Trump is Setting up a Corrupt Royal Court and Companies are Flocking to Pay Tribute
In medieval times, lords would pay tribute to the ruling monarch in order to collect money from local merchants and the peasantry. Under Trump, it's corporations gladly paying that bill.
If you were a merchant in the middle ages and you wanted to conduct business on the Mongolian controlled portions of the Silk Road, you often had to pay a tribute to the great Khan. In return, the Khan would allow you to use an elaborate system of waystations along the land route, where you could rest, pick up fresh horses, and resupply.
Throughout medieval times, lords and landowners had to pay tribute to the local monarch to have the right to collect taxes and conduct business. In return, the king would offer protection for these lords' lands should there be a foreign invasion or local uprising. The arrangement worked for those with money power, less so for those toiling in the fields.
But as the world transitioned from that old feudal society and into early capitalism, those systems started to go away. Merchants became rich and powerful through the power of markets and distant trades. The old lords got left behind if they couldn't adapt to capitalism.
It was this time period into which the United States was born. Eschewing the idea of a monarch after having just won independence from Great Britain, the US set up a federal republic, with a citizen-led executive branch. The president would have executive power, yes, but that power was heavily checked by the judicial and legislative branches.
That system, largely, worked as intended for nearly 250 years. There was definitely corruption along the way by the executive branch, and many war crimes. But no president in US history has had absolute power.
Until now.
Under Trump, the old medieval tribute system is back. Want to complete a corporate merger? Be ready to give tribute to Trump. Want an exemption to Trump's tariffs? Pay Trump. Want your university to get the federal funds that congress has already allocated to you? Better pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the president (and agree to discriminate against your trans students).
Trump is an innovative president. Every other week, he comes up with new and unprecedented ways to extract millions of dollars out of taxpayers and this country's merchants just to do the fucking job he was elected to do. It's like if the mafia was the federal government, turning up at Apple headquarters saying, "it sure would be a shame if we smashed the place up," before demanding millions to get out of it.
Speaking of Apple, the tech company and its CEO Tim Cook have paid the Trump administration millions. They contributed to his transition fund, and then recently contributed to demolishing the historic East Wing of the White House to build Trump's absurd ballroom.
The absurd White House ballroom is just the latest scheme for Trump to scrape personal wealth and power out of his position as president. Originally, Trump said that the ballroom would cost about $200 million. He never explained where the money would come from, as it was never allocated through congress.
Then the corporate donations started coming in.
According to NBC News, the following companies have already contributed to Trump's ballroom fund:
- Altria Group
- Amazon
- Apple
- Booz Allen Hamilton
- Caterpillar
- Coinbase
- Comcast
- Hard Rock International
- HP
- Lockheed Martin
- Meta
- Micron Technology
- Microsoft
- NextEra Energy
- Palantir Technologies
- Ripple
- Reynolds American
- T-Mobile
- Tether
- Union Pacific Railroad
- J. Pepe and Emilia Fanjul
- Adelson Family Foundation
- Stefan E. Brodie
- Betty Wold Johnson Foundation
- Charles and Marissa Cascarilla
- Edward and Shari Glazer
- Harold Hamm
- Benjamin Leon Jr.
- The Lutnick Family
- The Laura & Isaac Perlmutter Foundation
- Stephen A. Schwarzman
- Konstantin Sokolov
- Kelly Loeffler and Jeff Sprecher
- Paolo Tiramani
- Cameron Winklevoss
- Tyler Winklevoss
(Yes, I laughed when I saw the Winklevoss twins on this list too.)
As the corporate donors poured in, Trump's public statements about how much the ballroom would cost has ballooned. Suddenly it was $250 million, then $300 million. The last I heard he was saying it would cost $350 million.
But are these companies really just purely motivated by their patriotism with these contributions? No, obviously not.
A study of Trump’s first term tariff exemptions by researchers at Lehigh University showed that companies that contributed to Republican political entities were statistically more likely to get tariff exemptions than the average firm, while companies that contributed to Democrats were statistically less likely to have tariff exemption applications approved by the government.
No wonder the Republican National Committee has five times more cash on hand than the Democratic National Committee.
The ballroom, of course, is not nearly the only version of open corruption within the Trump regime. Just last week, Trump, who has received millions in contributions from the cryptocurrency industry, pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. The company paid a fine of $4.3 billion, and Zhao had personally paid a $50 million fine and served nearly four months in prison, after pleading guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program stemming from failing to report suspicious activity from designated terrorist organizations like al Qaeda and Hamas..
Binance has been involved with Trump's family cryptocoin, a stablecoin called World Liberty Financial, and now their founder has been pardoned after working with terrorist organizations. This would sink most presidencies, but I guess no one cares anymore.
It brings me no comfort to say this, but we no longer have a government, especially after the government shutdown. What we have instead is a financial passthrough system for the Trump family's personal enrichment.
We aren't even funding the military anymore. Trump ally Timothy Mellon gave Trump $130 million to fund military salaries during the shutdown. The contribution is blatantly illegal as federal agencies are not allowed to accept funds that are not appropriated by congress except in a few very specific cases.
In medieval times, an army that was paid for privately were called mercenaries. Are the US armed forces now considered mercenaries? We don’t know, every respectable news outlet was just barred from every day coverage of the Pentagon, because they wouldn’t sign a pledge intended to muzzle them.
What if Republicans intentionally orchestrated this shutdown in order to consolidate even more power and influence in the hands of Trump? Though I don't think Democrats were wrong in allowing it to happen. We don't know when, or if, the government will reopen anytime soon, but what's the incentive for Trump to reopen it?
He's extracting wealth from taxpayers, he's taking corporate money for favorable government treatment, he's extorting American universities for millions, he's extorting foreign countries for personal favors, and he's using his own Department of Justice to pay himself hundreds of millions.
Trump is the most openly corrupt criminal president we've ever had. He is much closer to a king, extracting every last cent of tribute from every corner of his kingdom. We don’t even get the fun tourist stuff of the United Kingdom, or the cool history of the Holy Roman Empire, we just have this extortionist prick in DC destroying the White House.
Americans didn't use to stand for this type of treatment, in fact, we once fought a war over it. I don't know how all of this will end, all of this is scary as hell, but we cannot allow any of this to stand.
Thank you for reading! Have a good week! If you appreciated this piece, consider becoming a paid subscriber!
-Katelyn
