By Anne Applebaum
Monday, April 14, 2025
As the stock markets crashed on Friday, April 4, Donald
Trump left Washington, D.C. He did not go to New York to consult with Wall
Street. He did not go to Dover, Delaware, to receive the bodies of four
American servicemen, killed in an accident while serving in Lithuania. Instead,
he
went to Florida, where he visited his Doral golf resort, which was hosting
the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tournament, and stayed at his Mar-a-Lago club, where
many tournament fans and sponsors were staying too. His private businesses took
precedence over the business of the nation.
Many of his guests were also interested in boosting
Trump’s personal interests, as well as gaining the American president’s favor.
One of them was Yasir al-Rumayyan, who runs the $925 billion Saudi
sovereign-wealth fund and is also the chair of the LIV tournament. Other
sponsors of the tournament included Riyadh Air, a Saudi airline; Aramco, the
Saudi state oil company; and, startlingly, TikTok, the Chinese-owned
social-media platform whose fate Trump will personally be deciding, even as he
profits from its sponsorship and support.
Once upon a time (and not even that long ago), blatant
conflicts of interest, especially involving foreign entities, were something
presidents sought to avoid. No previous inhabitant of the White House would
have wanted to be seen doing personal business with companies from countries
that seek to influence American foreign policy. Such dealings risk violating
the Constitution, which prohibits government officials from accepting “gifts,
titles or emoluments from foreign governments.” But during Trump’s first term,
the court system largely blew off his commercial entanglements. Now he not only
does business with foreign as well as domestic companies that have a direct
interest in his policies, he advertises and celebrates them. We know the
identities of the golf-tournament sponsors not because investigative
journalists burrowed deep into secret contracts, but because they appear on official websites and were
displayed on a billboard, observed
by The New York Times, at his golf course.
Both the website and the billboard would have been
scandals in any previous administration. If they are hardly remarked upon now,
that’s because Trump’s behavior is a symptom of something much larger. We are
living through a revolutionary change, a broad shift away from the transparency
and accountability mandated by most modern democracies, and toward the opaque
habits and corrupt practices of the autocratic world. For the past decade,
American government and business alike have slowly begun to adopt the kleptocratic
model pioneered by countries such as Russia and China, where the rulers’
conflicts of interest are simply part of the fabric of the system.
The change began during Trump’s first term—Vice President
Mike Pence once
made a 180-mile-plus detour on a trip to Ireland, in order to stay at a
Trump hotel—but Trump was constrained by his advisers and perhaps by what was
then still his fear of legal consequences. This time around, he knows he got
away with a series of crimes, including an attempt to overthrow an election.
His advisers are supine; he feels no more constraints. New standards were
already set in December, when the Trump Organization announced
the construction of a Trump Tower in Saudi Arabia, an investment that posed a
clear conflict of interest for the president-elect.
Trump’s family also created
a cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial, that could, in practice,
serve as a vehicle for anyone to pay him indirect bribes. Nobody around him
objected. After Trump’s return to office, his administration, unbothered by
appearances of impropriety, did indeed quickly suspend a civil
investigation into Justin Sun, a Chinese entrepreneur and an adviser to
World Liberty Financial, who had also invested at least $75 million in the
company. More recently, The Wall Street Journal discovered that
executives from Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange, met
with Treasury officials to ask for looser oversight, even while they were
at the same time negotiating a private business deal with World Liberty
Financial. In the past, Binance has been fined $4.3 billion, a
record, for letting terrorists, drug traffickers, and people under sanction
use its exchange, so the company’s interest in looser oversight is not
theoretical.
In keeping with the new atmosphere, the inauguration
itself became an ostentatious display of the new administration’s kleptocratic
values. American tech CEOs were the most prominent guests and got the most
attention, but several foreign business partners of the Trump Organization also
attended
inauguration-related events, posed for photos with Trump, and referenced their
connections to his presidency in promotional materials. Several lesser-known
companies involved in regulatory and other negotiations with the U.S.
government quietly donated
hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump’s inauguration. Soon afterward, in a
late-night purge, Trump fired
17 inspectors general, all people who were responsible for monitoring
corruption and ethical violations inside the government.
Trump isn’t just disregarding old norms for his own sake.
He’s making it easier for others to cut corners too. From the beginning of his
career, Trump participated enthusiastically in the opaque, offshore world of
shell companies and anonymous bank accounts, a milieu that has always attracted
autocrats, criminals, and anyone else who seeks to hide their money. As of
2018, more than one out of every five condos in Trump-branded buildings had
been
purchased by shell companies whose true owner was unknown, and anonymous
owners continued
to buy into his businesses during his first term as president. Now his
administration is helping other businesses that operate in the shadows to stay
there. Trump’s Treasury Department announced
last month that it would no longer enforce the Corporate Transparency Act,
hampering recent congressional efforts to end money laundering, tax dodging,
and other lawbreaking by anonymous investors. In an executive order, Trump suspended
enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits American
and foreign companies from paying bribes to do business. The Department of
Justice is also disbanding
a task force set up to administer sanctions on Russian oligarchs close to
Vladimir Putin.
Oversight will be removed from many domestic financial
and government institutions too. Trump ordered a full work stoppage
at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had been created to protect
consumers from manipulation by banks and other financial institutions He has fired
top officials overseeing ethics, whistleblower protections, and labor rights,
including the heads of the Office of Government Ethics, the Office of Special
Counsel, and the Merit Systems Protection Board. Meanwhile, Justice Department
officials are drafting plans to reduce investigations of fraud
and public
corruption, which means that prosecuting crooked officials will be more
difficult. Cuts to the IRS mean that tax fraud will also be harder to identify
and prosecute. Just last week, the Justice Department announced that it would curtail
investigations of cryptocurrency fraud and disband its National
Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team.
***
One particular Trump backer has already profited from
this new world in which conflicts of interest just don’t matter. Elon Musk, who
has no mandate other than the personal blessing of the president, now has
enormous influence over the very same government institutions that have long
subsidized and regulated his companies. Musk slashed
jobs at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal
agency that oversees auto safety and crash investigations, including those
involving his own electric-vehicle company, Tesla. Musk oversaw
mass firings at other regulatory agencies that had launched more than 30
investigations into his companies, which include SpaceX and Neuralink.
At the same time, major government agencies, including
the General Services Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration,
are using or were considering the use of Starlink,
a product of SpaceX. The State Department planned to buy
armored Teslas. One Commerce Department official, Evan Feinman, resigned
last month because of an administration push to use Starlink to provide
rural broadband services. “Stranding all or part of rural America with worse
internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another
in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” he said. Musk isn’t breaking the
law, and he doesn’t have to say or do anything to encourage these changes. His
new role as America’s premiere oligarch means that all kinds of people and
agencies will kowtow to him anyway.
Musk has also had real influence over American foreign
policy. If they are upheld by courts, DOGE’s cuts to USAID, to the U.S.
Institute of Peace, and to U.S.-backed foreign broadcasters, including Voice of
America, will all deliver deep blows to American diplomacy and soft power, in
addition to the damage they will do to international health care and
humanitarian aid. The end of American-funded broadcasting by itself will
particularly benefit China, which competes with the U.S. in the realm of
narratives and ideas as well as economics. It’s curious that Musk was in a
position to make these decisions, all so favorable to Chinese soft power, even
though he has important ongoing business relationships in China. His
“gigafactory” in Shanghai, opened with hundreds of millions of dollars in
Chinese loans, has become Tesla’s
largest production site.
But in Trump’s administration, outside interests are no
big deal. To take one of many examples, FBI Director Kash Patel, during his
Senate hearings, revealed that he has accepted $1
million to $5 million in stock as payment from the corporate parent of
Shein, a Chinese e-commerce company that has been accused of using
forced labor in its supply chain; he told senators that he would not
divest. Patel has also consulted for the Czechoslovak Group, a foreign arms
conglomerate that J. D. Vance, when he was still a senator, said had “ties to
the inner circle of Russian President Vladimir Putin.” Although Patel, in his
new role, will be responsible for countering Russian and Chinese influence and
espionage operations, 51 Senate Republicans nevertheless confirmed him.
But these are only the conflicts of interest we know
about. How many people benefited last week from advance knowledge that Trump
would reverse his position on tariffs? How many others are making other
stock-market bets based on their access to government information? We don’t
know the answers, and Trump’s Department of Justice is unlikely to want to find
out. We are living in the dark, just as people do in other kleptocracies, and
this changes everything.
***
Earlier this year, I published a book, Autocracy, Inc.,
which argues that many modern dictatorships are best analyzed not through the
prism of ideology but through the political and financial interests of the
people who run them. The presence in the American government of so many people,
most notably the president, whose financial interests can be directly and
immediately affected by their political decisions means that we now need a
different way of analyzing American policy too.
To understand Trump’s policies toward Russia and Ukraine,
for example, one should ask not merely How will they end the war? and How
will they shape America’s relationship to Europe? but Who in Trump’s
immediate circle will benefit from the lifting of sanctions? and Have
the Russians made explicit financial offers already, and to whom? The
rare-minerals deal now being negotiated with Ukraine deserves especially close
scrutiny. We need to establish which Americans, exactly, will benefit, and how.
The right question to ask about Trump’s tariff policy is
also financial: How will this enormous change to American trade policy benefit
Trump? One answer is already clear. The countries and large companies damaged
by these tariffs, some of which could face huge losses or even bankruptcy, will
have an enormous incentive to play up to the president, to offer him political
donations, and maybe even to offer business deals to him, his family, or his
friends in order to get some kind of exception made for themselves or their
industry.
In a law-abiding administration, personal finances
wouldn’t be an important part of the public debate. But this administration’s
leaders have decided that laws and norms of behavior that have held for a
century or more don’t apply to them. The Republican-led Congress has so far
decided not to enforce them either. It’s now up to the media, to outside
organizations, and to whistleblowers to keep reporting the slide into
kleptocracy to the public and to the courts, to make sure that remaining laws
are enforced. It’s up to the Democratic Party to follow the lead of opposition
movements in other kleptocracies and to put corruption at the center of their
arguments. Before it’s too late, everyone who can do so must communicate what
is happening: American government, American foreign policy, and American trade
policy are slowly being transformed, not to benefit Americans but to benefit
the president, his family, and his friends. Only voters can stop them.
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