Donor Eric Deters describes a “pay to play” arrangement with US president Donald Trump’s friends/family circle in which he fully participated until one member of that circle — Kimberly Guilfoyle, US ambassador to Greece and former fiancée of Donald Trump Jr. — took things $100,000 too far.

According to the New York Times, Deters claims he “paid $300,000 to Ms. Guilfoyle, $200,000 to Donald Trump Jr. and $100,000 to Eric Trump to speak at [Patriots Day Freedom Fest] events between 2021 and 2024.”

Deters apparently thought he was buying influence, or at least access, not just cheesy campaign speeches, with that money.

In particular, he says, he asked Guilfoyle to help him resolve an IRS “issue,” and get the US Department of Justice to demand extradition of a doctor from Pakistan over botched spinal surgeries (he represented the alleged victims in litigation).

He didn’t feel like he was getting his money’s worth — and stopped coughing up when, he says, Guilfoyle wanted him to wire another $100,000 directly to American Express to cover her credit card tab in a way that wouldn’t show up as a payment to her.

That last part seems to have been important.  Deters shared screen shots with the Times of alleged text messages asking him to move their communications to the encrypted messaging app Signal, and for Deters to “stop papering all these things.” Presumably “papering” is shorthand for creating a chain of communications that can be discovered. Why the secrecy? Another supposed text: “You’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship.”

American media are, of course, reporting the matter as a “scandal.”

I don’t see it that way, at least if we define “scandal” as (per Dictionary.com) “damage to reputation; public disgrace” or “defamatory talk; malicious gossip.”

It seems to me that, in order for something to qualify as a “scandal,” it has to allege conduct that’s corrupt beyond the ordinary or expected.

The only thing extraordinary or unexpected about the self-enriching conduct of the Trump crime family is that, for the most part, it’s all done right out in the open. From cryptocurrency scams to insider trading to sweetheart contracts, the Donald and his offspring operate their corruption machine in a refreshingly transparent manner. They don’t care if you notice, and don’t consider such things worth the minimal effort of manufacturing plausible cover stories for.

Guilfoyle’s alleged conduct is  more typical of how the American political class usually works. Nancy Pelosi’s unusually astute stock trades. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas’s billionaire litigant funded RVs and vacations. Elizabeth Warren’s strangely big book advances. When payola can’t be completely hidden, there’s at least a cover story to distract and confuse the onlookers.

Perhaps today’s Republicans are dogs compared to modern Democratic cats: Both animals will happily take a dump on your lawn, but only one can be bothered to cover it up.

Which tracks with Guilfoyle’s background: Until the early 2000s, she moved in Democratic Party circles. Before she was engaged to Donald Trump, Jr., she was married to then San Francisco County Supervisor (now California governor) Gavin Newsom. “Train up a child in the way he should go,” Proverbs 22:6 tells us, “and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Or, more plainly, old habits are hard to break.

Even if the allegations are true, this isn’t a “scandal.” It’s just business as usual.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“David J. Rush, 49, of Ashburn, Virginia,” the US Department of Justice informs us, “pleaded guilty today [October 6] to executing a scheme to defraud the federal government relating to the misuse of his government position, resulting in a loss of approximately $194 million.”

Rush faces a sentence of up to 20 years in prison, in addition to three years of “supervised release, forfeiture, restitution, and a fine.”

I’m glad to see that restitution may be part of the sentence. Sure, it only maximally amounts to about $1.75 for each American, and we’re unlikely to see the maximum, but it’s the thought that counts, right?

Oh, wait … apparently the “restitution” isn’t to the Americans the money came from, but rather to the crime ring which stole it from us before Rush got his double-crossing hands on it.

Make no mistake, Rush is small potatoes.

Because I’m lazy, I asked Google’s Gemini “how long does it take the federal government to spend $194 million?”

The answer: “[R]oughly 14.6 minutes (about 874 seconds) … based on recent annual federal spending of approximately $7 trillion” (I checked the spending number and the math — not an AI hallucination).

I guess it’s the principle of the thing. If the feds let even one of their hirelings get away with stealing from the gang itself, even  just a measly 14.6 minutes’ worth of the annual loot, more of those hirelings might decide they’d like a taste too, and next thing you know the gang’s leaders migh have to give up the thug life and get real jobs serving caffeinated beverages or pumping out septic tanks. Can’t have that!

But it’s also the principle of the thing  working from the other direction: If it’s not theft for the feds to steal the money from you, how is it theft for Rush to steal the money from them?

And Rush’s form of theft was arguably less violent than his bosses’ preferred way of doing things.

All Rush did was “create fictitious government authorities … to obtain US government funds for his own benefit.”

He didn’t point his gun at anyone else’s head and tell them to cough up or go to jail like the IRS branch of the fed gang does.

He didn’t take out huge loans and fraudulently list other people as the guarantors out of whose hides the principal and interest would be taken like the Congress chapter of the fed gang does.

He just created fake paperwork and raked off 14.6 minutes’ worth of already stolen money.

And he probably didn’t spend any of it on missiles to murder Iranian schoolgirls with. Heck, whatever part of it he didn’t sock away for later likely went into the productive economy for luxury vacations, cool sportscars, erotic massages, etc.

Maybe that’s not commendable as such, but it beats the money getting spent on concentration camps for immigrants, SWAT teams to take out recreational pharmaceuticals dealers, etc.

And now the federal gang will steal another million bucks or so from the rest of us to keep Rush in a cage for 20 years, instead of just handling the problem the way smaller, more efficient crime rings do (cement shoes don’t cost nearly as much, even if there’s a missing persons report filed).

I’ve heard the current administration described as “the Sopranos, DC chapter.” If only. It’s the mafia version of “too big to fail.” Its protection rackets and heist schemes are poorly planned and inefficiently executed, and when one of its rogues goes rogue it puts on a show trial instead of ordering a hit.

“This thing of theirs” makes The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight look like a well-oiled crime machine.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Wall Street Journal columnist Barton Swaim’s “A Suggestion for Young Radicals” to embrace moderation (October 1) might seem to bring the second least appealing news hook for a commentator whose outlet is named after the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison who famously asserted that he would rather “tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm” than “use moderation in a cause like the present … I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.”

At least Swaim’s contribution keeps the Journal‘s op-ed page going when even the New York Times has moved on to so-called “guest essays.”  P.J. O’Rourke, in contrast, opened A Cry From the Far Middle with a proposal for “an opinion-free news media source” called “Happy Medium” — and while Swaim commends Aurelian Craiutu’s Why Not Moderation? for how it “distinguishes moderation from ‘lukewarm wishy-washiness,'” O’Rourke would happily “bring the Wishy and the Washy back together … The extreme moderates’ non-negotiable demand? Negotiation.”

While O’Rourke made his lack of regret for moving from his hippie Maoist youth to middle-aged rock-ribbed-yet-still-hip conservatism clear with titles like Republican Party Reptile or Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut, his idea of mellowing in old age was writing a follow-up to a humor piece whose title infamously began “How to Drive Fast on Drugs” with one on “How to Drive Fast When the Drugs Are Mostly Lipitor …” (both reprinted in a 2009 book whose subtitle boasts that his ideal post-recession economy would be one “With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn”).

In contrast, Swaim seeks refuge in “institutions that require political actors to reason, argue and compromise with one another.” The Freeman founder Leonard Read anticipated Swaim’s invocation of Aristotelian moderation as an inherent good, writing in a 1956 article for that magazine that “the golden-mean theory cannot properly be applied indiscriminately … it is patently unsound when deciding between stealing nothing or stealing $1,000.”

Swaim paints a picture of a “hard left, from the French Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union” which always “tried to explain life’s complexities in terms of class warfare” (which makes it almost redundant for him to note that he “regard[s] socialism as itself a form of extremism”).

In the wake of that collapse, The Freeman ran an account about how “it is good to remember that from the beginning—not just among conservatives but among democratic socialists—there were many who saw clearly that Marxism was a weird mystique set forth by an egotistical crank” by democratic socialist Martin Gardner, who related how “[H.G.] Wells tried to convince Russian leaders that in England there were at least 200 different classes.”

Gardner could then point to Bertrand Russell’s The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism as a book-length exposé of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from the perspective of a less doctrinaire socialist “widely known” enough compared to Wells’s Russia in the Shadows to not need popularization (a category for which he could have also mentioned John Spargo’s Bolshevism: The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy).

As for actually existing capitalism, it includes not only such deviations from clichéd socialist theory as individuals like Wells’s “works foreman who is being taken in a train by an engine-driver to see how the house he is having built for him by a building society is getting on.” The editors of In These Times, which to Swaim exemplifies far-left “periodicals that might fairly be termed immoderate,” observed in 1980 that “federal regulation of the economy has been welcomed or sought by American business leaders” while being sold as a populist imposition on them — and thus socialism would involve “dismantling the highly centralized agencies created to insulate corporate power from popular control.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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