WASHINGTON — When Donald Trump was headed for the Republican nomination in the summer of 2016, I took Carl Hulse, our chief Washington correspondent, to Trump Tower to meet him.
Trump didn’t know anything about the inner workings of Washington. He proudly showed us his “Wall of Shame” with pictures of Republican candidates he had bested. His campaign office had few staffers, but it overflowed with cheesy portraits of him sent by fans: one of him playing poker with Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Teddy Roosevelt, and a cardboard cutout of him giving a thumbs-up, flanked by Reagan and John Wayne.
As we were leaving, Hulse warned Trump dryly, “If you ever get a call from our colleague Eric Lipton, you’ll know you’re in trouble.”
“Eric Lipton?” Trump murmured.
The president probably knows who Lipton is now, because the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter is tracking Trump on issues of corruption as closely as the relentless lawman in the white straw hat tracked Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Lipton and the Times’ David Yaffe-Bellany were on the scene at Trump’s Virginia golf club this month as the president held his gala dinner to promote sales of $TRUMP, the meme coin he launched on the cusp of his inauguration. (Melania Trump debuted hers two days later.)
Trump has been hawking himself in an absurdly grandiose way his whole life. But this time, he isn’t grandstanding as a flamboyant New York businessperson. He’s selling himself as the president of the United States, staining his office with a blithe display of turpitude.
Protesters at the golf club shouted, “Shame, shame, shame!” but there is no shame in Trumpworld. Trump asked guests, who were whooping with joy at the president who allowed them to purchase such primo access by essentially lining the pockets of Trump and his family, if they had seen his helicopter.
“Yeah, super cool!” gushed a guest.
Buyers flew in from China and around the world, scarfing up a fortune in $TRUMP — some had millions of dollars worth — to procure the 220 seats at the dinner.
“It was a spectacle that could only have happened in the era of Donald J. Trump,” Lipton and Yaffe-Bellany wrote. “Several of the dinner guests, in interviews with the Times, said that they attended the event with the explicit intent of influencing Trump and U.S. financial regulations.”
Pan-seared influence peddling with a citrus reduction. The prez is a pro at quid pro quo.
Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, rebutted criticism Thursday, saying, “The president is attending it in his personal time. It is not a White House dinner.”
But he flew to Virginia on Marine One. He gave his remarks from a lectern with the presidential seal. And some of the crypto crowd Friday got a tour of the White House (Lipton took his post outside the fence).
With more than a dozen lucrative deals for his family and partners, the Times article said, “Mr. Trump is estimated to have added billions to his personal fortune, at least on paper, since the start of his new term, much of it through crypto.”
The corruption is seeping across the Potomac.
Donald Trump Jr. and investors are opening a pricey private club in Georgetown called “Executive Branch,” where business and tech moguls can cozy up to administration big shots.
The notorious $400 million gift for the president from the Qataris, a luxury jumbo jet, has arrived in San Antonio. This alluring “pre-bribe,” as “SNL” dubbed it, instantly wiped out Trump’s old concerns that “the nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level.” (Accepting the plane was sort of like a terrorist fist-bump, the same kind a Fox News host bizarrely accused the Obamas of making with each other.)
Other foreign leaders got the message that emoluments were welcome. In an Oval Office meeting where Trump continued to relish his role as protector of the white patriarchy, the South African president jokingly told the American president, “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.” (This might be the line that best sums up the Trump presidency in the history books.)
Trump replied breezily, “I wish you did. I’d take it.”
Trump Inc.’s money grabs were taking place against the background of the president pushing through his “big, beautiful bill” extending his obscene tax cut for the rich while slicing billions from programs that help poor people stay alive.
“The guy promised to make American families more prosperous,” David Axelrod said. “He just decided to start with his own.”
In a galaxy long ago and far away, there was shame attached to selling your office. Sherman Adams, President Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of staff, lost his job and ruined his reputation after he accepted a vicuña coat from a Boston textile manufacturer doing business with the federal government.
Trump has no reputable reputation to ruin. He’s a snatch-and-grab artist.
“I think social media and Donald Trump’s persona have numbed people to the idea that certain forms of behavior are off-limits,” said Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer. “No institution has been able to rein in Donald Trump. He got impeached twice. Didn’t matter, so Congress couldn’t rein him in. He had all sorts of federal and state prosecutions that ended up going nowhere, so law enforcement couldn’t rein him in. The media has been covering him as close as anyone could ever be covered, and the media couldn’t rein him in. I think it makes people just sort of turn away and accept it as inevitable.”
Before he did his “YMCA” dance and scrammed early, the scamming Trump told the crypto enthusiasts at his golf club that he wasn’t pushing crypto and bitcoin for himself.
“I really do it because I think it’s the right thing to do,” he said.
In Trump’s moral universe, the right thing to do is always the thing that makes him richer.
Maureen Dowd writes a column for the New York Times.
