Date: Wednesday, 02 September 2026
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/is-trump-the-most-corrupt-president
https://theduran.com/is-trump-the-most-corrupt-president-in-u-s-history/
Is Trump the most corrupt President in U.S. history?
1 September 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
The Republican President Warren Harding is generally considered to have been the most corrupt in U.S. history. But on June 11 2024, I headlined “Biden is the most corrupt President in U.S. history.” And then, on 23 August 2025, I headlined “The Trump crime-family now outdoes even the Biden crime-family.” However, in a recent week, there were so many incidents reported of Trump’s corruptness, that I have now increased still further my rating of him for corruptness. Consider the following article from The Week magazine, issue-dated on 14 August 2026, summarizing those reports:
Profiting from the presidency
The Week (US)
7 August 2026
In the second Trump administration, “the palms couldn’t be greasier,” said Daniel W. Drezner in his Substack newsletter. A Wall Street Journal story last week revealed the epic scale of President Trump’s corruption, detailing how he has extracted more than $800 million from companies and donors since returning to office. Top Trump fundraiser Meredith O’Rourke—whom he’s nicknamed the “princess of darkness” — will call companies on the president’s orders and say, “The boss wants this money.” O’Rourke has gotten results: SoftBank handed over $50 million for Trump’s presidential library, Apple $25 million for his White House ballroom, and Meta $10 million for a Trump-aligned nonprofit. Donors understand that such investments might secure them more-favorable treatment. Trump last month renewed a tariff exemption for natural diamonds just weeks after a Belgian diamond group gifted him a watch-size 18-karat gold ring bearing two large diamond Ts. And all this graft is on top of the $2.2 billion Trump made in 2025 alone “from a variety of shakedowns and grifts,” including cryptocurrency schemes and real estate deals with Arab tyrants.
The Trump family is about to rake in even more, said the Washington Examiner in an editorial. Its media venture last week launched Truth API, which for up to $100,000 a month will give subscribers’ millisecond-faster access to the president’s Truth Social posts. The ability to trade early on market-moving information can generate big profits — a Trump post in April 2025 “announcing a tariff pause sent the S&P 500 soaring 9.5%” — and hedge funds and financial institutions will likely pay for the service, if only to stay competitive with other traders. “The whole concept is so corrupt you almost struggle to get your head around it,” said Jim Swift in The Bulwark. Trump is charging for something, knowledge of government actions, that should belong freely to Americans. “This is pure rent-seeking.”
Cracking down on Trump’s corruption should be a winning message for Democrats in the midterms, said James Downie in MS.now. A CNN/SSRS poll last week found that nearly two-thirds of Americans think Trump has “gone too far” in “pursuing his personal business interests.” But half of voters, including two-thirds of independents, think neither party is fighting the rot in Washington. After a decade of Trump’s grifting, Democrats might find those numbers “baffling.” But the public’s frustration is understandable: Congress has not passed a major ethics reform in decades, and a congressional stock-trading ban “remained in purgatory under Democratic and GOP-controlled Congresses.” Democrats can make Trump’s graft an election-defining issue — but then they must do something about it.
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The evidence is conclusive that both Parties are totally corrupt. However, Trump has risen to be the king of corruption, in ways that no previous U.S. politician had even imagined possible.
I asked Chat GPT to check whether anything alleged in that article was false; and it then accessed each of its sources and found all of them to be accurately represented there. It also said that if courts were to consider whether any of this amounts to “corruption,” “graft,” “shakedowns,” or “grifts” as defined by U.S. laws, some courts might say yes, and other courts might say no. But all of the Trump actions that were described in this article were accurately represented.
The fact that a President can get this far without being imprisoned for life is yet another indication that there is no justice in America, no actual democracy in America, and that the U.S. Government is profoundly rotten to its core — which “core” is not, and does NOT mean including, the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. actually stopped adhering to the U.S. Constitution when the worst President in U.S. history, Harry Truman, became President in 1945. Ever since then, America’s billionaires, and no longer America’s voters, have been the “power behind the throne” of (what Truman turned into) the U.S. empire.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.