This newsletter was originally published on Revolving Door Project’s Substack.
It’s weeks forty-nine through fifty-one of the Revolving Door Project’s Corruption Calendar, where we highlight the latest slate of corporate corruption that’s shaping the Trump Administration, its agenda, and the material impacts of that corruption on real people. Our first forty eight issues can be found here, and you can follow us on Bluesky and X for more updates on this work.
The Trump administration has had a busy holiday season – over the past several weeks, the admin has bombed Nigeria on Christmas Day, continued to threaten a U.S. invasion of Greenland, kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro seemingly in order to hand over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves to American billionaires, and murdered a U.S. citizen watching ICE’s activities in Minneapolis. The imperial boomerang just keeps on ricocheting. Who pays the price? Vulnerable people the whole world over.
Amidst all of this state-sanctioned cataclysmic enactment of global violence, the grifters that define the Trump era just keep on grifting.
Forever Wars For Everyone
Maduro, of course, has long subjected the people of Venezuela to an oppressive regime that has seen years of state terror enacted through the kidnapping of political dissidents and the torture of protestors across the country. Yet, the U.S.’ illegal incursion into Venezuela—like all of the U.S.-led coups that have preceded it—will bring nothing but harm to Venezuelans themselves.
Indeed, those poised to benefit from Trump’s illegal actions include the U.S. oil majors and their investors, though likely less so than in the narrative Trump and his cabinet seem insistent on selling. In fact, as Aaron Regunberg and Tyson Slocum noted in The New Republic, the regime change seems designed, in part, to force American taxpayers to guarantee, and subsidize, profits for the oil and gas industry and the billionaires who run it.
Of course, many American oil companies and their execs, whom Trump tipped off before the coup, are notably also major Trump donors and have “revolved” a significant number of policy advisors and staffers into the administration. (Speaking of insider information, suspicious bets made in prediction markets in the days leading up to Trump’s invasion sparked online speculation of insider trading.)
The forced regime change has also spurred apparent windfalls for other U.S. industries, like America’s war profiteers. NPR reports that “shares in Lockheed Martin, Boeing, RTX Corp., and General Dynamics are all up this week, with the latter hitting an all-time high,” as execs prepare to capitalize on the launching of more U.S. taxpayer-funded forever wars across the globe. Notably, many of these same defense profiteers have also been significant donors to Trump, his ballroom, and his allies.
Paul Singer—a billionaire Trump donor—also stands to massively profit from Maduro’s capture, by way of his ownership of Citgo, the US-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company. Should more Venezuelan oil come flowing to the US, Citgo’s refineries on the Gulf will inevitably bring even more poison to vulnerable communities already plagued by cancerous chemicals in their air and water.
Karen Budd-Falen Failing To Disclose Rampant Conflicts Of Interest
Reporting this week revealed that Karen Budd-Falen, Trump’s Associate Deputy Secretary at the Department of the Interior, made a killing off her agency’s approval of a massive lithium mine in Nevada.
In 2018, when she was an Interior official in the first Trump administration, Budd-Falen and her husband sold $3.5 million in water rights to Lithium Nevada (the owner of the project). Then in 2019, Budd-Falen met with Lithium Nevada execs in the Interior Department’s cafeteria.
Why does it matter? The water rights sale was contingent on the project securing appropriate permits from the Department of the Interior, which Budd-Falen also failed to disclose. Notably, the Trump Administration seemingly fast-tracked that approval just days before it left office in 2021.
Of course, Budd-Falen also seemingly failed to appropriately disclose the value of the ranch property; per the New York Times, “On four successive financial disclosure forms submitted to the government between 2018 and 2021, Ms. Budd-Falen listed her husband’s ranch, named Home Ranch, as an asset, noting that he had a 50 percent ownership share. The disclosures didn’t mention her husband’s sale of the water rights to Lithium Nevada Corp. Each document filed annually also listed income from the ranch as less than $201. At the time, it was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in initial payments from Lithium Nevada Corp., according to the contract.”
The mine itself has long been controversial for a slate of other reasons, including grossly violating the federal government’s obligation to obtain the free, prior, and informed consent from Indigenous communities in the region, reportedly stealing water from other rights holders in Thacker Pass, and more.
Narcissism: A Study In Three Parts
As we noted in our last edition, Trump has reached new levels of narcissistic fervor by renaming the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after himself.
He didn’t stop there. The Navy has dubbed its new class of battleships “the Trump Class,” and has even gone so far as to emblazon Trump’s own likeness on the first of the fleet as the ship’s logo.
He has also (potentially illegally) slapped his picture on the annual National Parks Pass. The National Park Service (NPS) then changed its own policies to try and punish people for attempting to cover up Trump’s likeness by seemingly redefining its “Void if Altered” policy. The move could result in the total invalidation of the pass and result in additional charges to passholders seeking access to the national park system. In other parks news, the Trump administration rapidly (and allegedly also illegally) hiked the cost of admissions for non-U.S. residents, who now face a $100 surcharge when seeking entry to the nation’s most popular parks.
Though childish and absurd, the moves aren’t arbitrary, and do speak to the new depths of sycophancy and self-obsession—to levels only befitting of a tyrant—that this administration reaches everyday. We should all be concerned by the footprint of Donald Trump’s ego continuing to grow as it scars an innumerable amount of landscapes, institutions, and communities ever deeper, and we should all be concerned by its enforcement via increasingly brazen militarized violence in and outside of the country itself.
One reason we favor a strong civil service and a sense of independent mission in government agencies ruled by law is precisely to inculcate a sense that, and to create a reality in which, government is of, by, and for the country as a whole, rather than being subject to radical alteration by the fleeting machinations of tyrannical wannabes who are constantly enabled by a corrupt Supreme Court.
Quick Corruption Hits
The New York Times put out a number of useful tools in December tracking the Trump administration’s circus of liars, grifters, and parasites: one found that hundreds of Trump donors have benefited majorly from Trump’s first year back in office. Another tool explores the wild web of self-enriching schemes that Trump, his family, and his allies have launched to cash in on his second term. Both reveal a hugely concerning scene of the state of basic ethics standards in Washington.
Also, our Kenny Stancil has an excellent piece out in The American Prospect today. Stancil examines Kristi Noem’s ruinous decision making as head of the country’s disaster preparedness and response apparatus, and the deadly past (and future) consequences of such brazen ineptitude on vulnerable communities reeling from catastrophe.