Welcome back to Revolving Door Project’s Corruption Calendar, where we provide in-depth explanations of the material consequences—real and potential—of the Trump administration’s corrupt policymaking, with an emphasis on tangible harms to working people. Read our first 48 issues here, and follow us on Bluesky, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for more updates on our work.
Is the Trump administration the most corrupt ever? The vice president seems to think so. Last week, JD Vance smirkingly opined that “if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12 hours news story.” His sardonic remark is really an admission of the administration’s relentless embrace of corruption. Moreover, it’s only true because he’s helped to make it true, by heading up a White House that inundates the public with an unholy number of scandals that everyday people now find themselves numb to the shock of it all.
Fifty years on, Americans wake up to a new Watergate every morning; shock and disgust alone are not enough to motivate people anymore.
Still, there are some forces cutting through the apathy. In New York City, political outsiders running on platforms focused on the needs of working people triumphed over establishment Democrats. The primary wins should serve as a wake up call to Democrats on what messages actually resonate with voters: It’s not enough to call out Trump’s corruption. In 2026, voters believe that almost all institutions are corrupt! To speak to the pain that Americans are feeling right now, moral outrage about Trump must explain how the scale of the material consequences of his corruption is unprecedented and demonstrate that the opposition party’s commitment to fight for a thorough reversal is beyond question.
Unfortunately, as our stories this week illustrate, there are plenty of examples of how Trump’s corruption is making our lives demonstrably worse—from mining and oil extraction pollution that threatens the health of our communities and monopolists’ tightening stranglehold on our pockets and labor to corrupt machinations attacking our increasingly fragile democracy.
Trump Allows Fossil Fuel Barons To Unleash Mining and Gas Pollution
This month, ProPublica reported a pair of stories exemplifying how Trump’s allies and supporters are destroying our environmental agencies for their gain—making Americans more vulnerable to deadly pollution.
First, in early June, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche killed off an investigation into Southern Coal, a mining empire owned by a close ally of Trump, Senator Jim Justice (R-WV). Career federal prosecutors conducting the investigation had identified “tens of thousands of alleged violations of the Clean Water Act,” that had potentially “risen to the level of criminal behavior.” Indeed, recent legal proceedings had also exposed that Justice’s companies may have “knowingly violated environmental laws, a key threshold for bringing a criminal matter.” Yet Todd Blanche ordered “pencils down” on the probe.
Blanche’s killing of the investigation protects Southern Coal from criminal liability while also limiting the public’s knowledge of the extent of the company’s wrongdoing, but as ProPublica reports, “Coal mines often leach dangerous chemicals like arsenic into waterways and are required to strictly monitor pollution discharge and keep it under certain limits.” The World Health Organization warns that long-term exposure to arsenic from drinking water and food can cause cancer and “in utero and early childhood exposure has been linked to negative impacts on cognitive development and increased deaths in young adults.” Career officials at the EPA and DOJ were preparing to bring to light what potential dangers Southern Coal may have knowingly exposed Americans to. However, the Trump administration has decided the federal government is no longer in the business of ensuring justice and good health for all of us.
The Trump administration is also taking advice from a top polluter (and Republican megadonor) on how to deregulate Environmental Protection Agency rules around methane pollution. Oil billionaire Jeffery Hildebrand has “given more than $15 million to Trump and other Republicans” since 2020. His company, Hilcorp, which is in the business of “stripper wells,”—old, low-producing oil wells—is part of an industry infamous for “playing fast and loose with environmental rules.” Hilcorp has racked up dozens of such violations, including for failing to repair a natural gas pipeline rupture in Alaska for four months, spewing methane all along.
Instead of going after polluters, Trump has rewarded Hildebrand by putting a former Hilcorp lobbyist in charge of the deregulatory effort at the EPA. With the fox now supervising the hen house, more Americans are likely to feel the effects of methane pollution, from breathing problems, heart disease, cancer and strokes, to causing climate change.
And for polluters who aren’t high-rolling enough to get Trump’s attention directly, there are members of Trump World willing to help grease the wheels through lobbying. Public Citizen reported this week that former Interior Secretary from the first Trump administration, David Bernhardt, launched a lobbying firm that has tallied up $8.8 million in revenue from 53 clients in the last year, mostly seeking to influence “natural resource issues overseen by the Interior Department.”
Laura Thoms, a career public servant who left the Department of Justice’s environmental enforcement section last year, painted a picture of the destruction the Trump administration’s plummet in environmental enforcement will bring, right to our very homes:
Imagine living next to a factory that dumps waste into the river behind your house to save on treatment costs. Or a refinery that shuts off its pollution controls because no one is checking. You don’t need to care deeply about environmental laws to know that’s wrong. And you don’t need to be a legal expert to know that if you break the law, there should be consequences.
As Thoms writes, the Trump administration has essentially stopped bringing cases against polluters. Last year, the administration filed just one third the number of civil environmental enforcement cases compared to the year before, the lowest number of cases in modern history. And 2026 doesn’t look any more promising.
Thoms also expounds on the Trump administration’s attack on citizens’ ability to sue polluters themselves, especially in the absence of federal law enforcement: In a citizen lawsuit against Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI for air pollution, the DOJ argued that “the executive branch has the unilateral power under the Constitution to dismiss citizen suits,” contradicting precedent and dampening Americans’ ability to stop polluters when the government won’t step in. As Thoms aptly summarizes, Trump’s refusal to enforce the law will make our collective lives worse:
Without enforcement, environmental laws are just words on paper. Companies can dump toxic waste like coal ash in our rivers, release more soot and smog, spew cancer-causing chemicals into the air, and basically cut every corner that saves them a dollar but costs the rest of us in medical bills, lower property values, and premature deaths. Enforcement is what makes the law real.
Monopolists Gain More Power As We Pay The Price
Trump’s corruption has amplified the ability of Big Tech and other monopolists, already immensely dominant in our lives, to accumulate more economic power, quashing their competitors and employees along the way. The president is happy to let these companies have their way with regulators while he enjoys their gifts, from ballroom funds to sycophantic media coverage.
Trump’s lackeys have yet again railroaded career antitrust enforcers’ decisions and closed the DOJ’s investigation into Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The Wall Street Journal reported that DOJ leadership rubber stamped the merger, although staff had been considering recommending a lawsuit to block it. The merger stands to decrease competition between movie studios and streaming services, likely leading to price increases, as well as creating a news media environment even more warped to favor Trump.
At the National Labor Relations Board, Trump’s pick for General Counsel did a favor for her former client, Amazon. Under both the Biden administration and the acting general counsel under Trump, the NLRB found merit in delivery driver Hunter Richau’s allegations that he was subject to illegal threats. The Labor Board also concluded that Amazon had enough control over Richau’s subcontracted employer to be considered a joint employer. Yet Crystal Carey, the NLRB general counsel sworn in earlier this year, decided to end the case with no concessions—a win for Amazon.
Carey previously represented Amazon’s interests as a partner at union-busting law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, but said she didn’t need to recuse from the case as it had been over a year since she last represented Amazon. While this is apparently reasonable to the Office of Government Ethics, it’s evidently an insufficient way to police conflicted decisions like the one Carey just made. To apply common sense—if the referee in a World Cup match had been a coach for one country 13 months ago, would you think they could judge that team without bias?
Last week, Politico reported that the White House helped Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai dodge a Senate hearing on Meta and Google’s child safety practices. Zuckerberg would have been an excellent witness on the subject, given that he was aware of the need for more focus on children’s well-being and safety on his platforms as early as 2021. But the two tech CEOs instead are sending the heads of their Instagram and Youtube subsidiaries to be grilled as the Senate considers bipartisan legislation aimed at combating online child exploitation.
Trump’s recent dealings with Paramount, Amazon, Meta and Google illustrate the monopolist playbook for the Trump administration: accumulate power (via anti-competitive mergers) and undermine all accountability (by quashing employee grievances and avoiding public judgement). Our families and communities pay the price for this corruption, both literally through higher prices, and more abstractly through our weakened labor power and our exposure to the harms the monopolists have built into their products.
Executive Branch Power Grabs Inch Us Closer To Fascism
With every passing day, our democracy seems more and more precarious. Two recent power grabs by Trump’s executive branch have brought us further away from democracy and closer to the fascist systems Trump covets.
In the continued assault on free and fair elections, the Trump administration is moving to withhold federal homeland security funds from states unless they adopt his rules to root out supposed “voter fraud.” These steps include “phasing out certain electronic voting systems and moving to hand-marked paper ballots” and running state “voter rolls through a controversial Department of Homeland Security citizenship verification database.” The Trump administration is determined to force states into allowing them control over elections, despite such control being illegal.
Back in May, Federal Bureau of Prisons director William K. Marshall III quietly signed a new rule giving the attorney general the authority to pick and choose where to place those serving sentences in federal prisons. This means if confirmed, Blanche might seek to reward cooperators, as he appears to have done with Ghislaine Maxwell, who Blanche moved to a minimum security prison last year after she denied any wrongdoing by Trump in the midst of the Epstein Files scandal. Conversely, the attorney general might seek to punish political enemies by sending them to maximum security prisons.
Quick Corruption Hits
- Trump Admin Progeny Make Money Off Of Daddy’s Deals: Yesterday, the New York Times reported that after Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick negotiated with Kazakhstan’s president to “to give a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten,” Trump and Lutnick’s sons both conveniently started doing business with that American company. A company partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump took a stake in the corporation working on the Kazakhstan project, while Lutnick’s sons, Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, steered the family-owned investment company Cantor Fitzgerald to help raise $210 million in new capital for an entity related to the deal, earning millions in fees for Cantor in the process. The White House unconvincingly denied that Trump and Lutnick are allowing anything but the public interest to guide their actions. Yet the Kazakhstan project is just one of 14 instances of one or both families having ties to a company that is “actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals.”
- The Fed Takes After Trump’s Corrupt Lead: Trump’s brazen self dealing is reshaping the executive branch for the worse. The Federal Reserve, whose leadership have been embroiled in ethics scandals stretching back to 2020, now have an official who appears to be entirely unconcerned with appearances of impropriety. In Trumpian fashion, Fed vice chair of supervision Michelle Bowman was feted as “the guest of honor at a private, invitation-only dinner hosted exclusively by Bank of America for a handful of its top Wall Street clients.” As Better Markets detailed, Bowman’s presence appears to have violated the FOMC ethics policy, as her insights into what was going on at the Fed at that time were invaluable to Bank of America and its clients, potentially allowing them an advantage over their competitors.