The royal family of Qatar might be gifting the Trump administration, via the Department of Defense, a $400 million luxury superjet that could be used as Air Force One. According to the reports, the plane would be transferred to Donald Trump’s presidential library foundation after his term ends. Not to worry, the president assured Americans—the deal was a very “transparent action” with the Defense Department and won’t cause any problems. The announcement came shortly before the president’s first overseas trip of his second term, which brought him to Qatar, whose government has funded Hamas. Since the news broke, a Qatari spokesperson clarified that no deal has been reached.
This deal would be a major ethics scandal in most U.S. presidencies. But not with Trump.
Cryptocurrency has been another area where the lines between personal and political interest have been blurred, if not erased altogether. Shortly before his inauguration, the president—once a critic of the crypto industry—jumped into the mix with a memecoin of his own, as did first lady Melania Trump. Together with other ventures, the family has reportedly earned billions in just the past few months. Two of Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald Jr., recently started World Liberty Financial, which has begun another stablecoin. There are reports that a company based in Abu Dhabi, MGX, will use its coin for a multibillion-dollar investment.
As if all this was not problematic enough, on May 22, the 220 top investors in the $Trump memecoin will enjoy a lavish dinner with the president. Attendees upped their investments in the coin to secure their seats, paying as much as $16.4 million.
This comes after years of Republicans alleging that Hunter Biden had capitalized on his family name to make money in Ukraine and elsewhere (without providing evidence that his father, President Joe Biden, had been involved with his dealings).
The difference with the Trump sons is that the entire world knows what they are up to, since they conduct their business with the cameras rolling. Several major business deals have been completed or are in process in countries with which the United States has major policy interests. The Trump Organization, for instance, is pursuing a tower project in Dubai and a $5.5 billion golf club in Qatar.
During Trump’s first term, the same problems emerged—just at a smaller level. The president refused calls for him to separate his business by putting it into a blind trust, instead insisting that his sons and CEO Allen Weisselberg would ensure that everything was kosher. Trump insisted on retaining ownership.
Former President Richard Nixon famously said, “When the president does it, that means that it’s not illegal.” By doing everything in broad daylight, Trump’s update would likely be, “If a president does it with the whole world watching, it mustn’t be illegal.”
As the worlds of business, politics, and policy blend into one, and it becomes impossible to disentangle self-interest from many of the decisions being made in the White House, the situation has created an ethics crisis unlike any the nation has faced since Nixon’s presidency between 1969 and 1974.
Although the short-term prospects for any legislative solution are minimal—given that the Republican majority on Capitol Hill still has little interest in challenging the administration on anything—Congress will have to act in the long term. Reform is possible. The last time that the nation faced a crisis of this magnitude, in the aftermath of Watergate, lawmakers and the president met the challenge.
During the first part of the 1970s, there was widespread concern that the democratic process in the United States was broken. The investigations that brought Nixon down exposed how leaders could abuse political power. Watergate also revealed multiple examples of how the Nixon administration had courted the support of interest groups, such as milk producers, with the lure of favorable public policies.
Over on Capitol Hill, there were shocking scandals that brought major legislators down. There were personal scandals, such as House Administration Committee Chairman Wayne Hays hiring his girlfriend as a secretary despite her not being able to type, or Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills being caught in a relationship with a stripper (stage name Fanne Foxe) after she plunged into the Tidal Basin following a night of drinking. Shady financial escapades came to light as well. In 1978, Michigan Democratic Rep. Charles Diggs was convicted on charges of diverting his employees’ pay for his own use. Two other Democrats, Pennsylvanian Reps. Joshua Eilberg and Daniel Flood, pleaded guilty to separate felonies. Both would plead guilty to separate felonies. Several other elected officials were also under investigation, including Georgia Democrat Herman Talmadge. The Senator was not ultimately charged with a crime, though he was censured by his colleagues in October 1979.
While incumbents are rarely interested in tackling ethics, realizing that voters care much more about bread-and-butter issues, conditions in the 1970s were unique. The “Watergate Babies” elected in 1974 were committed to changing the rules of the political game so that elected officials had to be held accountable. There was a sense of urgency and a perception that politicians could suffer electoral consequences if they did nothing.
President Jimmy Carter, who had run against then-President Gerald Ford in 1976 by promising voters they could trust him, was determined to take concrete measures to curb executive power and impose real preventive restraints on its abuse. He was more than willing to give up presidential power in exchange for expanding the “auxiliary precautions,” as James Madison called them, required to prevent tyrannical and corrupt leaders.
In October 1978, upon signing the Ethics in Government Act into law, Carter announced: “I believe this act will help to restore public confidence in the integrity of our Government, and I think it might serve as a bellwether or a guide to other elements of our government at the State and local level.”
The legislation contained several provisions. Financial disclosure regulations required representatives and senators, federal justices, officials in the executive branch who were at a specified pay level, the president and vice president, and candidates in federal elections to provide annual financial reports. The documentation would be put into the public record, along with information about their income and assets, transactions, close family members’ interests, and gifts that they had received. The measures ensured greater transparency than ever before.
To tackle the “revolving door” problem—where legislators, staffers, and interest groups were constantly trading places—the bill also restricted former government officials from lobbying for two years after leaving their jobs. The rules were meant to create some form of separation between when a person served in office and when that person could try to influence those still in office. Other congressional ethics rules that had recently been adopted, such as bans on earning certain kinds of outside income, were also codified in the legislation.
The Ethics in Government Act established an Office of Government Ethics within the Office of Personnel Management to oversee and regulate ethics policies within the executive branch. The president would appoint a director, whom the Senate would then confirm.
Finally, the legislation established the Office of the Independent Counsel. This was in response to Nixon having fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox in October 1973 during the “Saturday Night Massacre,” which triggered public outrage. Under the 1978 law, the attorney general would be charged with asking a special panel of judges to appoint an independent counsel to investigate allegations of misconduct committed by high-level officials. The prosecutor would have full authority over the matter and could not be removed from their job without strong and credible evidence of misconduct. The prosecutor was given the power to issue a report to Congress that would include impeachment recommendations.
Over the following decades, the law created an essential infrastructure to counter and expose the worst inclinations of officials willing to take advantage of voters’ trust in them. Congress continued to strengthen the measure. In 1988, the Office of Government Ethics became an independent agency, which further insulated the body from presidential interference. The Ethics Reform Act of 1989 imposed new disclosure requirements while strengthening compliance measures.
The most controversial part of the legislation became the Office of the Independent Counsel. After its creation, several independent prosecutors would conduct multimillion-dollar investigations into many cases, including the Iran-Contra scandal under President Ronald Reagan (investigated by Lawrence Walsh) and President Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky (Kenneth Starr), the latter of which resulted in the House voting to impeach Clinton for obstruction of justice and perjury.
Though this component of the legislation would survive a Supreme Court challenge with Morrison v. Olson (1988), Congress and the president eventually allowed the measure to expire in 1999, at which point both major parties felt that the prosecutors had gained too much power and were unaccountable to any branch of government.
The remainder of the legislation, however, remains intact. It has fulfilled its promise of improving voters’ knowledge about the financial interests of elected officials and maintaining rules that render certain types of problematic activities unacceptable. Until recently, the Office of Government Ethics has remained an important state body that has kept an eye on this issue.
Trump has exposed how, regardless of the rules on the books, there is plenty of space for powerful politicians to ignore guardrails if they don’t have any sense of shame and are not scared of being brought down by investigations. And the president is also going after the legislation with hammer and tongs. In February, for instance, Trump removed David Huitema from his post as head of the Office of Government Ethics.
Yet the Ethics in Government Act remains a notable example of how Congress has the power to take concrete steps to restore public trust. Capitol Hill is not helpless. Not doing anything is a choice.
While the Constitution does contain certain provisions to stem corruption, such as the foreign emoluments clause, which disallows public officials from taking gifts or payments from “any King, Prince, or foreign state,” the courts have been reluctant to enforce the provision, and it is unlikely that the current Congress will conduct hearings into the administration. Nor did the Constitution stipulate what the remedies should be when the clause is violated.
The nation needs a new round of ethics legislation once again. Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin has been championing a bill that would establish a procedure to require presidents to approach Congress about gifts from overseas leaders, mandating a specified amount of time by which the House and Senate must approve or disapprove the gift.
A group of 20 Senate Democrats, too, seem to understand the urgency of the moment. The minority party has been trying to move forward with a bill that would prohibit presidents, lawmakers, and their families from endorsing or sponsoring crypto products. Last year, there was also a bipartisan House proposal (sponsored by Kentucky Republican James Comer and California Democrat Katie Porter), the Presidential Ethics Reform Act, that would strengthen disclosure laws for foreign payments to the president, vice president, and their families.
But most Republicans, who control both chambers, have shown little interest in joining their colleagues in voting for the legislation.
Reform, however, is a long game. Veterans of this issue understand that building support for measures such as the Ethics in Government Act can take years, if not decades, before windows of opportunity emerge to move forward with legislation. Very often, major scandals—such as Watergate—have become the earthquakes that shake the stability of the status quo.
