The president’s corruption hurts us all

As anyone old enough to remember the Watergate scandal knows, Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon has long been thought of as the quintessential example of presidential corruption.

Not any more.

The current president is, by any standard, the most corrupt in the history of America.  It began on Day 1, when he had the tech billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg seated prominently during the inauguration. These three men own more wealth than the entire bottom half of our country – over 165 million people.

During the president’s first 100 days in office, he engaged in so much corruption and self-dealing that Senator Elizabeth Warren read a list of 100 acts of “Trump Corruption” into the Congressional record. Some of these include: launching a crypto memecoin right before inauguration to make millions of dollars, accepting $40 million for First Lady Melania’s documentary from Jeff Bezos, pardoning convicted criminals that range from violent Jan 6. rioters to drug kingpins to crooked political donors, and accepting a luxury jet valued at $400 million from the royal family of Qatar.

And now, this same president, who promised to lower costs for Americans on Day 1, is trying to take $1.776 billion of our taxpayer money to create an “Anti-weaponization” slush fund. It will be used to reward loyalists to the president, many of whom have broken the law or even committed violence on behalf of the president. This fund will have no congressional oversight and no public accountability. It demonstrates a bald-faced corruption that should offend every single American.

An Amicus brief was filed, representing 93 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, urging the federal court to dismiss Trump’s proposed settlement as unconstitutional. I noticed that our representative, Claudia Tenney, was not one of those 93 members, so I wrote to her and asked for her comment. In her response, she made disparaging remarks about the Democratic party five different times, but did not bother to say a single thing about the slush fund.

If this level of corruption and depravity makes you mad, then mark November 3rd on your calendar and vote for change.