What Happens When Presidential Power Becomes a Personal ATM?

How to describe my feelings about a US president who not only tolerates conflicts of interest, but embraces them with the serenity of someone who knows that, whatever happens, the personal cost will be minimal? It’s more than indignation for a country that I love: it’s a sense of weariness, a kind of permanent civic nausea. Every day I wake up with the expectation another “deal” disguised as public policy, a new “agreement” sold as patriotism, a new gesture of impunity turned into a spectacle. But what’s most disturbing is the normalization of corruption: democracy as a backdrop, and the presidency an instrument of monetization.

The TikTok case is especially revealing because it mixes presidential discretion, national security, political pressure and a list of beneficiaries with privileged access. NBC reports that a new anti-corruption group called the Public Integrity Project is bringing legal action against the president and Attorney General Pam Bondi over the deal to transfer TikTok’s U.S. operation to “administration-backed” investors, alleging that a 2024 law designed to curb risks of foreign propaganda and control was violated and that the agreement would have benefited actors with close ties to the president who “have sometimes enriched him personally”. That piece cites specific names such as Oracle, MGX, affiliates of Susquehanna International Group and General Atlantic, and details political and media connections that should have sounded alarm bells and blocked the deal.

Most disturbingly, the pattern is not limited to “having friends,” but to using power to rewrite the practical meaning of a law. The brief filed with the Washington DC Court of Appeals argues that the law was clear and, even so, it was not applied: after the legal deadline expired, the president issued executive orders to grant “extensions” and order the attorney general not to enforce the rule, adding several extensions contrary to the legal text. The same document states that the announced agreement would allow ByteDance to continue controlling essential elements, including the recommendation algorithm, while maintaining relevant operational relationships, emptying the law of any meaning.

When a president allows himself to make compliance with the law an option, we are not dealing with “hard politics” or “pragmatism”, but with institutional erosion. An official White House document celebrates ordering the Department of Justice not to act to enforce the law shifts the center of gravity: the will of the leader becomes the law. If there are also executive orders that, as the text published in GovInfo shows, it extends the “enforcement delay” and explicitly instructs the Department of Justice not to impose sanctions for “any non-compliance” during that period, or even for conduct that occurred before, the message is devastating: the president arrogates to itself the ability to retroactively shield third parties.

But what you feel when power works like this is not just concern for the rule of law. It is the perception of living under a logic of “everything is for sale”, where regulatory and institutional capture are routine: what better metaphor for the times we live in than the president’s crypto currency “initiative”? Time magazine explains how the launch of the TRUMP and MELANIA memecoins alarmed industry insiders and legal experts for the obvious conflicts of interest, concentrated control of supply, and the possibility of these instruments functioning as opaque avenues of influence and enrichment around political power. When the president uses his position to generate financial hype in a market that lives on information asymmetry and “pumping”, the problem is not that he “likes crypto”; it’s that he is normalizing the idea that the presidency is a legitimate way to make money on the job.

Fortunately, there has been an institutional response. Senator Richard Blumenthal has announced an investigation by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into the risks of corruption and conflicts of interest linked to Trump’s crypto scam, asking for information on ownership structures, possible foreign investments and measures to mitigate potential conflicts. The fact that a Senate committee has to ask for explanations about a “financial” product linked to the president is already, in itself, a symptom: we have crossed the line between governing and monetizing the office.

Added to this moral fatigue is the permanent suspicion of access to privileged information. There does not need to be a conviction for the damage to be done; it is enough to reiterate scenes in which a message, an insinuation or a sudden political turn moves markets, and people wonder, rightly, who was positioned before the announcement. TIME has dedicated articles to the insider trading allegations raised by lawmakers following a Trump post and subsequent tariffs that impacted lawmakers explaining why an investigation was called for and what the core of the suspicion was. ABC News also picked up pressure from Democrats for transparency on financial transactions. Although it is then difficult to prosecute legally, the democratic consequence is clear: if power is perceived as a generator of private opportunities, the social contract is eroded.

And therein lies the central point: contemporary corruption is rarely as obvious as a briefcase full of banknotes. Increasingly, it is architecture. It is using institutions to allow money to circulate to those close to them, for law enforcement to be selective, for regulators to look the other way, for access to the president, or the ecosystem that surrounds him, to be the real asset. The V-Dem report has been documenting for years how democracies can be degraded gradually by weakening the checks and balances and the concentration of power, until all that remains is a formal democracy with an empty soul. And when a president acts without any fear of the consequences, demonstrating that the law is far from the same for everyone, that process accelerates: the law becomes a recommendation, the institutions become instruments and the truth becomes a battlefield.

That is why trying to describe my feelings is not an emotional question, but a political one. The feeling is of being robbed of something that cannot always be quantified: trust that the system has brakes, that justice is not an extension of power, that the general interest takes priority over one extortion by a privileged few. It feels that democracy becomes fragile not because people stop voting, but because voting is no longer enough when the rest of the edifice, from public ethics to the separation of powers, to the control of conflict of interest, has become a sad joke. And it is felt, above all, that those who should be afraid to destroy it have discovered that spectacle, polarization and impunity are a business model.

—

This post was previously published on Enrique Dans’ blog.

***