Trump Re-Election Risks American Kleptocracy
Trump Re-Election Risks American Kleptocracy
Donald Trump's vulnerable financial situation, coupled with his plans for an Orbán-style purge of civil servants, creates a recipe for self-enrichment, cronyism, and foreign influence peddling.
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Donald Trump approaches the 2024 election in a precarious financial situation.
Trump owes over half a billion dollars in civil judgments for business fraud, sexual abuse, and defamation. He has spent over $100 million on legal bills related to his civil and criminal proceedings, amounting to $90k a day, none of which has been paid with his own money. He’s leaning on donor money from his Save America PAC and soon the RNC to fund his legal bills. He owns what is essentially a meme stock that is losing billions in value.
As his financial and criminal liabilities mount, Trump is growing increasingly desperate. This is the exact starting point from which corrupt governments are born. Trump is already transactional by nature. But now, when money is increasingly important to him, a second term would present a unique opportunity for Trump to pursue unmitigated self-enrichment and for foreign governments to exploit his vulnerability.
If you think Trump’s first term was a nightmare of corruption, his second term is looking set to be a full-blown kleptocracy
This doesn’t get talked about enough: the first Trump term was a walking constitutional Emoluments Clause violation, with foreign governments seeking to fill Trump’s pockets to garner favorable treatment, no matter the foreign policy implications. Trump made $160 million from foreign countries while in office, according to a CREW investigation.
A second Trump term would bring more of this corruption but ramped up to the next level. With Donald Trump’s planned purging of tens of thousands of civil servants, we can expect Trump and his administration to issue government contracts to businesses with ties to Trump and his allies while punishing his political targets.
In a December 2023 piece in The Atlantic, Franklin Foer expertly drew parallels between Trump’s plans for his second term with Hungary’s far-right authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s regime. Orbán replaced civil servants with loyalists, creating a kleptocratic “Mafia state.” This system was made to reward Orbán’s allies and punish his enemies. From Foer’s incisive article:
“When he finally won consolidated control of the government in 2010, he purged the nation’s civil service—a ‘bloodless liquidation’… In place of professionals and experts, Orbán installed party loyalists. This wasn’t a superficial shuffling of his cabinet, but a comprehensive remaking of the nation’s public sphere…
The party loyalists Orbán appointed became the capos of his crime family. Their job was to reward its friends (by sharing the spoils of government contracts) and to punish its vocal critics (with tax audits and denial of employment).”
This is the very same approach that is planned for a potential second Trump term in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and Donald Trump’s Agenda 47.
As I’ve written about extensively, Donald Trump plans to implement Schedule F, an executive order that reclassifies tens of thousands of federal workers as “at-will” employees, making them easier to fire for no cause. The plan, as outlined by Trump and Project 2025, is to immediately purge and replace as many as 54,000 civil servants with Republican loyalists. Project 2025 has already begun screening, training, and creating a database of thousands of GOP loyalists, so they’ll be ready on day one to begin implementing Trump’s extremist agenda - which includes indicting Trump’s political targets.
It’s pretty clear Trump and his allies are emulating Orbán, and they’re not being subtle about it.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts explicitly claimed that Orbán is “the model” for “conservative statecraft.” Donald Trump has also repeatedly praised Orbán. In a January rally, Trump told a crowd of rallygoers: “There’s a great man, a great leader, in Europe. Viktor Orbán. He’s the prime minister of Hungary. He’s a very great leader, very strong man. Some people don’t like him because he’s too strong. It’s nice to have a strongman running your country.” Trump is priming his supporters for an Orbán-style administration.
Once Trump has an army of loyalists running the federal government, foreign governments will see an opening for influence. And Trump’s newest company provides the perfect way to do that.
Trump’s Truth Social stock (Trump Media & Technology Group) adds another mechanism through which Trump can unethically enrich himself while in office. The stock, which has already lost billions in value since debuting on the Nasdaq due to mounting losses and minimal revenue, provides a new vehicle for those who want to curry favor with Trump.
CNBC’s Jim Cramer pointed out this week how this stock can be used as a “backdoor” method to fund Trump’s campaign:
“Well, I think that what people are using it as, some as a keepsake, and I think some of them are using it to fund, another way to fund a campaign that — you buy some of that, maybe you make it so that there’s more money for the campaign. Just an easier way than donating… It’s a backdoor — backdoor campaign finance…”
Trump is restricted contractually from divesting from the company for another 6 months, but that could change with a Board decision.
We can surely expect efforts on the part of those affiliated with foreign governments to buy shares in Trump’s company in an effort to cozy up to him.
In a piece this week in her Substack newsletter,
highlighted the risk of foreign investments in Trump’s stock:“While FEC laws prohibit foreign nationals from contributing directly to political campaigns, these laws do not apply to the purchase of publicly traded stocks.
As a result, foreign governments could potentially buy a significant amount of Truth Social stock, thereby gaining a financial stake in the platform and essentially putting Donald in the position of owing them a favor. More directly, massive amounts of cash funneled to Donald from the sale of shares gives him the opportunity to divert large amounts of cash into his cash-starved campaign.”
There have already been some questionable characters involved in the company. Today, The Guardian reported that Trump’s company was kept afloat in 2022 by emergency loans from Russian-American Anton Postolnikov, the nephew of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ally Aleksandr Smirnov. Postolnikov has been under investigation in a federal insider trading and money laundering probe.
Trump’s transactional view of foreign policy makes this a particularly dangerous proposition. See how the Trump Administration approached Saudi Arabia and how Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner subsequently received $2 billion from Saudia Arabia to his private equity firm.
One of Trump’s core lies to his base is that he’s beholden to no one. But if you follow the money, it’s clear all you need to get on Trump’s good side is to cut him a check.
Do Trump voters really believe that he’ll spend his presidency helping anyone but himself, his cronies, and his kleptocratic foreign allies?
This aspect of Trump’s potential return to the presidency needs to be highlighted more often in the press. Americans need to be informed about the corruption that could be imminently unleashed if they make the wrong choice this November.
