The Worst People Have the Most Power
The CDC shooting reveals who is worthy of admiration—and who is not.
With Trump’s high-stakes Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin just two days away, it’s good to see that the president is in exactly the preparatory headspace you’d like to see: whining into the ether about how mean the press’s response is likely to be. Here he was just this morning:
Happy Wednesday.
Heroes and Monsters
by William Kristol
It’s sad but true: Contemptible men occupy the highest offices in our land.
Before becoming Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lied repeatedly and vociferously about the coronavirus vaccine, calling it the “deadliest vaccine ever made,” and claiming it contained “poison.” During his presidential campaign that ended with his endorsement of Donald Trump in return for the promise of a cabinet position, Kennedy slandered those serving at the Centers for Disease Control, boasting, “As President, I will clean up the cesspool of corruption at CDC” and “I’ll hold responsible those who lied or concealed critical health information.”
Last Friday, an American who believed the lies spread by Kennedy and others, 32-year-old Patrick Joseph White, took five firearms to the CDC campus in Atlanta and fired some five hundred shots at the complex. Two hundred shots hit six buildings. Amazingly, no CDC employees were injured. But White killed a DeKalb County police officer who rushed to the scene, David Rose.
After waiting eighteen hours, Kennedy tepidly condemned this attack on his department. On Monday, he paid a brief and perfunctory condolence visit to the CDC. He immediately followed this visit by giving an interview in which he chose once again to reiterate his view that “the public health agencies have not been honest.”
The next day, a CDC employee, Jessica Rogers-Brown, wrote on a local Atlanta online news website about the situation she and her colleagues had been confronting, expressing
anger that for months, public servants like me have been painted as villains—called liars, conspirators, even criminals—for doing unglamorous, necessary work. Anger that repetition turns rumor into permission; that lies, said often enough and loud enough, chamber a round as surely as a hand on a trigger.
Ms. Rogers-Brown continued, “Moments like this demand unambiguous sentences from the highest office in the land: Public servants are not the enemy. Attacks on them are attacks on America. Say it plainly. Say it loudly. Say it now.”
President Trump has said not a word about this attack on federal public servants.
Nor has he offered condolences or praise for Officer Rose.
Rose was 33 years old. He was married with two children, and his wife is expecting their third child. He had served in Afghanistan as a Marine, and graduated from the policy academy in March. In a graduation speech for his academy class, Officer Rose said, “From the very first day, we learned that policing isn’t just about enforcing the law. It’s about protecting the vulnerable, standing for justice, and being the person who runs towards danger when others run away.”
For their whole lives, Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have run away not merely from danger (recall Trump’s bone spurs) but from responsibility and accountability. They have gotten away with contemptible behavior. They occupy high public office after living sordid lives of wealth and privilege. They have paid no price for their irresponsibility and cowardice.
The contrast with David Rose, Marine and police officer, who lived far too short a life of courage and public service, is striking.
One would like to think that David Rose represents the real and lasting America. One would like to think that Trump and Kennedy are sad historical aberrations whose current prominence and power we will one day—perhaps one day soon—look back on with horror and disgust.
What’s a Few Billion Between Friends?
by Andrew Egger
Stories about Donald Trump’s staggering personal corruption—the open and brazen self-dealing that has profited him billions this term and the remarkable and unprecedented conflicts of interest that accompany it—tend to have a hard time staying in the news cycle these days. Every once in a while, a story is so outlandish that it breaks through. A dinner for investors in his cryptocurrency! A $400 million jet from Qatar! But with Trump doing so much to damage America all the time, right out in the open, who has time to worry about the ways in which he’s merely helping the people giving him payouts?
Still, this week brought a pair of stories on Trump’s corruption that absolutely deserve notice. The first was a herculean data-journalism effort from the New Yorker’s David Kirkpatrick, who sought to answer the question: Amid the president’s blizzard of self-dealing ventures, how much cold, hard cash has he actually made off his presidency?
Kirkpatrick acknowledges he’s only working in the realm of broad estimate. But he finds a number of solid data points to peg his estimates to, and the numbers add up quick. The skyrocketing prestige of Mar-a-Lago as a private club promising access to a president? $125 million. Supporters’ money he’s pocketed in the form of campaign-style merch and reimbursing himself for his personal legal fees? $127.7 million. Access-grubbing “investments” in Trump enterprises from monarchs and barons in the Persian Gulf? $320 million, not counting $105 million from Saudi investors and the aforementioned Qatari jet.
But all those eye-popping numbers dwindle in comparison to the vast sums Trump and his family have raked in across their various cryptocurrency enterprises, where they have routinely used both the suggestion of access and Trump’s notoriety as a public figure to spin internet straw into solid gold.
The $14 million he and Melania have made selling NFTs? Chump change. The real money is in World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture Trump announced last year. It’s the perfect scheme for Trump, allowing his back to be scratched in two directions at once. His supporters have piled into his cryptocurrency, either as a simple act of fandom or out of a half-baked idea that Trump’s totemic richness will rub off on them somehow. And crypto billionaires seeking friendly regulatory treatment have plowed huge sums in as well, legitimizing World Liberty’s coin marketplaces and further increasing their prominence in the wild and wooly crypto world. Here Trump and friends’ profits, at least on paper, appear to run into the billions. And it’s not all just on paper, either: Even if Trump never manages to sell his tokens for a princely sum, he’s still pocketing fees on every coin traded on his platform all along the way.
Just how sordid are these crypto deals? A Wall Street Journal report yesterday went deep on one of them. I mean, just look at this stuff:
The Trump family’s crypto venture has generated more wealth since the election—some $4.5 billion—than any other part of the president’s business empire.
A major reason for the success is a partnership with an under-the-radar trading platform quietly administered by Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, whose founder is seeking a pardon from President Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.
The online trading platform, PancakeSwap, serves as an incubator of sorts, drumming up interest among traders to use coins issued by the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial.
The more World Liberty’s flagship coin, USD1, is used, the greater demand to increase its circulation, and the greater the profit for World Liberty and its owners, including the Trump family.
PancakeSwap is an online marketplace for cryptocurrencies. It connects users who trade USD1 with newly created currencies such as Torch of Liberty and Eagles Landing. These patriotic-sounding coins, according to their websites, were launched this year with the main purpose of helping increase the use of USD1.
Traders, mostly writing in Chinese, gather in groups on the Telegram messaging app to talk about competing for rewards paid out to top users of USD1 and advertised by PancakeSwap.
Hell of a way for the billionaire president to make his money. Hell of a way for crypto felons to try to buy their way out of trouble. Trump’s cornucopia of awful policy changes will do untold damage to the nation and the world, but many of these may hopefully prove reversible. Can we say the same about the damage he’s done to the office?
AROUND THE BULWARK
Trump’s Message to Victimized Countries: You Know You Want It… He tariffs them, extorts them, grabs at their land, and pretends they consented. Sound familiar? WILL SALETAN examines the tendencies in Trump’s mindset.
Trump Sends in the Troops… On the latest Just Between Us, ANDREW EGGER and MONA CHAREN discuss the meat-axe approach to crime, the real D.C., and what will happen when Trump meets Putin again.
‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Is a Moral Stain… Kristi Noem said it will be used to “lock up some of the worst scumbags”—but its inmates haven’t been convicted of violating any laws, argues JAMES F. MCHUGH.
The Laura Loomer / MTG / Arby’s Scandal That No One Asked For… On Bulwark+ Takes, TIM MILLER and SAM STEIN join WILL SOMMER to break down Laura Loomer’s outrageous deposition—complete with roast-beef insults, Trump affair allegations, and her vicious feud with Marjorie Taylor Greene. (And a dramatic reading.)
She Was MAGA’s Precursor. And Then She Kinda Disappeared… In Press Pass, JOE PERTICONE checks in on a former Upper Midwest congresswoman—ahead of her time, yet somehow not quite right for it—to see what she’s up to now. Spoiler: She’s having a relatively normal time as dean of a right-wing college. Can you guess who it is before reading?
Quick Hits
THE NEW NORMAL: So the president has federalized D.C. law enforcement. Now what? So far, nobody seems quite to know. Here’s the Washington Post:
A day after President Donald Trump said he would deploy the National Guard in the nation’s capital, federalized the local police department and issued officers a far-reaching mandate to “do whatever the hell they want” to curb crime, it remained unclear what new directives, if any, D.C. police would receive from their new federal managers.
District officials said they were still in command of the department, operating as usual having received no new orders from the Trump administration. The city’s police chief, Pamela A. Smith, has been supplying ideas about how federal law enforcement could be used by D.C.—not the other way around, according to a D.C. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive, ongoing talks.
We’re already seeing at least one immediate effect: A surge of federal officers loitering around with too much time on their hands. One viral clip posted to Instagram and X seemed to show Park Police officers approaching a group of black men sitting on a back stoop drinking and smoking cigarettes, asking if they were “staying out of trouble,” and requesting to see one’s ID.
The interaction was short, courteous, and totally surreal. “We’re just out here trying to inform people and educate people. It’s not like we’re trying to just go grab people and ruin someone’s life over a joint or something like that, alright?” one officer said. “Just know, learn, tell your boys—everybody’s out, from FBI to Park Police. So do your thing, let ’em know, don’t be smoking outside, don’t be drinking outside, because Donald Trump’s tired of it.”
SO LONG TO INCONVENIENT FACTS: It all just happens out in the open now, doesn’t it? A Wall Street Journal headline: “Trump Advisers Consider Changes to How Government Collects Job Data”:
The Trump administration is considering changes to how the federal government collects and reports job data, according to White House officials, following President Trump’s decision to fire the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner earlier this month in the aftermath of weak employment numbers. . . .
Trump has complained publicly and privately that jobs-report data is designed to hurt him politically, taking aim at large revisions to the numbers that have complicated his contention that the economy is soaring in his second term. Trump has told his advisers that he doesn’t want large revisions to the data in the future, the officials said.
Trump’s new BLS commissioner nominee, E.J. Antoni, recently told Fox News that he believed the bureau should suspend issuing new monthly job reports temporarily, while still issuing quarterly ones. The comment came before his nomination was announced, and he has since apparently backed off from the idea, but White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt didn’t rule out the possibility when asked about it during a briefing yesterday.
Meanwhile, the Journal also reports that the White House is planning to “conduct a far-reaching review of Smithsonian museum exhibitions, materials and operations ahead of America’s 250th anniversary” to “ensure the museums align with President Trump’s interpretation of history.”
THE LEAST OF OUR PROBLEMS: Donald Trump, our interior decorator-in-chief, has been bludgeoning good taste to death at the White House all year—splashing gaudy gold trim all over the Oval Office, paving over the Rose Garden to create an outdoor patio (now with umbrellas to match those at Mar-a-Lago!), and announcing a mammoth new ballroom that would double the current footprint of the building. But hey, why stop there? Trump’s good buddy Dana White, head honcho of UFC, tells the Wall Street Journal that an honest-to-God cage fight is heading for the South Lawn: “That is going to happen,” White said, as part of next year’s celebration of the United States’ 250th birthday.
“Fighters will be warming up in the White House,” White said. “This is so monumental and historical and just such a cool thing. All I care about is the Octagon on the lawn and the fight happening with the backdrop being the White House and the Washington Monument.”
Is it just us, or is all this starting to look like a cry for help? What does it mean that Trump’s vision for the White House is apparently “gold-plated man cave”? She got a lot of flak for those Christmas trees, but you know what—Melania would never.
Cheap Shots
Bill: "It’s sad but true: Contemptible men occupy the highest offices in our land."
It's also sad and true that contemptible people -- voters -- facilitated their rise to those offices.
Thank you for the reporting on Officer Rose. Everyday this administration commits acts that violate human decency—not to mention breaking laws. I worry we will never get our country back.