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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is 2 July 2026. Welcome back to the show. Staff writer at the New Yorker and host, co host of its Political Scene podcast. Her most recent book is the Divider, co authored with her husband, Peter Baker. It's Susan Glasser. What's going on, Susan?
- [00:24]
B
Hey man. So great to be with you. What a treat.
- [00:27]
A
Welcome back to the show. Not much to talk about. Not a lot happening out there. Not a lot of embarrassments for America on the world stage or anything. It's hard to decide where to start. But I think I want to hit on corruption because it didn't have a time to get into it yesterday. It was, I guess, I think Maggie mentioned it briefly on the pod. But Trump had to file financial disclosures. I guess it's something that the financial disclosures are getting filed. I mean these small victories this day and age. But it revealed just an insane amount of graft and corruption. He brought in at least $2.2 billion, which is compared to much, much less than that from before he returned to the presidency. A lot of this money is from crime, crypto. All this money is from foreign countries, including the investment firm tied to the uae. We're going to get into the cutter plane a little bit. I guess that's more of government grift. But it is pretty astonishing that he has just decided that he is going to make as much money from this as possible. As if he is Vladimir Putin or the corrupt dictator of a non of a country that does not have a rule of law.
- [01:52]
B
Yeah, you know, the thing is, maybe
- [01:56]
A
we are one of those countries doesn't have a rule of law, at least when it comes to the President of the United States.
- [02:00]
B
Well, I mean, actually that is Donald Trump's theory of the case, which is that no laws apply to him. And the Supreme Court in some ways has gone along with that theory. You know, there's the sort of you and what army are going to do anything about it challenge to this, right? What, what accountability is there for a president who decides to shamelessly monetize the presidency? There is increasing evidence that he's doing things like selling off pardons. These, this crypto business that Donald Trump and his sons have gotten into along with the sons, I should point out of Steve Witkoff, his all purpose everything envoy, literally making billions of dollars. We know about the investment by the UAE investment fund. We do not have a list of the other investors who have put more than $2 billion, $2 billion in the pocket of Donald Trump. This is the guy who went literally, like steam flowing out of his ears, crazy over the idea that, you know, heaven forbid, Joe Biden's son had embarrassed the country by making money off of his father's name. And by the way, an embarrassment, let's be honest, that Hunter Biden was trading off of his father's name and the appearance that he might have access when he joined the board of a Ukrainian energy company when Joe Biden was vice president. You know what that is? That's an embarrassment. We're talking, though, about maybe millions of dollars. Add many, many, many zeros here to, to the scale of corruption from Donald Trump. And from my perspective, you know, it's one of those things. Are we so inured to this that people just won't care? Or is corruption the issue that finally causes people to break with Donald Trump? I mean, to me, that is the question because it's where he's so profoundly different than essentially any of his predecessors. And we've had some crooked presidents, but not this crooked.
- [04:06]
A
Yeah, I mean, not anything in even the ballpark. This doesn't even include also the stock trading. He's been doing something that our past presidents weren't doing. I want to just focus in on the Middle East. I mentioned the UAE deal, which is part of the bulk of the money, frankly, which is this massive crypto deal that the UAE is involved in. But then he also has some smaller for Trump. You know, it'd be nice money for me. Licensing deals that are happening in these countries. 14 million in licensing deals for hotels and Qatar and in Saudi Arabia. That ties to the other corruption story from this week, which is our new Air Force One, which was gifted from Qatar. Trump took his first flight on that. The new plane that he feels is more appropriate to his status, which again, I think should be noteworthy, was kind of a hand me down from Qatar. They wanted a fancier plane for themselves. So that's where we are right now as a country. We're taking cutter's hand me downs. But if you tie all this together, he's got a light, a personal. So he's making personal money with a licensing deal in Qatar, and then he also is taking gifts from Qatar for the country that he's then going to use for his presidential library, all the while, like being involved in negotiations with an active war that involves Qatar. Iran is attacking Qatar as part of the kind of decrease fire that we're in right now. And so I don't know if he's Making decisions entirely based on that brown paper bag of 14 million or the new fancy plane he's on. But it certainly is influencing and like this is why we have rules around this sort of thing, like the corruption, the money that he's making is tied directly to ongoing life or death policy affecting American citizens.
- [06:05]
B
Yeah, I think that's such an important point, Tim. In fact, Gutter, which gifted Donald Trump, in effect personally gifted him a $400 million plan. The American taxpayers had paid an uncertain amount of hundreds of millions of dollars additionally to fit it up in order to have the communications and security required for the President to fly on it. So, you know, we've paid hundreds of millions of dollars for this gift that Donald Trump now proposes to take with him to his, quote, presidential library. But actually it seems that he, he wants to keep using this plane personally. And you know, where, where, where is the outrage, to quote Bob Dole, you know, where's the out? But Qatar is the beef. Not only a key country that is affected by, by Donald Trump's decision to undertake this conflict in the Middle east against Iran. Qatar plays a key role as an intermediary and negotiator, both with Hamas, where it has been the key broker of talks over the last few years, as well as with the Iranians intermittently. And you know, it's that welter of apparent conflicts of interest and the lack of transparency that was exactly what, what the entire framework of post Watergate laws was designed to combat. Right? The idea that people had after Nixon's excesses and you know, there were terrible scandals in that administration, though the dollar figures were way modest compared with Donald Trump's, including Nixon's Vice President Spiro Agnew, literally taking payoffs while he was in high office as a result of that which Americans across the political spectrum viewed as a national embarrassment, a humiliation. Entire framework of laws was passed in this country. And it seems like Donald Trump's mission is to undo the final remaining shreds of these post Watergate laws. And they were designed to have transparency and accountability that if people were contributing to our politicians, they should do so with strict limits. They should do so with strict disclosure requirements. That's basically all gone now. It's basically all gone. The world as we know it. Growing up, I started out as a young reporter in Washington, Tim. It seems quaint. We would write these stories about like, you know, Tim Miller congressional candidate receives like $1,000, you know, thousand dollars PAC contribution, you know, from an industry in which, you know, his family has an interest, isn't this a scandal? This is the world that we came up in, and it's a world that Donald Trump has sort of stood on its head.
- [08:48]
A
We talked about this a little bit, David French, after the Supreme Court rulings this week about, like, the degree to which those post Watergate reforms have just been completely gutted. And it kind of informs a little bit the thinking about what Democrats might do if they ever get back into power.