Jeremy Warner
Large parts of the media are often accused of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, a type of bewildered disgust with the current occupant of the White House that verges on the pathological and warps perceptions of his actions and ambitions accordingly.
There may be some truth in that judgment, but whatever one might think of where the 47th president is taking his country, and indeed the rest of the world, there is one characteristic that should unite all decently minded people in outrage and condemnation.
This includes widespread allegations of corruption, the use of public office for self-enrichment, and an apparently casual disregard for accepted norms of financial practice and the disclosure of price-sensitive information.
The president seems to have no understanding of the boundaries that are meant to separate public office from private interests. He sees no problem with mixing the two.
Apparent tolerance of this kind of behaviour has reached levels more synonymous with a Third-World banana republic than the mature, law-abiding form of governance the US pretends to represent. In doing so, it threatens to destroy America’s reputation as both a safe haven for international capital and a land of equal opportunity.
The fact that the dollar’s traditional safe-haven attributes have been notably less evident in the current outbreak of geopolitical hostility is, in no small measure, because the US is no longer trusted as a reliable and dependable player. Perceived corruption at the heart of government is very much part of that story.
The blending of private and public interests was bad enough in Trump’s first presidency, but in his second, all semblance of accountability seems to have gone out the window. Trump rules like a medieval king, with an administration of fawning courtiers to match, some of them with their snouts quite visibly in the trough.
The first obvious sign of it was the sight of all those tech barons and financiers lined up in a sickening display of competing sycophancy for the president’s inauguration in January last year.
Some of them had been substantial campaign donors, but all of them expected contracts and regulatory concessions from the new president in return.
Since then, there has been a growing litany of questionable behaviour that goes not just unpunished, but uninvestigated and nonchalantly dismissed as irrelevant. Favours seem to be available for a price, and there has been no shortage of those lining up to pay.
A number of wealthy donors have been rewarded with cabinet and executive branch positions, ambassadorships, pardons and commutations. Investigations and enforcement actions have been dropped, and those willing to bend the knee, or, better still, invest in Trump family enterprises, have been rewarded with corporate-friendly policies, perks and foreign policy actions.
Having once described Bitcoin as a “scam”, Trump has wholly embraced the crypto revolution, substantially boosting the wealth of both his own family and many of his supporters.
Some cabinet posts give the impression of being partially bought with political donations, such as Scott Bessent as treasury secretary and Howard Lutnick as commerce secretary.
Beneath them is a veritable army of “placemen” with widespread command over public policy and contract allocation.
Some of this is to be expected; all presidents offer key positions to allies and, indeed, reflect their interests in policy.
But it is the sheer scale of it that stands out with Trump. Government agencies and ambassadorships are increasingly populated not just by political allies, which is scarcely anything new, but by political donors in large numbers.
Trump promised to clear out the swamp but has merely replaced it with another.
Apparent abuse of office is such an everyday occurrence that the public has become almost wholly desensitised to it. People no longer seem to care. “It’s just Trump; what do you expect?” they ask in resigned acceptance of the new reality.
One thing they do care about, however, is the sight of insiders apparently lining their own pockets courtesy of prior knowledge of the various twists and turns in Trump’s “Operation Epic Fury” attacks on Iran.
Perhaps surprisingly, these allegations have generated more public opprobrium than the war itself. There is nothing quite as shocking as insiders cynically abusing their positions to profit from a decision as momentous as going to war.
Suspicious spikes in activity in oil futures contracts and on the Polymarket prediction betting website occurred both immediately before the initial attacks and a subsequent de-escalation by Trump when he posted on Truth Social that “productive” talks were taking place.
Something similar happened around Trump’s “liberation day” tariff blitz a year ago, when Bessent told a closed meeting of JP Morgan clients that “de-escalation would come in the very near future”, a market-moving announcement that was echoed by Trump a few hours later. Smartphone activity among those in the room was said to be off the scale.
The president seems to have no understanding of the boundaries that are meant to separate public office from private interests.
Trump himself is evidently very much aware of the trading opportunities his various announcements create. “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” he told followers on Truth Social on April 9 last year, just a few hours before announcing a pause in his tariff assault. Indeed, it was.
As the firebrand Democrat senator Elizabeth Warren remarked at the time: “Chaos, confusion, economic damage, and opportunities for corruption have become the hallmark of Trump’s rollout of his tariff policies.”
Trump’s penchant for seemingly random course changes has created myriad opportunities for those in the know.
No evidence has yet been presented to suggest that either Trump or any member of his immediate team profited from such trades, and indeed the White House has pushed back strongly against all such suggestions, describing them as “baseless” and “fabricated”.
Allegations that Pete Hegseth’s broker was looking into buying a stake in a defence industry investment fund just ahead of the Iranian attacks have similarly been denied.
A spokesman for the US defence secretary called the accusation “entirely false and fabricated”.
These denials must be taken at their word. Yet it remains a mystery why there has been no official investigation into the chaos surrounding Trump’s decision-making.
It’s no small wonder that everyone is suspicious. If money-making is not the purpose of the Truth Social roller-coaster, it is hard to figure out what is.
Normally, you would expect the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a once formidable enforcer of US securities law, to have been all over these allegations like a rash.
But the SEC, too, is a substantially neutered organisation these days. Trump said he would fire Gary Gensler, the former head, on day one of his presidency, in punishment for Gensler’s aggressive enforcement actions against Trump donors in crypto and for what Trump saw as regulatory overreach in general.
The new man at the SEC is the far more compliant Paul Atkins; his deregulatory agenda suits Trump just fine. Don’t expect him to be hunting down any miscreants.
Telegraph, London
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