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Trump’s Scandals Have No Precedent
The Trump administration corruption is breathtaking in scale and volume
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By Max from UNFTR.com
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In just the past couple of weeks, there have been three separate instances of such unfathomable corruption that any other normal presidency wouldn’t have survived a single one of them. Let alone all three.
Confirmed insider trading — not by someone in the administration, but by the sitting president of the United States. A literal slush fund to help criminals who are allied with the administration. And a finance scheme so monumental it has the potential to set up Donald Trump and his family as one of the wealthiest dynasties in the world.
The level of corruption on display right now is so profound that historians will spend decades writing books about this period. The problem is we’re living in it in real time, which means we’ve lost our sense of scale. Thus, I think it’s helpful to remind ourselves what a real scandal looks like. What it used to take to bring down an administration. And how far we have fallen from that standard.
Teapot Dome
It’s the 1920s. Warren G. Harding is president and is about to be hit by a scandal so significant that for the better part of a century it was considered the single greatest act of government corruption in American history. Here’s how it went down.
The U.S. government had set aside oil reserves in California and Wyoming specifically for the U.S. Navy — strategic petroleum holdings that were not for sale, not for lease, not for the private market. In Wyoming, one of those reserves sat beneath a rock formation that looked vaguely like a teapot.
A man named Albert Fall was Harding’s Secretary of the Interior and in 1921 he maneuvered to have oversight of those naval reserves transferred from the Navy Department to his own Interior Department. Then he quietly leased the Teapot Dome reserve to oil tycoon Harry Sinclair and the Elk Hills reserve in California to Edward Doheny — without competitive bidding, public disclosure or congressional approval. In exchange, Fall received up to $400,000 in bribes — cash delivered in a black bag, Liberty bonds, livestock for his New Mexico ranch.
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When Senate investigators started pulling threads in 1924, the whole thing unraveled. Fall resigned. The leases were canceled by the Supreme Court, which declared them fraudulent and called Fall a “faithless public officer.” Criminal trials followed and Fall was convicted of bribery — becoming the first sitting cabinet member in American history to go to prison for crimes committed in office.
Harding died before the full scope of the scandal was known, spared the final reckoning.
The legacy: Teapot Dome produced a landmark Supreme Court ruling affirming Congress’s subpoena power in investigations. It defined the outer boundary of executive corruption for a generation. Its name became shorthand for what a cabinet official selling public assets for private gain looked like.
Watergate
Fifty years later, we got something even bigger and this time the guy at the top caught the heat.
June 17, 1972. Five men are arrested inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. They’re there to photograph documents and plant listening devices. They work — directly or indirectly — for the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Richard Nixon’s committee.
The burglary itself was comically unnecessary. Nixon was ahead in the polls and likely to win in a landslide. But paranoia is its own logic and the cover-up that followed the arrest was where Nixon destroyed himself.
Hush money was paid to the burglars. FBI investigations were obstructed. Nixon’s own White House counsel John Dean told him directly that there was a “cancer on the presidency.” And all of it was recorded — on Nixon’s own secret taping system — including the smoking gun conversation in which Nixon ordered the CIA to obstruct the FBI’s investigation. That tape, revealed two years after the break-in, ended his presidency.
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Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. The only American president in history to do so, prompting Gerald Ford to declare, “Our long national nightmare is over.”
But here’s the corollary to our current situation. Nixon didn’t just authorize a break-in. His administration was a catalogue of abuses: illegal use of military force, domestic spying, outright bribery, campaign contributions laundered through shell companies, the weaponization of the IRS against political enemies. And in one specific act of executive overreach — withholding congressionally appropriated funds for programs he opposed, a practice called impoundment — Nixon forced Congress to pass a law specifically to stop him.
The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. It passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, over Nixon’s veto. It established the Congressional Budget Office and required congressional approval before any president could rescind appropriated funds. This matters greatly today because Russell Vought—perhaps the most capable and dangerous person in this entire administration—is the one who orchestrated the theft of government funding to almost every agency in 2025, essentially flouting the Impoundment Act.
This is a very, very big deal. In fact, before we move on to another huge scandal in our little history lesson, let’s hang here for a second
Vought has testified that Congress can set the appropriations amount but cannot direct funds. That’s one interpretation, but it’s completely false. But because we live with the Roberts Supreme Court, this isn’t going to be considered. This is Russell Vought’s modus operandi and why he’s so dangerous. He knows with control of all three branches he can just break norms, protocols and laws to fuel his white Christian nationalist agenda. This is clearly the guy in the president’s ear because Donald Trump is too inept and distracted to pull this stuff off. And Vought is moving quickly and deliberately to tear as much down as he can. USAID, the departments of Education, Interior, Energy, EPA… all of these cuts and kneecapping of authority is this guy’s design and in the first year he did it all by ignoring the biggest thing that came out of the Nixon administration scandals.
Back to Nixon. In the end Watergate produced more good-government reforms than any single event in American history. The War Powers Act. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The Inspector General Act. Civil service protections. Campaign finance reform. And Impoundment. And of course, it gave us the suffix. Every scandal since has been appended with “-gate” to signal the depth of the wrongdoing. Monicagate. Deflategate. The suffix is so ubiquitous we’ve almost forgotten why it exists.
Iran-Contra
Let’s move ahead to the go-go 1980s and a scandal that revealed something even more troubling than personal corruption: a secret government operating inside the official one. Also chillingly familiar in today’s world.
In the early to mid-1980s, Congress passed a series of amendments referred to as the Boland Amendments to curtail US involvement in Nicaragua. They were specifically designed to prohibit U.S. government funding of the Contras, the anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua. The Reagan administration disagreed with this law. So rather than work through democratic channels to change it, senior officials decided to simply ignore it.
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Under the scheme, U.S. officials would sell arms to Iran — which was under an arms embargo, and which had taken American hostages — and use the proceeds to secretly fund the Contras. The operation was run out of the National Security Council by a Marine lieutenant colonel named Oliver North, who kept meticulous notebooks documenting every step of the scheme. When the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa broke the story in November 1986, the whole covert architecture collapsed into public view.
Reagan went on national television and insisted the U.S. did not trade arms for hostages. (Just like Bill Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman. Like Trump barely knew Jeffrey Epstein). Anyway, four months later, he went back on national television and said that yes, in fact, it did. “What began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages.” His approval rating suffered the largest single-month drop of any American president in history — from 67% to 46%.
This was back when presidents cared about approval ratings.
The fallout: Reagan appointed the Tower Commission to investigate. Independent counsel Lawrence Walsh spent nearly seven years on the case. He secured a dozen indictments, eight convictions or guilty pleas. Among the convictions were Oliver North and National Security Advisor John Poindexter. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was indicted. Most convictions were later vacated on appeal, or pardoned by George H.W. Bush in his final days in office — a pardon Walsh suggested was partly designed to prevent Bush himself from being implicated.
In the end, no one went to prison. But the scandal cracked something open about how American foreign policy actually worked — covert operations, off-the-books funding, a shadow government running foreign wars without congressional knowledge. The public’s trust in the presidency, already damaged by Vietnam and Watergate, dropped another floor.
The legacy: Iran-Contra revealed that the guardrails of democratic oversight could be routed around if the executive was determined enough.
Insider Trading
The aforementioned scandals were legitimately a big deal. Historic ones we study in school. Now let’s talk about what has happened in a matter of weeks in the Trump administration to give you an idea of the speed, the scale, and the brazenness of what is unfolding.
In mid-May, Trump filed a mandatory ethics disclosure covering his stock trades for the first quarter of 2026 — January through March. What was in it is extraordinary. Over 3,700 individual stock transactions with a total value of somewhere between $220 million and $750 million. More than 30 individual purchases worth $1 million or more apiece in a single quarter.
The companies: Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Broadcom, Goldman Sachs, Alphabet, AMD, Intel, Micron. And here’s where it gets interesting. The executives of nearly all those companies accompanied Trump on his trip to Beijing the week before the disclosures came out. The president was on Air Force One with the CEOs of the companies he had just bought millions of dollars of stock in.
It gets worse. Trump toured a Thermo Fisher Scientific manufacturing facility and on the same day he purchased tens of thousands of dollars in Thermo Fisher stock. Trump gave a speech calling Apple “a great company” and praising Tim Cook by name. Same day: he purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars in Apple stock. Trump gave a Fox News interview in which he described Micron Technology as “one of the hottest companies.” One day later: he purchased Micron stock. Trump gave a speech in Georgia and told the audience — directly, on camera — to “go out and buy a Dell computer.” Nine days later: he purchased millions of dollars in Dell stock.
Let’s be precise about the structure here: the president of the United States has a trust that holds his assets. That trust is managed not by an independent blind trustee — as every ethics norm and presidential tradition requires — but by his son, Donald Trump Jr. There is no legal or practical barrier preventing Trump from communicating with Trump Jr. about what to buy and when.
Now layer in the prediction markets. Bubblemaps, a data analytics firm, identified nine anonymous accounts on Polymarket and Kalshi — the betting platforms — that placed more than 80 bets on U.S. military actions: the timing of bombardments, ceasefire announcements, geopolitical events. Their win rate was 98%. Total winnings: over $2.4 million. One account called “Magamyman” made $553,000 betting on the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei. An active duty Army Master Sergeant was indicted in April for using a VPN to place a $34,000 bet on the capture of Nicolas Maduro — a bet that paid out $400,000. The White House itself sent a memo to staff in March reminding them that using nonpublic government information to bet on prediction markets is a federal crime. They sent the memo because it was already happening.
Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump Jr. is an investor in Polymarket through his venture capital firm, 1789 Capital.
No charges have (yet) been filed. Nothing has been proven in a court of law. But remember, in the Teapot Dome scandal it took two years of Senate investigation just to establish that Albert Fall had accepted a bribe. The mechanics of accountability move slowly. But the pattern here is not subtle. The president buys stock. The president makes a public statement that moves that stock. The president profits. Over and over and over again, more than 3,700 times in ninety days.
But wait, there’s more.
Slush Fund
On the same day that the stock trading disclosures were generating headlines, the Trump Justice Department quietly announced something else. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who, before taking that job, was Donald Trump’s personal defense attorney — unveiled what they called the Anti-Weaponization Fund totaling $1.776 billion to be drawn from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund and for the stated purpose of compensating people who claim they were unfairly targeted by the Biden administration’s Justice Department.
Let’s walk through how this money was created, because the mechanism is as important as the amount.
Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS — his own IRS, the one that reports to his own Treasury Secretary — over the leak of his personal tax returns. A federal judge had already cast doubt on the basic legality of a sitting president suing a department he controls. But before any ruling came down, the Justice Department settled the case. Against itself. The $10 billion suit became a $1.776 billion fund — controlled entirely by Blanche, Trump’s former personal attorney — to pay out Trump’s allies. Payable by the Treasury. Also his.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin did not mince words: “No president can concoct a fake case for $10 billion in damages against the government so he can be plaintiff and defendant and then ‘settle’ his bogus case against himself as a judge. This case is nothing but a racket.”
Senator Ron Wyden called it “the most brazen theft and abuse of taxpayer dollars by any president in American history.”
But here’s where it gets worse. The money doesn’t go to Trump directly — at least not yet. It goes into a fund controlled by a five-member commission. Those five members are hand-picked by Todd Blanche. The recipients of the payouts will not be made public nor will the amounts apparently. The process is entirely internal to an administration that has already demonstrated it will use every lever of government for political purposes.
And who are the beneficiaries? The roughly 1,600 people charged over the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Proud Boys. Militia members. Trump allies who claim they were “weaponized” against. Trump’s inner circle. Actually, we don’t really know, do we?
And what happened when this was announced? The Treasury’s own general counsel Brian Morrissey, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, resigned. A man who worked for Clarence Thomas decided even this was a bridge too far.
Crypto Grift
Last year we connected the dots on the Trump Family’s World Liberty Financial stablecoin gambit that sets the family up to be one of the wealthiest families on the planet. For this to happen, three distinct bills would have to clear Congress. The GENIUS Act, The CLARITY Act and the Anti-CBDC Surveillance Act. Together these bills would allow the Trump family to possess one of the only authorized mechanisms to buy U.S. Treasuries on the blockchain.
The GENIUS Act, which in and of itself is not a bad piece of legislation, is already law. But it’s the next two that in tandem weaponize the GENIUS Act and set the family up for life.
Last week the CLARITY Act cleared the an important milestone being passed by the Senate Banking Committee on May 14th in a 15-9 vote. Every Republican voted yes. Two Democrats crossed over. No Democratic amendments were adopted — not on ethics, not on anti-money laundering, not on consumer protection. All rejected or ruled out of order by Senator Tim Scott who chairs the committee.
Here is what this bill does and who it benefits. The Trump family, through an entity called World Liberty Financial, issues a stablecoin called USD1. They reportedly pocketed $57 million on the launch alone and have secured over $2 billion in institutional deals, including one with an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. The CLARITY Act creates the regulatory framework that legitimizes their coin, protects their market position, and hands oversight of the entire crypto industry to the CFTC — a smaller, more industry-friendly regulator — rather than the SEC.
Meanwhile, a companion bill called the Anti-CBDC Surveillance Act permanently prohibits the Federal Reserve from issuing a digital dollar. A government-issued digital currency would be the Trump family’s primary competitor. Congress is in the process of banning it. Forever.
Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, earned over $10 billion in profit last year from reserve income alone. Circle, the second largest, is on pace for nearly $3 billion. Those numbers will look small in a decade. And the Trump family’s USD1 is positioned — through legislation their allies are writing, with amendments from their opponents blocked — to capture an ever-growing share of that market in perpetuity. Since the Trump USD1 was launched it has already doubled in market cap and currently sits as the world’s fourth largest stablecoin by issuance volume.
The most vocal and righteous opponent of this bill is Elizabeth Warren, but despite her objections, she doesn’t represent all Democrats. One of two Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee to cross over to advance this bill is Ruben Gallego of Arizona who received approximately $10 million in crypto industry support in his 2024 Senate race. He was subsequently named Ranking Democrat on the Digital Assets subcommittee — the subcommittee that oversees this exact legislation.
Earlier this year he held a fundraising retreat at a luxury Sedona resort alongside Marc Andreessen, whose firm has invested in over 100 crypto startups and contributed more than $44 million to the same PAC that spent millions electing Gallego. So there’s blame to go around.
Teapot Dome was one transaction. One bribed official. One cabinet secretary. This is a sitting president using the legislative process to build a private financial empire — with no ethics provisions, no guardrails on his personal conflicts, and seemingly only one senator fighting it.
Three scandals. Three weeks. Any one of them, in any previous era of American governance, would have ended a presidency. Together, they represent something we don’t yet have adequate language for — not because the words don’t exist, but because we’ve never needed them at this scale before.
The historians will have plenty to write about. Our job is to make sure the story doesn’t get lost in the noise while it’s still happening.
For deeper dives into economic and socioeconomic stories, visit UNFTR.com or @UNFTR on YouTube. Make sure to sign up for the FREE weekly UNFTR newsletter here.
SOURCES
Yahoo News / Daily Beast: Trump’s Own Handpicked Lawyer Quits Treasury in Disgust at Massive $1.8B Grift https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-own-handpicked-lawyer-quits-080655433.html
The Intercept: Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization” Fund Is a Handout to His Hardcore Supporters https://theintercept.com/2026/05/19/trump-anti-weaponization-fund-jan-6/
The Daily Beast: Trump Insiders Face Wild Allegations After ‘Insane Pattern’ Spotted on Polymarket and Kalshi
Euronews - Stock Trades Reveal Trump Made Massive Gains on Big Tech Bets
Britannica: Teapot Dome Scandal
https://www.britannica.com/event/Teapot-Dome-Scandal
Britannica: Watergate Scandal
https://www.britannica.com/event/Watergate-Scandal
Wikipedia: Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_and_Impoundment_Control_Act_of_1974
Bill of Rights Institute - The Iran-Contra Affair - https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/the-iran-contra-affair/
CNBC: Senate Banking Committee Advances CLARITY Act in 15-9 Vote https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/14/clarity-act-congress-crypto-senate.html
UNFTR: The Heist, Part Two: The CLARITY Completes It (Video)
Teapot Dome
https://www.history.com/articles/teapot-dome-scandal
Teapot Dome Photo credits: US Senate Historical Archive
Iran Contra Photo Credits: Britannica and National Security Archive
Watergate Photo Credits: History.com and FBI
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