Trump’s Self-Serving Business Deals Have Prostituted the Office of the President
Paul Craig Roberts
 As far as I can tell, Donald Trump is the first American president in my lifetime to be actively engaged in business while serving as President of the United States. I have no memory of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, or George W. Bush starting and running businesses while occupying the Oval Office. It is true that Lincoln was a known agent of the railroads and that Grant’s administration was corrupt, as other 19th-century administrations might have been when the creation of a new nation offered so much to plunder to those with power.
I doubt presidents and their administrations can avoid doing favors for campaign donors and friends, and these favors little doubt bring gratuities when the president and his appointees are out of office. Clinton and Biden were perhaps the first truly corrupt American presidents in my lifetime. It was perhaps Clinton who “legitimized” selling influence. This practice took off in the Biden regime as so much evidence shows. The practice has been legally legitimized by the failure of the Trump regime to prosecute despite the evidence on Hunter Biden’s laptop, evidence we no longer hear about.
As President Trump has seemingly escalated the practice of using the Oval Office for personal enrichment, prosecuting past offenders would be self-indicting. We can expect Biden and his son to walk free.
Trump confronts us with a broader issue. A number of articles have pointed out that Trump is using his presidency to enrich himself and his family. For example, an article in The New Yorker reports that Trump has invested in companies that are competing for federal government permits and funding, has filed personal multi-billion dollar lawsuits against banks that are regulated by the Trump regime, which encourages the banks to settle, leases his name to resort hotels and golf courses, and suggests that Trump sold pardons, the net result being an increase in Trump’s net worth of $4 billion, perhaps making Trump a billionaire for the first time. See this.
The Rolling Stone reports an amazing rise in the net worth of Trump’s sons:.
In my time in Washington a president and his appointees who possessed wealth of any consequence had to put his assets into a blind trust from which he would receive an annual report whether his holdings had risen or fallen in value. Treasury Secretary Don Regan, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, used to tell us jokingly in meetings that he judged how well we were doing by whether his assets were rising or declining.
Trump doesn’t seem to have a blind trust as his businesses are run by his sons. Moreover, Trump’s sons’ net worth has also gone up substantially.
It has long been the practice of government officials in Latin America, Africa, and countries in the Middle East and Asia to personally profit by having control of the government. This control is the basic reason for seeking public office, not some liberal garbage about “serving the people.”
Trump has brought this motivation into America as the principal purpose of attaining public office. Entire administrations will now be organized around money-making and becoming wealthy. Don’t think that Democrats will be any different. Clinton and Biden paved the way.
When China’s President Xi told Trump in their recent meeting that America was a “declining power,” Xi put his finger on the consequence of the collapse of moral principle in the American government. A sense of propriety no longer exists among those in government today.
Throughout the Western World, the rule is that unless principle or some imitation of it is profitable, abandon it.
Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.
He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.
In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.
Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.
Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.
Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.
He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
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