When he and his family and close friends have lined their pockets with sufficient protection money.
Don’t see it often in the news as all the distractions, like the market sinking, are what almost all the media is writing about and watching. But if you go through enough headlines, one will catch a whiff of how the Trump family is using the distraction to line their pockets.
I had been waiting to print this for a while, but I know that many people don’t consider anyone an expert unless they are written by some white dude that probably still has pimples.
And, government watchdogs and other experts worry, with Trump having long demonstrated a willingness to take official actions in return for private or political benefit, a vast new field of potential corruption has opened.
“There are concerns around additional graft and cronyism,” said Melinda St. Louis, global trade director at Public Citizen.
Rajeev Goel, an Illinois State University economist, co-authored a 2023 paper finding that multilateral trade agreements help fight “public sector corruption” by creating transparent, level playing fields for buying and selling goods across borders.
“The current tariffs are doing the reverse of what we studied earlier,” he said.
“If you define corruption as making side deals with the Trump administration for special exemptions, that is certain to happen on a grand scale, and may well be the intent of the tariff imposition itself,” said Bill Megginson, a finance professor at the University of Oklahoma’s business school and a co-author of a 2025 paper that studied political “distortions” of Trump’s first-term tariffs.