“People Have Got to Know Whether or Not Their President Is a Crook…”

Nixon at least understood the people had a right to know. This crowd has decided the people have no rights the president needs to respect & they’ll keep believing that exactly as long as we let them…

Image by heblo from Pixabay

In November of 1973, with Watergate closing in around him and his approval rating in free fall, Richard Nixon stood in front of four hundred newspaper editors at Disney World in Orlando and said something that, whatever else you think of the man, revealed an instinct that has gone entirely extinct in today’s Republican Party. He said, in the words that became his epitaph, that “people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.”

He was lying, of course, when he added, “Well, I’m not a crook.” But notice the premise underneath the lie. Nixon understood, even as he was going down, that a president owes the American people an accounting, that accountability is the price of the office, and that the public has a right to know who’s running their government and how.

That premise is the thing that’s dead now, and a dear friend of mine put his finger on exactly why in an email he sent me yesterday morning. He’s a very smart guy, careful with his words, not given to hyperbole, and he wrote:

“Trump, as we well know, is a brazen crook. But never have I seen corruption as flagrant as the $1.8 billion slush fund that Trump is stealing from taxpayers to reward, in part, the Jan 6 rioters. Imprisoned by a jury of their peers, Trump pardons them and where was the outrage. Now this? Is there no way it can be stopped? So far I haven’t heard anyone suggest how. Why do I even pay my f...ing taxes? I have always committed to honesty in my tax returns. Perhaps I should find ways to cheat as so many of my acquaintances have.”

I’ve been getting versions of that email all week, and that last line is the part that should worry every one of us. This is a man who has spent his entire adult life filing honest tax returns out of a sense of basic civic obligation, and he’s now openly wondering, in writing, to a friend, whether he’s been a sucker. That’s what corruption at the top actually does to a nation.

It isn’t just the money. It’s the slow poisoning of the idea that the rules apply to everyone — the idea that holds a self-governing republic together — and once enough honest people conclude that only chumps pay full freight, we don’t have a country anymore. We have a kleptocracy with a flag.

So let’s look at what actually happened, because it’s somehow even worse than the email suggests.

On Monday, the Justice Department announced that Trump was dropping the ten-billion-dollar lawsuit he’d filed against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns, and in exchange the government would create a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate people who claim they were wrongly targeted by the Biden administration, a category that, by design, makes eligible for “compensation” the very January 6th rioters Trump already pardoned as well as Trump himself.

By the way, the entire frame — picked up and dutifully repeated by the corporate media — was a lie. Trump’s lawsuit was about to be thrown out by a skeptical judge, so he simply killed it. There’s no “settlement.” No “in exchange” for dropping the suit, none of that. Instead, Trump wants us to think that, but in reality — as Rachel Maddow pointed out — Trump is just forcing us taxpayers to give him a $1.776 billion slush fund.

On top of that, we learned Monday that Trump has made hundreds of millions of dollars trading on the stock market with stocks that he is recommending or promoting as president. Martha Stewart went to prison for making $45,000 off insider information; Trump adds a billion to his portfolio.

Then on Tuesday it got worse. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who you’ll remember was Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer before Trump installed him atop the Department of Justice, signed a one-page addendum declaring that the IRS is “forever barred and precluded” from auditing or pursuing any tax claim against Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, the Trump Organization, and an unspecified circle of “related or affiliated individuals” and entities, for any return filed before May 18th or for any matter that “could have been raised.”

Any past Trump tax crime, or any other crime involving financial fraud against the government, is now officially forgiven, forever, including over $100 million the family currently owes the IRS for previous attempts at tax fraud. Crime on, Trump’s!

Blanche handing Trump $100 million along with immunity makes Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell — who went to prison for his corruption on Tricky Dick’s behalf — look like a choir boy.

A man found liable in a New York courtroom for years of business fraud, who spent three campaigns refusing to release his returns by claiming he was perpetually under audit, has now had his own lawyer, running his own Justice Department, issue him and his children a permanent, retroactive get-out-of-jail-free card on every tax crime they may have committed, including the ones we know about and the IRS has been trying to collect since 2010.

And he did it while simultaneously arranging for the Treasury to hand nearly two billion dollars of your money to Trump’s violent foot soldiers who killed four police officers, tried to lynch Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, literally shit on the Capitol, and did their best to overthrow our government at Trump’s behest.

Congressman Richard Neal, the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, put it as plainly as it can be put when he said Trump has turned the federal government into his personal protection racket.

Meanwhile, Don Jr. isn’t waiting around for the compensation checks to show up. Days after his father won the 2024 election, Don Jr. joined a venture firm called 1789 Capital as a named partner, and the firm proceeded to invest in a two-year-old critical-minerals startup called Vulcan Elements.

That company then somehow received the single largest loan the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital has ever issued, $620 million, with another $50 million in equity from the Commerce Department as the cherry on top.

At least three more 1789 Capital portfolio companies pulled down federal contracts in 2025, and Don Jr.’s personal net worth has grown sixfold, to roughly three hundred million dollars, since the day his father was elected.

When my friend asks why he should bother paying his taxes honestly, this is the answer he’s really wrestling with. His money is being routed, through the machinery of the United States government, into the private fortune of the president’s son.

And the corruption and the danger to American democracy are not two separate stories; they’re the same thing.

While Trump is busy looting the Treasury for his family and his rioters, he’s also systematically taking apart the alliance structure that has kept the free world — those countries that respect the rule of law and democracy — relatively safe since 1945. Even worse, he’s doing it at the precise moment our adversaries are knitting themselves together for exactly the confrontation he’s leaving us unprepared for.

Olga Lautman has been documenting this with the rigor it deserves, and her latest reporting, drawing on Reuters and the German paper WELT, lays out how China covertly trained Russian troops, drone operators and electronic-warfare specialists, on Chinese soil in late 2025 under a secret military agreement that explicitly barred any disclosure, with those troops later deployed into occupied Ukraine.

The cooperation runs in both directions, she writes, with Russia also training Chinese forces for a potential seizure of Taiwan, and the whole apparatus is increasingly wired into Iran and North Korea.

And what was Trump doing while this alliance hardened into an axis that looks like it’s preparing for World War III? He flew home from Beijing, lavished praise on Xi, and then mused aloud that the congressionally approved fourteen-billion-dollar weapons package for Taiwan might just be a “negotiating chip.”

NATO formally calls China a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war, but our idiot president calls Xi a “friend” and treats our treaty commitments like old MAGA hats on a clearance rack.

So my friend’s question, “is there no way it can be stopped,” deserves a real answer rather than a shrug, because the shrug is precisely what the people doing this are counting on. Yes, there is a way, and it doesn’t require waiting until 2029.

House and Senate Democrats should be holding shadow hearings right now, on the record, with witnesses named and a documentary record being built in real time, so that the day the gavel changes hands there is no two-year Merrick Garland-style delay while everyone studies their shoes.

And the Blue states’ attorneys general, who answer to their own voters and not to Todd Blanche, should be opening criminal inquiries into the Trump organization’s conduct under state law, where no federal addendum and no presidential pardon can reach.

Letitia James already showed in New York that state fraud statutes have teeth. There’s no reason the attorneys general of at least a dozen blue states couldn’t be coordinating that work this afternoon.

Here’s the bottom line. We have a professional conman and career criminal — who has even gleefully engaged in murder in the Caribbean — in the White House.

And the Trump family sweetheart tax deal and the ~$2 billion for insurrectionists and the Trump family is a done deal; Todd Blanche has put it into writing and it doesn’t require Congress or anybody else for it to go into effect. If we don’t keep speaking out, it will soon become yesterday’s news for the mainstream media.

This adjudicated rapist and convicted fraudster now sits beyond the reach of the tax law, his family enriching itself directly from the public Treasury (and millions for Melania from Bezos and political money from other billionaires).

He’s turned our Justice Department into his personal law firm, and the Republicans in Congress are too frightened of one man’s Nazi-drenched social media account to so much as clear their throats (just ask John Cornyn), all while the dictators Trump admires, Putin and Xi, draw up the plans to end America’s role in the world.

Nixon at least understood that the people had a right to know. This crowd has decided the people have no rights the president needs to respect, and they’ll keep believing that exactly as long as we let them.

So don’t let them. Call your senators and representative through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them you want shadow hearings on this corruption now, not next year. That Todd Blanche should share John Mitchell‘s fate.

Contact your state attorney general, whose office you can find through openstates.org, and ask them point-blank what they are doing about the Trump organization’s conduct under your state’s laws.

Make sure you and everyone you know is registered and ready to vote in 2026 by checking at vote.org. If you live in a Red state where they’re purging millions of voters as you read this, check your registration every few weeks; Republican Secretaries of State are particularly fond of bouncing people off the rolls in the weeks before the re-registration deadline closes.

And if this piece said something you think your neighbors need to hear, share it, forward it, post it, and send people to hartmannreport.com, because the single thing this administration most depends on is your silence and your exhaustion, and the most radical thing you can do in a moment like this one is to refuse to provide either.

My friend is right to be furious. The answer to his question is that yes, it can be stopped, but only by us, and only if we start now.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Trump the Crook”

Comments on the Tuesday Daily Take:

What Happens When a President Stops Obeying the Constitution?

Congress and SCOTUS protect him.
~ US Taxpayer

I say it is all about POWER for the Republicans. Power exercised to plunder the treasury, to destroy organizations providing aid and sharing democratic values and ideals (e.g. USAID, VOA), to desecrate the Constitution, icons and ideals and empower autocracy, corruption, greed and cruelty. Always has been. Always will be. My question: To what end? Ultimately, the world loses.
~ Judy Player

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.