Quote of the Day (Anne Applebaum, on How Kleptocracies Spread From Russia)

“Since the 1990s, the kleptocratic model created in Russia has spread much further. From Angola to Zimbabwe, dictators with access to hidden sources of wealth are better able to resist demands for political change. They can hide their families and their property abroad. They can finance bribery and influence operations. The aura of secrecy they build is also part of what keeps them in power. Ordinary Russians, ordinary Chinese or ordinary Venezuelans are not allowed to know why their rulers, and their rulers’ friends and their families, are billionaires, because they’re not meant to have any influence or understanding or knowledge of politics at all. That lack of knowledge creates a sense of helplessness, apathy, even despair.”— Pulitzer-prize winning American historian Anne Applebaum, “Follow the Money,” The Financial Times, Aug. 31-Sept. 1, 2024

With Donald Trump’s election to a second term, the United States has officially joined—or, I should say, rejoined—the ranks of the dubious global fraternity of kleptocracies—i.e., governments with leaders who seek personal gain and status at the expense of those they govern.

In an interview last month with Jeffrey Rosen at the National Constitutional Center, Applebaum not only discussed how the kleptocratic model exemplified by Vladimir Putin (pictured) operates in autocracies across the world, but also how it figures in the case of Trump, whose “primary concern at all times is himself and his own finances and his own power.”

Even while President, Applebaum notes, the autocrat-curious politico maintained the practice he’d begun in his days as a New York real estate mogul of selling condos in Trump-branded or Trump-owned buildings to anonymous people, whose intentions—including whether they were out to bribe or influence White House officials—were unknown.

The potential for conflicts of interest was clear, a situation only worsened by how Trump flouted prior Presidential procedures for blind trusts. Though ostensibly turning over management of the Trump Organization to his two eldest sons after becoming President in 2017, he still received updates on the family-owned trust and remained its chief beneficiary.

Just as the Former and Future Guy made a farce of the notion of a “blind trust,” the Supreme Court did so with the belief that justice is blind. 

In a preview of its extraordinary deference in this past session in granting Trump broad immunity from prosecution for “official acts,” the Roberts Court dismissed in 2021 two cases involving his violations of the Constitution’s “emoluments clauses” for preventing Presidential corruption. (See Ciara Torres-Spelliscy’s excellent summary from that time for the Brennan Center for Justice.)

I have taken particular interest in Trump’s use of the U.S. government as a virtual slot machine for the Trump Organization because one instance of it occurred not far from my family’s ancestral homeland in County Clare, Ireland.

In September 2019, taxpayers footed a $15,000 bill for Secret Service lodging for Vice President Mike Pence’s trip to Ireland. The lucky beneficiary of this largesse? Trump’s Doonbeg resort, which he had already spent $41 million to buy, renovate and operate without returning a profit to that point. 

It was all part of a pattern in which Trump made $82 million from his three properties in Ireland and Scotland through often convoluted and unnecessary travel itineraries and exorbitant tacked-on charges, according to Rebecca Jacobs’ June 2023 report for the ethics watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

Even while in office, the Trump Organizations maintained ethically and legally questionable investments involving Trump International Hotel, New York’s Trump World Tower, Dubai’s Trump International Golf Club, trademarks in China, and royalties from The Apprentice and its spinoffs in multiple countries.

Then, while Trump planned his return to power, son-in-law Jared Kushner, while publicly withdrawing from campaign appearances, secured a $2 billion investment from a Saudi Arabian fund led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as well as $157.5 million in management fees from foreign investors for work expected to be completed in 2024.

Let’s stop for a second on that last item. Mohammed bin Salman—you may remember him as “MBS,” the shadowy potentate credibly charged with ordering the October 2018 assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Is it necessary to spell out the obvious implications of the Kushner deal for diplomacy and influence peddling?

The naturalist writer Frank Norris titled his 1901 novel of corruption by a massive railroad conglomerate The Octopus. With the resounding victory of MAGA forces this week, American voters have given carte blanche to the Trump Octopus.

Presidents' financial misdeeds are not as easy to understand as their infidelities, but they are more important to know if we hope to grasp how the long-term interests of the American people can be subverted. 

Despite Trump’s war against the group he calls “the enemy of the people,” the press owes it to the republic to continue and even amplify its reporting on the President-elect’s festering corruption—and Americans in turn owe it to themselves to pay attention and act accordingly.