Today in Presidential Corruption News

Imagine that the political donations that rented the Lincoln Bedroom in the Clinton era were actually personal payments, made directly to the Clintons, and paid immediately, to bypass all the ordinary-political-corruption norms about waiting until someone is out of office to unfairly enrich them. Imagine that rather than reduce the income stream by limiting himself to one bedroom, Clinton rented out the entire, pre-tacky-gold-fixtures White House. And then imagine that to sweeten the deal, the President offered to personally service each of the guests. 

Welcome to your current president. His family memecoin business was already inherently corrupt. Then it was factored into the corrupt personal monetization of regime policy. And now, having found the initial windfall from the memecoin insufficient, and apparently too impatient for additional profits, Donald Trump is now--not to put too fine a point on it--whoring himself out more aggressively.

The flashy online announcement called it “the most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the World,” a chance to have “an intimate private dinner” with President Trump at his members-only golf club in Virginia, followed by a tour of the White House.

A seat would be reserved for each of the top 220 investors in $TRUMP, a cryptocurrency that Mr. Trump launched on the eve of his inauguration....

The effort was, in effect, an offer of access to the White House in exchange for an investment in one of Mr. Trump’s crypto ventures....

As news of the dinner invitation spread on social media, the memecoin’s price surged more than 60 percent, suggesting that investors were rushing to accumulate enough coins to qualify for a dinner seat.

“This is really incredible,” said Corey Frayer, who oversaw crypto policy for the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Biden administration. “They are making the pay-to-play deal explicit.”

A business entity linked to Mr. Trump owns a large tranche of the coins, meaning the president personally profits every time the price increases, at least on paper. Mr. Trump and his business partners also collect fees when the coins are traded, a windfall that amounted to nearly $100 million in the weeks after the coin debuted in January.

Of course, the president has already disbanded the DOJ cryptocurrency prosecution unit, and the SEC has already announced its desire not to stand in the president's industry's way.  His conflict of interest policy is less rigorous than Caligula's. And his law enforcement consists of the author of a children's book that, on a charitable reading, is a thinly veiled perverse fantasy about himself and the President. (But it wasn't an audition!) 

Why bother recounting the obvious? Four reasons. One, of course, is sheer anger at the bottomless pit of corruption that is Donald Trump when not surrounded by adult minders, and at his befouling of American institutions. Another is that it is so easy to focus on the many ways in which he is otherwise harming and dishonoring his office and the nation--his wreckage of the economy, his service as adjutant-general to Russia's quest for Lebensraum, his violation of law and legal norms, his wholesale violations of due process, his eagerness to rent out quasi-concentration camps abroad, his desire to lay waste to public health and encourage disease and death at home and abroad, the fundamental vulgarity, tackiness, sloppiness, and illiteracy with which he infects public office and public discourse, and so much more--that one can easily neglect his now-unrestrained personal vice and corruption. That would be unfair. We must take him for all in all. And all in all, this is a man who makes Idi Amin look like Mother Teresa. Third, given the ways in which policy and personal gain are intertwined in this regime, not just at one level but throughout a "unitary" executive branch that has pledged itself to his personal service in a branchwide violation of the constitutional oath, one must note again that denying this regime a presumption of honesty, sincerity, and regularity is no departure--why grant a presumption that every day is loudly refuted?--and granting it those presumptions would be a farce and a willful lie. Judges are obliged to be impartial to the parties before them; they are not obliged to be ignorant, or impartial about the rule of law itself.  

Finally, as has been wisely said, one must live up to the intrinsic integrity of the academic enterprise, particularly as it relates to the legal profession and public law. Integrity demands that one profess the truth. Respect for the rule of law, and a desire not to encourage a "disillusioned and cynical" view of the rule of law, likewise demands that one note total, blatant, vulgar corruption of the office, "without fear or favor" and without engaging in "tendentious" apologetics. Any "emphatic subscriber" to anything faintly resembling the "rule of law" recognizes this, sees this personalization of the executive branch for purposes of self-enrichment for what it is, and perforce must say so.    

I note, in passing but not without shame, that this is the man who invited himself to speak to an audience at the University of Alabama, and to whom the university half-capitulated by having him speak at an address prior to the commencement weekend. (And even in this, he could not stifle the impulse to engage in a narcissistic, self-idolatrous lie about it.) One hopes that, if the university was trying to buy his goodwill or at least buy off his always-threatened hostility, they tried to win the liberty of our own graduate student as part of the bargain, however corrupt such a use of power would be.