Back in 2019, Donald Trump pointed at Hunter Biden’s brief “cup of coffee” with a Chinese banker during a 2013 ride on Air Force Two and turned it into the single biggest line of attack he ran against Joe Biden for the next five years.The grift! The corruption! The selling-out of America! Oh, the humanity!!!Trump told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that Hunter “walked out of China with $1.5 billion” because his father was vice president, even though no evidence ever surfaced that the elder Biden touched his son’s business dealings, nor that Hunter ever pocketed anything close to that sum.This week, Donald Trump landed in Beijing for a three-day summit with Xi Jinping with his son Eric and daughter-in-law Lara on Air Force One, alongside more than a dozen of the wealthiest CEOs in America: Elon Musk of Tesla, Tim Cook of Apple, Larry Fink of BlackRock, Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, and many others.The Trump Organization, which Eric runs, has flirted with Chinese business deals for years, and Eric’s American Bitcoin company works directly with Chinese crypto-mining giant Bitmain.Hunter Biden’s cup of coffee looks like a teetotaler’s glass of water next to this rolling roadshow of self-dealing, where every executive on board is openly there to negotiate his own deal while Beijing’s officials size up the willingness of the family of the most powerful man in the world to sell out America for a few billion dollars.That’s the thing about Trump. He brags about corruption, lives on corruption, and treats every lever of the federal government as a personal slot machine, yet because he yelled “drain the swamp” loud enough in 2016, half the country still believes he’s the guy fighting the corrupt part of the establishment.He isn’t fighting it; he is it, only stupider, more openly larcenous, and more contemptuous of the public good than anyone who’s ever held the office.Consider what he’s done just in recent months.In January, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and the Treasury Department, agencies he himself runs, over the leak of his tax returns during his first term while his own appointees were running the IRS. He’s suing himself, in other words, for damages he then expects his own Justice Department to pay him out of taxpayer money.According to reporting in The New York Times and New Republic, Trump’s DOJ is now negotiating a settlement that may include dropping all IRS audits of Trump, his family, and his businesses, which would amount to a get-out-of-tax-fraud-free card signed by the very man whose taxes the IRS is required by law to audit every year.ABC News is now reporting that he also wants $1 billion to give to the January 6 rioters. Perhaps as prepayment for his “army” that will attack people during this November’s elections?This is naked corruption on a scale we've never seen. The federal government's now a personal piggy bank for one criminal man and his violent cult.Senators Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren rightly called it “a shameless and transparent act of corruption that should make any American’s head spin.”Trump’s corruption extends to his civil debts too. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals denied his motion to undo the $83 million defamation judgment won by E. Jean Carroll, whom a jury found Trump had sexually abused and then defamed.Now Trump’s lawyers are floating a brand new theory: maybe the Department of Justice should substitute itself as the defendant under the Westfall Act, on the theory that defaming a woman he abused “is part of the official duties of the President of the United States.”Because the federal government can’t be sued for defamation, this would vaporize Carroll’s judgment entirely and let Trump walk away free. Trump’s corrupted DOJ, naturally, is willing to argue it. That’s what happens when you corrupt the Justice Department into your personal law firm.The same corrupt Justice Department is also doubling as Trump’s cortupt personal revenge machine. There’s been a fresh corrupt indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over a beach photograph of seashells that prosecutors claim, against all credulity, was a coded threat to kill Trump.The DOJ corruptly raided John Bolton’s home and indicted him on classified documents charges.They corruptly went after what they called the “Seditious Six,” the Democratic lawmakers who recorded a video reminding service members they have a duty to refuse illegal orders, until a grand jury embarrassingly refused to indict.Senator Adam Schiff is being corruptly investigated by the DOJ for alleged mortgage fraud that his attorneys call “transparently false, stale, and long debunked,”Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is under a corrupt investigation, New York Attorney General Letitia James is under a corrupt investigation, and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was under a corrupt investigation until even Trump’s corrupt Republican allies told him the optics were getting...
The key to Trump's destruction is working — there's just one major obstacle
