U.S. politics is drowning in scandal. President Donald Trump continues to test the boundaries of what is considered acceptable, blurring the lines between his family’s self-interest and the responsibilities of his office. While the president’s first term generated similar concerns, such as foreign organizations and government leaders booking rooms at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, his second term is blowing the roof off any lingering informal or formal safeguards that were put into place in the 1970s, after Watergate.
Just a few weeks ago, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a deal that the Department of Justice had reached with Trump—who had sued for damages related to prior investigations—that will establish a $1.8 billion fund for individuals claiming they were targeted by the federal government. As an unexpected kicker, Trump and his family are being granted immunity from investigations into their taxes. In most administrations, this alone would have been enough to set off major alarm bells, even within the president’s own party.
U.S. politics is drowning in scandal. President Donald Trump continues to test the boundaries of what is considered acceptable, blurring the lines between his family’s self-interest and the responsibilities of his office. While the president’s first term generated similar concerns, such as foreign organizations and government leaders booking rooms at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, his second term is blowing the roof off any lingering informal or formal safeguards that were put into place in the 1970s, after Watergate.
Just a few weeks ago, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a deal that the Department of Justice had reached with Trump—who had sued for damages related to prior investigations—that will establish a $1.8 billion fund for individuals claiming they were targeted by the federal government. As an unexpected kicker, Trump and his family are being granted immunity from investigations into their taxes. In most administrations, this alone would have been enough to set off major alarm bells, even within the president’s own party.
Yes, some Senate Republicans finally said no, at least for the time being, by refusing to pass legislation that would pay for the fund, as well as provide money for Trump’s ballroom renovations.
But even if the Republican “no” lasts longer than a few weeks, what is most remarkable is that it took this much brazenness to trigger a reaction. The tax immunity for the Trump family is just the tip of the iceberg. After an inauguration that featured some of the nation’s top executives, including Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg (whose companies contributed over $1 million each to Trump’s inaugural committee), Trump began his term by launching a new crypto venture as his administration pulled back on regulating the industry. Foreign investors in the venture, such as Justin Sun, have received favorable treatment from the president. The conflict-of-interest problem deepened when several prominent investors holding the Trump token were invited exclusive White House events. There have also been reports that the Trump Organization has pursued real estate transactions influenced by states affected by the administration’s foreign policy decisions and diplomacy. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, despite holding no official appointment, has been deeply involved in Middle East negotiations; his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, has significant financial stakes in the region. Some observers have even raised concerns about whether the president has issued statements about Iran in ways that could influence the stock market and prediction sites.
This list goes on in ways that can be mind-numbing. There are so many stories that they overwhelm the senses, leaving much of an electorate already distrustful of politics to simply accept these actions as the new normal.
To grasp how serious the situation has become, it is useful to contrast it with what counted as a major financial scandal during the presidency of Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The issues that fueled Clinton’s financial scandals were almost quaint compared to what is unfolding in 2026.
In August 1996, the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group in Washington, published a bombshell report called “Fat Cat Hotel.” It landed at a moment when politicians such as Arizona Sen. John McCain were making campaign finance a top issue, alarmed by how Watergate-era reforms were rapidly eroding under the pressure of soft-money (unregulated donations to parties for so-called party-building activities) and dark-money (spending by undisclosed, politically active non-profits to influence elections) loopholes that allowed private funds to flood the system. The report alleged that the president’s team was rewarding major Democratic donors with overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom, the historic room where President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. (The room, which Lincoln called “the shop,” was never actually his bedroom.) The investigation found that the number of guests allowed to sleep there under Clinton over far outnumbered that of previous presidents.
With only a few months to go before Election Day, when Clinton would face recently retired Kansas Sen. Robert Dole, the president denied that anything improper had taken place. Eleven days before the election, on Oct. 25, Dole broke into a rant at a rally in Houston. Referring to the Lincoln Bedroom and other fundraising controversies (including allegations of questionable or illegal fundraising events involving Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic National Committee, and Chinese agents), he asked: “Can you imagine former President Bush doing one of those things? No. … So where’s the outrage? Where’s the outrage? When will the voters start to focus?” Dole claimed that the mainstream news media was biased. Republicans, he said later that week, “were punished in the 1970s because of Watergate. We probably deserved it. Now it’s taken all this time to get back on our feet.” But if Republicans were doing the same thing as the Clintons, he said, “They’d be putting out special editions of the New York Times. They would be so outraged. And now it appears in Section D or later, if they got a later section.”
After defeating Dole (with 379 Electoral College votes to Dole’s 159, and 49.2 percent of the popular vote), Clinton insisted in February 1997 that the allegations were a “false story,” a claim echoed by first lady Hillary Clinton. Amy Weiss Tobe, the press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, later said that the role of Democrats in arranging these events had “become an urban myth, like the alligators in the sewers of New York. It is just not true.”
The White House released more than 500 pages of documentation with information detailing the guests who stayed in the Lincoln Bedroom, most of them from the entertainment world, including the producer Steven Spielberg and Hollywood agent Lew Wasserman, as well as longtime friends from Arkansas. According to the records, individuals who stayed in the room in 1995 and 1996 contributed a combined $5.4 million to the Democratic National Committee. Other donor perks, such as having a private coffee with the president in the White House Map Room, also came to light during the investigations. There were numerous memos showing that the president knew about and supported aggressive fund raising efforts. “Yes, pursue … get other names at $100,000 or more,” he wrote on a memo from January 1995, “$50,000 or more. Ready to start overnights right away.” Indiana Republican David McIntosh quipped: “It looks to me like they set up the Lincoln Bedroom as the ultimate bed and breakfast for donors.”
Clinton continued to insist that he had done nothing wrong. “[Y]ou will see that the people that worked for me,” the president said, “and helped to raise funds for me, were a small percentage of the total number of people who stayed at the White House. But they were my friends, and I was proud to have them there, and I do not believe people who lawfully raise money for people running for office are bad people … They make the system work that we have now.”
Democrats also pointed out that when it came to money and politics, Republicans were not entirely innocent. During the 1996 election cycle, Republicans held numerous fundraising initiatives where they made explicit promises that big donors would receive special access the GOP. “There is no question—if you give a lot of money, you will get a lot of access,” one major executive donor acknowledged. “All you have to do is send in the check.”
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott called for an independent prosecutor to look into the scandal. Attorney General Janet Reno refused. Congressional Republicans launched their own investigation, concluding that the Lincoln Bedroom had been an important tool of Democrats’ fundraising. The Department of Justice also reviewed the matter, ultimately finding no evidence of illegality, only bad judgement. In a letter to Republicans on Capitol Hill, Reno rebutted all of the charges that had been made against the president. “The White House is the personal residence of the President, provided to him for his ‘private use’ during his term in office,” Reno explained. “The mere occupancy and use of the space that has been provided to him as his home is not a criminal theft or conversion of government property.” Polls showed that the nation was split, with 42 percent in favor and 42 percent against using the Lincoln Bedroom in the way that Clinton did.
Clinton’s Lincoln Bedroom scandal seems quaint relative to the ways that Trump and his family have been personally benefiting from the benefits of holding power and key policy decisions. Independent investigations never found that Clinton had broken any laws and the scandal—along with most of the others—centered around how he and Democrats raised funds for the campaign.
Now the situation centers on a president who, along with his family, owns a massive business that is directly benefiting from executive branch decisions on domestic and foreign policy. Many observers argue that the very forms of corruption that the Founders feared are unfolding in plain sight. Worse still, the electorate has become accustomed, even numb, to these actions.
In 1996, in the heat of the presidential campaign, Dole asked in frustration about where the outrage was. Thirty years later, he might be stunned to see what the leader of his own party is undertaking—the brazenness and lack of shame with which the most powerful figure in the nation is reaping massive profit from the very office he holds.
Though there has been ongoing discussion about whether Trump is attempting to establish an autocratic system or intends to hold onto power for as long as possible, more attention should be paid to the distinct possibility that he is currently trying to extract as much of a profit as he can, at the direct expense of taxpayers and the moral core of democracy, before leaving office in 2029.
