Trump Americanizes Putin-style corruption

Trump's thuggery will lead us to a very dark place

Sabrina Haake

Proving that a lying clock tells the truth twice a day, JD Vance recently quipped that politics have shifted so much that “if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story.” Vance was unwittingly acknowledging his own handiwork as he and his intellectually stunted boss flex Steve Bannon’s flood the zone strategy: throw crap on the wall, throw it often and fast, until the American public is too overwhelmed to pay attention.

It’s working. Eighteen months into this nightmare regime, as one corrupt move follows the next, Americans are turning away. One study found that 65% of Americans across political affiliation and age groups are consuming less news due to information overload and fatigue. It’s exactly what a corrupt administration wants.

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As Trump awards billions in no-bid federal contracts to his political donors, from the no bid multi-million dollar Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool debacle, to hundreds of millions to build a ballroom, to multi-billion dollar no bid contracts to rape and pillage our national parks, his political donors are reaping unprecedented windfall rewards.

His sons aren’t doing too poorly either. After Republicans blew a gasket over Hunter Biden serving on a corporate board, the Trump boys have cashed in big time with an Air Force contract to buy interceptor drones from Don Jr. and Eric (who have no experience in the drones business), Don Jr.’s ownership stake in a mining project that just secured $1.6 billion in government backing (ditto), and a $620 million Pentagon loan for Don Jr.’s venture capital firm. Trump’s crypto scams have caused investors to lose up to $3.8 billion while the Trumps pocketed up to $2.3 billion across the same crypto projects. Now Trump wants to personally profit from “selling” early internet access to his social media posts, which will facilitate large scale insider trading.

Meanwhile, as wealthy individuals spend millions to secure presidential pardons, and Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for his supporters refuses to die, the Department of the Treasury just announced that it is destroying its anti-corruption database, the federal registry of shell-company ownership. It plans to destroy all the data it has already collected, to prevent future FBIs, future DOJs, and future local police departments from ever seeing the incriminating data. A true crime novelist couldn’t write this stuff as fast as it’s happening.

Money is one thing, national parks are another

One piece of corruption that appears to be getting through to the public involves the Big Bend National Park in Texas. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security fast-tracked multibillion-dollar, no bid contracts to erect a nonsensical steel barrier wall along parts of the Rio Grande River where cliffs and canyons already serve as natural border barriers of up to 1,500 feet. The administration waived all standard financial transparency, competitive bidding laws, and environmental reviews so that the massive no-bid contracts would go to long time Trump donors.

Robbing the American taxpayers of billions most people can’t comprehend is one thing, robbing them of their national parks is another. Even Republicans in Texas are pushing back. Calling it a “crazed road-building spree,” and an unnecessary “boondoggle,” given the region’s “God-given barriers,” a bipartisan furor has erupted. James Talarico, running for U.S. senate, calls it Trump’s “monument to corruption” that “no Texan asked for.”

When I discussed the issue on Thom Hartmann’s show earlier this week (it’s about 10 minutes, you can watch it here), Hartmann characteristically pulled the camera back to widen the perspective. He noted that the award of massive no bid contracts to donors— spending billions for unnecessary projects just to reward them—was the same modus operandi of despotic regimes like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. As Hartmann put it, this conduct is exactly how Orban and Putin “cement loyalty with their oligarchs.” It’s also why Republicans in Congress won’t quit Trump: he’s brazenly corrupt, while the spoils spill over into their donors’ hands as well.

Corruption speaks with one accent

In Russia, when communism fell, rapid privatization—which Project 2025 is pushing for government services— allowed crooked Russian oligarchs (“apparatchiks”) to divvy up Russian industry and national resources. I experienced the ruthlessness first hand, and wrote about it last year.

Before I became a 1^st A trial lawyer, I was general counsel to a Chicago beverage maker, negotiating contracts and foreign licensing agreements. My client’s biggest customer was Russian, and they tried to misappropriate my client’s world famous trademark. When I was in Moscow litigating the matter, two things happened: The government representative from what is now called Rospatent (Russia’s Patent and Trademark Bureau) said, point blank and on the record, that my client was at a legal disadvantage because of U.S. prohibitions against bribing government officials. My adversary had greased government palms as a routine procedural matter.

The other thing that happened was worse. An American businessman staying in my hotel was murdered, gunned down as he left the building. The LA Times reported that Paul Tatum helped develop the Radisson-Slavjanskaya Hotel into one of the first Western-style hotels in Moscow. Just before he was killed, Tatum said he was in Moscow to “defend his share in the hotel against unscrupulous executives, the Chechen Mafia, and a Russian business culture that wouldn’t play fair.”

After doing business in Russia for several years, Tatum observed quite accurately that murder is “a corporate strategy in Moscow.” It’s something everyone doing business in Russia knows.

I traveled with a bodyguard because hundreds of business executives are killed annually in Mafia-style hits throughout Russia, while Putin himself is infamous for assassinating inconvenient people. This is the business culture our ‘president’ is incubating in the U.S.; he’s just stupid enough to think Russian-style corruption is ‘masculine.’ In a 2017 interview, while he was president, Trump defended Putin’s killings by saying, “What? You think our country’s so innocent?”

Fast forward nine years. Trump’s IRS has nearly eliminated audits of rich Americans and large corporations, and haulted criminal referrals for tax fraud. His Treasury Department is looking the other way on Americans bribing foreign officials, while his DOJ deprioritizes prosecution of corporate crime.

Trump is a convicted white-collar criminal who does business with other criminals, actively facilitating corruption. If he and his oligarchs get their way, America’s rule of law will fall.

If that happens, ruthless Americans will be no different from ruthless Russians. Trump’s financially impenetrable oligarchs, who will do anything to destroy the taxing and regulatory state, will easily slip from white collar crime to murders for hire, and American business people will start needing bodyguards.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.