Elect a felon, expect crime

The conman in chief remakes the government in his own image.

Paul Waldman

In almost every way imaginable, Donald Trump’s second term is a purer expression of his personality and preferences than his first term was. 

Not only is he far less constrained — by the courts, by the law, by Congress, or by aides who might suffer an unfortunate attack of conscience — he has created a system in which his desires and predilections are translated into policy far more smoothly than before.

So it should not be surprising that a man who built a career on scams, cons, grifts, and swindles has fundamentally reoriented the US government’s approach to corruption. 

It isn’t just that Trump has ramped up his own personal self-dealing (though he most certainly has), or that his administration is tolerant of conflicts of interest in other officials (though it is). Just as important, Trump is enacting a sweeping set of policy changes that will make it more likely that Americans will themselves be the victims of all kinds of scams.

This is less a single strategy than the accumulation of many policy decisions pushing in the same direction: to make America a place where citizens can no longer expect that the government will be there to protect them when they’re being taken advantage of.

There are few better examples than the demise of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), one of the key progressive achievements of recent years. Arising out of the 2008 financial crash, it was based on a simple premise: Americans ought to be protected from financial scams and exploitation. 

And it was extraordinarily successful: According to the Bureau’s data (which for some reason the Trump administration hasn’t gotten around to removing from the web), its actions have returned over $21 billion to consumers and imposed billions in fines on wrongdoers. 

Just as important, it sent a message to anyone contemplating financial exploitation of consumers that there is an agency that will aggressively investigate illegal activity, and there will be consequences for those who break the law.

So when Trump took office, he sought to shut the CFPB down. Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, the dark lord of the effort to dismantle the government, told its employees to stay home and “stand down from performing any work task.” 

Under its new management, the agency then began dropping lawsuits it had brought against banks, mortgage companies, car dealers, and others it had found were defrauding or mistreating customers. The administration is hoping to fire 1,500 of the agency’s 1,700 employees (that move has been temporarily halted by a judge).

Doing their part, congressional Republicans sought to eliminate the agency entirely in their budget bill. Fortunately, that provision was struck down by the parliamentarian as being inconsistent with the rules of budget reconciliation. Nevertheless, the CFPB has all but ceased to function, which means that the kind of financial abuse it was established to prevent will likely go unpunished.

You’re on your own

The administration is taking a similar approach in area after area, sending a clear message to consumers that you’re on your own, and a message to those who exploit them that they’re free to do pretty much whatever they like.

Trump’s attempts to fire Democrat-appointed members of independent commissions have been described mostly as an effort to consolidate power, which is true, but those moves also mean removing restraints on scams and abuse. 

In other words, he is dismantling the government’s ability to rectify exploitation based on power imbalances. If he succeeds, the Consumer Product Safety Commission will do far less to protect consumers, the National Labor Relations Board will cease protecting workers, and the Merit Systems Protection Board will no longer protect government employees.

If the Department of Education is dismantled, it will no longer police the for-profit colleges that saddled millions with crushing debt and useless degrees (or no degrees at all). With long-awaited reforms at the Internal Revenue Service being quickly reversed — the administration is planning to cut its workforce in half — tax cheats know that they stand a good chance of getting away with their crimes. 

At times it almost seems as though administration officials are searching frantically for anything the federal government does that might be useful or helpful to regular people, and quashing it. They’re even eliminating the Energy Star program, which does nothing but inform consumers about which appliances are energy efficient, saving them tens of billions of dollars in utility costs every year.

There may be no area with more reckless dismantling going on than finance, where the system of regulation and law enforcement now reflects Trump’s personal views. He himself was repeatedly investigated by the federal government for various financial misdeeds, and he obviously believes that finance is and ought to be an arena where rules are for suckers and succeeding at the con game just means you’re smart.

To understand how and why, Trump’s reversal on the crypto industry is the key piece of context. In years past he had described crypto as “a scam,” but at some point he had a realization: If crypto is a scam, the scammer-in-chief surely ought to be in on it. 

The then-unprecedented corruption of Trump’s first term pales in comparison to what his family is now doing, building a crypto empire — stablecoins, meme coins, bitcoin mining — with ample opportunities for criminals, foreign governments, or anyone else who might want something from the president to put money right in his pocket.

And since crypto is becoming so central to his own wealth, Trump very much wants to ensure that the industry is regulated as little as possible, if at all. To that end, his Justice Department disbanded its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team and told prosecutors to stop investigating certain kinds of crypto crimes. 

Under the leadership of Paul Atkins, the crypto advocate Trump made chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency has dropped a dozen pending enforcement actions against crypto firms for various kinds of alleged violations, including some involving major donors to Trump. 

Few were happier about the policy about-face than Justin Sun, the Chinese-born crypto billionaire who was charged by the SEC in 2023 with various forms of fraud. After Sun bought $75 million in crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial, a firm controlled by the Trump family, the SEC halted the investigation and asked a judge to set the case aside.

As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, enforcement of laws against all kinds of white-collar crime is atrophying and “in some cases, the administration is effectively redefining what business conduct constitutes a crime.”

It’s only getting started

It can be a shock to remind oneself that we’re still less than six months into Trump’s term, so when it comes to changing the government’s position on scams and cons, he may just be getting started. Though most people probably weren’t aware of it, the Biden administration amassed an impressive record of regulation aimed at preventing consumers from being misled and manipulated — all of which could be vulnerable to the current administration’s regulatory rollback.

For example, the FTC under Biden created a “click-to-cancel” rule, which requires companies to make it no more difficult to cancel a subscription or a service than it is to sign up in the first place; if you’ve ever tried to cancel a gym membership, you know why this was necessary. 

But the Trump administration has delayed implementation of the rule, and it’s unclear as of yet whether they’ll try to kill it entirely. Will they reverse the regulation cracking down on junk fees in hotels and concert tickets, or the one banning fake online reviews? They certainly might.

Why, one might ask, would Donald Trump want Americans to live in Scamville? The answer is that it’s the place that made him, where he thrived by preying on those with less money and power than he had. 

When he sees that America has a law that bans our companies from paying bribes overseas, he recoils in disgust and tells the Justice Department to stop enforcing it; after all, that’s just how things work. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.

Corruption and scams are not the same thing, but they are close cousins. They add a note of tension and uncertainty to life — the knowledge that rules are not necessarily followed, fair treatment is not the default, and we’re more vulnerable than we ought to be. All of which is fine with Trump and the administration he leads. 

America ought to be a place where everyone is expected to act with integrity and the government protects people from abuse and exploitation. But in the phrase the Trump administration uses so often, that would be “not consistent with the president’s priorities.”

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