JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Most presidents wait until they leave the White House to cash in.

President Trump takes a different approach.

Crypto deals, hotels, golf courses, 747s, everything is on the table.

If there's a way to make money off the presidency, he's on it.

Tonight, we'll talk about all the ways Trump is treating the White House and Mar-a-Lago as places to help make him richer than he already is, next, Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

So, here's a partial list of deals and moves Donald Trump has done that would have sunk any other president.

He's accepted a $400 million plane as a gift from a Middle East autocracy that hosts both Hamas and the Taliban, and also may be the home of a new Trump hotel.

He's dined with top investors in one of his cryptocurrency projects and reportedly promised to promote the crypto industry from the White House.

He's pardoned prominent Republicans and reality T.V.

stars, including a man convicted of securities fraud, who, with his wife, donated $1.8 million to Trump's reelection campaign, for good measure.

By the way, he commuted the sentence of the leader of the murder of Chicago criminal and organization, the Gangster Disciples, Trump's family is charging half a million dollars to join a private club in Washington, D.C.

He's building a golf resort in Vietnam, a country seeking tariff relief for $1.5 billion, and a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City, a fact, ho Chi Minh himself would've undoubtedly found darkly amusing.

The Trump organization is planning to build a Trump Tower in Riyadh, for good measure.

After a dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Jeff Bezos agreed to pay $40 million to license a documentary about Melania Trump, the most expensive licensing fee ever paid for a documentary.

I could go on.

I.

But I won't because I want our panel to tell us what this all means.

Joining me tonight, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Leigh Ann Caldwell is the chief Washington correspondent for Puck, and Steven Hayes is the editor of The Dispatch.

Thank you for joining me.

I want to read you all something from my colleague, David Frum, just wrote about Trump and his relationship to corruption.

Quote, nothing like this has ever been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency.

Throw away the history books, discard people, comparisons to scandals of the past.

There is no analogy with any previous action by any past president.

The brazenness of the self-enrichment resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House.

This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a post-colonial African dictatorship.

Peter, agree, disagree, is there any precedent for what we're seeing in American history?

PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: No, I mean, there really isn't.

Nothing comes close at this point, no.

There have been presidents who have monetized the presidency on some level or another.

They used it to benefit their family businesses or whatever.

Certainly, there have been family members who tried to trade off their famous presidents.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That's more happens more often than not.

PETER BAKER: It happens.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

PETER BAKER: It happened in the last administration, let's face it.

Hunter Biden certainly traded off his father's name, but it was penny-ante compared to what we're talking about now.

Even if you believe all the worst allegations against Hunter Biden, it would be a tiny fraction of what we're seeing now in terms of the scale and scope of these billions of dollars.

Literally this cryptocurrency thing alone, his family and businesses have got $320 million in fees just in the four months since he started it for creating nothing, by the way.

I'm not much of an expert on crypto stuff, but that seems to be you don't actually have anything.

There's no actual tower at the end of the day.

It's just this coin, and he's already made hundreds of millions of dollars.

So, now, the question is what does that do in terms of policy?

That's the next question.

You can certainly make some connections, right?

The guy who shows up at this crypto dinner, Justin Sun, just had the SEC say, we're going to pause our fraud case against him.

So, he comes back to the country where he hadn't been in a couple years after paying tens of millions of dollars for this crypto coin that he's bought.

Is there a direct connection?

It doesn't look good, obviously.

And that's the problem with conflict of interest.

Even if you're doing everything on the up and up, the appearance usually makes most presidents say, let's not do that because it might give the wrong impression.

Trump has no problem with this.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Peter, you're giving me the impression that you have not yet purchased the Washington Week meme coin.

I'm a little -- PETER BAKER: I'm looking for the discount.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I don't know if we're going to see you back at this table.

Yes, I don't know if we're going to see you back at this table.

Leigh Ann, it's interesting, you know, like in Watergate, you know, by August of 1974, Republican leaders, House and Senate, bring Barry Goldwater with them as top cover to the White House, tell Richard Nixon, your support is evaporating across Congress, Democrat, obviously, but Republican as well.

By, you know, the next day, Nixon resigns even before, you know, impeachment.

Something remarkable has changed in Washington, and maybe it's a tribalism, maybe it's fear.

But where is Congress on all of this.

As Peter points out, Republicans were very activated by Hunter Biden's activities.

No activation here, whatsoever.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL, Chief Washington Correspondent, Puck: Yes.

Remember they were trying to impeach President Biden because of Hunter Biden's activities.

Yes, Republicans are completely silent about it.

In fact, there's legislation on the Hill, in the Senate, right now called the Genius Act, which is about crypto, that was stalled for several weeks.

Because once this crypto news with the president came out, Democrats demanded that there be some constraints on the administration when it comes to deals like this.

They never reached an agreement, and this bipartisan legislation is moving forward without those constraints on the administration trying to rein in and make some of this maybe not illegal, but some guardrails around it.

But another thing is the president is immune from any sort of repercussions other than congressional impeachment, right?

The Supreme Court has already ruled that the president cannot be charged with anything.

And Republicans do not have any motivation, political, or any way, to break with the president on this.

This is not something that they think is worth getting in front of the president on.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Can I ask you this, though?

I mean, and I know this probably will sound naive to you, but you said they have no political motivation, but what about just being shocked ethically or morally by this kind of brazen business dealing in the White House?

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: Yes.

So, yes, you think that is how it should play out.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I mean, you talk to people all the time and you talk to them privately as well.

Is there any private anxiety about this, private anger?

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: I mean, privately they're like, yes, this isn't great.

Publicly, you seem some, you see some who say, you know, well, we would prefer if it wasn't like this, like Senator Josh Hawley is one of those people who has said something publicly, but they're not willing to do anything about it.

And let me flip the question around, because even the Democrats aren't really making this much of an issue.

And the reason they're not talking to Democrats is, first of all, the flood the zone thing is absolutely working.

They can barely keep up.

But also Democrats are telling me, look, everyone knows that Donald Trump is corrupt.

It is already baked in what people think about him.

They also think that all politicians are corrupt.

And so this is not a political argument that works right now.

And so they are trying to refocus everything on chaos, on how Donald Trump is not helping inflation and cost and not helping your pocketbook specifically because they found that people just don't really care and respond to the corruption.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I guess one of the things I'm surprised at, Steve, is, throughout American history, there have been consequences for this kind of self-dealing, right, whether it's Ulysses Grant whose reputation suffered because of a corruption in the cabinet, Warren Harding, the Teapot Dome scandal, up to Watergate, obviously, and more minor incident.

This seems completely novel in American history.

How do you explain the fact that no one seems to care?

STEPHEN HAYES, Editor, The Dispatch: Yes.

I mean, I think, you know, what you read from David Frum was accurate.

I agree with Peter.

This is unprecedented.

And, you know, during the first Trump term, I think too many of our colleagues said things were unprecedented that weren't in fact unprecedented.

This is truly unprecedented.

We haven't seen this before.

And I think one of the reasons that there's not more outrage, as Leigh Ann's last point, there's a general sense, certainly on the Republican side, rank and file Republican voters believe that everybody does this.

This is what's been going on in Washington.

Remember, Donald Trump ran and he was going to drain the swamp.

This is the way that people perceive Washington working.

And Trump just does it with a little -- he's a little bigger, does it with a little more flare.

He's a little more aggressive, right, right.

And I think that's how you get Republican voters who can rationalize this, having talked to some of them about it.

And in Congress, you know, I think there's a divide on the Republican side.

You have the sort of hardcore MAGA supporters who say, this is great.

I'm glad he is doing this.

I don't care.

This is what everybody's done all along.

Then you have the, I'd say a quiet majority who thinks it's awful and they will tell you it's awful off the record or in private conversation.

But they don't love it.

They're not going to step up to do much about it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Are any of them, not to be overly cynical now, are any of them making money on any of this?

STEPHEN HAYES: I mean, that's a real question, I think, you know, and it's a question about the tariffs and what he is doing with the tariffs every single day.

I mean, if you know that these things are coming, you know, he announced he wants to now double the steel tariffs suddenly.

People weren't expecting this.

But if you knew that this was coming and you could potentially place bets that way, it could be profitable.

PETER BAKER: Well, and that's the thing, right?

The president may be immune for actions that are officially, you know, part of his job.

People around him aren't.

And, normally, administrations, in fact, find, you mentioned a couple of examples where presidents themselves didn't get in trouble, but the people around them had done a lot of things, well, we don't know, right?

If somebody playing the market here, if they know the president, as you say, is going to say something and it'll tank the market or the other way around, you can time it.

There's no regulation right now.

There's no regulatory authority right now that seems eager to look at that.

Why?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, I want to come back to that point in one minute, but, Steve, I want to ask you a question about the foreign entanglements here.

It's one thing to have this guy who's like, you know, got pardoned because of some securities thing or some of these other characters who make donations to his campaign, but it's quite another thing to get into bed with Middle East autocracies, communist nations, communist governments from Asia.

There are national security consequences here, yes?

STEPHEN HAYES: Huge potential.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Talk about those.

STEPHEN HAYES: Well, look, I mean, I remember it wasn't that long ago when people like me were obsessed with reporting on Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.

And those were, you know, I suppose if you wanted to -- I still have problems with them.

I thought it was grubby at the time.

But at least they were sort of a bank shot to the person who's not still in charge.

These are just open and aggressive.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But what do you mean by that?

Go into that a little bit.

STEPHEN HAYES: Well, I mean, you know, the $400 million plane that you mentioned.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

STEPHEN HAYES: I mean, this is -- you know, Donald Trump is accepting this.

He's celebrating it.

He's got his people on his staff who are justifying it, rationalizing it, saying, we'd be crazy not to do this.

That's far worse than anything we reported on with respect to the Clinton Foundation back in 2016.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Maybe you could help me understand something about the Trumpian mentality.

I want you to watch something.

This was from a meeting President Trump had in the Oval Office with the president of South Africa a little while back, a little while ago.

Let's just watch this for a second.

CYRIL RAMAPHOSA, South African President: I am sorry I don't have a plane to give you.

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. President: I wish you did.

I would take it.

If your country offered the United States Air Force a plane, I would take it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: He's serious.

STEPHEN HAYES: Yes.

I think he's serious.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: Yes.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Is he serious?

PETER BAKER: He's not smiling.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: Yes.

PETER BAKER: No.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: What's the thought process there?

Why would he do this in the Oval Office?

I mean, it seems degrading to the United States, the richest country in the world, to say, pay me tribute in your -- give me old planes and I'll take them.

I don't understand.

STEPHEN HAYES: Yes.

I mean, look, I think he likes it when people sort of kowtow to him and go in and kiss the ring.

I think that's exactly what was happening there.

And, you know, it's part -- Peter alluded to this earlier.

Part of what makes it hard to keep up with is that is the volume of it and that it is so out in the open.

And, you know, you have talked to Republicans on the hill and they will say, hey, you know, the Hunter Biden stuff was all hush, hush.

And, you know, these payments for his bad art that, God, and we had to subpoena people to find out about this.

Trump's doing it in the open, so it must be justifiable.

You're actually seeing Republicans make those arguments and I think it's a strength of Trump's.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: They're literally comparing it to France, giving us the Statue of Liberty, like the airplane equates the Statue of Liberty.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

I mean, you know, there is something interesting here that in journalism, obviously, a lot of the energy of investigative journalism goes into exposing the cover-up.

But, Leigh Ann, there's no cover-up, period.

There's just business, like business that would have been considered scandalous in any other administration.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: And when Donald Trump Jr. goes overseas to help ink these deals, they're very open about it.

And, yes, and there are -- and no investigations on the Republican side into this.

There are a couple letters and inquiries from the Democratic side in Congress into this.

But, you know, Republicans are still investigating President Biden's administration.

The Oversight Committee in the House just opened another investigation into the auto pen.

And so they are still obsessed with that while all of this, like you said, is completely out in the open.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Could you just do 20 seconds for all the normal people at home that don't follow the autopen scandal, what the Autopen scandal is.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: Yes.

Should I look into camera and explain?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

Talk to America about the autopen for a minute.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: The fact that President Biden, Republicans say, was so incapacitated that staffers were running the government using his signature with an autopen.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right, which is not actually scandalous because presidents often use autopens to sign vast numbers of -- PETER BAKER: Also produced zero facts on this.

This is simply them trying to say, well, he's so doddering, he must have had aides with the autopen, they have no idea.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: Correct.

PETER BAKER: And it doesn't matter that there are no facts behind it.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: But they are subpoenaing people to come in.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And, Peter, one more angle on this that I'm interested in.

Congress is obviously not providing muscular oversight now, but there used to be in government, various bodies within the executive branch that would provide self-oversight.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I want to read you something that you just wrote.

Mr. Trump, the first convicted felon elected president, has erased ethical boundaries and dismantled the instruments of accountability that constrained his predecessors.

There will be no official investigations because Mr. Trump has made sure of it.

He has fired government inspectors general and ethics watchdogs, installed partisan loyalists around the Justice Department, FBI and regulatory agency and dominated Republican-controlled Congress unwilling to hold hearings.

Talk about the changes that have been made in the inspector general system in the last five months.

PETER BAKER: Yes.

I mean, these are the mechanisms of accountability of a normal government, right?

And he has made very clear by firing the people who held jobs like that, by putting people in, like Pam Bondi and Kash Patel at the Justice Department and the FBI, what his expectations are?

His expectations are you're going to go after my enemies and you're not going to go after my friends.

And he's done that through the pardons.

He has done that through, you know, retribution time and time again.

What happened in his first term when a special counsel was appointed by his own deputy attorney general, and he then spent the rest of his term and ever since then, you know, lambasting, Rod Rosenstein for doing that, for appointing Bob Mueller to look into things.

That is not going to happen in this term.

And that's what's so different.

Like under Reagan, when they investigated people in the Reagan administration, under Clinton, when they investigated people in the Clinton administration, there were multiple special counsels.

Anytime you had a cabinet officer or somebody in there, even the president, do something that was questionable, there was this expectation that you would have a Justice Department appoint special counsel, independent counsel, whichever the structure they used, because you didn't trust the government to investigate itself.

And people wanted to have, you know, independent investigation.

STEPHEN HAYES: There's no expectation that's ever going to happen in the next four years.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: And he fired the special counsel and then put into place an ally into the special counsel's office, who's only, I think out of law school three years.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, there was a system here, there's a deliberate -- PETER BAKER: There's a system that will never be used under the next -- in this administration.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

I want to change subject.

Steve, I want to talk about Harvard for a minute, and I want to talk about specifically the Trump administration.

Seemingly war, I guess you could say, on Harvard.

What's the motivation for this campaign?

Harvard is obviously fighting back against it, but what's the motivation, the core motivation?

STEPHEN HAYES: So, I'd say there's a substantive motivation and a political motivation.

The political motivation is, it's probably good politics for Donald Trump.

He puts himself out as the sort of champion of the common man.

There's no better way to reinforce that image than by picking a fight with one of America's most prestigious universities.

So, it's probably a political win for Donald Trump.

On the substantive side, you have, and I'd say, conservatives in general have had problems with not only Harvard, but problems with elite institutions, higher education for rank discrimination, for aggressive over the top DEI policies, things that I think have some merit arguments that have some merit.

The Trump team has taken this sort of, and then done that times ten, times a hundred.

J.D.

Vance gave a speech at a National Conservatism Conference in 2021 before he was a candidate for the Senate.

And the title of the speech was Professors Are the Enemy.

And it was a 30-minute stem-winder about all of the problems with all the problems with higher education, all the problems with academia, and said, the university are ruining our kids, they're corrupting our kids, they're the enemies.

They're not teaching the truth.

They're teaching lies and deception.

So, that's sort of where I think a lot of this comes from.

And it's a plan.

I mean, this is not -- none of this is happening by accident.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Leigh Ann, how's this playing politically?

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: This is -- well, let's say two different things.

On the Hill, Republicans do not -- this is not something that they want to break with a president on.

This is not an issue that they're willing to stand in front of him on like most issues, I should say.

Politically, you know.

I actually don't know the answer to that.

I think that most Americans, from what I am reading in the polls and when I'm talking to my sources, say this is not on top of mind.

This is not what they elected Donald Trump to do.

And, you know, that is something that I've heard from Republicans say that they hear from voters on the issue of DOGE and government spending and that sort of stuff.

But like this just seems pretty extreme for people who want immigration crackdown and want lower costs.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Peter, is Harvard in real trouble?

PETER BAKER: Well look, you know, this is an administration that's been very clever and methodical about its use of government pressure on Harvard.

They keep finding a new way to attack Harvard every single day.

And on some of these, they may win.

We don't know.

Obviously, it's now starting to move its way through the court.

A judge this week said, no, you can't suddenly cut off their international students for the moment.

It is going to go eventually to the Supreme Court where there are a number of Harvard graduates sitting at the moment.

I don't know what that means in terms of their personal -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Some of them might hate Harvard, but that's what we'll find out.

PETER BAKER: I mean, you know, I mean, J.D.

Vance is a Yale graduate.

I obviously, some people came out of this experience in the Ivy League's feeling quite bitter about it, right?

And they feel like they maybe as maybe a lone conservative in a liberal institution felt motivated to attack the best -- STEPHEN HAYES: I mean, I'm sympathetic to the lack of ideological diversity to some of these arguments.

I think there's a risk for some blowback.

If you look at what Trump is doing, he's demanding five years of videos of protests.

He's saying that they need to meet some ideological diversity test to prove by a third party.

That's a problem.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Well, we'll probably be talking about this again because this seems to be a sincere commitment on the part of the Trump administration, despite what you point out, Leigh Ann, that it might not be top of mind for the average voter, but it's definitely top of mind for this administration.

But we are going to have to leave it there.

I do want to thank our panelists for coming on Washington Week, and I want to thank you at home for joining us.

For more on corruption and the presidency, please read David Frum's latest article on theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Goodnight from Washington.

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