How Serious Is The Case For "Corruption" Against President Trump?
/A major theme of President Trump’s critics is that he is corrupt. As a couple of examples, here is Elizabeth Warren on July 26 calling Trump “the most corrupt president of the United States any time in American history”; and here is a piece from the Guardian on August 11 calling Trump’s second term “the most openly corrupt” presidency ever. There are hundreds more where those came from.
But is there anything to this? As long time readers here are aware, my view is that politics is inherently corrupt. In this way, politics differs from business, because in business it is completely legitimate to seek to maximize one’s own profit. By contrast, in politics, the officeholder has a duty to exercise policy in the public good, and not for his own benefit or for the benefit of his friends and supporters. But government policy affects everybody, and it is inevitable that some policies will benefit the officeholder and his friends, or will disadvantage the officeholder’s adversaries. Did the officeholder implement some particular policies entirely for the public good, or in whole or part to enrich himself and his friends? It is impossible to know. And in the real world, every political officeholder will implement policies that can be justified as being in the public good, but in reality also benefit the officeholder himself, or his friends and supporters, disproportionately. Is it corrupt? How would you know?
The Supreme Court has struggled mightily trying to distinguish criminal political corruption from the corruption inherent in the exercise of political power that cannot be criminalized. See my tag “Phony Prosecutions.” Perhaps the leading case is McDonnell v. United States (from 2016), where the Court held that a criminal bribery case against a political officeholder requires an official action taken in return for some “quid pro quo” going to the politician. Thus, the fact that an officeholder or his friends may personally benefit from some policy cannot make out a criminal case, unless the politician has been given a bribe specifically to adopt that policy.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan takes up the question of political corruption as to President Trump. The headline and sub-headline are “The Art of the Self-Deal: Thoughts on how Trump-era corruption is affecting Americans as a people.” Clearly, Noonan has concluded that there is a lot of corruption in Trump’s presidency, and that that it is a big problem. But has she made out a case? My observation is that her case is remarkably weak.
The single biggest element of Noonan’s case is that Trump has become much wealthier during his presidency, and much of that as a result of policies that he has adopted. Excerpt:
The personal-enrichment part [or Trump’s corruption] is suggested by recent and frequent reports showing that Mr. Trump’s net worth, and that of his family, has surged dramatically in his second term. This isn’t just wealthy folks seeing their stocks go up: Trump businesses have developed positions in industries over which the administration exercises power. Some were in cryptocurrency, and there is the $Trump meme coin, some of the largest buyers of which have been given access to the president, some at a dinner at one of his golf clubs.
So Trump and his family had substantial interests in cryptocurrency businesses, and then Trump pursued an aggressive deregulatory policy with respect to cryptocurrencies, and the value of his investments surged. Is this corrupt? My view is yes, but only in the sense that politics is inherently corrupt. Noonan says that “Trump businesses have developed positions in industries over which the administration exercises power.” The problem with that is that the government “exercises power” over every industry. Also, the view of the investors in essentially every industry is that they are over-regulated by the government, and that less regulation would be an improvement in public policy. And in almost all cases, they are right about that. So Trump deregulated the cryptocurrency industry, and made money for himself off that. Independent of whether Trump made money personally on this, was de-regulation of cryptocurrencies good public policy? Cleary, Trump thought that it was.
The real question is not whether Trump is “corrupt,” but whether it is a good thing to have Presidents with interests in the private sector economy. All the most recent Democratic Presidents — Clinton, Obama, Biden — have had no significant interests in the private sector economy, and indeed no real job in their lives other than politician. Is that preferable? In my view, no.
Noonan continues:
Suppose a Republican president leaves office having established that a president can use regulatory powers against antagonistic institutions, exert pressures on companies needing government approval, and demand personal loyalty throughout the executive branch, all with no lasting repercussions. The next administration, disposed in other ideological directions, inherits the precedents.
A President “can use regulatory powers against antagonistic institutions”? Guess what — he can. A President can “exert pressures on companies needing government approval”? Again, guess what — he can. Did anybody think that these things might be a problem when these powers got enacted? Did somebody really have the idea that the President and his subordinates were always going to be completely disinterested geniuses acting wholly in the public interest, with no personal or political motives of any kind? The whole idea is ridiculous. Ultimately, Noonan is not making an argument why Trump is corrupt, so much as she is making an argument in favor of more limited government. She just doesn’t recognize that.
And then there’s the idea that it’s somehow “corruption” for a President to “demand personal loyalty throughout the executive branch.” Huh? I recognize that there may be some aspirational world where the employees of the executive branch could have respectful disagreements with each other, leading to improvements in public policy. But then we find that in a world where loyalty to the President is not demanded from employees of the executive branch we get people in the FBI and CIA cooking up the Russia collusion hoax, and initiating criminal investigations against the elected President on the flimsiest of grounds in the attempt to bring him down. And Noonan thinks that trying to put a stop to this is corruption. It is not. Unfortunately, we have learned that such a demand for loyalty is necessary for the government to be able to function at all, at least if a Republican gets elected.
Back in the Clinton/Obama/Biden days, there was a whole different kind of corruption, namely passing out tens of billions of taxpayer dollars annually to Democrat-friendly institutions and NGOs, some percentage of which then gets kicked back as monetary or in-kind political contributions to keep Democrats in power. In my view this is a far worse and far larger type of corruption than what Noonan has identified as to Trump. I don’t recall Noonan writing anything about it at the time. Note, however, that this corruption is again in the category of “politics is inherently corrupt,” rather than something that can be effectively criminalized.
And then there’s the kind of corruption in which Biden specialized, taking millions from a corrupt Ukrainian business and in return using U.S. foreign aid as a lever to call off a prosecutor. That was classic “quid pro quo” corruption, actually subject to criminal prosecution. See my tag “Bidens: Stone Cold Crooked.”
I certainly don’t mean to stand up for everything Trump has done as completely free from corruption. But again, politics is inherently corrupt. Overall, I would far prefer a President with experience and interests in the private sector than someone without such experience or interests. If that means that the President can inherently benefit from some of his policy decisions, so be it. If we don’t like that, the best solution is to shrink the scope of the President’s responsibilities.