On June 16, 2026, a Park Service worker stood in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with a vacuum pump, sucking algae off a floor Trump had ordered repainted “American Flag Blue” for the Fourth of July. The no-bid paint job grew from $6.9 million to $14.7 million and began peeling almost at once. The no-bid algae cleanup went to a company owned by a Republican donor.
Teapot Dome, the name Americans have used for a century for the worst kind of government corruption, was worth about $7 million in today’s money, and the Interior Secretary went to prison for it. In his first year back, Trump reported $1.4 billion in income from crypto alone. That is roughly 200 Teapot Domes, paid into the president’s own accounts.
There is a name for a government that exists to make the ruler and his friends rich: kleptocracy. Hungary’s version turned a gas fitter from Orbán’s hometown into the country’s richest man. The American version is bigger. An Emirati sheikh bought 49% of the family crypto company days before the inauguration, and within ten months the administration approved the AI chip exports he wanted. Qatar gave Trump a $400 million plane.
It works because Trump first fired the people who could stop it: at least 17 inspectors general, the head of the Office of Government Ethics, and all but two of the 30 lawyers in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section.
And you pay for it. Pilgrim’s Pride gave $5 million to the inauguration, and a proposed limit on salmonella in raw chicken was dropped. Nursing-home executives bought a lunch with the president, and the nurse-staffing rule was rescinded. Donors to the ballroom have since won $50 billion in federal contracts. When the Fourth of July came, the Reflecting Pool still wasn’t blue.
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