We all know Americans vote with their wallets. President Bill Clinton’s first campaign ran on the slogan: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Today, with questionable economic news, maybe this means trouble for President Donald Trump.
But forget the economy. Americans should be more concerned about the Trump-led corruption that has settled over Washington like a poisonous fog.
Believe it. It’s never been like this before. Can you name another president who accepted for his personal benefit a $400 million airplane from a foreign government? All of this is utterly unprecedented.
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But not elsewhere. At various times Trump has held up as his exemplars both Russia under Vladimir Putin and Hungary under Victor Orban. Yet Russia’s economy under Vladimir Putin turned into a kleptocracy benefiting his friends while the rest of the country got poverty and war. While Orban engages in crony capitalism and crushes the rule of law, his country’s economy is a basket case.
Donald Trump wants their sort of power for the same ends. It’s about extracting money. This past week, Trump’s corrupt pursuits continued with a disgrace that should be burned into the conscience of everyone in Washington and the nation too.
The CBS bribery transaction is now complete.
Just before his election, Trump sued CBS seeking money for himself over a segment he said made Kamala Harris look too good. The lawsuit was widely denounced as a joke. But pending before the federal government since September 2024 was an application to transfer to Skydance the CBS news licenses of CBS’ parent company, Paramount.
While the suit continued, the application languished—for almost a year. Meanwhile, the head of the FCC revived and pursued an investigation of alleged CBS wrongdoing while CBS negotiated with Trump’s personal attorneys. And then, wham! On July 2, 2025, CBS announced that it would give Donald Trump $16 million for his library to settle the lawsuit.
On July 14, CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert described the CBS payment as a bribe. The next day, Skydance CEO David Ellison met with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. We don’t know what passed between them, but just two days later CBS chose that particular moment to announce that for “purely a financial decision” it would soon cancel Colbert’s show, the most popular show in late-night television.
And now we know that the bribery worked. One week after Colbert was fired and a few weeks after the $16 million was agreed, the FCC announced that the CBS license transfer was approved. As Sherlock Holmes might have put it, the connection is “elementary, my dear Watson.”
It’s too bad that economic news dominated headlines rather than the consummation of the most obvious presidential crime in history. It follows lesser Trump crimes involving extortion of money using frivolous lawsuits against ABC and Facebook, and may be joined by payoffs from Trump’s latest victims, Rupert Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal. These join a six-lane highway of money flowing to Trump from other dubious directions ranging from bitcoin to bibles.
All this accompanies news this week that Trump’s former personal attorney and now Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche had a nine-hour talk with Jeffrey Epstein partner and convicted sex trafficker, Ghislaine Maxwell. Was the meeting to get at the truth or to get at Maxwell? Place your bets, but we know that after the interview, with talk of pardon in the air and the DOJ continuing its refusal to release the Epstein files, Maxwell was transferred to a more comfortable minimum-security prison which normally has no room for her kind.
Meanwhile, Trump has directed Texas Republicans to try to rig the next congressional election by redrawing the lines for districts in Texas to push Democratic representatives out of the House of Representatives. Texas officials were reluctant, but now they’re doing it despite a walkout by local Democratic legislators. Republican Dustin Burrows, Speaker of the Texas House, recently said he’s ready to arrest Democrats who stand in their way.
But this week in corruption can still end on an economic note. Trump responded to lower-than-expected job numbers by firing for corruption the non-partisan expert in charge of job numbers. This gives him the chance now to hire someone who is actually corrupt and will give him numbers he likes.
So, remember, it’s not the disappointing job numbers that should upset us. It’s not inflation or the tariffs. It’s the corruption. It’s the corruption.
Thomas G. Moukawsher is a former Connecticut complex litigation judge and a former co-chair of the American Bar Association Committee on Employee Benefits. He is the author of the book, The Common Flaw: Needless Complexity in the Courts and 50 Ways to Reduce It.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
