Do you remember the uproar when President Barack Obama accepted a shiny $50,000 gold coin from the Sultan of Brunei? Critics said he was “selling out the presidency.” Republicans called for his immediate impeachment. Even some Democrats said he had “betrayed the office,” particularly after Obama refused to return the gift, saying he “deserved it for the outstanding job I’ve done as your President.”
Of course you don’t remember it because it didn’t happen! It could never have happened. Not under Obama. Not under any president until the present one. Because we Americans have always understood that when one assumes the presidency of the world’s mightiest country, one also assumes a sacred obligation to the people of this nation. That obligation is to put, as one recent president describes it, “America first.”
Today, though, the hollowness of that slogan echoes even louder than the twang of country guitars floating across the empty National Mall during Trump’s tragic festivus marking America’s 250th birthday. What should have been a raucous celebration of the unique characters of our fifty states is, instead, yet another P.T. Barnum put-up job, with eighty million dollars in taxpayer dollars apparently spent on a Ferris Wheel and a Spinal Tap-sized “Arc d’Trump.” The ice cream has melted.
It’s been easy—and hilarious—to poke fun at the flaccid fair, but the laughter obscures a painful wound in our nation’s belly: That the President of the United States has turned the Oval Office into nothing more than another check-cashing joint on the Potomac. Every single thing this bouffanted buffoon does is to enrich himself and his cronies. It’s corruption of a magnitude the country has never seen, all of it being done with the quiet acquiescence of a Congress seemingly unable to do their constitutional duty in restraining our Commander-in-Chief.
This week, we learned that Trump profited over two billion dollars last year, most of it coming from his money-laundering crypto schemes. To paraphrase Jay-Z, Trump isn’t a businessman. He’s a business, man. The “business” is selling out the country he was elected to lead. The grift is blatant and endemic. Every beat of his heart is another violation of the Emoluments Clause. If you haven’t read the Constitution in a minute, I’ll remind you what it says: PRESIDENTS CAN’T TAKE BRIBES!
So how the f–k is he accepting a $400,000,000 airplane from Qatar?
Our new Air Force One is a secondhand Qatari jet which the American taxpayer paid a further $400,000,000 to modify. Although unseemly, perhaps we could excuse the extravagance if the plane were to remain in service post-Trump. But that’s not the case. At the conclusion of his term, somehow the plane will be “retired from flight” and transferred to the “Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Fund.” What? Why did the U.S. taxpayer just gift a guy who made two billion dollars a further nine-figure joy ride?
On Wednesday, Trump took his first flight aboard the new aircraft, calling it “the best plane ever built.” Its mahogany bookshelves—lined with pristine, fake volumes—were a great backdrop for members of the MAGA inner circle to vlog their first joyride. It all felt less like a state affair and more like an influencer trip, capped off by fruit bowls—filled with imported fruits currently in short supply for everyday Americans—and the inability to spell bon appétit on social media.
(This at the same time Iran walked away from further negotiations to end a war launched at the behest of his brother in bribery, Benjamin Netanyahu, indicted for accepting gifts in excess of $200,000 from his patrons.)
Maybe some people can shrug their shoulders at… all of it? His defenders say this is just what the boss man does. Maybe so. But the presidency isn’t the job of a tycoon. It’s the honor of a lifetime. It’s supposed to be the one office whose occupant willingly accepts constraints the rest of us never would because they understand the highest office in the land comes with the highest level of public scrutiny. Presidents surrender business opportunities. They release their tax returns. They place assets into blind trusts NOT overseen by their corrupt children. They do not accept airplanes. They don’t even take a free bag of airline peanuts—and they sell their damn peanut farms. They endure those inconveniences because the appearance of corruption can be nearly as corrosive as corruption itself.
Corruption doesn’t just empty the public treasury. It drains the public imagination far quicker than a Trump goon can drain the Reflecting Pool. We stop asking whether something is in the interests of the public good and just ask whether it’s legal. We replace the idea of service from our public servants with a dead-eyed transactionalism. Worse, future leaders will be motivated less by what they can get done and more by what they can get away with.
It’s a sham. A con. And even our Democratic leaders are silent on the matter. Why? Why aren’t they standing in front of the American public every single day and making the case for impeachment and removal from office? Why aren’t they making the case that Trump should spend his few remaining days in another federally-owned facility, Fort Leavenworth?
My job is to write jokes for the Daily Beast, but there’s nothing funny about this. The stupid carnival, the airplane, the crypto, the alleged pay-for-pardon scheme. All of it part and parcel of a gigantic money-making operation funded by you and me.
That’s why the imaginary Obama story matters—except that whether the name was Obama, Clinton, or Reagan wouldn’t matter. Twenty years ago, Americans of every political stripe would have recoiled at a president profiting from their office. The idea of a president taking a $50,000 gold coin from a foreign leader would have been understood as an absurdity. Today, the absurdity is that reality has outpaced the joke.
