Frank Rich, a veteran political and cultural critic, makes a safe prediction: we are about to enter an era of corruption and influence peddling that will make Warren Harding’s Teapot Done scandal look like child’s play.

 

Rich writes:

 

“After the press revealed that a hastily assembled “Opening Day Foundation,” with Donald Jr. and Eric Trump on its board, was selling access to the president-elect and his family the day after his inauguration, for $500,000 to $1 million, the Trump family abruptly distanced itself.

 

“Simultaneously, Trump surrogate Newt Gingrich floated the idea of using the presidential pardon to help advisers get around conflict rules. What happens if Trump doesn’t work out a consistent conflicts-of-interest policy before his inauguration?
I hate to break it to anyone at this time of year, but (a) there is no Santa Claus, and (b) there will be no conflicts-of-interest policy in the Trump administration. What there will be are rampant conflicts of interest, more than you can count, as the Trump family and his appointees rip off anything they can — from taxpayers, from consumers, from shareholders — in a spree of deregulation, special dealing, lax white-collar-law enforcement, and corporate welfare. Just in the past day we’ve learned that the billionaire investor Carl Icahn will be Trump’s adviser on deregulation and do so under a legal dodge (he won’t collect a government salary) that will allow him to hold on to his own investments in the industries he’ll be enriching.

 

“Only hours before the Icahn announcement we had learned that Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager and ever-loyal wingman, was opening a “consulting” firm “just a block from the White House” (this was the language in the press release) to facilitate access to the White House for corporations, trade associations, and heaven knows what other favor seekers. As I’ve said before, the Trump kleptocracy is going to make the Harding administration’s pay-for-play Teapot Dome scandal look like a Sunday-school picnic.

 

“And so instead of draining the swamp, Trump is going to build a bigger and better swamp smack in the middle of the Rose Garden.

 
“Many have noted the hypocrisy: Trump promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington. Gingrich explained the seeming discrepancy in that same NPR interview in which he proposed that the new president evade ethics laws by granting mass pardons to any administration hands that get caught in the till. “I’m told he now just disclaims that,” Gingrich said of Trump’s current attitude toward his former catchphrase. “He now says it was cute, but he doesn’t want to use it anymore.” (Gingrich has since disowned his own phraseology in a subsequent tweet.) Instead of draining the swamp, Trump is going to build a bigger and better swamp smack in the middle of the Rose Garden — and, don’t worry, it will be fantastic. Meanwhile, it says all you need to know that Gingrich, the first Speaker of the House ever to be punished for ethics violations, is stepping into the vacuum to serve as moral arbiter of this new regime.”