With his usual threats, Donald Trump is trying to ward off the dire reality that he has created and is bearing down on him. He can clamp migrants in foreign gulags, coerce white-shoe law firms into becoming his pro bono serfs and try to simply erase the National Endowment for the Humanities, but he can’t rescind his harm to the economy. Trump can slash the National Weather Service, but he can’t stop the storm he’s whipped up. He’s shouting into the wind at his twister.

No matter how much he might lower his draconian tariffs after his 90-day breathing spell, the velocity of damage is just building. It’s not a mistake that can be rectified. There’s no do-over. It’s not a golf game at one of his clubs where he gets endless mulligans and is declared the champion. Nor does Trump really want to draw back completely from his tariffs as if he never had proudly displayed his “Liberation Day” idiot board.

When the Walmart CEO inevitably announced that prices would have to be raised as a result of Trump’s tariffs, Trump warned: “Between Walmart and China they should, as is said ‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!”

Trump has falsely insisted that tariffs are levied on foreign importers. But Walmart demonstrated the indisputable fact that tariffs are price increases passed on to consumers. They are a tax. Trump is furious at the early indication of the renewed inflation and price rises that are coming. His natural response, of course, is an attempt at intimidation.

The tariffs are a shakedown by which Trump could exercise his control over corporations that must scrape and bow before him, asking for targeted relief in exchange for, perhaps, payments to his personal political action committee, or, perhaps, throwing money into the kitty of his various financial endeavors, his crypto firm and meme-coin scheme. According to his wishful thinking, businesses should “eat the tariffs” to cover up his falsehood and maintain his popularity. For his sake, shut up and “eat” it. Trump is at war with the corporations’ bottom line.

He can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but he can’t fool the bond market any of the time. When Moody’s Ratings downgraded the US credit rating, the Trump White House put out a statement attacking Moody’s “credibility” while blaming “Biden’s mess”. Moody’s reasons were an oblique criticism of Trump’s pending “big, beautiful bill” for massive regressive tax cuts in addition to his tariffs, which have led to the suspension of any further cuts in interest rates from the Federal Reserve.

Blaming Biden, in any case, hasn’t been cutting it with public opinion. Only 21% of Americans attributed the state of the economy to Biden’s policies in a poll in early April conducted by CBS News/YouGov. In Trump’s first hundred days alone, he denigrated Biden at least 580 times, according to NBC News. Trump sought to make him the scapegoat for his own policies. But the public is certain that Trump and nobody else owns the economy as he desperately tries to restore it to where Biden bequeathed it to him, with inflation and interest rates falling. And, now, very ill, Biden can no longer serve as a convenient target.

Even if, after Trump’s 90-day pause on tariffs, he cuts them in half, the result will be devastating to small businesses, family farms and many large corporations. Nearly 90% of American small businesses rely on imported goods. More than 20% of the US agricultural sector depends upon exporting its products, according to the US Department of Agriculture. US manufacturers rely on imports for more than 20% of machinery, products and components. More than 41m American jobs are linked to imports and exports, one in five, according to the Business Roundtable. That does not include the multiplier effect of millions, if not tens of millions, of additional jobs created as a result.

The supply chain has been severely distorted. For 12 hours on 9 May, zero cargo ships – none, not one – departed from China to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the two major US ports for Asian imported goods. The more than $906bn trucking industry, which had finally regained stability after the Covid disruption, faces another shock. “Trump trade war is wrecking hope for 2025 US trucking rebound,” reads the headline on a Reuters story.

The uncertainty factor that Trump has introduced has frozen all planning. The auto companies, among others, have given up issuing any guidance to investors. Their earnings are plunging, their suppliers in chaos. Nobody can predictably produce, order or hire, and so businesses are in a state of suspension. The prospect of a slowdown has already depressed oil prices to the point where it will soon not be profitable to drill at all. In April, Trump called critics of his tariffs “scoundrels and frauds”, but retailers do not know how to price goods, how much to raise them to sustain often razor-thin profit margins. They face a Hobson’s choice of pricing themselves out of their markets or absorbing the costs and going bust.

The head of Trump’s council of economic advisers, Kevin Hassett, cheerfully announced on 12 April that he expected the gross domestic product to grow by 2% to 2.5% in the first quarter of this year. On 30 April, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that GDP had fallen by 0.3% in the quarter.

Even after Trump agreed to drop his 145% tariff on China to 30%, Paul Krugman points out that “we’re still looking at a shock to the economy seven or eight times as big as Smoot-Hawley, the previous poster child for destructive tariff policy”. Krugman states that on the optimistic lower end, “we’d expect Trump’s tariffs after last weekend’s retreat on China to cut overall US trade by roughly 50%. Trade with China, which would have been virtually eliminated with a 145% tariff rate, would fall by ‘only’ around 65% with a 30% tariff.”

The result will be devastating, with rising inflation, higher unemployment, shortages, and lower growth and investment. In short, the economy will plunge into stagflation for the first time since the 1970s. Then, the phenomenon was the outcome of the Opec oil shock. This is the Trump shock, not the consequence of an external factor, but entirely self-induced through a delusion. Does he care? “Well,” Trump said, “maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.”

All of what’s coming was foreseeable. This is not a case in which unintended consequences suddenly emerged without advance warning, like in the 1970s. Here the red lights flashed; Trump raced through them.

The uncertainty he’s injected is not a byproduct of happenstance. Uncertainty is the aspiring dictator’s pre-eminent prerogative. Trump resents any limitation on his ability to act however he wishes. The ultimate privilege of a dictator is to be at liberty to be impulsive. The more unpredictable he is, the more he is regarded as omnipotent.

Trump has no real policies. There is no actual analysis, no expertise, no peer review. He brandishes atavistic symbols as primitive representations of his unrestrained power. Lowering or raising the tariffs are functionally equivalent if they are perceived as enhancing the perception of his potency. The merits are of no interest. Policies, such as they are, are measured by how well they gild his lily. The more unpredictable he is, the more he thinks of himself and thinks others think of him as almighty.

For Trump, experience is meaningless. He never learns. Even his existential moments are forgotten, like his near-death from Covid. He deduces no lessons. It doesn’t inform his health policies, for example, which he’s turned over to oddballs and snake-oil salesmen led by the chief crank with roadkill in his freezer and a worm in his brain, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Trump’s learning curve is a hamster’s wheel. He goes ’round and ’round, repeating belligerent ignorance unaltered over decades. He’s the hamster who thinks he’s making progress if he receives attention. His solipsism is epistemological. Jared Kushner grasped its essence when he surfed on Amazon to find the one discredited economist, Peter Navarro, to provide sham formulas to justify Trump’s preconceived tariff obsession.

Trump’s psychological equilibrium requires the constant rejection of his responsibility for the abrasive reality he churns up. Confronting reality exacts fortitude, both politically and intellectually. He considers that a mug’s game he must resist. His inner fragility is shielded by projecting images of muscular strength, now AI generated videos and pictures of himself produced by the White House communications team as a Jedi, a guitar hero (after Bruce Springsteen called him “treasonous”) and the Pope (the new Pope Leo XIV does not much care for the social Darwinism of JD Vance).

Meanwhile, there must be a conspiracy theory to deliver up a scapegoat. That opens the door of the Oval Office for malicious fabulists to whom Trump is particularly susceptible and finds useful as his instruments to terrorize even his own staff. Enter loony Laura Loomer as his virtual national security personnel director with a portfolio in hand identifying six officials on the national security council to be purged, soon to be followed by the defenestration of the national security adviser Michael Waltz, who, rather than the thoroughly incompetent secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, served as the scapegoat for the Signal chat group that invited in Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic.

A 9/11 truther, Loomer claimed the terrorist attack was “an inside job.” During the 2024 campaign, Trump brought her to the 9/11 memorial service. Loomer said that if Kamala Harris won the White House it “will smell of curry”. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right member of the House from Georgia, assailed Loomer as an “appalling and extremist racist”. “You don’t want to be Loomered,” Trump said. “If you’re Loomered, you’re in deep trouble. That’s the end of your career in a sense. Thanks, Laura.”

Trump famously can’t accept the slightest criticism. He is armored against learning in any case. He is incapable of engaging in any self-examination for both emotional and cognitive reasons. It would be too upsetting even to contemplate. His whole being would become paralyzed if he were ever to suffer a bout of introspection. His system couldn’t tolerate it. His brittle peace of mind requires his fabricated self-image to be constantly apple-polished and worshipped.

The split between Trump’s anxious need for his cosseted appearance and the terrible reality he’s making is his ultimate credibility gap. He must sustain a completely self-contained inner world or the walls start to close in.

Information must therefore be suppressed. When the intelligence community assesses that the Tren de Aragua gang is not being manipulated by the Maduro regime of Venezuela, which is the invented excuse for Trump’s migrant round-up emergency, then fire the intelligence analysts or tell them to redo their report.

When the Democrats in the House attempted to bring up a bill to remove Trump’s claim of a national security emergency for his tariffs – another mythical emergency – Republicans moved to block it in the rules committee. No vote, no debate. It’s a disappearing act.

If the lying doesn’t work, try intimidation. That is the rhyme or reason behind Trump’s success in imposing his malignancy. But now he’s created a reality he can’t disguise or bully. The planets are hurdling into collision. He’s done it to himself by himself.

The passage of his “Big Beautiful Bill”, with its extravagant tax cuts for the wealthy and deep cuts to Medicaid, wounding his white rural base, of which, depending on the county, are 25% to 40% dependent on the federal healthcare program, will spike the inflationary effect of his tariffs as well as the deficit. Republicans no longer uphold the pretense that their tax cut redistribution of wealth upward will actually lower the deficit by reducing revenue. Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics claims, originally dubbed voodoo economics by George HW Bush, in fact proved Bush prescient. Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, confessed that the supply side charade was a “Trojan horse” for lowering the upper rate and was just a “horse-and-sparrow” theory of “trickle down.” Thus, Trump’s potential legislative success will only deepen his crisis.

Donald turns his lonely eyes to the Federal Reserve to bail him out, like his father, Fred Trump, who always arrived in the nick of time to rescue him from his messes. Trump lies in capital letters: “THE CONSENSUS OF ALMOST EVERYBODY IS THAT, ‘THE FED SHOULD CUT RATES SOONER, RATHER THAN LATER.” There is no such consensus. The consensus is to the contrary.

Trump’s begging shifts to threats. If Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, doesn’t do what Trump says he will be turned into the scapegoat: “Too Late Powell, a man legendary for being Too Late, will probably blow it again – But who knows???”

But Powell is imperturbable. “Higher real rates may also reflect the possibility that inflation could be more volatile going forward than in the inter-crisis period of the 2010s,” he said in his most measured tone on 15 May. “We may be entering a period of more frequent, and potentially more persistent, supply shocks – a difficult challenge for the economy and for central banks.”

It’s not Powell who is “too late.” It’s Trump. As Evelyn Waugh wrote in his novel Decline and Fall: “Too late, old boy, too late. The saddest words in the English language.”

Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth

There’s an old saw: If you lay every economist end to end, they still won’t reach a conclusion. Not true. Every economist except for ex-con Peter Navarro, who was recently exposed as having invented an imaginary expert to bolster his research, concluded that President Trump’s now-paused tariff policy was not just wrong but idiotic.

Trump’s embarrassing retreat last week from both global tariffs and about a quarter of the tariffs on Chinese goods (by letting “Tim Apple” and other makers of smart phones and computers off the hook) was such big news that it obscured what is likely coming next: A tariff exemption system that essentially puts a “For Sale” sign on the U.S. Government.

Lifting tariffs on iPhones and other tech imports wasn’t even the first major exemption this year. While screwing most of the world with his original “Liberation Day” tariffs, Trump quietly exempted metals and minerals that Elon Musk and other manufacturers need. The tariffs were Swiss cheese from the start, the perfect means for jaw-dropping corruption.

I grew up in Chicago politics, where if you wanted anything done — a pothole fixed, a city contract —you usually needed “clout,” a Windy City word denoting political influence.

The storied “machine” of Mayor Richard J. Daley lasted from 1955 until his death in 1976 and was continued, in much less blatant form, by his son, Mayor Richard M. Daley, from 1989 to 2011. The Daley Machine, like Tammany Hall in New York and the federal spoils system that dominated national politics through much of the 19th Century, ran on patronage, which in turn was powered by loyalty and money. It “worked” only for those who bent the knee.

To this day, many state and local governments operate on an informal spoils system called “Pay to Play.” If you want access to lucrative government contracts, you have to pony up at election time.

And, of course, Capitol Hill and state legislatures have been dominated for generations by a system of legalized bribery. In the 1830s, Senator Daniel Webster, lionized as one of our greatest statesmen, was literally on the payroll of the Bank of the United States. Corruption eased some in the 20th and 21st centuries, but we still see legislators working with lobbyists (and their PACs) to fire unnoticed “rifle shots” into the fine print of 2,000-page tax bills to benefit specific special interests.

When reporting my book on Barack Obama’s tumultuous first year as president, 2009, I remember Senator Dick Durbin fuming over the rejection of a so-called “cram down” bill that would have forced banks to renegotiate mortgages with millions of distressed homeowners, as they did with distressed businesses. These were not speculators or irresponsible borrowers but honest middle-class people victimized by the subprime mortgages that helped cause the Great Recession. Had Durbin’s bill passed, the country might have been spared the festering bitterness that brought us Trump. “The banks own this place,” Durbin told me. The following year, the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision turbo-charged congressional corruption by opening the door to hard-to-trace dark money.

But for all of the corruption, the United States has mostly thrived through its history in large part because our administrative state stayed relatively clean. Ever since President Chester A. Arthur signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, the executive branch of the federal government has been run professionally, if not always efficiently. After the civil service was established and strengthened, presidents could only place loyalists in a small number of positions —mostly as postmasters — and the job security granted to federal employees eliminated (or greatly lessened) the opportunities for boodlers, grifters, and political hacks.

That’s changed in the last three months. Instead of tapping the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) expertise, which has identified hundreds of billions of dollars in genuine savings, Trump and Elon Musk have opted for smash-and-grab. Every day, we learn of new acts of vandalism by Musk Rats more interested in installing Trump loyalists and mindlessly screwing bureaucrats (and the cancer patients and starving children in Africa their programs help) than in rooting out real waste, fraud and abuse. The line between creative disruption in Silicon Valley and mindless destruction in Washington, D.C., has been obliterated.

And now, there’s a new arena for unfathomable levels of corruption, road-tested in Trump’s first term. It’s the tariff exemption process run out of the Commerce Department and Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, a process that a 2020 Wall Street Journal editorial called “a black box.”

According to an exhaustive academic study published in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (which I read so you don’t have to), the new Chinese tariff exemption grant process of 2018 to 2020 employed “quid pro quos” and “was not subject to effective legislative or regulatory oversight.” Worse, lobbyists could apply for exemptions or tariff waivers to help individual companies and products, not just industries. Within weeks of the new tariffs, members of Congress from both parties lobbied USTR on behalf of businesses in their districts and states.

The study of 7,015 applications for exemptions from the steel and aluminum tariffs imposed on China in Trump’s first term found that 14.6 percent were approved and that “a supposedly arm’s length government adjudication process has been at least partly co-opted to reward supporters [and] punish…the opposition.”

The results were predictable: “Our findings indicate that political connections, in the form of campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures, have an impact on the likelihood of firms being approved for trade-tariff exemptions.”

Using data from OpenSecrets.org, the report concluded in dry but deadly fashion that “contributions to Republican politicians are positively related to the probability of exemption approval. In contrast, contributions to Democrat [sic] politicians are negatively related to the probability of exemption approval.”

Buried in the data was a shocking detail. Of those products made by companies that had contributed to Democrats, 94 were granted exemptions from tariffs that affected their imports from China. With the political factors stripped out and the applications measured just on their merits, the number would have gone to 928. Punishment indeed. Even what the article called “political hedging” — giving to both parties — offered no assurances of approval on the merits. That was five years ago. With MAGA retaliation ramped up under the new regime, it’s hard to imagine any companies (or their law firms) that favor Democrats winning tariff waivers.

The non-China tariff exemptions evaluated by the Commerce Department in Trump’s first term were also problematic. In 2019, Carol Rice, the Assistant Inspector General for Audit and Evaluation, wrote a memo to then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross laying out how the system had been compromised. She wrote that “Evidence of an unofficial appeals process exists” and “Off-record discussions between interested parties and Department officials are not documented.” In other words, the Commerce Department had become a safe space for influence-peddling and extortion.

And of course it’s worse now. Recall what Trump did just days after the Inauguration. He illegally fired inspectors general throughout the government, failing even to give them the 30-days notice required by a 2008 law. This lawlessness makes it clear that he wants the “black hole” on tariff exemptions (and other key decisions) to be as dark as possible as soon as possible.

Trump’s 90-day pause on implementing his “Liberation Day” tariffs was done on the spur of the moment. But that period of time seems perfect for negotiating not just tariff deals with scores of nations but clout deals with thousands of U.S. companies. These firms will soon join Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk in circuitously directing, in the aggregate, hundreds of millions of dark dollars into Republican super PACs and the pockets of Trump’s family and friends.

This shakedown scheme will make Trump’s outrageous meme coin corruption look penny ante by comparison. Fighting it begins with drawing a bright line between tariffs on products (ripe for scandal) and whole industries (necessary sometimes for national security), and with a commitment by Democrats and the press to review the thousands of applications for exemptions.

And if that fails? We become Hungary. We sink into crony capitalism, which hurts everyone except the strongman and his circle. And we maim the mightiest economy the world has ever seen.

The US has demanded control of a crucial pipeline in Ukraine used to send Russian gas to Europe, according to reports, in a move described as a colonial shakedown.

US and Ukrainian officials met on Friday to discuss White House proposals for a minerals deal. Donald Trump wants Kyiv to hand over its natural resources as “payback” in return for weapons delivered by the previous Biden administration.

Talks have become increasingly acrimonious, Reuters said. The latest US draft is more “maximalist” than the original version from February, which proposed giving Washington $500bn worth of rare metals, as well as oil and gas.

Citing a source close to the talks, the news agency said the most recent document includes a demand that the US government’s International Development Finance Corporation take control of the natural gas pipeline.

It runs from the town of Sudzha in western Russia to the Ukrainian city of Uzhhorod, about 750 miles (1,200km) away, on the border with the EU and Slovakia. Built in Soviet times, the pipeline is a key piece of national infrastructure and a major energy route.

On 1 January, Ukraine cut off the supply of gas when its five-year contract with the Russian state energy company Gazprom expired. Both countries had previously earned hundreds of millions of euros in transit fees, including during the first three years of full-scale war.

Volodymyr Landa, a senior economist with the Centre for Economic Strategy, a Kyiv thinktank, said the Americans were out for “all they can get”. Their bullying “colonial-type” demands had little chance of being accepted by Kyiv, he predicted.

Last autumn, Volodymyr Zelenskyy proposed giving the US access to Ukraine’s underdeveloped mineral sector. He envisaged a deal that would see the incoming Trump administration supply Ukraine with weapons, in return for future profits from joint investments.

Instead, Trump has refused to give security commitments or military support but wants the minerals anyway. Last week he complained Zelenskyy was trying to “back out of an agreement” and said Ukraine’s president would have “big problems” if he failed to sign.

Speaking to journalists on Thursday, Zelenskyy said he was ready to do a deal to modernise his country but that Ukraine could only agree if there was “parity” between the two sides, with revenues split “50-50”.

“I am just defending what belongs to Ukraine. It should be beneficial for both the United States and Ukraine. This is the right thing to do,” Zelenskyy said. The US Treasury confirmed “technical” talks were ongoing.

Meanwhile, the US special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, said his remarks over a possible partition of Ukraine had been misinterpreted. In an interview with the Times, Kellogg said the country could be divided “almost like the Berlin after world war two” as part of a peace deal.

Writing on X, Kellogg said he was referring to “a post-cease fire resiliency force in support of Ukraine’s sovereignty”. Under this plan, Russian troops would remain in territory already seized by Moscow, with British and French forces stationed in Kyiv and in other parts of the country.

On Friday, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff held talks with Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg. Witkoff’s reported solution to the conflict was to give Russia the four Ukrainian provinces it is demanding – including territory that Ukraine controls, and which is home to 1 million people.

Meanwhile, at a meeting of the Ukraine defence contact group on Friday, Kyiv’s allies announced a record €21bn (£18.2bn) in additional military help. They accused Putin of dragging his feet over a 30-day ceasefire deal which Ukraine has accepted.

Early on Saturday, Russia carried out further air attacks against Ukrainian civilian targets. Three warehouses were destroyed in Kyiv, with two people injured. The Kremlin has fired 70 missiles and 2,200 drones at Ukraine since the 11 March US ceasefire proposal, Ukrainian officials said.

Zelenskyy paid tribute on Saturday to a 26-year-old pilot, captain Pavlo Ivanov, who was killed during an F-16 combat mission. Ukraine’s small air force “heroically” defends the country from Russian missiles and drones, and supported ground operations, he said.

China said Tuesday it will “fight to the end” if Trump imposes an additional 50% tariff on Chinese goods as many countries rush to negotiate trade with the United States.

If the plan is fully implemented, the total tariffs on goods imported into the United States from China would be as much as 104%. In response, the Chinese Commerce Ministry said China “firmly opposes” Trump’s tariff threats, calling its previous countermeasures “entirely justified.”

“If the U.S. insists in its own way, China will fight to the end,” the ministry said in a statement Tuesday, adding that Trump’s threat to escalate tariffs on China is a “mistake upon a mistake.”

Read the full story here.

Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.

Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.

Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways

Ever since Donald Trump descended that golden escalator in 2015, a central tenet of his bond with his supporters has been a simple promise to them: I have seen elite corruption and self-dealing from the inside, and I will put that know-how to work for you.

During that campaign, for instance, Trump could boast that not paying taxes “makes me smart,” knowing supporters would hear it in exactly those terms. More recently he has told the MAGA masses that in facing multiple criminal prosecutions, “I am being indicted for you,” as if he’s bravely journeying into the belly of the corrupt system mainly to expose how it’s victimized them.

A new Washington Post report that Trump made explicit policy promises to a roomful of Big Oil executives—while urging them to raise $1 billion for his campaign—is a powerful story in part because it wrecks what’s left of that mystique. In case you didn’t already know this, it shows yet again that if Trump has employed that aforementioned knowledge of elite corruption and self-dealing to any ends in his public career, it’s chiefly to benefit himself.

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That counternarrative is a story that Democrats have a big opportunity to tell—if they seize on this news effectively. How might they do that?

For starters, the revelations seem to cry out for more scrutiny from Congress. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who has been presiding over hearings into the oil industry as chair of the Budget Committee, says it’s “highly likely” that the committee will examine the new revelations.

“This is practically an invitation to ask more questions,” Whitehouse told me, describing this as a “natural extension of the investigation already underway.”

There’s plenty to explore. As the Post reports, an oil company executive at the gathering, held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last month, complained about environmental regulations under the Biden administration. Then this happened:

Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation. Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.

Obviously industries have long donated to politicians in both parties in hopes of governance that takes their interests into account, and they explicitly lobby for this as well. But in this case, Trump may have made detailed, concrete promises while simultaneously soliciting a precise amount in campaign contributions.

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For instance, the Post reports, Trump vowed to scrap Biden’s ban on permits for new liquefied natural gas exports “on the first day.” He also promised to overturn new tailpipe emission limits designed to encourage the transition to electric vehicles, and he dangled more leases for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, “a priority that several of the executives raised.”

“The phrase that instantly came to mind as I was reading the story was ‘quid pro quo,’” Whitehouse told me. He also pointed to a new Politico report that oil industry officials are drawing up executive orders for Trump to sign as president. “Put those things together and it starts to look mighty damn corrupt,” Whitehouse said.

So what would be the legislative aim of a congressional inquiry into all this, and what might it look like? One argument is that knowing what transpired between those executives and Trump could inform an analysis of what’s wrong with our campaign finance laws—and how to fix them, says Noah Bookbinder, president for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

The rub here is this: It’s likely that what transpired between the executives and Trump is perfectly legal. It may not have risen to a solicitation of something of value directly in exchange for an official act. But determining whether it was as egregious as it seems, and examining how it may be permissible under current laws, would illuminate the gaping problems with them, Bookbinder noted.

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“There’s a clear legislative purpose in determining what happened at the meeting,” Bookbinder said. If this really constituted “an attempt to link significant campaign contributions with specific policy promises,” Bookbinder continued, “that suggests a huge loophole that needs to be closed.”

Or, as Fred Wertheimer, the president of the watchdog group Democracy 21, told me, this episode “certainly looks like an offer of an exchange of policy for money.” Given that this was probably legal, Wertheimer added, Congress could “look at this as an example of what kind of corrupt campaign finance system exists today.”

Such a move could have second-order political effects. Republicans understand that when they use their power in Congress to kick up a lot of noise about something, it induces the media to make more of it than they otherwise might. Democrats could apply that lesson here.

Democrats could also highlight this affair as a clear indication of Trump’s broader priorities. This would entail pointing out that Trump has vowed to roll back Biden’s whole decarbonization agenda, meaning he’d cancel billions of dollars in subsidies and tax incentives fueling a manufacturing renaissance in green energy. This boom is happening in red areas, too: As Ron Brownstein reports, new Brookings Institution data shows that counties that backed Trump in 2020 are reaping outsize gains—including investments and jobs—from the transition to electric vehicles.

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Yet Trump would like to see all this reversed, and he’s apparently dangling this before fossil fuel donors while demanding enormous campaign contributions from them. Making this all even more sordid, recall that Trump is channeling millions in donor money to high-priced lawyers who are defending him against multiple criminal prosecutions.

“Hundreds of thousands of good clean energy jobs have been announced, and whole communities are being revitalized as factories are being rebuilt,” Jesse Lee, a Democratic strategist who advises various climate groups, told me. “Trump is promising to crush it all in exchange for a $1 billion check from oil companies to pay his legal fees.” Trump also recently promised billionaire donors he’d keep their taxes low at another recent gala.

As The Atlantic’s David Graham details, Trump has long presented himself as an outsider—despite being a billionaire himself—by purporting to speak traitor-to-his-class blunt truths about how the rich buy politicians. This was always a transparent scam. Yet it seems even harder to sustain now that Trump has apparently placed himself at the center of that very same scam so conspicuously, making his own corrupt self-dealing as explicit as one could imagine.

If elected, Trump would throw into reverse our transition to a decarbonized future, one that’s creating untold numbers of manufacturing jobs—including in the very places that Trump has attacked Democratic elites for supposedly abandoning—all in exchange for mega-checks from chortling fat cats right out of the most garish of Gilded Age cartoons. For good measure, some of that loot could help Trump secure elite impunity for his own corruption and alleged crimes. We can’t say we weren’t warned. Trump has told us all this himself.