There’s a passage in the U.S. Constitution -Section 1, Article 9 – that even the dumbest Americans should be able to comprehend, if they read it slowly and move their lips to aid the effort:
“… no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatsoever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.“
And here’s the dictionary definition of emolument: “A salary, fee, or profit from employment or office.” In other words, it should be crystal clear – especially to Republicans, who profess to revere the literal language of our founding document – that no president can put himself up for sale in the pursuit of private profit.
But alas, on this particular issue the Constitution is a mere scrap of parchment crushed by the MAGA blitzkrieg. We learned this yesterday when House Democrats released a report – built on financial evidence subpoenaed from Donald Trump’s former accounting firm – which says that during the first two years of his failed presidency, roughly 20 nations, including the authoritarian regimes in China and Saudi Arabia, pumped $7.8 million into his private businesses in New York, Washington, and Las Vegas.
And that’s only a partial summation of Trump’s profiteering; when Republicans took over the House a year ago, they shut down the probe. As the House Democrats’ report points out, “that $7.8 million is almost certainly only a fraction of Trump’s harvest of unlawful foreign state money.” Nevertheless, the sum unearthed so far “in itself is a scandal and a decisive spur to action.”
A decisive spur to action…as if that will ever happen.
The sad truth, as we all know, is that the criminal defendant and adjudicated rapist/financial fraudster/ insurrectionist has committed so many despicable acts and degraded our civic life in so many ways, that hey, what’s the big deal about violating the Constitution’s ban on emoluments? From what I can tell, the public reaction to the House report – among the handful of people who even know about it – ranges from silence to numbness.
Jennifer Rubin, the must-read Washington Post columnist (and former Republican), wrote yesterday, “Will the media spend a fraction of the time on the documented foreign corruption of Trump as it has on ‘Dems nervous’ and bogus polls? I hope I am wrong.” Unfortunately, she’s not wrong.
Media coverage has mostly been lame, which is a shame because the House report is festooned with nauseating nuggets. For instance, Trump was nice to China, despite its human rights abuses and financial ties to nuke-building North Korea, because one of the biggest office tenants in Trump Tower was a major Chinese bank. The report says: “No other president had ever come close before to trying a rip-off like this simply based on vacuuming up foreign government money, which was the cardinal presidential offense and betrayal in the eyes of the Founders – an offense and betrayal made all the more striking here by the offender’s repeated laughable proclamations of ‘America First!'”
The problem, from a media standpoint, is that Trump’s personal profiteering isn’t “new,” in the sense that we’ve “always known” he’d make it a priority to line his own pockets. Even before he was inaugurated in January 2017, there was open talk that he’d defy the Constitution – so much so that, in late 2016, I wrote in a column that “we are suddenly poised on the precipice of an unconstitutional kleptocracy.”
I also recall that CNN’s Jake Tapper raised the emoluments issue with Reince Priebus, Trump’s incoming chief of staff: “Is it seriously the position of the Trump transition team that this is not a huge cauldron of potential conflicts of interest?” Priebus replied: “We will comply with all of those laws and we will have our White House counsel review all of these things.” His pledge was predictably worthless and he was gone within six months anyway.
Now we need to look ahead. The House report urges Congress to crack down on those abuses, to require that future presidents “disclose to Congress their receipt of any foreign emoluments,” and disclose (borrowing a quote from the Constitution) all foreign financial entanglements “of any kind whatever.” But since the House Republican majority is a wholly owned Trump subsidiary, you’re more likely to see unicorns gamboling on the White House lawn before emolument reforms are enacted.
No wonder the coverage of this report has been anemic; no wonder the few who know about it are benumbed. I get it, despair can be exhausting. But need I even suggest how much profiteering will take place if the criminal defendant is elected in November? That prospect alone should wake us up.