Corruption in the Trump Government – El Financiero

Corruption and violence move throughout Donald Trump‘s government. The president is using his position to enrich himself enormously. His critics point it out, supported by evidence; for example, the missions ahead of Trump’s state visits to commit private businesses to the president’s host governments.

Like Trump, some members of his cabinet have very compromised positions, such as the Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnik, a billionaire, who before assuming that position ran the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald and, to avoid the obvious conflict of interest, gave the business to his children.

Cantor Fitzgerald, as Paul Krugman, 2008 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, published in his podcast, “is closely linked to Tether, a very profitable cryptocurrency because it has become a favorite channel for money laundering by international criminals.” (If an economist knows it, surely the competent authorities also know it, even if they say or do nothing).

“Nor,” Krugman continues, “money laundering through cryptocurrencies was the only criminal conspiracy to which Lutnick was, at least, contiguous.” Lutnick, who has vehemently denied any relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the pedophile, “not only remained in close contact with Epstein, but the two appear to have begun doing business together.”

Lutnick’s conflicts of interest and his lies about Epstein should get him fired immediately, but he has the backing of an administration in which Trump himself is using his position to get richer.

And what can we say about the sale of weapons for the exclusive use of the United States Army that enter Mexico through the so-called Iron River; There must have been an agreement between senior officials of the US army and private contractors to create a black market through which 50 caliber heavy weapons circulate, which are only manufactured, under supposedly strict controls, for the military forces.

It is a still modest business of 500 million dollars annually, which if it is growing is not due to carelessness, but rather due to a well-thought-out design by US authorities, which harms the Mexican government and society by increasing the dangerousness of the firepower of the drug cartels in our country.

Businesses like this can only prosper in the context of a corrupt government.

Other observers turn to conceptual ideas to explain American corruption; One of these approaches sees it as a realization of the idea that private investments and businesses are managed more efficiently than public resources, in the fact that it is businessmen who are in charge of the United States government.

The Trump administration seems determined to hand over the entire government to businessmen, considers Katharina Pistor, a German lawyer known for her contributions to the legal formation of financial systems around the world. According to her, this American government is not just “good for business”: it is a business in itself.

Perhaps markets are a matter of negotiation between free and equal parties, Pistor adds, but “companies exercise central control, the logic of which leaves little room for freedom.”

For a company, the German expert maintains, there are only two types of human beings: workers and consumers. The former as inputs for production, the latter as buyers of goods or services. In both cases, people’s only role is to help maximize shareholder value. “There is no place for loyalty, community or individual rights” and there is room for far-right positions in politics and the economy.

For some years now, business leaders with sufficient economic power have been emerging in the United States and other nations who, when assuming governments, promote ultra-libertarian positions of economic power and eliminate all controls that seek to regulate it.

I am not going off topic when referring to perhaps the most serious consequence of making government a business, which is the abysmal inequality that results in wealth and income between nations and societies that inhabit them.

The 2026 Inequality Report, from the World Inequality Lab, measures the division between rich and poor in the world, a division that has reached extreme levels.

It confirms that, on the one hand, a small group of capitals in finance, industry and services controls wealth and, therefore, investment decisions and job creation in the world. It is a core of 147 companies that, according to the Swiss Institute of Technology, directly control and through stakes in other companies, 40 percent of global productive assets. If the number is expanded to 737 companies, 80% of global productive capacities are under their control.

On the other hand, the greater the wealth inequality in an economy (global or national), the greater the income inequality. In 2025, the richest 10% of the world’s population earned more than the remaining 90%.

The authors of the report state that “inequality is a political choice. It is the result of our policies, institutions and governance structures”; Yes, only inequality is not the result of our policies, institutions and government structures, but of the corporations that concentrate productive wealth and the governments that, in increasing numbers, are dedicated to favoring them.