So recently I learned the US President took money through a cryptocurrency company from a Middle Eastern government, possibly sending it advanced AI chips which it might forward to other countries, thus potentially harming our national security. There is a movement in the Senate to ensure the chips are not sent, let’s hope it works. My immediate, naive reaction was, “Well, he’ll have to go to jail for this now, of course…at least impeachment.” I apologize for such naïveté.
The Senate is filled with members of his own political party who are terrified of him. So, no impeachment there. Trump has repeatedly prioritized personal, political and transactional interests over national interests and his party never stopped him, why would they stop him now? To ensure our national defense? That’s a good one.
A UAE royal bought 49% of the Trump’s family crypto company. Trump family entities received around $187 million of this. Shortly afterward, the UAE received approval for 500,000 advanced U.S. AI chips per year which they can share with anyone – which concerns many foreign policy experts. Lacking any demonstrable moral backbone, the incentive structure pushes Trump toward continuing the deal, not admitting a mistake and moving away from it.
When asked by a reporter whether he was using his position for personal profit, he said that the stock market was so great everyone was profiting – an evasive, meaningless non sequitur. This is not about the stock market, this is about a shady quid pro quo deal.
But the voters? The people…we the people!!!?
Well, a massive segment of the electorate has channeled their rage entirely into xenophobia. Trump supporters will, seemingly, tolerate absolutely any level of executive corruption as long as the administration keeps aggressively funneling out immigrants, using the border to distract from any White House corruption.
As long as those immigrants keep moving out, inflation, war, treason, incompetence, megalomania, mental illness in the White House, an active friendship for many years with Jeffrey Epstein…it all seems tolerable to the MAGA machine.
Well, it was a golden jubilee, another 50-year celebration of our country’s “birthday,” this time the 250th, and why should this jubilee have been any different from the past?
If you take stock of America’s major jubilee years, starting from 1876 and moving forward every 50 years, you see systematic corruption and governmental complicity all over the place.
1876: The Centennial and Gilded Age Industrial Theft
Go back 150 years to the nation’s 100th birthday in 1876. The president was Ulysses S. Grant. When Grant entered the White House, the emerging industrial capitalist class realized they could buy the machinery of the state wholesale. This was the dawn of the Gilded Age, where the phrase “Grantism” became synonymous with the raw merger of corporate greed and state power. Happy 100th birthday America! You celebrated in the shadow of:
The Black Friday Gold Ring (1869): Financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk attempted to corner the gold market, using Grant’s own brother-in-law to get close to the President and manipulate federal policy, resulting in a catastrophic financial panic.
The Crédit Mobilier Affair (1872): A massive railroad construction scam where congressmen and high-ranking officials – including Grant’s Vice President – were given discounted tech stock in exchange for lucrative, fraudulent government subsidies. The Union Pacific massively overcharged the government for railroad construction, pocketed the profits, and handed out discounted stock to congressmen and officials to keep them quiet.
The Whiskey Ring (1875): A massive conspiracy of distillers and federal officials who siphoned off millions in liquor taxes. Grant’s own private secretary, Orville Babcock, was deeply implicated.
The Belknap Bribery Scandal (1876): Right at the centennial mark, Secretary of War William Belknap was impeached for taking massive kickbacks from operators of lucrative Native American trading posts.
By 1876, the lesson was clear: the state would act primarily as an executive committee for managing the common affairs of the corporate class.
But there was also a surprise. Oppressed Native Americans decided to also celebrate America’s centennial. Word reached the stunned American public, exactly on the Fourth of July, that Crazy Horse and the Lakota Sioux had wiped out George Armstrong Custer’s entire army along the Little Bighorn River in Montana.
What was the “hero of Gettysburg” doing out there to get his entire command massacred in one fell swoop? Well, the volatile American economy desperately needed gold, and there was plenty of it in the Black Hills. Even though a binding treaty explicitly assured the Lakota Sioux that those sacred hills were theirs forever, Custer went in there to kill Sioux and steal gold for the state’s corporate engine.
Instead, he met a brutal, degrading end at the hands of the people he sought to conquer. After he died, among the things they did to his corpse was to puncture his ear drums with an awl so that he would actually listen to the truth in the afterworld. When the relief army found Custer’s stripped, bloody corpse, the myth of the glorious Indian fighter evaporated into raw terror. For Custer the final, gory reckoning was absolute.
1926: The Sesquicentennial and the Corruption of Inaction
Let’s fast forward fifty years to the 150th anniversary in 1926. Enter Calvin Coolidge, the ultimate mascot for corporate politics. “Silent Cal” didn’t need to break the law because he believed the law was already serving Wall Street, and it was. His core philosophy “The business of America is business” didn’t pay much attention to the fact that inequality was widening. Industrial production rose 70% from 1922–1928 but the gains increased the gap between rich and poor as most of the profits went to corporate America.
The 1920s, especially under Coolidge, are often considered the first modern era of American inequality because it’s the moment when federal policy, corporate consolidation, consumer credit and tax structure all aligned to funnel economic gains upward, creating a national, systemic pattern of wealth concentration.
Coolidge’s brand of corruption wasn’t about pocketing cash or hatching secret plots, it was the corruption of intentional, aggressive inaction. Because he refused to look too closely or regulate anything, a few major things happened under his watch:
When the Teapot Dome scandal exploded, Coolidge did the bare minimum to prosecute it. He let Harding’s corrupt cronies take the fall, used his clean personal reputation as a shield to protect the Republican party, and left the underlying system completely untouched.
He appointed regulatory heads who completely loathed regulation. He watched the stock market inflate into a massive, fragile bubble driven by wild speculation and fraud, and praised it as prosperity rather than stepping in to manage it.
While Wall Street boomed, American agriculture and banking in the Midwest were already collapsing. Coolidge repeatedly vetoed aid packages for struggling farmers, believing it wasn’t the federal government’s problem.
Coolidge let corporate monopolies write their own rules and completely ignored the collapse of the agrarian working class. By the time the nation celebrated its 150th birthday, this dogmatic refusal to check corporate power was already approaching the point that would trigger the Great Depression.
1976: The Bicentennial and the Corporate Coup
By the time the United States hit its 200th birthday in 1976, the guy leading the celebration was Gerald Ford, a president who nobody had even voted for.
Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in total disgrace over a bribery and tax evasion scandal, and shortly after, President Richard Nixon was forced to resign by the sheer gravity of the Watergate Scandal, a sprawling web of political espionage, illegal wiretapping and massive executive cover-up that shattered the public’s faith in the executive branch.
When Gerald Ford took the stage for the Bicentennial in 1976, he did so under a heavy cloud of national cynicism. His highly controversial, preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon led millions to believe a corrupt, backroom deal had been struck to keep the former president out of jail.
Combined with a crippling stagflation economy and the humiliating final collapse of the war in Vietnam, the Bicentennial wasn’t a celebration of triumph, it was a milestone led by an unelected caretaker trying to patch up a sinking ship.
This political breakdown didn’t happen in a vacuum. In 1971, corporate America quietly drafted its battle plan: the Powell Memo the “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.” Written by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it argued that corporations needed to seize control of universities, courts, media and politics to protect their interests. By the Bicentennial, that memo had become a blueprint. Business lobbies expanded, think tanks multiplied, campaign financing exploded and the corporate class began reshaping American democracy in its own image.
This political crisis perfectly coincided with the birth of neoliberalism. As the country celebrated 200 years, corporations were actively restructuring the economy, crushing labor unions, off-shoring jobs and using stagflation as an excuse to slash the social safety net. Democracy was formally subordinated to the market.
2026: The Semiquincentennial and Trumpism
So here we are at 250 years. The corruption has simply evolved with technology. We have moved from railroad bonds to cryptocurrency bribes, but the underlying pathology is identical: everything, including the presidency, is for sale. The Republicans no longer even care, seemingly, about American national security if it means the president can line his pockets, as high profile Democratic Senators are now fighting to stop AI chips from going to the UAE.
Previous acts of Trumpism: Under Trump, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was direct corporate welfare disguised as populist relief, slashing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Corporations overwhelmingly used this windfall for stock buybacks that enriched executives. This massive upward wealth transfer ballooned the national debt, which the right uses as a pretext to demand deep cuts to social safety nets.
Furthermore, Trump’s regulatory rollbacks turned federal agencies over to the industries they were meant to police. Trump has furthered corporate interests over public interests by stacking the government with corporate insiders, by blurring the line between public office and private profit, and by shaping policy to benefit the industries his own appointees come from.
Economic Democracy Ensures Political Democracy
FDR believed that political democracy required economic democracy and he tried to establish a second Bill of Rights to ensure this. It failed. When wealth can buy political influence, democracy becomes a theatrical performance designed to keep the working class fighting over crumbs and borders while the billionaire class loots everything.
Can we predict what our next golden jubilee and the 300th birthday will look like? If nothing changes, if the people do not gain power, my guess is the complete fusion of corporate power with the state, which would make government and the corporate world indistinguishable, all made possible through AI governance, as we will be free-falling out of control through an irreversible ecological crisis. Yes, corporate America will still be making money, now firmly a part of the US government, so as our planet continues to die, our economy will still be thriving (for some).
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
