It's a Great Time to Be a Crook

If the Trump administration put Tom Homan on Fox News to make a public case for his innocence, it didn't work. MSNBC and the New York Times reported over the weekend that during the presidential election last year, Homan — Trump's border czar and easily one of his weirdest and most sadistic advisors — allegedly took a Cava bag full with $50,000 of cash from undercover agents posing as executives who wanted government contracts. There's apparently video of this, but during the investigation, the politically captured Department of Justice shut it down. Now the line is that Homan was the victim of a political hit job.

Asked by Laura Ingraham Monday night to respond to the allegation, Homan said, "I did nothing criminal, I did nothing illegal." If you weren't already convinced, he continued and told Ingraham that he doesn't live with his wife because he's getting death threats (?) and said "Tom Homan's not going anywhere." Ok.

In an administration that's infested with graft and people trying to make a quick buck, the Homan story was mostly shocking for how old-school and quaint the alleged corruption was. Last week, for example, the SEC dropped civil enforcement cases against three white collar fraudsters who were convicted of crimes amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, including Ozy Media founder Carlos Watson.

Another one of the three, Trevor Milton, was convicted of wire and securities fraud for defrauding investors in his electric semi-truck startup that won a deal with General Motors. The indictment of this guy is a novel; at one point, his company booked a commercial shoot, but because the truck couldn't actually run, they kept towing it to the top of a hill and just filmed it rolling down over and over again so they could pass it off as an actually functioning vehicle. Anyway, Trump pardoned that guy (whose lawyer is Attorney General Pam Bondi's brother) after he and his wife donated more than $3 million to the Trump campaign and other Republicans last year. The SEC decision meant Milton is now absolved of paying back more than $660 million to the investors he defrauded.

It just keeps going. Trump taking a free jet from the government of Qatar; everything to do with World Liberty Financial; countries clearing the way for Trump hotels while he's negotiating with them over tariffs; freezing enforcement of the federal law preventing U.S. officials from bribing other countries; sanctioning officials who make decisions damaging to the business interests of Trump associates, and so on. The second Trump term is by far the most corrupt since at least the Harding administration, and even if the whole thing crashes and burns, all of the people even tangentially involved with this racket will undoubtedly walk away with an enormous amount of money which they will presumably use to boost more right-wing efforts in the U.S. and around the world.

You and I are already on the hook for those global right-wing efforts. Trump ally Javier Milei's party took a bath in Argentina's provincial elections last week, partly due to Milei's own corruption and a nosediving economy. Yesterday, just weeks before legislative elections in Argentina, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said "all options are on the table" for the U.S. to bail the Argentine president out, which could include a direct loan from the Treasury department.

This is the same administration that believes stuff like Meals on Wheels and cancer research is a scam on taxpayers and is going to be responsible for millions of people losing Medicaid and the closures of hospitals all over the country. Now those same people are bailing out a foreign government to prop up the same project of austerity and plunder and privatization that Trump's team is pursuing in the U.S. Hundreds of thousands of people in America are homeless, but the America First government would rather plow money into Javier Milei's peso.

This is, even by Trump's standards, a complete mockery of America First — throwing a lifeline to a foreign government because their political program of "make life worse for almost everybody" isn't popular for some reason. It's an incredible time to be a rich crook in the Western world. Everyone else, not so much.