Paul Krugman wrote about a giant-sized scandal that involves corruption, conflict of interest, nepotism, any number of violations of the law and the Constitution. The story appeared on the front page of The New York Times. Will anything happen to the perpetrators? Not as long as Trump is President.

The attitude of Republicans: Move on, nothing to see here.

Krugman wrote:

It’s kind of hard to believe, but the original Borat movie was 20 years ago. It’s time for a second sequel. And I already have the title. It would be Corruption for Make Benefit Glorious Family of Trump. 

I hope that some of my listeners are young enough to not remember the original Borat movie. But it was a mockumentary, a satire, in which Sacha Baron Cohen pretended to be a journalist from Kazakhstan investigating and interviewing Americans about American mores. It was not about Kazakhstan, although he did insult the country along the way. 

The reason I think about it is that today’s New York Times has a piece that reports, investigative reporting, on an immense mining deal in Kazakhstan, which, what do you know, turns out to be a big profit center for the Trump sons and also the sons of Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary. 

Check out the investigative reporting for the details, but basically here’s another one, another big one.

It’s part of an immense series of corrupt deals, often with petrostates — which Kazakhstan is — that financially benefit Donald Trump and his family and some of his cronies and cabinet members as well and their families. It’s all on a truly epic scale. 

This is a message I have been trying to get across. I don’t think many people even now understand just how much of a departure what’s happening now is from past US history. I still see people saying we might be, could be heading for another Gilded Age. But we have a level of concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people that is something like three times what it was at the peak of the Gilded Age. We’re in a super duper Gilded Age. 

And I sometimes hear people say, well, could we be returning to old kinds of corruption? Might we have another Teapot Dome scandal? Well, my God. Teapot Dome was a scandal actually involving mineral rights and bribes during the Harding administration, although not bribes to the president’s family, which is, again, something entirely new. The scale of the bribes was about $500,000: adjusting for inflation, that’s something like $9 million today.

So how much has Trump enriched himself since returning to the White House about 500 days ago? The answer is certainly more than four billion dollars, almost certainly more than four and a half, maybe five billion dollars. Divide that by 500 and we basically have a Teapot Dome sized corruption scandal on an average day under Trump.

So it’s basically day after day of scandals as big or bigger than Teapot Dome. Our corrupt grandfathers, great-grandfathers were pikers compared with this, just as the Gilded Age robber barons were pikers compared with the modern-day tech bros. 

This is obviously not good. It’s actually quite horrifying. How did we so quickly descend into becoming a truly massively corrupt country on a level that we used to think of as being associated only with tinpot dictators in the third world? And yet here we are. 

This ought to be a political issue and it ought to be a legal issue as soon as the government is back in the hands of people who actually take the rule of law seriously. Again, without going into the details of the deal, it’s surely illegal. I mean, it’s illegal under the Emoluments Clause. Probably since there are definitely Kazakhs on the take as well, it’s illegal under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This is just, it’s illegal up the wazoo.

Of course, it will not be prosecuted as long as Trump is in the White House. But forget any Democrat who isn’t promising to go after this massive corruption when they regain power. If they don’t, then none of this matters, but that should be a core part of anybody’s platform. 

I’m not a political expert — sometimes I think nobody is — but my God, again, this corruption is so blatant. And it does resonate with people. It’s really clear that corruption at the top and the sense that ordinary people are paying the price while people with power enrich themselves is an effective popular issue. That is actually the issue that brought Viktor Orban down in Hungary, which is one of the hopeful signs for what may happen to America going down the pike. 

So here we are, just to remind you that this scandal, it’s a huge thing. It’s page one in the New York Times, but in a way it’s actually kind of ordinary, since even this size of scandal is happening every few weeks these days.

Do not make the mistake of treating what’s going on as in any sense normal. This is hugely abnormal, and I believe that the American people will understand that it’s abnormal even if pundits get bored of talking about the corruption. So drive it home, maybe for make benefit American people instead of the Trump family.

Here is the article in The New York Times describing the lucrative deal in Kazakhstan that will increase the wealth of the sons of Trump and Lutnick. It is a gift article.

When Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with Kazakhstan’s president at the St. Regis Hotel last September in New York, President Trump jumped in by phone as the men sealed a deal on a top priority for Washington.

During the call, Mr. Trump and his team won an agreement from the Kazakh leader to give a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips and other critical goods.

Ahead of the deal, the Trump administration approved preliminary applications for as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing for the American company, now called Kaz Resources, which plans to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan.

It was not only Mr. Trump and Mr. Lutnick who saw an opportunity.

Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history.

Within weeks of the St. Regis negotiations, investors with a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed at Trump Tower in New York and partly owned by the president’s two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, joined with other partners to take a 20 percent stake in a corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project.

Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment company controlled by Mr. Lutnick’s family and overseen by his sons Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, helped one of the lead investors working with Dominari on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity. Such rounds of fund-raising typically net Cantor millions of dollars in fees.

The Kazakh deal was ultimately signed on Nov. 6, six days after the investment involving the Trump sons and their partners, which was not publicly disclosed at the time.

The arrangement is hardly an outlier. One or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project, according to federal filings examined by The New York Times.

All 14 of these companies have either benefited directly from offers of financial assistance from the Trump administration, or have pending permit applications before the Commerce Department, which Mr. Lutnick oversees, The Times found. The total amount of federal funding that the Trump administration has provided or is considering providing to the companies exceeds $8.9 billion, according to public statements by the companies and federal government.