currently polling lower now than any period in his first presidency. I think if you look at, at Democrats like Jon Ossoff, what are they talking about? They're talking about corruption. And so I don't think it's so much the case that Trump is getting away with all of this. He is, from a legal standpoint and a financial standpoint, getting away with it. But he's also at the same time creating an enormous, enormous political risk that Democrats are going to take advantage of, I think, not only in 2026 and 2028. So I am really grateful, Isaac, that you put together this incredible compendium, this resource for understanding Trump's corruption. And thanks also for allowing me to gamify it a little bit and turn it into a bit of a shtick. I'll give you the last word because you really inspired this episode from the get go. As you finish now, your first Ever Trump corruption draft. What are your takeaways?
- [65:19]
B
I'll say my mood feels a little elevated. I think it helped. I feel like that was a little for my soul. Yeah. Thank you for the invitation and for making it a little gamified. I think I was able to have a few good laughs. Look, I'll just say to your last point about the political implications of this, and I'm not an expert in Hungarian politics, but we just had this election with Viktor Orban that a lot of people were watching closely from the United States, and there were a lot of assumptions made about what it meant for the conservative movement and conservative populists. And one of the interesting things that I saw in the wake of that election from people who are experts in Hungarian politics who I was reading was a lot of commentary about how for Viktor Orban, a big part of his downfall was actually the corruption. It wasn't the kind of right wing populism that he was preaching going out of favor. It was the fact that he wasn't really succeeding in some of the goals that he set out to and that the corruption in his administration and around him was so overt and it had become such a central issue in the election that he just couldn't stave off the fall in popular opinion. And I will say, while I am frustrated by the lack of interest in this story and the lack of focus on it and the way in which flooding the zone with these kinds of stories has actually worked for the Trump administration, I'm optimistic that if enough people like you, like me, keep beating this drum and keep focused on this story and make sure that it's central as a defining characteristic of what the Trump administration is doing, because I think they've earned it. There will be people who wake up and enough of them in mass wake up to this story and realize that they don't want this to be an acceptable form of governance. And hopefully Trump will pay the price for that politically. And that's not an endorsement of any challenger he might be running against in the future or whatever. It's just politicians who do what he's doing should pay the price politically. And I hope that's the ultimate outcome here, even if it hasn't happened as fast as I wish so far to
- [67:22]
A
review Trump coin, CZ pardon, UAE bribe, Trevor Milton pardon, Trump family trading and influence slush fund, the firing of the inspectors general, and Dell stock manipulation. Isaac, Saul, thank you very much.
- [67:38]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [67:39]
A
Derek, Sam,