Trump Is Far From the First Corrupt U.S. Politician

Opinion|Trump Isn’t the First Politician to Sell the Office

President Trump’s trip to the Persian Gulf, which just ended, could be fairly described as dual-purpose. On the first day, he visited Saudi Arabia, where the Trump Organization — now in the hands of two of his sons — is engaged in a number of business deals.

In the fog of public outrage over this (and especially about things like Mr. Trump’s plans to accept the gift of a Qatari jet), we have forgotten that two things can be simultaneously true: that the kind of pay-to-play schemes emerging between the Trump administration and foreign patrons are far more brazen than anything else we’ve seen in American history and that Mr. Trump did not emerge in a vacuum.

Any one of the new foreign deals, the memecoins and secretive crypto fund-raisers, the open attempts to court investments from kleptocratic regimes and oligarchs abroad — all while Mr. Trump’s children and in-laws travel around the world, pocketing new foreign clients — would have been, under previous administrations, a scandal of its own.

Mr. Trump might have single-handedly replaced things like Teapot Dome as shorthand for presidential corruption, but he and his family are merely surfing on a wave of previous administrations and officials who spent years looking the other way when it came to how foreign regimes and foreign oligarchs target, manipulate and directly bankroll American politics and policymakers.

Take how the broader Trump family has cavorted around the globe, unearthing all manner of inventive ways to profit from its patriarch’s return to office. There is the new Executive Branch club, peddling direct access to the administration for only half a million dollars. There is a new Trump family cryptocurrency business, which just inked a multibillion-dollar deal with a fund backed by Abu Dhabi. There are any number of deals directed to and through Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, in addition to multimillion-dollar investments with Mr. Kushner’s firm from numerous autocrats. Time and again, the Trump family has acted as if there were not only no concern to be had about potentially signing deals with kleptocratic clients but also no price to be paid for such dealing.

Are they wrong? It was only a few months ago that President Joe Biden, in one of his final acts of office, issued a blanket pardon to his son Hunter Biden — who, while his father was vice president, likewise spent years traveling the world trading on his last name. Even after Hunter Biden apparently lobbied American officials to aid at least one foreign client — a clear violation of U.S. foreign lobbying laws — he paid no legal price, making a mockery of his father’s campaign pledge to crack down on the practice. Why would the Trump children behave any differently?