Swamp Thing
Trump’s pardons sent an unmistakable message, capping the corruption of his tenure in office.
“Drain the swamp.”
Of all Trump’s lies, that was one of the most puzzling. It’s not just that Trump himself was and is crooked, or even that he so obviously likes and admires crooks. It’s that Trump’s particular form of crookedness was exactly the kind of crookedness that people have in mind when they imagine Washington, D.C., as a “swamp.”
Trump’s first Manhattan real-estate deal—the first deal on which his employer-father allowed him to take the lead—was the redevelopment of a bankrupt historic hotel near New York’s Grand Central Terminal. The deal needed complex permissions from the city and the state. To obtain those permissions, Trump hired the famous fixer Roy Cohn. Cohn secured him a $400 million tax abatement plus other special favors, including a waiver of all urban-preservation rules. After the deal was done, the city official who bestowed the favors was hired as a partner in Cohn’s law firm. A decade later, that official went to federal prison for corruption crimes.
And so it went throughout Trump’s business career, beginning to end. Shortly after ascending to the presidency, he agreed to pay $25 million to settle fraud claims brought by students at Trump University (he admitted no wrongdoing).
And on his last full day in office, as the minutes ticked down, he ended his presidency with a grand present to pro-Trump crooks, past and present. Earlier in the transition period, he had pardoned Paul Manafort and Roger Stone—the longtime associates who protected his secrets. On his way out, he has pardoned another former campaign chair, Steve Bannon, who was indicted on charges of defrauding Trump’s own supporters. ...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...m_medium=social
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