Autocracy Watch Day 11: An authoritarian uses power for personal profit

 The New York Times, NO. 11

An authoritarian uses power for personal profit. Trump has.

Authoritarians often turn the government into a machine for enriching themselves, their families and their allies. Mr. Trump glories in his administration’s culture of corruption.

He openly uses the presidency as an opportunity to pad his bottom line, in ways that range from the comically petty (like charging the Secret Service up to $1,200 per night for rooms at his hotels) to the shamelessly greedy (like the $40 million that Amazon paid for the rights to a Melania Trump documentary or his recent demand that the government pay him $230 million because he was investigated for breaking the law). He solicits favors from foreign governments, including an airplane from Qatar. His children also profit from their father’s position, through real-estate deals, crypto, a private club in Washington and more. And he rewards those who enrich them, recently pardoning the head of a cryptocurrency firm who worked with the Trump family.

In the first six months of this year, the Trump Organization’s income soared to $864 million, up from just $51 million a year earlier, according to a recent Reuters analysis. It’s worth noting that recent Supreme Court decisions have made corruption harder to police.

The Bottom Line
Mr. Trump’s culture of corruption may resemble the behavior of foreign autocrats more closely than any other category on this list. He is using what rightly belongs to American citizens — the power and resources of our democratic government — to enrich himself, and he is not trying to hide it.

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