Transcript: Trump’s Epic Humiliation of Nikki Haley Contains a Warning

Sargent: In your piece for The New Republic, you point out that foreign agents are rising higher in Trump’s orbit than before. Susie Wiles, who will be his chief of staff, and Pam Bondi, who will almost certainly be his attorney general, were both registered foreign lobbying agents. Jared Kushner and the Trump Organization are doing all these deals in the Mideast, as we discussed before. There are now these new, very clear and wide-open channels to channeling bribes to the president. What is this new Trump kleptocracy that’s emerging here? It’s a new kind of beast, isn’t it? It’s both more public, more explicit, more self-celebratory in ways I don’t think we’ve seen before, have we?

Michel: No, Greg, and that’s a key point. We have never seen something like this before. Of course, the common refrain is that, yes, we have seen these plutocratic elements and things like the Gilded Age with robber barons in American history, but we have never seen such a singular cohort of so many deep-pocketed individuals with direct access to the White House. And beyond that, we have certainly never seen a president like Donald Trump who completely blurs and dissolves the lines between private interests and public policy.

This is not a surprise to you or to listeners that so much of Trump’s policy, whether domestic or increasingly foreign, is predicated on what benefits him, his inner circle, his family, and, of course, the Trump Organization itself. And it’s worth highlighting that the Trump Organization has come forth and said that they do have an ethics pledge. All they say is they won’t do any deals with foreign officials or foreign governments, but that leaves the door wide open to doing deals with foreign individuals, foreign companies, or any other proxies for these regimes. And, of course, these regimes can do this in seconds; they can set up a company themselves that is nominally independent that the Trump Organization can then work with. That is little more than a cutout for x dictatorship or y autocracy or whatever the interests may be.