This week, Donald Trump has been leading the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of American independence. And it is hard to escape the irony that the current head of state is every bit as autocratic as a Hanoverian king – and then some.
Seldom have Thomas Jefferson's words sounded so hollow than on the lips of an unashamed strongman, who has purposefully sought “to upend the very freedoms Americans are celebrating” while brazenly “treating the presidency as a personal ATM”, says Rolling Stone. “Let's say it plainly: there has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump.”
Trump's second term as US president has been punctuated by a steady stream of stories relating to his and his family's business interests – from the cynically marketed Trump Bibles, gilded merchandise and social-media ventures marking his inauguration to the Qatari Boeing 747, booming stock portfolio and multiple crypto ventures that have followed.
Try 6 free issues of MoneyWeek today
Get unparalleled financial insight, analysis and expert opinion you can profit from.
Sign up to Money Morning
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
When the president talks about “liberty”, says The Wall Street Journal, the entity closest to his heart is World Liberty Financial, the self-described “next-generation financial platform” that accounted for a large chunk of the $2.2 billion gains that he has made since returning to the White House, according to a financial disclosure report released last week.
Americans have become so used to the drip, drip of financial “coincidences” and family deals that closely track state policy – a federal contract for a Trump son here; an investment in drone technology or Kazakhstani mineral rights there that they have almost become part of the wallpaper.
Nonetheless, his recent financial disclosure seems to have touched a nerve, says The Free Press. “It's not just the moneymaking that's unrivalled. It's also the flagrant appearance of corruption that those billions represent” – at a time when many Americans are struggling. “You do not need to think Trump is the end of American democracy, or that everything he does is evil, to see this for what it is”: a blatant “transfer of wealth from them – and perhaps foreigners – to the president”.
The way Trump sees it, these moneymaking ventures are payback time for his period in the financial and legal wilderness after the 6 January riots. The family's Wall Street debanking in particular was a source of humiliation. There's another factor at play here too, says The Guardian: the entanglement in Trump's mind between what is good for him and what is good for America. His defence of his crypto windfall, for instance, is that it's the dibs of a wider boom he has personally conferred on America. Trump has taken Louis XIV's dictum, “L'État, c'est moi”, to heart, with an extra twist. In his view, he is the stock market, too.
Trump compares himself to Hitler and Napoleon
In the general scheme of constitutional abuse and the weaponisation of government departments, Trump's hijacking of the Independence celebrations might seem small beer. Yet they are a case study in how things work under the 47th president, says The Telegraph: from the Colosseum-style cage fight on the White House lawn to the underhand tactics, not to say fraud, underpinning the funding switch from the politically neutral America250 organising committee to Trump's pet Freedom250 body.
In Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump – a hair-raisingly detailed survey of his second term so far – New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reveal how Trump proudly showed them a document “arguing he was more powerful than some of the most feared and treacherous leaders in history – including Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler”, says CNN. That is now coming back to bite. To Trump's chagrin, the book topped the sales charts on Independence Day. There was symbolism in that.
This article was first published in MoneyWeek's magazine. Enjoy exclusive early access to news, opinion and analysis from our team of financial experts with a MoneyWeek subscription.