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........

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