Is Trump the GOAT of Presidential Corruption?

The president’s gluttony for graft is the only truly remarkable thing about his political career.

President Donald Trump is an unimpressive person. He possessed no real intellect even before his cognitive faculties began to decline. His real-estate business career was mediocre at best, having inherited most of it from his father before going bankrupt multiple times. He lacks any real sense of ethics or integrity and often appears incapable of moral reasoning.

As an electoral candidate, Trump’s only real skill was disposing of ossified, entitled competitors: the Clintons, the Bushes, the unremarkable and uninspiring band of GOP primary challengers, and so on. Trump won in 2016 thanks to a fluke in the Electoral College and the luck of having an opponent falsely tarred by the FBI director on the eve of the election. He won in 2024 amid public backlash to inflation that he helped cause and after President Joe Biden stepped aside mid-campaign after the incumbent turned in a disastrous debate performance.

Having attained the White House twice through sheer luck, he has largely squandered the legacy of past generations. Trump’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic led to his defeat in 2020. He lacks the focus or interest to build sustainable policy achievements beyond harming his perceived foes. He lacks the basic capacity to transmute a GOP majority in Congress into permanent legislative accomplishments. Among our nation’s presidents, he will surely rank as the worst.

The only thing truly impressive about Donald Trump is his skill at corruption. This is not, strictly speaking, a good thing to be good at. Yet one cannot help but be awed at the talent that he possesses for abusing power and enriching himself. The last ten years have seen more innovations in corruption by Trump than the 240 years of American history that preceded them.

Take, for example, his latest scheme to enrich himself and others at the expense of everyone else. Trump owns a social-media company named TruthSocial on which he writes his infamous stream-of-consciousness posts. (He previously posted them on Twitter before its then-owners banned him for trying to overthrow the 2020 election in 2021.) These posts can provide an unusual level of insight into Trump’s thinking, and interpreting them has been a recurring feature of his political career.

Last week, TruthSocial announced an extraordinary new “product”: Truth API, a version of his social-media feed that gives........

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