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Corruption in the White House: Does Anybody Care?

The 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential election should be referendums on whether Trump and his associates can profit from his presidency.

Donald Trump claimed income of over $2 billion in 2025. A substantial part of it came from persons and entities who have a direct interest in what he does as president. When asked why he believed he and his family could buy and sell as if he were not president, he tellingly retorted, “Because I found out that nobody cared.”

It is a frightening thought that nobody cares whether the president uses his office to make money for himself and his family. If nobody cares about the kind of corruption now on display, not only our moral authority in the world but our constitutional democracy is at risk. Elected officials in the United States have a moral and legal duty not to put their own interests above, or in conflict with, the interests of their constituents. If they forsake that duty, we cannot expect they will act only in the best interest of the country, and we cannot expect our noble experiment to continue.

Citizens must care, moreover, because while the president gets richer, they get poorer. The 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election should be referendums on a central issue: whether the holder of the highest office in the land, and his relatives and friends, can accumulate fabulous wealth because he holds that office.

Despite his claim to business genius, there is no confusion about how Donald Trump has made money as president and whether it is wrong for him to do it. The rejoinder is that what he has done is not illegal. That may be so for some of his gains: The laws that prevent conflicts of interest for all other federal officials do not apply to the president. The current Supreme Court has defined corruption narrowly, requiring an explicit agreement to give or receive a thing of value in exchange for an official act, and given the president broad immunity. A court will have to determine whether manipulating the stock market, trading on inside information, profiting from pardons, or extorting things of value from foreign governments are protected as part of his “official duties.” But whether it is illegal or not is beside the point: It is morally and ethically wrong. And it must be disqualifying for Trump or any other officeholder.

The framers feared corruption in government because they had seen it and felt it firsthand. Their concern was not just bribery, although bribery was a form of it. They despised the European practice of giving gifts to public officials. They believed gifts, especially valuable ones, caused officials to subordinate their duty to the public to their personal interests. At the end of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin warned of the danger from “the bold and the violent, the men of strong passions and indefatigable activity in their selfish pursuits.” And it was Franklin, of course, who had earlier received a gold snuffbox from Louis XVI, a snuffbox that became a symbol of all that was wrong with the lackadaisical European attitude about gifts.

The framers created a government with three separate branches and two emoluments clauses, in Article I, Section 9, and Article II, Section 1, seeking to restrain public officials, including the president, from “selfish pursuits.” The corruption they feared was just the kind we are seeing today: the president’s use of his........

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