Pay to Play

Ask the average political junkie to name a scandal involving Joe Biden’s son Hunter and I bet nine out of 10 would name the same one.

Not the crack habit. Not the gun crime. Not the tax offenses. Not the seamy sexual escapades. Not even the mysterious job opportunities he received from foreign corporations.

They’d mention the paintings.

Less than a year after his father became president, despite the fact that he was a novice at art, Hunter’s paintings were on display in a New York gallery. It was reported initially that the gallery was seeking up to $500,000 for some, but the owner scoffed at that number, insisting that they’d sell for no more than, er, $100,000 apiece instead.

By early 2024 Biden’s artwork had raked in a collective $1.5 million, more than half the proceeds of which went to the artist himself. But a funny thing happened: According to court documents Hunter filed earlier this year, the market dried up. “In the 2 to 3 years prior to December 2023, I sold 27 pieces of art at an average price of $54,481.48,” he attested, “but since then I have only sold 1 piece of art for $36,000.”

Seemingly overnight, Americans’ appetite for his work had changed. Ah well. You know how ephemeral trends in the art world can be.

The sudden rise and even more sudden fall of Hunter Biden’s career as a painter is more memorable than his other foibles because of how glaring and novel the corruption was. Lots of well-connected politicos have drug problems, commit crimes, sleep around, and cash in on their access to power by securing sinecures for themselves at companies eager for a foot in the door in Washington. But selling access in the guise of selling artwork is an unusually creative way (literally!) to make a buck off of one’s proximity to the president.

Instead of handing Hunter a fat envelope in the expectation of a favor, “art enthusiasts” could hand him a fat envelope in the expectation of a favor—and receive a piece of art, like the little 50-cent toy you get when you buy a Happy Meal at McDonald’s. They weren’t buying influence, they were buying beauty.

It was absurd, but here’s a thought experiment for you. What if Joe Biden himself was selling the art? And what if he explicitly promised buyers some face time with him after they made their purchase?

America is running that experiment right now, it turns out.

Influence peddling.

On Thursday Donald Trump directed the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, the Democrats’ online fundraising platform and the main conduit through which grassroots liberals bankroll their favorite candidates and causes.

It’s not the first time he’s used federal agencies to seek “retribution” against his enemies. He’s canceled the security clearances of lawyers who’ve made trouble for him and ordered probes of political enemies like Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor. But his move against ActBlue is more sinister than either of those, I’d argue, because in this case he’s looking to disable the opposition party’s ability to compete electorally with his own. It’s a direct threat to democracy.

And by instigating the probe himself in the form of a presidential order, he’s telegraphing that the motive is political. There’s no reason (yet) to believe that the group has done anything to warrant criminal suspicion from the DOJ. Trump simply wants them investigated, so an investigation there will be.

In any other administration I’d say it’s the most impeachable thing he’s done. But not in this one. It’s not even the most impeachable offense this week.

The new probe is supposedly needed to ensure that ActBlue isn’t facilitating “straw donations” (i.e. contributions made by one person in another’s name) or permitting donations by foreigners, both of which are illegal. But if the DOJ wants to find foreigners funneling cash to American politicians, there’s a much bigger target sitting squarely in front of it. Next month the president is planning to host a pay-for-play event, right out in the open, in which there’s good reason to believe that wealthy foreigners will be participating.

The event is being billed as an “intimate private dinner” with Trump at his club in Virginia on May 22. Invitations will be limited to the top 220 investors in the memecoin he launched shortly before being sworn in. The coin’s value soared this week as investors sought to buy up enough to make the cut. And that money isn’t going to a campaign or PAC, which is the way rich people typically buy access to public officials. It’s headed for Donald Trump’s own pockets.

“A business entity linked to Mr. Trump owns a large tranche of the coins, meaning the president personally profits every time the price increases, at least on paper,” the New York Times explained. “Mr. Trump and his business partners also collect fees when the coins are traded, a windfall that amounted to nearly $100 million in the weeks after the coin debuted in January.” The Washington Post estimates that the president and his partners have earned $312 million in sales and $41 million in fees to date.

He’s selling his own “paintings,” in other words, collecting fat envelopes for them, and enticing buyers to make the envelopes as fat as possible by dangling an opportunity to meet with him for those who dig the deepest.

Even for Trump, that’s pretty Trump. “This is really incredible,” one of Biden’s deputies on regulating crypto told the Times of the May 22 dinner. “They are making the pay-to-play deal explicit.” A lobbyist for a consumer advocacy group described the event to Bloomberg as “buying influence with the president, there’s no ifs ands or buts about it,” and marveled that “we’ve never had a president who is so in love with money as this one.” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy called it “the most brazenly corrupt thing a president has ever done.”

As for foreigners using their filthy riches to meddle in American politics, ahem:

The Post review found that several of the coin’s recent acquirers have received funds from Binance, a crypto exchange that doesn’t allow U.S. customers, suggesting that they may not be Americans.

The biggest wallet on the leaderboard, calling itself “Sun,” has more than 1.1 million of the coins, a stake now worth more than $13 million on paper. The wallet is registered by HTX, a crypto exchange founded in China whose global advisory board includes the crypto billionaire Justin Sun.

Sun invested $30 million in Trump’s World Liberty Financial last year while under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission on charges of fraud. The SEC asked a federal judge to halt the case in February, and the Justice Department earlier this month directed prosecutors to no longer pursue or investigate certain kinds of crypto crimes.

That’s the tip of the iceberg, potentially. “If you are a foreign government burdened by tariffs, will you be enticed to invest [in Trump’s coin]?” another ethics expert wondered to the Post, with good reason. Diplomats famously spent money on Trump assets to curry favor with the White House during his first term. Why wouldn’t they do the same now, when there are far fewer institutional restraints on him than there were eight years ago?

I won’t insult your intelligence by pondering whether congressional Republicans care about any of this, as we both know the answer. Instead I’ll pose this question: What if Democrats were in charge of the House right now? Would they impeach Trump for his scam di tutti scams?

Should they?

The case against impeachment.

It’s a terrible indictment of the United States, or at least the right-most half of it, that the politics of impeaching the president for gross corruption like the crypto grift are trickier for Democrats than they are for Republicans.

Constitutionally it’s a no-brainer. Bribery is so quintessentially an impeachable offense that the Founders mentioned it by name as an example of a high crime or misdemeanor in Article II, Section 4. The only other offense to hold that distinction is treason.

And given how handsomely Justin Sun’s previous investment in Trump’s crypto firm paid off for him with the SEC—it dropped a fraud investigation into him in February—it seems inevitable that big, bold, government favors will be done eventually for top investors in Trump’s memecoin. House investigators won’t need forensic accountants to connect the dots between secret money transfers in order to prove a bribe in this case. It will happen in plain view because the president believes he’s untouchable.

Which he is.

That’s what makes the politics of impeachment “easy” for House and Senate Republicans. It won’t be easy for them to come up with convincing rationales for why Trump shouldn’t be removed for selling political influence like an auctioneer on a meth bender, but they don’t need convincing rationales. Everyone understands the situation after January 6. The merits of the case against him have nothing to do with the choice between conviction and acquittal.

If you want a future in the Republican Party, you vote “no” on impeachment regardless of the evidence or the gravity of the charge. There are no other legal, ethical, or political questions to wrestle with. No matter how justified the general public believes the grounds for removal to be, the fact remains that voting “yes” all but guarantees defeat in a GOP primary.

And so the choice is an easy one for them. The circumstances of each Trump impeachment may change but, for the GOP’s many careerist sociopaths, the answer to the question, “Do you value your job—and your life?” never does. Bribery, treason, murder: For Republicans, beholden as they are to an amoral authoritarian cult, the calculus is always the same.

What about Democrats, though? If they ran the House today, should they impeach Trump for his crypto palm-greasing?

The simple answer is “Of course. It’s bribery, just like Article II says, and he’s not trying to hide it. You have him dead to rights. Proceed.” Proceed towards what, though?

For reasons I’ve just explained, he won’t be removed from office. The Senate won’t come anywhere near the two-thirds majority needed to convict him. And some casual voters would react to the verdict by stupidly treating it as vindication, proof that he must have done nothing wrong after all. Just another Democratic witch hunt, same as the rest.

“But impeachment will call attention to his corruption, at least,” you might reply. “Make congressional Republicans defend it!” That was also the argument for pursuing him over his Ukraine quid pro quo in 2019, though. What did it accomplish? On December 19 of that year, the day the House voted to impeach, Trump’s average job approval was 44.5 percent. By early February, when the Senate acquitted him following weeks of dogged Republican spin in his favor, his approval stood at … 45.2 percent.

The GOP made big gains in the House in that fall’s election and Trump probably would have been reelected if not for his bungling of the pandemic—and was nearly reelected anyway. Using impeachment to call attention to his corruption didn’t seem to hurt him, or them, at all.

Realistically, I think, there’s no degree of personal corruption at this point capable of galvanizing a revolt in public opinion severe enough to do the president or his party real political damage. His sleaziness is the most “known” known in politics. He was an honest-to-goodness convicted felon on Election Day last year with three other indictments pending against him and he won the popular vote anyway. He could start issuing presidential pardons with a payment section at the bottom for recipients to write in their credit card numbers and I’m convinced most Americans would say, “Yeah, that sounds like him.” His crypto scam is a dog-bites-man story.

Impeaching him for personal corruption would also feel like a non sequitur politically.

In a “normal” administration, the president selling access this shamelessly would be the be-all-and-end-all scandal, the thing the out-party should obviously dig in on to damage him with voters. In this administration, the civic corruption is much more alarming than the personal graft. Deporting immigrants to Latin American dungeons without due process; siccing the Justice Department on political enemies; demagoging judges and potentially defying court orders; granting clemency to cronies, some of them violent; and hinting, ever more seriously, of an unlawful third term as president in 2029. If you lay awake at night worrying about Trump, that’s what you worry about, not a rich old crook being a rich old crook.

Imagine House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries strolling out to the podium in 2027 to announce his impeachment bill of particulars against Trump and he starts talking about … crypto. It would feel like a joke. And what would Democrats do later when the president inevitably does something worse, like knocking over a bank or pardoning a serial killer or whatever? Would they impeach again?

Impeachment is like any other commodity: The more of it there is, the less value it has. After 12 or 13 acquittals by the Senate, I dare say Americans would stop paying attention.

The case for impeachment.

On the other hand, what choice would Democrats have?

The case for impeaching Trump for his memecoin graft is simple as can be. If a federal official insists on committing a flagrant high crime or misdemeanor in plain sight, right under Congress’ nose, all but daring them to do something about it, how can they refuse?

It’s a credibility test. If a thug mugs someone in front of a cop and the cop declines to intervene, the police will never again be taken seriously in that neighborhood. Especially by the thug and other thuggish elements among the locals.

“Congress has no credibility,” you might answer, but that’s not entirely true. Republicans in Congress have no credibility. Democrats in Congress have a little, having held Trump to account for his Ukraine shakedown and his coup plot following the 2020 election. If they regain the House majority next fall, their base will be itching to see them hold him to account again.

And so, as much as Jeffries might want to keep his powder dry and reserve impeachment for a momentous civic crisis, like Trump ignoring the Supreme Court, it will feel to grassroots Democrats like they’re being taunted if the president continues to hatch brazen bribery scams after the House changes hands. Liberals are ready to send Chuck Schumer into retirement because he wouldn’t move forward on a quixotic plan to shut down the government in March; imagine how they’d react to Jeffries declaring that Trump’s parade of fat envelopes isn’t troubling enough to warrant official action.

The 2026 midterms will be a referendum on the economy (good luck, Republicans!), but insofar as there’s a subplot, it will be whether the president should be allowed to go on not merely behaving with impunity but flaunting that impunity. His crypto scam, ”the most brazenly corrupt thing a president has ever done,” is the ne plus ultra of flaunting corruption. If he’s still pushing it in 2027, I think Democrats will impeach.