Just How Corrupt is the Trump Administration?
Welcome back to Flux, a weekly newsletter from GEN about the powerful forces reshaping America.
Every day it’s something new with this crew. And now GEN is tracking it.
Each Wednesday, Max Ufberg and Andrea González-Ramírez bring you the Trump Corruption Index, our weekly roundup of grift, self-dealing, and abuse of power in Trumpworld. When we launched this column we asked ourselves Is there enough graft, double-dealing, and self-interested chicanery in the Trump administration to publish this column every week? Only time — and Trump — would tell.
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Well, this past Wednesday was week three, and gathering up grift has been like shooting fish in a barrel. Trump commuted the sentence of his longtime confidant and convicted felon, Roger Stone; the Pentagon picked a new acting undersecretary for research and engineering who is a 33-year-old with a bachelor’s degree in political science — and former chief of staff for billionaire Trump supporter Peter Thiel; and McEnany Roofing, the Florida commercial roofing company owned by the parents of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, received between $1 and 2 million from the Paycheck Protection Program.
>>READ: The latest dispatch from the Trump Corruption Index, and bookmark this page for future editions.
The year conventions went out the window
This was the week my calendar kept showing me I was supposed to be heading to the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee. Thanks to the coronavirus, that did not happen. And now, even members of Congress have been asked to stay away from convention, now postponed to August, where Joe Biden will be named Democratic nominee for president. Almost everything that normally happens at the convention is going to happen online: No delegates will be traveling to Milwaukee, and all the Caucus and Council meetings will take place virtually.
The Republican Convention in Jacksonville, Florida, also postponed until August, will be a smaller than usual affair as well. A number of GOP senators announced they have no intention of attending, and as Florida becomes the global center of the coronavirus pandemic, the convention — which had been scheduled to take place in North Carolina until Trump grew angry at the state’s Democratic governor for asking conventioneers to wear masks and keep its size down — will be restricted to only delegates, except for the final night, when Trump gives his nomination acceptance speech.
Flux populi: Big man on campus
From the moment Al Thani stepped off the plane, an entire economy quickly grew up around him to meet his wishes and whims: chauffeurs, a security detail, concierges, trainers, a nurse, an all-purpose fixer and even, according to several USC faculty members, a graduate student who served as his academic “sherpa.”
He was allowed to blow off class for dubious “security reasons” as an undergrad, then was handed a master’s degree for a period in which he took several vacations in Europe and never stepped foot on campus.
His enablers went to extraordinary lengths to keep him happy: Forging documents, flouting university rules, plying a UCLA dean with a golden camel statue, giving a Rolex to a professor and even, accounting records and interviews indicate, buying a $500 gift for a DMV employee in an effort to secure a coveted vanity plate.
“The true story of the heartthrob prince of Qatar and his time at USC” (The Los Angeles Times)
And one more thing…
D.C. street art in the era of the Black Lives Matter movement has been an inspiration for cities around the country. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s decision to paint “Black Lives Matter” on 16th Street just north of the White House — where police tear-gassed peaceful protestors so that Trump could stage a photo op at St. John’s Church — has led to similar street art around the country, including on Fifth Avenue in New York City just in front of Trump Tower. Now, a new ‘living statue’ has popped up in Washington, D.C.’s Freedom Plaza to commemorate the assault, reports Washingtonian, alongside several other living statues, including one in front of the Trump International Hotel.
