How Much Fatter Can He Get Before He Explodes?

 

Harper's Weekly, 1871

 

 

The Campaign Legal Center (CLC), a non-profit government watchdog org founded in 2002 by a former chair of the Federal Election Commission, has cataloged very specific instances of "pay-to-play" corruption by the Donald J. Trump administration. It's an infuriating list partly because the corruption is spectacularly theatrical in its unembarrassed obviousness. Beware the man who can't be embarrassed, my mom always said.

Take the pardon for Paul Walczak, the former nursing home executive who pleaded guilty in Nov. 2024 to tax crimes arising from his use of over $10 million withheld from the paychecks of nursing home staff to pay for personal expenses, including luxury goods and travel. In April 2025, Walczak was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment and ordered to pay over $4.4 million in restitution. Twelve days later an unembarrassed Trump gave him a presidential pardon -- purely coincidental, we're sure, to the $1 mil that Walczak's mother donated to MAGA Inc., Trump's super-PAC.

Or take Mr. Timothy J. Leiweke, a CEO indicted for bid-rigging, who got a Trump pardon following a round of golf at Mar-a-Lago for Leiweke's lawyers, who may have reminded the president that Mr. Leiweke's company had made a hefty donation to Trump's 2nd Inaugural. 

In 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged crypto-currency entrepreneur and investor Justin Sun and three of his companies with illegally offering and selling unregistered crypto securities. Soon after, Sun bought $18.6 million worth of $TRUMP, the Donald Trump “meme coin,” making Justin Sun the leading holder of $TRUMP and therefore worthy of an invite to Trump’s private “crypto dinner” at the White House in May 2025 (most attendees were top purchasers of the $TRUMP meme coin). Sun had also previously invested $75 million into crypto tokens issued by World Liberty Financial, the Trump family crypto venture managed by President Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Trump, Jr. As soon as Trump got his rump into the Oval Office in January 2025, almost magically, the SEC paused its enforcement action again Sun and his companies.

CLC summarized the whole sordid round-up of demonstrable pay-to-play:

Multimillion-dollar political donors have been rewarded with prominent government positions and the power to financially benefit their own bottom lines; seven-figure corporate donations have translated to executive branch support for legislative and policy positions; major media companies seeking to stay in the administration’s good graces have paid Trump millions of dollars to settle meritless lawsuits; federal investigations and enforcement actions have dissolved for the right price.

The cases of public corruption cataloged by the Campaign Legal Center make for the slightly dizzying realization that 2nd Trump is the most nakedly corrupt, on-the-make, aggressively avaricious bunch to have ever ruled the District of Columbia (and I see your Warren G. Harding). I wouldn't want, nor could I imagine anything worse than we've experienced just since January 20, 2025. Donald Trump begins to resemble the gluttonous Mr. Creosote in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, who literally explodes, a victim of his own obscene appetite.