Hey, for $500 million it’s worth it
Talk about leaving a trail…
A mere 72 hours after the Chinese government agreed to put a half-billion dollars into an Indonesian project that will personally enrich Donald Trump, the president ordered a bailout for a Chinese-government-owned cellphone maker.
“President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast,” Trump announced on Twitter Sunday morning. “Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!”
To think that was only two days ago. I wondered about it at the time but thought it was a brain fart via talking to someone; I didn’t consider the bribery possibility (or I guess that should be likelihood). Probably because he said it on Twitter? I probably assumed, without thinking about it, that he wouldn’t announce an openly corrupt act on Twitter. Silly me.
Trump did not mention in that tweet or its follow-ups that on Thursday, the developer of a theme park resort outside of Jakarta had signed a deal to receive as much as $500 million in Chinese government loans, as well as another $500 million from Chinese banks. Trump’s family business, the Trump Organization, has a deal to license the Trump name to the resort, which includes a golf course and hotels.
No, he didn’t mention that. I guess he wanted reporters to do the work. He’s such a big tease!
“You do a good deal for him, he does a good deal for you. Quid pro quo,” said Richard Painter, the White House ethics lawyer for former President George W. Bush and now a Democratic candidate for Senate in Minnesota.
“This appears to be yet another violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution,” Painter said, referring to the prohibition against the president receiving payments from foreign governments.
The White House did not respond to HuffPost queries asking if there was a connection between the “MNC Lido City” project and Trump’s directive regarding ZTE.
At Monday’s daily briefing, Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah referred questions about the Indonesian project to the Trump Organization. “That’s not something that I can speak to,” he said.
Yeah that won’t do. Trump is “the Trump Organization” and vice versa, and he is doing favors for China in exchange for favors for Trump and his organization. They don’t get to refuse to answer questions about it. This is pathetic.
ZTE phones have already been described as a security risk by the U.S. military and intelligence community. Two weeks ago, the military banned their use on bases for fear they could be used to track the locations of service members.
The company, which is owned 33 percent by Chinese-government-owned enterprises, had been fined $1.2 billion last year after it was found to be violating U.S. sanctions against Iran and North Korea. After it was determined that ZTE officials had lied about their actions, the U.S. government last month banned it from purchasing U.S. components for seven years — a decision that essentially forced the company to shut down.
Violating US sanctions against Iran…Trump just pulled the US out of the Iran deal, yet he’s doing favors for a Chinese company that violated US sanctions against Iran.
Trump followed up late Monday afternoon with a new tweet on the issue: “ZTE, the large Chinese phone company, buys a big percentage of individual parts from U.S. companies. This is also reflective of the larger trade deal we are negotiating with China and my personal relationship with President Xi.”
His personal relationship ffs – as if that’s supposed to determine foreign policy. (Also as if he actually has one, and it’s as cozy as he seems to think. What an imbecile.)
The new statement, however, still did not address the question of the Indonesian resort and the Trump Organization’s coming profit thanks to Chinese investment.
“This is stunning. They perpetually find new things to surprise me,” said Robert Weissman, president of the open government advocacy group Public Citizen. “The idea of the president intervening in a law enforcement matter to satisfy a foreign government is extraordinary. And it’s extraordinary because it doesn’t happen. Opening that door threatens the integrity of all corporate law enforcement.”
Well that wouldn’t bother Trump any.
During his campaign, Trump attacked China almost daily for “stealing” U.S. jobs by manipulating its currency and using unfair trade practices. “No one has ever stolen jobs like other countries have taken from us,” Trump told a Nevada rally on Nov. 5, 2016. “We’ve lost 70,000 factories since China joined the WTO,” Trump told a Pittsburgh-area audience the following day.
Blah blah blah. He was just kidding.
For ethics advocates, the timing of the ZTE tweet on the heels of the Indonesian development announcement is yet another example of the consequences of Trump’s unwillingness to abide by the emoluments clause.
“The Chinese government seems to have figured out a way to manipulate President Trump,” Weissman said. “It’s exactly why this anti-bribery clause of the Constitution is common sense.”
Oh well!
I can proudly report I was speculating aloud (and I haz proofs) that this was about bribery. But I figured by ZTE themselves and/or some of their moneyed US suppliers. Didn’t figure on the Chinese government angle.
Now following from that, maybe I should write (obviously enough) that I’m not real surprised…
… but y’know, I get to thinking, this is a problem. That people aren’t surprised anymore. That they don’t react. Or react far more energetically.
It’s like we’ve all become habituated. The US public, especially and critically, like someone living with the habitually abusive, has just got used to it, just figures, that’s how life is…
To the abused, and to the US public: no, it isn’t. Or it really damned well shouldn’t be. A little reminder.
Outrage is appropriate, here. This breaks things, badly. This kind of corruption, unchecked, turns you steadily into a broken, stuttering banana republic, wherein the rich and connected make off with everything, the economy collapses further and faster, with that deadly, deadening stratification, and the already dangerously wide divide between rich and poor yawns ever further open…
The US, of course, already had plenty of trouble, that way. What looms behind normalizing behaviour like this in the executive branch, it seems to me, is like ebola to the flu, against what has been, however.
Don’t let anyone tell you, oh, everyone does it. Everyone does _not_. Certainly not this brazenly. And the relative prosperity and stability of western nations rests upon transparency and the rule of law, to a large degree. The constant creep in the direction of concentration of wealth, a tendency toward different laws for the wealthiest, it’s a known problem, but that’s no reason for rolling over and saying, oh, hell, fine, what can you do. That’s like saying because the weeds never stop coming you should just stop weeding.
Shorter: don’t say, oh, of course, it’s Trump. Say fuck, it’s Trump, and get his lousy, corrupt ass out of high government. With _all_ possible dispatch. Tell congress and the senate: do your damned jobs, party loyalty whatever, politics and crazy Tea Party morons lying in wait in the primaries or whatever, and get him the hell out of there…
Or preside impotently and shamefully over the death of what little remains of your nation of laws…
Which legacy do you prefer, really, legislators and citizens both?
That’s why I keep yammering about it endlessly and sharing a lot of the headlines, which is annoying because there are better things to think about but I just feel we have to keep listing and pointing and objecting or yes we’ll get used to it.
I suspect sometimes the sheer volume of chichanery is actually some kinda strategy. Commit so _many_ crimes that people’s prefrontal lobes seize up just trying to keep up.
… but it’s probably just that he’s greedy, shameless, and doesn’t even _think_ beyond oh, look, there’s another dollar someone’s offering.
… and, absolutely, respect to you that you’re keeping at it. Here’s to justice being brought, eventually.
I was recently privy to a conversation in which a group of educated, intelligent people were going on about how we could not slip into fascism or dictatorship because Constitution. I pointed out what at least one of them should have already known – the person who is charged with enforcing the Constitution is the president. He has command of the military, etc. These people who moments before had suggested that the military would always follow orders (i.e., no state could use the National Guard to secede from the union because of the national military, etc) then suggested that the orders in this case would not be followed.
And then followed that up by informing me with due solemnity that the citizenry would rise up in rebellion if such a thing were to happen. We…all of us, tea partiers and liberals together, would prevent this assault on our beloved piece of paper.
I was so condescended to and talked down to that I gave up…the best I could do was go home and take a hot bath and try to forget the world existed outside of my bathtub until the water got cold.
iknklast,
I’ve had similar conversations with Americans about your Constitution and pointed out that, like all constitutions, without the will to enforce it, it’s just another document. I didn’t manage to penetrate their insufferable smugness.
They also believed that the US was founded as a democracy.
O/Tish
During his US citizenship interview, the mathematician Kurt Gödel decided to tell the judge about his discovery that there are flaws in the constitution that could lead to a dictatorship. That doesn’t seem like the wisest idea. Fortunately, the judge was a friend of Einstein (one of Gödel’s sponsors) and it ended well.
I don’t know if he was right. Gödel did go a bit bonkers, even for a mathematician. In the end, he starved to death because he would only eat food that his wife had prepared, for fear of being poisoned. She was hospitalised for 6 months, so he died.