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Last week, a delegation of business leaders from Switzerland visited the Oval Office to meet with President Trump. They bore gifts. The businessmen gave Trump an engraved gold bar worth more than $130,000, as well as a Rolex desk clock. Trump, labeling the meeting a “job well done,” agreed to cut tariffs on Swiss imports from 39 percent to 15 percent.
A year ago, I warned that a move to fund the government through tariffs would bring about a new era of crony capitalism. We are now neck-deep in the muck. It all resembles the Gilded Age, the era of gaudy corruption in the late 1800s — this time, with gold bars piling up on the Resolute Desk.
Trump’s net worth has grown by $3 billion since he took office. His family businesses are raking in millions in the crypto industry, luxury real estate, and investment deals in the Middle East. The Trump Organization is reported to be in talks with Saudi Arabia on a deal that could bring the Trump brand to a government-owned luxury real estate development, flying in the face of the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause. Meanwhile, Trump hosted Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House today.
Brazen grifting now pervades the entire federal government.
The bill to end the government shutdown included a provision quietly inserted at the last minute that allows senators to sue for $500,000 or more if their phone records were investigated without notice. That could hand millions of taxpayer dollars to eight senators whose phone records were subpoenaed in Jack Smith’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Even those who voted for the bill are now calling for its reversal. It’s a rare moment of “bipartisan outrage,” as Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) put it.
Indeed, the bill was stuffed with language sought by lobbyists. One provision guts food safety rules, including regulations designed to prevent contamination and illnesses at farms and restaurants. Food industry lobbyists spent millions in the last election cycle to promote deregulation. Among the bipartisan beneficiaries: the campaigns of Sens. Tim Kaine (D-VA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Jacky Rosen (D-NV), who were among the seven Democrats who voted for the funding bill.
All this underscores what happens when public service becomes a means for private plunder. Macroeconomic consequences loom. The crypto industry flooded Congress with cash and won backing from the federal government; now, as David Frum argues in The Atlantic, crypto’s wildly gyrating, vaporous values may pose a systemic risk.
If a crash comes, will voters connect the dots? Throughout history, reform follows scandal — but not always.
Meaningful change requires public awareness. Moral condemnation and aesthetic disdain are not enough. Nor is an abstract commitment to the rule of law. Rather, citizens must understand with specific clarity how an unfair system gives them the shaft.
The Gilded Age produced, first, the revolt of the Populists. Largely rural, that impulse soon curdled into nativism and bigotry.
But then came the Progressive Era, a more lasting and significant response to the Gilded Age. A movement for change swept every level of government. Both parties vied for the mantle of reform. Americans of the early 20th century saw that the answer to corruption was not just protest but rebuilding institutions and forging a modern government.
Among other things, reformers won constitutional amendments establishing that U.S. senators would be chosen directly by voters, not legislatures. (State legislators often chose senators who doubled as industry representatives: Montana’s senators represented copper, Pennsylvania’s steel, New York’s Wall Street.) Women won the right to vote. The Constitution was also amended to replace the corruption-riddled tariff regime with the income tax.
After he became president, Theodore Roosevelt said, somewhat hyperbolically, “Sooner or later, unless there is a readjustment, there will come a riotous, wicked, murderous day of atonement.”
We hopefully remain far from that. Reform is achievable. Change and redemption require sustained citizen engagement, political creativity, and leaders willing to mix it up.
