This is the most overt corruption to date
Walter Shaub is livid about the Doral crime. He’s also informative – he says the Doral thing is a whole new level. I thought that in terms of the extreme blatancy and defiance of boundaries, but he says more than that. I’ll just go way back early yesterday and quote the hell out of him.
Agents of chaos want you to be cynical about democracy and believe public servants are, were and always will be corrupt. If that’s true, nothing matters. The life of Elijah Cummings and last night’s #Sammies2019 tell a different story. Democracy requires belief in what can be.
The summit will be held in June, when Miami is hot and Doral is usually empty. In 2017, only 38% of Doral’s rooms were occupied in June. Only August (31%) was slower. Now — b/c @realdonaldtrump has awarded the summit to himself — it will be full.
The “Miami is hot” bit matters – people don’t want to go to Florida in summer. Trump is forcing heads of state and everyone who accompanies them to go to a bad nasty place to make money for himself.
This is the most overt corruption to date. How any Senator could fail to object to this is beyond me. There’s no universe in which anyone could believe that, in a country as big as ours, the selection of Trump’s resort was anything but a product of the worst kind of corruption.
Somebody please ask the White House what agency ran this procurement. The White House does not have a procurement team that could run this, and it definitely does not have an appropriation to use for the event.
This is so overtly corrupt that it can’t be viewed as anything but a loyalty test for Senators. If they are corrupt enough to look the other way, Trump will know he can do anything. In that case, he will do everything.
Shaub says CREW filed an investigation request with the State Department on the Doral issue a month ago and haven’t heard anything. That’s not a good sign.
In case it’s not clear from my freaking out, this G-7 thing is an escalation. It may look from the outside like it’s been corruption all along—because it has been—but participating in a contract award to yourself is different by orders of magnitude. This is a red line crossed.
Good to know. Bad to know, but good to know.
I’d like you to imagine a conflict of interest prosecution in which a defense attorney’s closing argument is based on the things Mick Mulvaney said in defense of awarding the G7 contract to Doral. That attorney would be disbarred. The arguments are ridiculous.
The President of the United States participated in the award of a contract to himself. Are there Senators who find that acceptable? Are you prepared to say all future Presidents can award themselves contracts? Why do we even have an @OfficeGovEthics if the Senate will allow this?
We now live in a country where government employees like Mick Mulvaney can violate the ethical principle prohibiting misuse of position for private gain without official rebuke. The ethics program died yesterday.
So…there it is. If they let him get away with this everything will get even worse.
It’s not as though this will only be an issue for Trump’s presidency. Sure, maybe he’ll be the only president who enters office owning hotels and resorts. But what’s to stop future presidents from “buying” (at a special LOW LOW price) an interest in a hotel chain and then directing all U.S. government business (and that of all foreign governments looking to curry favor) to that company?
Or buying a defense contractor?
Meanwhile Never-Trump Republicans (such as Tom Nichols) are caterwauling their heads off that Democrats can, should, and must not nominate Elizabeth Warren because she’s ‘too liberal’ to unseat the naked criminal, as though Trump will not viciously tear down any nominee with schoolyard insults and obviously fabricated slanders, and as though the media will not dutifully parrot these and ask the Dem nominee earnestly to address whichever manufactured pseudo-scandals the Republican fever swamp belches out, meanwhile Trump will just continue openly flouting the law and enriching himself and daring anyone to do anything about it and threatening to rip the nation asunder from within if anyone tries.
It may even be true. The Democrats have to run a razor-lined tightrope over a shark tank without spilling a drop of blood, while the Republicans get to publicly shit themselves and say the quiet parts out loud, and the Republicans will probably win.
I am reminded of a question put to Jon Stewart on the eve of Obama’s election, wherein he was supposed to be rooting for Republicans to win in order to secure his job as a farcical newsman. Apart from rolling his eyes at the implication that his personal fortunes trump the national and global interest, he said (of the Bush Administration, which had spent two terms flagrantly breaking the law and killing hundreds of thousands of people) that “it’d be hard to top this group”.
I do believe that that group has been topped.
I was listening on the radio once to an interview with the late and great Norman Mailer, author of ‘The Naked and the Dead.’ He made a rather interesting observation. He said that in his opinion, the default political state or condition of human society was fascism.
I would argue that this is true for much of the present world, as I think just for starters that Islam wherever dominant has created a mild form of ‘entry-level’ fascism. But more generally, our default condition would appear to be feudalism, and that wherever it has been overthrown, it starts as if naturally to reappear, with all its specially priviledged and entitled levels of hierarchy.
Trump as I see it is another, more modern (but not too far so) version of the French King Louis XVI, actively working to create his own form of Ancien Regime in America. What he sees as normal, and the natural state of affairs, is to an increasing number of people not only in America but around the democratic world, a total and scarcely-to-be-believed outrage.
Somewhat (but not entirely) off topic, Heather Cox Richardson has been giving invaluable summaries of each day’s events on Facebook.
Thank you; bookmarked. Historians rule!