Rep. Jamie Raskin says he is willing to learn from past mistakes to help prevent President Donald Trump from amassing wealth through corrupt means.
The Maryland Democratic congressman joined Sarah Ewall-Wice on The Daily Beast Podcast to discuss how the 79-year-old president has allegedly channeled money for himself during his second term and what he proposes to stop it.
“In the new term, they are into the digital age,” Raskin, 63, said about Trump’s alleged methods of wealth accumulation, noting that his first term included “brick and mortar style corruption,” whereas he now argues the president can receive money from foreign governments via cryptocurrency.
“He’s increased his net worth by more than $6 billion,” the congressman said about Trump, adding that the president’s income also allegedly “went up a billion and a half dollars in his first year in office.”
Trump, whose finances and business dealings are primarily managed by his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who oversee the Trump Organization, has his assets largely handled by his children.
He had a reported net worth of $6.5 billion as of March, with his cryptocurrency ventures expanding after his presidential win and adding an estimated $1.8 billion to his fortune, according to Forbes.
“I think it was our failure to stop him in the first administration to have a unanimous bipartisan blockade of his efforts to turn the presidency into an instrument of private profit that set the stage for him to do this now,” Raskin admitted, calling the current way that the president makes money “a completely lawless situation.”
A Reuters investigation found that Eric and Don Jr. have pursued cryptocurrency investments internationally, including from Chinese businessman Guren “Bobby” Zhou, who is currently under investigation in the U.K. for alleged money laundering.
“I mean, he was asked the question, you know, what are the limits on what you will do? And he said, ‘My limits are my own conscience,’” the congressman said, referring to Trump’s interview with The New York Times in which the president said his power is only constrained by his “own morality.”
Raskin also referred back to Trump’s admission that he hasn’t been thinking about “Americans’ financial situation” while negotiating in his war with Iran, which the representative called “perhaps the truest statement he’s ever uttered.”
As the president reportedly enriches himself, with The New Yorker reporting that the Trump family is expected to increase its wealth by roughly $3.4 billion by the end of the president’s second term, the American public faces rising gas prices and the highest grocery price spike in years.
The congressman suggested that, to address the alleged corruption, Congress would need to begin by introducing foreign-emoluments rules, requiring the president to report any such payments to Congress, which would then meet to vote on them.
“He got a jet from Qatar for $400 million that the government accepted that he’s going to keep with him after he leaves office,” Raskin said as an example of a gift the president received last year from Qatar’s prime minister.
The gift prompted intense backlash in the U.S., with lawmakers from both parties raising concerns over security and ethics, but Trump accepted it nonetheless.
“In other words, we need a real system because all of this is taking place as kind of a shadow government operation,” Raskin said.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle called Raskin a “lightweight” and a “stupid person’s idea of a smart person.”
“President Trump’s sharpness, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in stark contrast to what we saw during the last administration when Democrats like Raskin intentionally covered up Joe Biden’s serious mental and physical decline from the American people,” he continued in a statement.
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