As his mentor Roy Cohn counseled, Donald Trump never admits wrongdoing or apologizes. But he occasionally evinces something resembling a qualm. In October, considering renewing claims against the government for $230m in compensation for federal investigations against him, he reflected on his own appointees deciding on the payout and him signing off on it. “It sort of looks bad, I’m suing myself, right?” he said. “So, I don’t know.”
That month, when he demolished the White House East Wing to build his ballroom, he made it sort of look good by vowing that the now $400m project would be privately funded. It went without saying that the donors would expect gratitude in the form of government contracts or favorable regulatory rulings.
The desecration of the people’s house was a kind of theft – of our shared architectural heritage. Still, like the billions the Trump family has earned in cryptocurrency trading or the $400m jumbo jet the president received from the emir of Qatar after the Trump Organization decided to develop a $5.5bn luxury resort in that country, the ballroom deal was business-to-business. The taxpayer wasn’t out a dime – or so Trump promised.
Trump, his family, his companies and his administration have always been more concerned with the appearance of conflict of interest than with conflict of interest itself. Indeed, conflict of interest is White House Inc’s business model.
But something has changed in the last few months. They’ve given up even caring about appearances. The president is pilfering money directly from the US treasury – that is, picking our pockets. And he is doing it in plain sight.
Last month, a third attempt on the president’s life – and this weekend a shooting near the White House – allowed Trump to recast his heap of glitz and vanity as critical national security infrastructure. Adding a hardened bunker underneath, ballroom construction needed a billion dollars of public money. Only terror of the midterms moved the Republicans to strip that item from their homeland security appropriations bill.
But Trump’s recent deal with the Internal Revenue Service was by far the most flagrant act of corruption yet – perhaps in US presidential history. First, he sued the agency for $10bn for its alleged negligence in guarding his and his companies’ tax returns from being leaked to the press. Then he dropped the suit in return for a $1.776bn slush fund to repay his friends, possibly including the January 6 insurrectionists, for the suffering inflicted by their criminal penalties.
And, like a mafia enforcer shooting his victim in the knees after extracting the cash, Trump took a little more. A memo from Todd Blanche, his former personal lawyer and the acting attorney general, waives all pending liabilities incurred by his client, including $100m in potential tax penalties, and bars all future actions against Trump or his companies by the IRS “or other agencies or departments”. In 2024, the supreme court granted the president “presumptive immunity” from criminal prosecution for actions taken as part of his executive duties while in office. Anna Bower and Eric Columbus, of Lawfare, suggest that this agreement could give him immunity from everything else, forever.
The fund has met a torrent of lawsuits, Democratic outrage and even a few objections from Republicans. Still, write Bower and Columbus, “what makes this particular episode so unsettling is that it’s not clear how it would be stopped. The legal avenues to challenge it are untested and the standing hurdles are formidable. Meanwhile, the legislative appetite to act – at least in this Congress – is not yet apparent. By the time a future Congress might try, nearly $2bn in taxpayer funds may be largely gone, disbursed to recipients whose identities may never be publicly known.”
It’s enough to make an American move off the grid and read novels until it all blows over, or up. This is precisely what Trump wants.
As corrosive as the corruption is the impunity with which the corruption is committed. Impunity – the expectation of unaccountability – is not only a stance. It is a tactic. It breeds cynicism, and popular cynicism is a necessary ingredient of autocracy and kleptocracy.
The autocrat does not just flout the law; he renders it so fungible that as social or moral framework, it becomes meaningless. There is no use trying to stay on the right side of the law when you don’t know from day to day which side is right.
The autocrat does not just defy the popular will; he dismisses it. Trump’s impunity once rested on confidence of his unconditional adoration: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” he crowed during the first campaign. Ten years later, as his policies repel voters from his party, he is discovering that he needs neither party nor votes nor love to exercise power, and power is more gratifying, and remunerative, than any of these.
The realization seems to have liberated him. As fast as his approval ratings plunge, the public resources he demands for his imperial adventures and self-glorifying monuments mount. Last week, Trump declared that his triumphal arch in Washington doesn’t require congressional authorization because Congress signed off on an arch in 1925. Told by a reporter that a veterans’ group is suing to stop the construction because it would block views of Arlington Cemetery, he scoffed: “You’ve gotta be kidding.” Like its amount – $1.776bn – the “anti-weaponization” fund implies a declaration of Trump’s independence.
Their money stolen, their laws defanged, their opinions ignored, the governed (or ruled) begin to adjust. In Syria, crossing the border costs you $100; in Russia, a gratuity to the police turns a violent felony into a misdemeanor. Here, the press normalizes the heinous. The New York Times called Trump’s slush fund “highly unusual”. PBS reported that it was “unprecedented”, yet referred to as if it were a done deal: “How will the Anti-Weaponization Fund work?”
Still, cynicism is not acceptance of the current system so much as the inability to imagine an alternative. Its extreme version is fatalism, a view of an unchangeable present that stretches into both the past and the future – the feeling, as the philosopher Karl Popper put it, that “things always have been and always will be so”.
Exhaustion of imagination becomes literal exhaustion. For a populace already demoralized by political gridlock, economic precarity, and an impenetrable morass of disinformation, resistance can feel like too much work. The only people left with any ambition are those bent on abusing it. When cynicism slides into compliance, the autocrat has won.
How do we fight this autocracy-enabling cynicism? We don’t have to fool ourselves that things are better than they are. It is “possible to imagine situations where we might be in a state of despair without being in the state of giving up”, writes the University of St Andrews philosopher Mara Van Der Lugt in Hopeful Pessimism. Similarly, the British left collective Salvage proposes “hard-won pessimism”. This “is neither cynicism nor hopelessness: it is about our clear-sighted analysis – of capitalism, of the class system, of the centrality of this antagonism to our lives – that we refuse to gloss over the scale of the difficulties we continue to face”. That analysis recognizes winnable battles and makes room for celebration of victories.
The first blow against autocracy is the refusal of cynical complacency. Right after Trump’s first election, the Russian émigré M Gessen proposed some “rules” for surviving autocracy. Among them: “Be outraged … [I]n the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock.”