Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.

Corruption is often defined as the abuse of public power for private gain. Whatever their other faults, American presidents have not historically used their office as a vehicle to accumulate personal wealth. There is a tradition of presidents disclosing their taxes and then putting their assets into a blind trust. The idea was consistent with the notion the presidency is about public service.

Like other authoritarians, Donald Trump moves to the beat of a different drummer and right from the start he has demonstrated a drive for personal enrichment. This is one president who, last time and this time, has shamelessly used the presidency for the pursuit of maximizing his own wealth. His middle initial should not be J. It should be G. for Grift.

During the campaign it was like he was selling everything that was not nailed down. Just stick a Trump branding name on a product. Take your pick – gold high-top sneakers, $199 Trump cologne, $100,000 18-karat gold watches, ultra MAGA gold golf balls or Trump bibles. In his golden age of hype, it appears there is almost nothing he would not sell.

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics found 168 new products on trumpstore.com since November. You can get a $200 MAGA victory blanket, a $30 inauguration seal coffee mug or a $550 “Trump 45-47” Bling Clutch. The Trump store is run by Trump organization and it puts millions in the president’s pocket. So much for not turning the presidency into a profit-making business.

The weekend before the inauguration, Trump released meme coins named after himself and his wife. The meme coins, $Trump and $Melania, are crypto tokens. They perfectly reflect the scam nature of MAGA. A meme coin has no intrinsic value. They are usually based on an internet joke, a product of hype and shared delusion. They reflect and make use of a celebrity’s image.

People make money riding the speculative highs and lows of meme coin trading. Value is highly volatile. Meme coins are used for crypto “pump and dumps.” Investors can use social media to push a profile causing a surge in value. That can allow insiders to sell making quick profit before the price falls. If this sounds sleazy, you got it. As Jacob Silverman has written, it is a bunch of insiders self-dealing fake money and dumping it on the public.

The Friday before his inauguration, the value of $Trump spiked as high as $72.62.

80% of the tokens were allocated to insiders. Trump owned an estimated 800 million of the new $Trump coins blowing up his fortune. On the day of his inauguration, Trump announced the $Melania coin which had a quick rise and fall. By Tuesday, the day after the inauguration, Trump’s own coin value went down to $38. It is hard to think the values offered mean anything but Axios reported the coin had made Trump $56.6 billion on paper.

This art of the deal is about taking something worthless, making easy money and selling before the price crashes. It is about bleeding suckers dry. Just like in everything, there will be losers, likely low-level MAGA diehards who bought into what they thought was a get-rich-quick sure thing. Lawsuits about meme coin cheating are an almost certain likelihood.

Trump did a turnaround in his attitude toward crypto when he saw it could be a personal money-maker. He said his sons opened his eyes. Don Jr. and Eric launched their own crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Trump now says he plans to make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet” and a “bitcoin superpower.”

As the historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has written corruption is a process as well as a set of practices. In her book, Strongmen, she wrote:

“They turn the economy into an instrument of leader wealth creation, but also encourage changes in ethical and behavioral norms to make things that were illegal or immoral appear acceptable, whether election fraud, torture or sexual assault.”

The legal questions raised by Trump’s behavior abound. There are massive conflicts of interest and securities fraud issues. Trump is seeking to gain while being obligated to regulate. Non-disclosure and de-regulation are his way. The ethics expert, Norm Eisen, calls the meme coins “the single worst conflict of interest in the modern history of the presidency”.

Those seeking favors or policy change can buy the $Trump meme coin. This becomes particularly problematic considering the Constitution’s emoluments clause. The Constitution bars federal office-holders from receiving payments from foreign governments. Foreign governments can buy the $Trump meme coin and raise its value. No one is policing this activity. It is like the Trump administration is successfully pretending the emoluments clause doesn’t exist. Who will stop foreign governments from giving Trump money in the scheme? It would appear no one.

The proliferation of meme coins would also appear to be the issuance of unlicensed securities opening the door to securities fraud but Trump has replaced the SEC Chair with a cryptocurrency advocate. The new chair is likely to take the position that no cryptocurrency is a security. This is essentially putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop. I would expect we will see much defrauding of investors as insiders “pump and dump.”

Last year, House Democrats released evidence that showed Trump accepted $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments during his first term. He used Trump properties such as Mar-a-Lago and Trump International Hotel in Washington DC for fundraising events and meetings with foreign heads of state. He turned the office of the presidency into a vendor of his own brand.

Not surprisingly, Trump’s transition team submitted an ethics pledge that doesn’t require him to address potential conflicts of interest. Trump’s return is both a shady cash grab and a statement about the end of accountability and ethical standards in government. It is entirely fitting that Trump fired Inspector Generals from more than a dozen federal agencies. They have been the watchdogs for uncovering fraud and abuse. Trump failed to give Congress the 30-day notice required by law nor did he provide substantive rationale which is also required by law. This is what one would expect from a convicted felon.