MS NOW analyst Hayes Brown says President Donald Trump doesn’t have a problem with corruption. Trump loves corruption, actually. He adores it. What he hates, however, is corruption that doesn’t give him a cut.
“Trump’s jealousy over money that he feels was unfairly earned on his coattails is legendary,” said Brown. “Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital strategist in 2016 and campaign manager in 2020, raked in millions via his strategy company’s contracts with Trump-affiliated groups. ‘That’s my money!’ Trump reportedly exclaimed after learning about the high-spending lifestyle Parscale had cultivated.”
Parscale was demoted in July 2020, and he abandoned the administration before Election Day.
Trump’s former personal lawyer (and not-quite AG) Alina Habba Mildon, similarly, was the latest to draw the president’s ire for “profiting off her place in his orbit,” said Brown.
Mildon allegedly signed a $50 million contract last year to serve as general counsel for a billionaire Venezuelan family, just weeks away from a family member nabbing a clemency deal from Trump. But Trump allegedly grumbled to aides and allies that Mildon should donate a portion of her money “to his future presidential library or another Trump-related entity, according to multiple people briefed on the conversations.”
In another recent example, 2024 co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita and adviser James Blair caught fire from Trump for their political work in a Balkan territory whose nationalist government is aligned with Russia.
“This side hustle taking their focus off the U.S. midterms was bad enough, but the hundreds of thousands of dollars they each reportedly earned certainly didn’t help matters,” said Brown. … Trump threatened to cut LaCivita and Blair off entirely but allowed them back into his good graces through an act of, as the president put it to reporters last week, ‘charity.’ Again, the two men donated the money they made consulting to the Trump presidential library, according to social media posts.
“The money flowing to his presidential library instead of his businesses or personal bank account makes it no less of a racket,” said Brown. “There still have been no good answers as to where millions of dollars pledged to the library went after the initial fund was dissolved last year. … A sitting president even considering a tithe of this nature from a former staffer necessary is shocking, but it fits perfectly into Trump’s zero sum understanding of the world.”
But Trump’s personal brand is a money-maker, said Brown, and licensing some of that clout for dirty deeds requires Trump wetting his beak on a share of the gains.
“The alternative is risking Trump harnessing the full power of his office to collect what he sees as his due,” Brown concluded.