This is an adapted excerpt from the July 1 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
America’s 250th birthday is nearing, a heat wave is gripping much of the country, the price of gas is still hovering around $4 a gallon and Donald Trump is … playing with his favorite new toy.
On Wednesday, the president took a maiden voyage on his new Air Force One. You know, the 747 jet he accepted from the Qatari government, in open violation of the Constitution.
While Trump has claimed the plane was a free “gift,” it’s worth noting reporting that suggests it may have cost the U.S. government as much as $934 million to make the foreign-owned jet suitable for presidential travel — and that it is not for future presidents to use. According to Trump, when he leaves office in 2029, the jet is planned to be transferred to the foundation overseeing his future presidential library.
The reality is, Trump doesn’t care how any of this looks.
Also, by definition, it was not a gift: CNN reported at the time that Trump asked Qatar for the plane.
And, as we just learned from “Regime Change,” the new book on Trump’s second term by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, at some point after Qatar agreed to give Trump the plane, “It was announced that the aircraft would be a gift, an idea that a senior official would say was ‘generated at the POTUS level.’”
At this point, Trump’s corruption is so frequent and brazen that he is shoving our faces in it.
I’m not just talking about his vanity projects like the ballroom, the Reflecting Pool, the arch, the passport and the restoration of Washington’s fountains — even though a new Washington Post analysis finds that for the past three months, Trump has talked about those projects more than he has talked about healthcare and wages. That stuff is just the tip of the iceberg.
On Tuesday, Trump released nearly a thousand pages of new financial disclosure forms, showing that Trump’s reported income soared to more than $2.2 billion last year, as he took in more than $1.4 billion from crypto and digital schemes alone.
In fact, according to a Reuters investigation, Trump and his sons “have added at least $2.3 billion to the family fortune from their main crypto ventures, while the investors they’ve wooed” have lost a near-identical amount.
In response, a White House spokesperson told Reuters, “All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”
But the reality is, Trump doesn’t care how any of this looks. In an interview with The New York Times earlier this year about his sons’ many business dealings, he said, “I prohibited them from doing business in my first term, and I got absolutely no credit for it … I didn’t have to do that. And it’s really unfair to them.”
“I found out that nobody cared, and I’m allowed to,” Trump added.
That was back in January, and now, over the weekend, the Times reported on a $1 billion mining deal that Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick closed with Kazakhstan, in which contracts are going to businesses with ties to both men’s sons.
In fact, the Times found, the Trump and Lutnick families “have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project.” (The White House and the Commerce Department reject any suggestion that the Trump administration was improperly mixing government actions with family business.)
On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that the president’s beloved White House ballroom was being built under a secret $500 million no-bid contract, similar to the ones the administration doled out for the botched reflecting pool job.
White House officials defended the move and said “that they could award the no-bid contract” by routing it through the Executive Residence, which “is not bound by competitive bidding requirements.”
Also on Tuesday, The Atlantic reported on a new White House effort to grant pardons that are tied to the 250th birthday celebrations, setting off a bidding war for clemency. One prominent white-collar defense attorney told the magazine, “It is general knowledge in our practice that for $2 million, you can have a pardon. The clients come to us and tell us, I’ve been told I need to go hire this specific person, and [then] I will get a pardon.”
Suck it up; this is what a great businessman looks like — that’s the White House’s message to Americans who are struggling in their daily lives.
This is the whole game for Trump now. As those reporters, Haberman and Swan, suggest in “Regime Change,” U.S. policy is dictated by whoever appeals most directly to the president and his vanity.
“Now a CEO could simply ask for something and it was granted,” they write. He would reportedly dictate exact dollar figures to extract from each CEO and, Haberman and Swan report, “within days, millions of dollars, and then tens and hundreds of millions, were pouring into Trump’s various fundraising accounts.”
But according to the White House, all of this is what Trump voters wanted. When White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly was asked about the Kazakhstan deal on Fox News, she said this is “why Americans elected this president to office.”
“Because he’s an outsider who was tremendously successful in business. Built the New York City skyline. And that’s what Americans wanted. They wanted a businessman in office,” she said.
Suck it up, this is what a great businessman looks like — that’s the White House’s message to Americans who are struggling in their daily lives and looking up at this guy and his family swimming like Scrooge McDuck in a sea of corruption and greed that is unprecedented in American history.
Allison Detzel contributed.
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