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Trump's Laying the Groundwork For Unfettered Corruption [1]
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Date: 2025-01-28
Some crimes are more complicated than others.
If you want to steal a bag of potato chips from a convenience store that’s probably pretty simple. If you want to rob the store that might take a little more thinking. If you want to rob a bank that’s going to take more planning, and if you want to rob Fort Knox that’s a whole other animal.
If you want to establish the most corrupt presidential administration in history, that’s going to take at least a few steps, too. And I hate to tell you but four-time indicted, twice impeached, sexual assaulter, tax fraudster, insurrectionist inspirer, wannabe fascist dictator, convicted felon, President Donald Trump is already working on it.
I’m no expert in these things, but from here it appears Trump is set on doing his dirty work at four levels: The rank-and-file, the investigators, the law, and the courts.
He’s setting the stage for years of corruption while many folks get overwhelmed by his current onslaught of executive orders and immigration raids. We can’t let that happen.
So, let’s take a look at what he’s doing from the bottom up.
The Rank-and-File
Trump’s intention to replace thousands of career government workers with loyalists has been well-documented. This was among the many plans developed under Project 2025 which Trump – no surprise here – dismissed during the campaign but is embracing now that he’s in office.
The Associated Press reported that “Job-seekers hoping to join the new Trump administration are facing a series of intense loyalty tests, with White House screening teams fanning out to government agencies to check for ‘Make America Great Again’ bona fides and carefully parsing applicants’ politics and social media posts.”
Those seeking jobs have been told they will have to prove their “enthusiasm” to enact Trump’s agenda and have been asked when their moment of “MAGA revelation” occurred, the AP reported.
Interrogators want to know things like which candidate someone voted for in the election, their political contributions, and whether they made social media posts that could be considered incriminating by Trump’s team.
“The Trump administration’s conduct and imposition of a political litmus or loyalty test, it betrays the oath that the president took … to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution,” Donald K. Sherman, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group, told the AP. “What this suggests to me is that demonstrating loyalty is as important or more important than merit.”
Sherman is absolutely right. Who’s the first line of defense against government corruption? The career employees who work through both Republican and Democratic administrations. Fill those ranks with loyalists and we lose our whistleblowers who are critical to policing what’s going on in our government.
A lot of shit is going to happen that we’re probably not going to hear about because Trump’s handpicked workforce will try to make sure that we don’t. Even what does leak out has a few more roadblocks to go through, starting with the next level of our now deteriorating system of accountability.
The Watchdogs
Trump fired more than a dozen independent inspectors general at various federal agencies last week.
A report by Reuters explained that the president is “eliminating a critical oversight component and clearing the way to replace them with loyalists.” Interestingly, most of them were appointees from Trump’s first term.
Axios reported that those axed include IGs from the departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Energy, Commerce, and Agriculture, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Federal law says the firings require the president to give both houses of Congress reasons for dismissals 30 days in advance. Even so, it’ll probably just take Trump longer to get what he wants, since Republicans in Congress have been rolling over faster than a hungry dog hoping for a treat.
Patrick Reis. Senior politics, policy, and ideas editor at Vos, wrote this on his newsletter, The Logoff:
“Inspectors general are a thorn in the side of administrations, as they often uncover practices that are embarrassing (or worse) to the president and his appointees. But they are a necessary check on the abuse of power, as their broad oversight authority -- and, critically, their independence -- helps them reveal errors and malfeasance. In a massive government moving around trillions of dollars, that’s critical, as there’s plenty of potential for waste and plenty of incentives for corruption.”
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that those are just the kind of folks Trump and his team of grifters would like to do without. Sen. Elizabeth Warren posted on social media that “President Trump is dismantling checks on his power and paving the way for widespread corruption.”
Of course he is.
But the coverup isn’t stopping there. Trump’s plan to weaponize our top law enforcement agency to go after his perceive enemies has been well-documented, but he’s got other plans for it also – to keep him and his buddies unaccountable for their own actions.
The Department of Justice
The New York Times reported on “The frenetic speed and scale of leadership changes” the Trump administration has made at the Justice Department.
The Times summarizes: “Senior officials handling national security and public corruption at the department have been transferred to areas far outside their expertise, as have high-ranking employees overseeing environmental, antitrust, and criminal cases. Top officials overseeing the immigration court system were outright fired, as were more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on the two federal criminal investigations into Mr. Trump.”
Notice where he’s hitting: national security (think Russia), public corruption (no doubt), environmental (you go fossil fuel industry), antitrust (the rich get richer), criminal (Trump’s a convicted felon), and immigration (mass deportations now).
The Times called this “sloughing off decades of apolitical expertise to new assignments widely seen in the building as punishments likely to result in resignations.”
You can read the Times story thorough and disturbing account here.
And just wait if Trump is able to get his choice for FBI director Kash Patel in place. He’s already got the new attorney general Pam Bondi in his pocket. Things are going to get ugly.
But we always have the courts to protect us. Right?
The Courts
So far, we’ve talked about the grunt work of protecting Trump and his criminal gang. The cornerstone of this effort is our historically corrupt U.S. Supreme Court, which has ruled that the president can’t be charged for any of his actions that he can fit under the category of his official duties.
Add to that his power to pardon anybody he wants and there’ll be no rule of law concerning our criminal president. He can do what he wants and hand a get-out-of-jail free card to anyone who does his bidding.
Throw in the roster of Trump-appointed judges willing to bend the law for the president and his friends – I’m looking at you Aileen Cannon – and you’ve got a pretty sad and dangerous state of affairs.
***
Let’s not sugarcoat this. We’re screwed.
Trump can and will put all of these personal safeguards in place. I don’t know how he can be stopped short of impeachment for abuse of power, and the Republicans are never going to let that happen. Maybe some legal action will work.
Obviously, the midterm elections in 2026 offer an opportunity to change which party holds power in Congress, followed by the 2028 presidential election. We’ll see how that goes.
We’re looking at an unprecedented level of corruption. The goal here has been to explain at least one person’s view of how Trump is going about his business. Personally, I find it terrifying. Unfortunately, not enough people had the foresight to see this coming and voted for the most corrupt and unfit president in history to return to office. Or maybe some of them just didn’t care.
For those who do, will there be other fronts in this battle? Maybe. I hope so. But even if they exist, will Democrats and those who value the rule of law in our country and some level of integrity in our government figure out and execute successful means to counter what’s happening now? You’re talking about the Democrats, remember.
For now, I’ll steal a line the late Sen. John McCain used to say: “It’s always darkest before it turns pitch black.”
That said, we better turn on some lights pretty damn soon.
***
Thank you for reading my post. You can see my other writings on my blog: Musings of a Nobody. Please share and subscribe for free via email on its home page.
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