photo by: Creators Syndicate

Keith Raffel

As the saying goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And even in the river of lies pouring from the mouth of President-elect Donald Trump, occasional truths flow by. He’s repeatedly accused Washington, D.C., of being a “swamp” of corruption. That resonates with the American people because they can see evidence of the corruption at every turn.

The Supreme Court made pro-business decisions as its senior member, Justice Clarence Thomas, accepted gifts worth millions from billionaires. Texas real estate mogul Harlan Crow, whose holdings could be affected by court rulings, was especially generous in funding Thomas’s vacations, private jet flights, gifts, purchase of his mother’s house and grandnephew’s tuition payments.

The CEO of Nvidia, one of the world’s two most valuable companies, is using loopholes in the federal tax code to avoid $8 billion in taxes. That’s about the same amount as 1 million average taxpayers pay in federal income tax each year. Eight billion dollars is enough to pay for the whole federal court system for a year, for the National Park Service for over two years or for the state of Mississippi’s K-12 education system for two and a half years. Warren Buffett, one of the 10 richest people in the world, once said he paid taxes at a lower rate than his secretary. Tax loopholes for the rich, while legal, do carry the whiff of the swamp.

Trump has tapped the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, to co-head a “Department of Government Efficiency.” Well over $100 billion of Musk’s wealth stems from his ownership position in the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla. Trump has vowed to impose tariffs of up to 60% on imports from China. Such taxes would protect Tesla’s U.S. market position from Chinese-manufactured electric vehicles. Musk also owns 42% of Space X, which makes the Falcon 9 rocket that has become the go-to rocket for U.S. government agencies including NASA. Since the DOGE, despite its name, is not an official government body, Musk will not be subject to government conflict-of-interest laws.

Campaign finance records show Musk contributed $277 million to support Trump and other Republican candidates in last month’s election. In the two weeks after the election, Musks’s net worth climbed by over $70 billion, about 250 times his contribution total. Not a bad return on investment.

Electing Trump to drain the swamp of corruption is like installing Al Capone as head of an anti-organized crime strike force. A unanimous New York criminal jury found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts for his attempt to influence the 2016 election through a six-figure payoff to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Also, a staff report from the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability found Trump’s “businesses received, at a minimum, $7.8 million in foreign payments from at least 20 countries during his presidency” in violation of the Constitution. The homepage of World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency firm, features a picture of Trump and the tagline “sponsored by Donald J. Trump.” Steve Witkoff, Trump’s designee as Middle East envoy, is a co-founder of WLF. Eric Trump is calling for “sensible” regulation by his father’s incoming administration of the cryptocurrency industry that he and his father participate in.

Other Trump family members stink of the swamp, too. After serving as a Middle East adviser in the first Trump administration, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner raised $2 billion for his firm Affinity Partners from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. The Saudi government invested despite objections from its fund’s advisers about “the inexperience” of Affinity’s management and a management fee that “seems excessive.” The chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Ron Wyden, wrote to Affinity in July asking whether its “investors may not be motivated by commercial considerations but rather the opportunity to funnel foreign government money to members of President Trump’s family, namely Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.”

There are too many other examples of unethical behavior, favoritism and greed in the swamp to list here. We do know, however, that Supreme Court justices should adhere to an enforceable ethics code, that tax loopholes favoring billionaires and burdening average taxpayers should be closed and that self-dealing by the nation’s chief executive and his family and associates should be outlawed.

Donald Trump is right: In order to preserve the faith of Americans in their national government, the swamp should be drained. But as for counting on an administration headed by him to end D.C. corruption? I don’t think so.

In fact, the American people have elected the Swamp King as their president. Whatever Trump drains will be more than offset by the new streams of sewage he generates and proliferates.

— Keith Raffel is a syndicated columnist with Creators.