The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 4 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump’s administration is already shaping up to be a Murderer’s Row of Billionaires. By one count, he has already picked eight billionaires for positions in his government. We just learned that he has selected a ninth billionaire as deputy Defense secretary, and this one happens to enjoy, wait for it, lucrative contracts with the Pentagon. Trump, who is widely and uncritically described as an economic populist, is already stocking his government with ultra wealthy plutocrats. So how bad is the oligarchic corruption going to get and are there any safeguards left in our system? Today, we’re chatting about all this with Noah Bookbinder who has long done great work tracking Trump’s corrupt self-dealing as the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Good to have you on, Noah.
Noah Bookbinder: Thanks a lot for having me.
Sargent: Newsweek counts eight billionaires so far chosen by Trump. Not all are in very important positions, but many are. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are overseeing this new entity that will propose deep spending and regulatory cuts. Then there’s Scott Bessent as treasury secretary, Howard Lutnick as secretary of commerce, Steve Witkoff as special envoy to the Middle East, Linda McMahon leading the Department of Education, and a few others. All billionaires. Noah, have you ever seen anything like this?
Bookbinder: Not remotely. There certainly have been successful business executives who have come in as secretary of the treasury or secretary of commerce or some of those positions before. But the idea that you would have a government where such a high proportion of the top ranks are filled by the wealthiest people in American society is not something we’ve seen in modern times. If you go back to the Gilded Age and times of real corruption and real kleptocracy in government, you might find some similar things; but it’s not something we’ve seen in my memory.
Sargent: U.S. News and World Report added up the total net worth of these figures and came up with a whopping $344 billion. A lot of that is Elon Musk, but still, that’s pretty big. Then on top of that, The Washington Post reports that Trump has offered the number-two post at the Pentagon to billionaire investor Steven Feinberg, who has Pentagon contracts. Feinberg is promising to adhere to ethics standards, but Noah, this seems like a really dark turn in this whole saga because it comes after all these other billionaires. And now he picks someone who directly profits off the entity he’d have a big hand running. OK, maybe he will follow ethics standards, but it’s still a middle finger, isn’t it?
Bookbinder: It is. There are really two major problems that can come from what you have here with all of these billionaires in top positions. One is very specific conflicts of interest. That’s what you were just getting at: people have their own investments, their own companies, their own contracts that could benefit from the work they do.
Now, as you said, in that particular case, there were public assurances that he would follow ethics rules. The track record is not great. Donald Trump himself really showed ... callous disregard doesn’t even really begin to do credit to the extent to which he blew off any ethics requirements or laws. There was a lip service paid in his cabinet the first time around, and in some cases more than that, to divesting, to submitting financial disclosures, all of those kinds of things. There were lots of violations and lots of conflicts. So there’s no particular reason to have a lot of confidence that these folks will avoid specific conflicts.
And you don’t want those because then you could have people making decisions about how to run the Department of Defense or any other department that affects American national interest and the American people based on whether their own investments are going to pay off. That’s a huge problem.
Then there’s the broader issue of you want to have a government that looks out for the American people. If you have a government that is primarily made up of billionaires, there’s a real risk that that government is going to broadly govern for the benefit of the very wealthy rather than in the interest of regular people. Even where you have recusal and other things that can protect against specific conflicts, you can still have a government that is really geared toward making the rich richer. That’s not what our government’s supposed to do.
Sargent: The Feinberg pick seems particularly glaring to me because we’re constantly told that Trumpism is this reaction to the D.C. swamp. In particular, we’re told that Trumpism and MAGA is a reaction to the warmongering D.C. self-dealing elite. The foreign policy blob in D.C. is a real thing. No one would deny that, and Trump has campaigned against that. But now to just select someone who’s so plainly right out of the swamp, right out of this foreign policy blob/elite, as you will, one who directly profits from it, just seems incredibly crass to me.
Bookbinder: If you drive through Washington, D.C., or through Northern Virginia, you see building after building with the logos of defense contractors. These are very powerful folks in the D.C. area. And that’s something that the American people are legitimately concerned about. When it comes to deploying the military or spending billions and billions of dollars in taxpayer money that comes from you and me and all the people listening, you want decisions to be made based on what’s really necessary and what’s really the right thing for the American people. The idea that you’re then going to put in place people who are benefiting from those very contracts is concerning.
Obviously, you want people with expertise. Often, people become secretary of defense or deputy secretary because they have either direct military experience or civilian experience with the military. We certainly don’t want to say that you don’t want someone who hasn’t interacted with the military; you can query very wealthy investors on whether that’s the type of experience that is going to give you the decision-making that the American people want. That’s the case of Feinberg if he is, in fact, nominated. That’s a case he’s going to have to make, explaining to the American people why he would go in and make decisions based on what is the right course for the American military based on his experience.
Sargent: Absolutely, Noah. It’s obviously true that you want people that have expertise in a particular field. And obviously, there’s a long, sordid history of this revolving door between industries and government. He could potentially persuade us that we shouldn’t be concerned about this. What strikes me about it is it’s so directly at odds with this basic conception of Trumpism that we’ve been fed for so long. I can’t process that.
Bookbinder: One thing that we saw again and again in the first Trump administration were people coming into cabinet positions or deputy positions, and immediately making decisions that benefited former clients, former companies, companies to which they had ties. Now, you see a little bit of that in every administration—as you said, the revolving door is a really unfortunate D.C. tradition. But it was taken up a notch in Donald Trump’s administration to what seems to be happening here, which is you increase the number of billionaires and investors and people who potentially stand to profit.
Look, I’d love it if they could prove us wrong and actually go in and govern in a civic-minded way, but the risk that they’re going to come in and govern for the benefit of either themselves narrowly or for this class of millionaires and billionaires is really high. And it certainly does seem to be in contrast with the rhetoric that we tended to hear from Donald Trump over the past few years.
Sargent: It really does. What’s your overall assessment right now? Trump is not divesting his holdings, unlike every other president before him. We already know from his first term that he engaged in extraordinary self-dealing as it was. Now we’ve got even more billionaires in his administration than last time, and he picks Musk to advise him on how to cut spending and regulations, even though Musk himself enjoys extensive government contracts and is known to personally hate the regulations that are imposed on his SpaceX company. What are we left with here? What safeguards are there right now? How bad is this in a big picture way?
Bookbinder: Something that we saw throughout the first Trump administration was a gradual erosion of checks and balances, of safeguards—that network of good government protections that were put into place 50 years ago after Watergate. Donald Trump tended to find the places where things were based on tradition rather than law and he could just disregard that tradition; or where there was law but there wasn’t an enforcement mechanism; or where there was an enforcement mechanism but not the will to use it. By exploiting all those weaknesses, he peeled away a lot of the protections that we had relied on to ensure that we could minimize corruption and abuses and make government work for regular people.
We see that it sure looks like he is planning to pick up where he left off, and probably on steroids. The first time around, he made a big show about turning over interest in his companies to his sons and divesting in some sense from them. It turned out that that wasn’t really real, that he maintained his financial interest. He knew what those interests were, he used government to benefit them, and he also seemed to have more decision-making in his companies than he let on. But there was at least a pretense that he was going to follow ethical rules.
It now looks like he’s got no particular interest in doing that. I’m hopeful that he’ll see the light in the next month or two and divest from his companies and commit to ethics, but we certainly haven’t seen anything to date that gives us a lot of confidence. When you have a president who has chipped away at ethical safeguards coming in without any stated regard for those safeguards and surrounding himself by very, very wealthy people who stand to benefit from their government posts unless they adhere to the strictest ethical standards, there’s a lot of cause for concern here.
Sargent: To underscore your point about how he actually made some show of being in compliance with certain ethical standards the first time: It’s lost on a lot of people that this time Trump openly campaigned on a promise to enrich wealthy elites. That sounds crazy when you say it that way, but he did tell a room full of big oil executives that he’d carry out their policy bidding specifically if they raised $1 billion for his campaign. He told roomfuls of rich donors that he’d keep their taxes low, provided they raised money for him. Now, obviously an old story in Washington is elite influence peddling and so forth, but this is really something else. It’s much more explicit, and it’s basically a direct declaration to the world that he can get away with whatever the hell he wants. That’s how I see it.
Bookbinder: It is certainly a long tradition in Washington that wealthy donors give money to candidates and get greater access, and candidates will listen to them on policy issues. But this takes it to a whole different level where you had a candidate very explicitly saying, If you give me a lot of money, I will do what you want in terms of policy, and in some cases also explicitly, If you give me support, I will give you a direct role in my government. Again, donors get posts pretty regularly, but that level of explicit trade is really new and different and suggests that we’re going to have a government that is for the benefit of those people who helped Donald Trump and particularly who helped him financially. That’s a troubling place to be.
Sargent: You brought up Watergate, and I’d like to go back to that. Maybe the bigger story here is that ultimately the anti-corruption architecture that lawmakers put in place after those scandals has clearly proven unable to contain a figure like Trump. This goes beyond the billionaires and the self-dealing. A lot of what Trump is threatening to do right now—prosecuting enemies without cause or turning the FBI into his own strike force—is supposed to be constrained by things like the post-Watergate reforms and by norms that have arisen in the wake of Watergate that try to uphold the idea of independent civil servants and independent agencies that are accountable to the president but also are not as prone to being corrupted and infested with self-dealing. I just get the sense that the last vestiges of this stuff are going to get bulldozed over. Can you talk about that big picture? What happened here?
Bookbinder: There are a couple of things that happened. One is that these are reforms that were put into place 50 years ago or so. The American people have forgotten what it was that led to the need for those reforms. They’d forgotten that these were things that government specifically chose to do because people demanded it. A lot of people weren’t alive at all, and even those who were, that was a long time ago. There’s not the popular attachment to these checks and balances that there was a generation or two generations ago. That’s one piece of it.
Another piece of it is that the infrastructure of government and of society is so different now than it was 50 years ago; laws and rules that could have constrained people at that time just aren’t really tailored to the possible risks we have now. So you have those things going on. I also think that nobody envisioned somebody like Donald Trump who was going to take the approach of getting away with absolutely anything that he could and just disregarding laws and rules and embarrassment or shame or the kinds of things that have constrained people in the past.
It turned out that if you just didn’t care what anybody said and dared people to hold you to the law, you could do almost anything you wanted. We just have never had a figure who’s taken that approach before. The system wasn’t designed for it.
Sargent: A big part of this, Noah, is that the Republican Party has proven entirely unwilling to act as any check on Trump in any way on all these fronts.
Bookbinder: One of the real disappointments, particularly the last four years, has been seeing institution after institution fail to take the steps that they could take to protect the country against the corruption and abuse that we saw, to some extent, in the first Trump administration that we could well see again. That certainly included the Senate failing to convict Donald Trump in the second impeachment after January 6. It has included, as you said, the Republican Party again and again looking the other way on abuses and corruption. It’s included a pliant conservative Supreme Court that has given him a pass again and again.
It’s also included a mixed record from Democrats in Congress and the Democratic administration. The House Select Committee on January 6 did really admirable work, but legislatively strengthening the democracy either didn’t have the votes or wasn’t a high enough priority. That’s disappointing as well.
Sargent: It’s clear that Senate Democrats have really not done all they could to rein in Donald Trump also. That’s a very big problem. And now we’re at a point where their investigations into Trump’s billion-dollar shakedown of big oil executives will now disappear when Republicans take over. The fact is that Senate Democrats just did not use their power to the degree that they could have. And that’s part of the story, no question.
Bookbinder: That’s right. There were certainly investigations that took too long to get started. We’ve seen examples ... There was a House committee that did some really fantastic work in tracking down the money that Donald Trump received from foreign governments during his first administration, and then that investigation ended when power changed. CREW actually picked it up and was able to find $7-8 million in foreign government spending. We were able to pretty conclusively say that we think that number was over $13 million, and probably much higher. We think we do great work, but it shouldn’t be outside organizations that are doing that work. It should be from within government.
Sargent: Yeah. It’s a very sad story when you really put it all together. There was a time during which you could actually cut a very high profile in Congress by being a bulwark against corruption. You could get lots of positive attention and the country saw that type of civic behavior as a positive thing. I don’t get the sense that there’s anything like that in the culture anymore. Do you?
Bookbinder: I don’t really, and it used to be bipartisan. In the wake of Watergate, there were Republicans and Democrats who were both investigating and pushing for reform. That continued on and off with lots of fits and starts for decades. We’ve seen Donald Trump’s own party become completely unwilling to do anything that might challenge his power, even where it could be Congress looking out for its own constitutional prerogatives and for the democracy. And also, no one in any party has made this a top priority.
The irony there is that if you talk to the American people, the American people across the political spectrum are disgusted with corruption and with the idea that government is not working for them. So there’s a tremendous opportunity there. It’s an opportunity that, in some ways, Donald Trump has seized rhetorically in talking about draining the swamp and working for the people. He just hasn’t ... His conduct is, going back to where we started, has not reflected that. There is room, to the extent that our checks and balances remain, for Congress to come in and say, Hey, corruption is a problem. The American people care about it. We’ve got to shine a bright light on it and then pass laws to prevent it. We haven’t seen enough of that in recent years.
Sargent: It’s going to be really, really grim for at least the next two years. As you point out, the House Committee on January 6 was a real success, and it was greeted by the country as exactly that. It achieved real penetration in the culture. It was a tremendous achievement in many ways, but now there’s just not going to be anything like that. And Donald Trump is even more emboldened having campaigned on an open vow to be corrupt, basically. It’s that simple: he campaigned on a promise to be corrupt; he won. And that’s where we are.
Bookbinder: I wish I could contradict that, but that’s where we are.
Sargent: Noah Bookbinder, thanks so much for the thoughts today.
Bookbinder: Thanks so much for having me.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.