A man with a long track record of corruption took office as president in January. In his second term, he’s surrounding himself with like-minded cabinet secretaries and agency heads.

It’s a fact that Donald J. Trump is a felon, convicted by a unanimous state jury of 34 counts of corruptly falsifying business records. Days before taking office in 2017, he paid $25 million to settle a suit for cheating students who’d enrolled in Trump University. His Trump Foundation was shut down for misusing charitable funds for political gain.

Now back in office, Trump continues to exude the odor of corruption more strongly than ever. Here’s one example: his launch of a cryptocurrency product in January. Two days before his inauguration, Trump promoted a meme coin on the social media platform X with a post urging investors to “GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW.” Purchase of the coin provides a straightforward way to funnel money to Trump. Last month, the SEC paused its investigation into a businessman after he bought $75 million worth of the coin.

Corruption and conflicts of interest have gone viral in the second Trump administration.

Take Elon Musk, who contributed $288 million to the 2024 Trump presidential campaign and who, according to The New York Times, has signaled his intent to contribute another $100 million to the Trump political operation. Musk’s net worth of over $300 billion can be traced primarily to his holdings in Tesla, the electric vehicle company; SpaceX, the rocket company; xAI, an artificial intelligence company; and Neuralink, a company designing brain implants. He is the CEO of the first three and owner of the fourth. The Washington Post estimates that Musk and his businesses have received at least $38 billion in contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits from the federal government extending back over 20 years.

After winning the election in November, Trump announced that “the Great Elon Musk” would co-manage the Department of Government Efficiency to “pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”

According to Bloomberg News, SpaceX engineer Ted Malaska instructed Federal Aviation Administration employees to “immediately start work on a program to deploy thousands of the company’s Starlink satellite terminals to support the national airspace system.” The Campaign Legal Center has filed a conflict-of-interest complaint with the Department of Transportation citing evidence “that Musk has blatantly and improperly influenced the FAA’s decision to work with Starlink” in violation of criminal law. Starlink is a satellite communications company owned by SpaceX.

This past September, the FAA proposed a $633,000 fine for SpaceX’s failure to follow its licensing requirements during two 2023 launches. This month, a SpaceX rocket diverted commercial air traffic when it blew up over the Caribbean Sea. According to the company website, SpaceX is working with the FAA “to either close the mishap investigation or receive a flight safety determination, along with working on a license authorization to enable its next flight of Starship.” At the same time, the Musk-directed DOGE is laying off FAA employees, over 400 in February.

Dismissing civil servants who are regulating or investigating Musk companies has become standard operating procedure in the current Trump administration. Musk has accused the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of slowing his company’s technological progress. The team regulating autonomous vehicles, which are under development at Tesla, has been cut almost in half. There was no need to lay off any civil servants overseeing former President Joe Biden’s executive order regulating artificial intelligence, xAI’s business. Trump rescinded the order on his first day in office. The Food and Drug Administration was reviewing the plans of Neuralink for brain implants. Employees doing the review were laid off by DOGE.

Shouldn’t federal laws prohibiting federal employees from working on matters where they have a financial interest apply to Musk? Nope, not according to the current administration. Trump has designated Musk “a special government employee,” purportedly not subject to conflict-of-interest laws.

On the other hand, there’s no doubt Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services, is subject to those laws. Prior to his confirmation, Kennedy Jr. was paid over $2.5 million by the law firm Wisner Baum. Under his signed ethics agreement, Kennedy Jr. will continue to receive 10% of fees awarded to the firm as a result of its suit against the pharmaceutical giant Merck. The legal action relates to the Merck vaccine that protects against cervical cancer and multiple other types of cancer. At least Kennedy Jr. promises to “not provide representational services in connection with the cases during my appointment to the position of Secretary.” In the Kennedy Jr. confirmation hearing, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said the bottom line was this: “Kennedy can kill off access to vaccines and make millions of dollars while he does it.”

Trump has nominated TV celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which has a budget of almost $1.5 trillion that provides coverage for more than 40% of all Americans. According to his filings, Oz’s net worth is somewhere between $90 million and $335 million. He holds stock in iHerb, which sells products he has pitched as supplements that stimulate hair growth and “might be able to actually help with Alzheimer’s.” In office, he could influence Medicare and Medicaid coverage of iHerb products. He has fudged as to whether he would sell his holdings.

There are more examples of potential corruption among Trump’s nominees and appointees, but let’s stop with Musk, Kennedy Jr. and Oz for now. They remind me of one of my favorite quotes. In Ian Fleming’s “Goldfinger,” the title character tells 007: “Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action.”

— Keith Raffel is a syndicated columnist with Creators.