Trail Notes
Trump’s “May the 4th Be With You” Day / Trump boys’ mega deals / Crypto corruption bill / EPA's falling star / ICE is hot / $1-billion presidential pardons
The Grift that Keeps on Grifting
On Star Wars’ “May the 4th Be With You” Day, the White House social media team posted an image of Donald Trump as a ripped Jedi warrior. Their X post read, “Happy May the 4th to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting so hard to bring Sith Lords, Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, & well known MS-13 Gang Members, back into our Galaxy. You’re not the Rebellion—you’re the Empire. May the 4th be with you.”
That’s quite a leap for Captain Bone Spurs. But they left out a headline. How about: “The grift is strong in this one.”
Cheap shot? The truth is that there’s nothing cheap about what Trump sons Don Jr. and Eric have been up to in recent weeks. They’ve been nailing down business deals in the Middle East and Europe promoting Trump-associated business ventures that likely will directly benefit their Jedi warrior dad.
The New York Times compiled a list: A $1-billion luxury hotel in Dubai, a golf course and villa community in Qatar, a hotel on land owned by the Serbian government, and a $2-billion investment by a venture capital fund backed by the Abu Dhabi government using the Trump family’s cryptocurrency. That last deal alone could net the Trumps hundreds of millions of dollars.
Yes, others have used their familial connection to a president to cash in, from Billy “Billy Beer” Carter to Hunter Biden. But Trump’s financial disclosure report shows that he still personally benefits financially from many of these ventures. As Rice University presidential historian Douglas Brinkley put it, “There’s nothing like it.”
The Expanding Trump War Chest
But there’s more. Early this week, the president spoke at a fundraising dinner for his MAGA Inc. super PAC. The cost of entry? A donation of at least $1.5 million from each one of the “crypto and AI innovators” who attended. MAGA Inc. raised $400 million during the 2023-2024 election cycle, but we still don’t know how much it has taken in since Trump became president.
MAGA Inc. is primarily spending the money to attack Democratic candidates, but it is also going after Republicans who are not aligned with the Trump agenda. It’s worth noting that three members of Trump’s cabinet kicked in beaucoup bucks to the PAC before they were appointed. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon donated $20 million; Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, $9 million; and Kelly Loeffler, now head of the Small Business Administration, $2 million.
Dems Take on “Crypto Corruption”
You may remember when Donald Trump bashed crypto as a “scam.” That was then. Now he’s all in, which is raising plenty of eyebrows.
Take the aforementioned cryptocurrency deal tied to Abu Dhabi, a modern-day example of how a foreign government can curry favor with a U.S. president. That transaction, not surprisingly, set off Democrats in Congress, and on Tuesday, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley introduced the End Crypto Corruption Act. It would ban the president, vice president, members of Congress, and their families from issuing digital assets, such as meme coins and stablecoins.
“Currently, people who wish to cultivate influence with the president can enrich him personally by buying cryptocurrency he owns or controls,” said Merkley. “This is a profoundly corrupt scheme.”
Falling Star at the EPA
Another casualty of the Trump wrecking ball is Energy Star, the Environmental Protection Agency’s energy efficiency certification for dishwashers, refrigerators, dryers and other appliances. There’s a good chance you have a device in your house with the blue Energy Star label. It’s proof that the appliance has met energy efficiency standards. Since its launch under President George H. W. Bush in 1992, it has helped save U.S. households and businesses more than $500 billion in energy costs. But EPA managers were told earlier this week that the agency divisions that oversee climate change and energy efficiency are being eliminated. Overall, the White House recommendations for the fiscal year 2026 budget call for cutting EPA funding by 55 percent and reducing its staffing to 1980s levels.
It’s Nice to be ICE
By contrast, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, is potentially a big winner in the budget reconciliation bill that Congress is currently considering. Already, the House Judiciary Committee has approved a bill allocating $45 billion for ICE detention centers. According to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, that would amount to a 365-percent bump in its annual detention budget. The bill also would provide $14.4 billion for ICE’s transportation and removal operations, a spike of 500 percent. When it comes to bringing aboard more agents, the legislation allocates $8 billion to hire 10,000 new ICE officers. So, if this bill becomes law, ICE will become the highest-funded law enforcement agency in U.S history and have a larger detention budget than the Federal Bureau of Prisons. (Never mind that undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022, according to Americans for Tax Fairness, at a higher effective tax rate than the wealthiest 1 percent of U.S. households.)
The High Cost of Trump Pardons
Liz Oyer, a Justice Department pardon attorney until she recently lost her job, estimates that the president’s pardons of white-collar convicts has cost the federal government $1 billion so far. That’s the total that those criminals allegedly owed in restitution, based on how much they were convicted of stealing. Oyer said that amount reflects the unusually high number of Trump’s coterie of fraudsters who received a Get Out of Jail Free card.
Randy Rieland is a former columnist at Smithsonian magazine, website director at the Discovery Channel, and senior writer at Washingtonian magazine.
 |
|