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OK, we all knew Trump was fond of bribery —- both giving bribes to public officials like Pam Bondi when he wanted them to not investigate his University and similar schemes, and even better, taking what appear to be bribes himself now that he’s a public official. But this Times interview lays out how mind-bogglingly, unprecedentedly, openly corrupt the Trump family’s crypto dealings are.

Yes, there have been lots of corrupt Federal officials before, but they usually tried to hide their corruption, while Trump is completely open about it: he knows that the only way he can be held accountable is through impeachment, which won’t happen as long as his party controls at least one house of Congress. And the scale is probably at least an order of magnitude beyond all previous Federal bribery scandals combined.

It raises some interesting questions: assuming Trump left office and we still had a vaguely functioning republic, how would we even begin to fix this?

(1) Overturn the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, and make clear that somebody who uses Presidential powers to commit a crime can be prosecuted for that crime. For example, the President has nearly unlimited pardon power, but granting a pardon in exchange for money would still be prosecutable as bribery. This would require either a SCOTUS decision or, better, a Constitutional amendment.

(2) Put teeth in the emoluments clause. We can’t expect the DoJ to criminally charge a sitting President, but we could impose a 100% income tax rate on the fair market value of any gift the President (or any other Federal officer) receives in violation of the emoluments clause. This could be done by act of Congress, and signed into law by one honest President.

(3) Make impeachment slightly easier —- say, a 3/5 majority in the Senate rather than a 2/3 majority. Again, this would require a Constitutional amendment. Trump’s second impeachment failed to convict by a vote of 57-43, not quite a 3/5 majority, but the margin would have been much less comfortable, and three more Republican Senators might have voted to convict if they had thought it possible to come out on the winning side.

(4) How to deal with cryptocurrency? The basic problem is that it enables anybody who wishes, anywhere in the world, to put large amounts of money directly into the President’s pocket, anonymously but verifiably if the donor wishes to prove it to the recipient in private. If you were designing a system to encourage bribery, you couldn’t do much better. And the Trumps are currently using it in several different ways, as the Times interview points out:

(a) direct gifts from the donor’s “wallet” to the recipient’s,

(b) purchases of assets from which the recipient receives a transaction fee,

(c) purchases of floating assets of which the recipient holds a lot, driving up their price, and

(d) purchases of stablecoins from the recipient, which must be backed by actual dollars so they amount to a zero-interest loan to the recipient (who can invest the money in something interest-bearing).

For all of these, the novel problem is anonymity: the public, the IRS, and law enforcement have no way of knowing who gave the President (or other public official) how much money when. If we could fix that, at least for a limited class of recipients (high-level Federal government officials), the usual mechanisms of accountability would at least have a chance to do their jobs.

Existing law requires certain categories of government officials (including the President and Vice President) to file financial disclosure forms, within 30 days of taking office and annually thereafter, identifying the sources and amounts of income, gifts, and reimbursements. In a crypto account, some income, gifts and reimbursements are likely to be truly anonymous, and you can't report what you don't know -- but you can still report the total amounts of anonymous transfers, and you can report the account numbers of any such accounts that you own, so the information can be verified. And the tax code could be amended to apply a 100% income tax rate to the total value of such anonymous receipts beyond an annual threshold.

That would work for dodges (a), (b), and (d), but not for dodge (c), the “driving up the price” trick, unless applied to every purchaser of the asset, even those with no interest in bribing public officials. Fortunately, this is the most unwieldy, inconvenient trick of the four: it costs the donor a lot of money, depending on market demand, to drive up the price of a publicly-held asset sufficiently to affect the recipient's behavior, and the recipient can't realize the gains except by selling large amounts of the asset, which pushes the price back down.

I've heard bits and pieces about "the abundance agenda" in reading Ezra Klein's NY Times opinion pieces over recent months. He recently co-authored (with Derek Thompson) a book entitled Abundance (review here)on the subject, and this Atlantic article sums up the split in the Democratic party caused by this and two other similar books (Yoni Appelbaum's Stuck and Marc Dunkelman's Why Nothing Works). I haven't read any of the three books yet, but I'm intrigued.

We can all see that the current administration is intentionally destroying the Constitutional Republic and the rule of law in favor of a klepto-autocracy. The only way it's likely to stop doing that is if it loses badly in free and fair elections, and the only likely candidate to beat it is the Democratic Party. But the Democratic Party doesn't have a great reputation with the public either: it can run on "stopping the steal" and restoring the rule of law, but to seriously win, it needs to be in favor of something. What is it in favor of?

For most of my (sixty-year) life, the most consistent difference between Democrats and Republicans has been that Democrats believed government could and should work to make ordinary people's lives better, while (starting with Regan) Republicans believed government couldn't work, and shouldn't work, and that any time government threatened to make ordinary people's lives better, it must be sabotaged to prevent it from doing that. Since it's always easier to break something than to fix it, Republican governments have had an unfair advantage over Democratic ones in proving their respective points.

But even where and when Democrats are firmly in control, whether local, state, or Federal, they haven't done a great job in recent decades of demonstrating that government can work. Public projects like the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge were built a hundred years ago, on schedule and under budget, but anything a government tries to build now takes much longer, costs much more, and accomplishes much less, than initial estimates -- think of the Second Avenue Subway in Manhattan, or inter-city high-speed rail in California. Trump likes to criticize "Democrat-led hellholes" like San Francisco for their homelessness, and he's not entirely wrong: Democratic-led large cities do have more homelessness than smaller cities or than the few Republican-led large cities. Biden's "Inflation Reduction Act" (which was mostly an environmental-policy bill) promised vast increases in solar and wind power, widespread broadband Internet in rural areas, and thousands of new electric-car charging stations so one could actually travel across the country in an electric-only car without fear of getting stranded; in fact, most of the solar-and-wind and broadband projects are still going through permitting and approval, and only dozens of new electric-car charging stations were actually built by the time Trump took office and slammed the brakes on all of that in a fit of pique. By comparison, I think China builds more public transit, solar and wind generation, and so on every year than the US has built in its entire history.

I gather (from the summaries I've read) that in the 1930's and 1940's, liberals in government were successful at using it to build things to improve ordinary people's lives. In the 1960's, liberals started viewing government as the enemy, became more concerned about stopping it from making ordinary people's lives worse, and enacted lots of procedural rules to ensure that all conceivable stakeholders are heard before a shovel goes into the ground. Which is laudable, but in practice it often prevents government from accomplishing anything, even things that would clearly improve most people's lives. The Chinese government, of course, goes to the opposite extreme that Trump would like to emulate: what the President says is what will happen, and other stakeholders might as well not exist.

I don't lose a lot of sleep over the Trump administration demonstrating overwhelming competence at getting good things done, or even overwhelming competence at getting things-I-think-are-bad done. Very simply, Xi Jinping is better at being a dictator than Donald Trump will ever be, and he heads a system of top-down control that's already worked out a lot of the bugs over the past eighty years. But the "abundance" movement within the "liberal-ish" half of the US says "we need to demonstrate that we can make government actually work, largely through reducing procedural obstacles, simplifying and optimizing operations." Sorta what DOGE would be doing if it actually aimed to make things work better rather than just destroying them, if it took the time to understand what current systems aim to achieve and how they currently work before burning them to the ground. Al Gore's Reinventing Government initiative was a related effort; see also this look back at its successes and failures twenty years later.

At the same time, I have libertarian friends I respect who would argue that anything government does to help ordinary people is inherently susceptible to corruption, rent-seeking, and regulatory capture, and we're all better off in general if government doesn’t try to do so many things.

I'm reminded that Frank Herbert wrote a couple of SF novels (and short stories, I think) on the premise that "efficiency in government" proponents had actually succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, to the point that a Bureau of Sabotage was created to slow down the rest of the government; the protagonist is a vaguely James-Bond-ish (and quite efficient) Saboteur Extraordinaire named Jorj X. McKie.

Comments? Suggestions? Have you actually read any of the recent books on the subject?