The last month alone has treated a weary American public to stories of shady dealings that would put any dark, smoke-filled back room to shame.
The Swamp — A new Fox News poll finds that 88 percent of American voters are extremely/very concerned about corruption in government. The poll, released yesterday, comes amid an onslaught of stories of questionable dealings involving Trump family members, administration officials, and the web of the MAGA universe.
The last month alone has treated a weary American public to stories of corruption that would put any dark, smoke-filled back room to shame.
ProPublica reported in September that a Putin ally and Russian oligarch bankrolled Donald Trump Jr.’s post-wedding celebration in the Bahamas. Trump Jr.’s ex-fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle just resigned her post as U.S. ambassador to Greece after reporting revealed that, on the eve of her Senate confirmation last year, she solicited $100,000 from a Trump donor to pay off her credit card debt. “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she wrote the donor.
Last week, Chris LaCivita and James Blair, each a top Trump political adviser, jetted to Republika Srpska, a Kremlin-aligned Balkan state, for its elections, after advising the incumbent party to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees.
A story of corruption during the Trump era wouldn’t be complete without a crypto scandal. Earlier today, the Wall Street Journal reported that while former White House crypto adviser Bo Hines helped craft the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, his consulting firm, Nxum, received $6.3 million through a deal with crypto giant Tether. Hines, 31, is now CEO of the U.S. division of Tether.
All of this comes as Vice President JD Vance is making it his primary mission to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government — to great success, it must be added. Unfortunately, his efforts may be in vain in the eyes of American voters, who see examples of corruption in the administration metastasizing by the day.
While corruption in D.C. is as old as time, the boldness and openness with which some self-described outsiders have sought self-serving deals is staggering. For corruption to be top of the list of voters’ concerns — three points more than inflation, five points more than gas prices, and eight points more than health care — should be a five-alarm fire not just for the GOP but for anyone who cares about self-governance.
Trump decries the “witch hunts” that would follow if Democrats retake Congress in November, but you can hardly blame them for licking their chops at the prospect of investigating these matters.
Voters, after all, seem to believe that a cabal of D.C. insiders is sucking them dry.