11 Ways Trump Is Corrupting the Government to Help His Reelection Campaign
Administering the oath to new Americans, a pinnacle of the immigrant experience, is one of the great civic functions the government performs on behalf of the citizenry. In August, Donald Trump found a way to demean this precious ceremony for a handful of new citizens when he staged a naturalization event on White House grounds that was later broadcast to millions of viewers during the Republican National Convention. The spectacle — the participants were not aware it would be televised — was as grotesque as it was cynical. An American president known for his hostility to immigrants seized on their pride and joy, and treated them as props, for the purpose of scoring political points in front of a primetime audience, all in the hopes of getting re-elected.
That the ceremony, and the president’s later acceptance of his party’s nomination on the South Lawn, was also likely illegal is almost beside the point, given the wider scope of Trump’s transgressions. Its broader import is that in the final stretch of the 2020 campaign, Trump has shown no compunction in wielding the amazing power of his office, and the near-limitless resources of the federal government, to send signals to the electorate that he wants their vote. These official acts go beyond the usual end-of-term bill signings, regulatory announcements, and presidential awards that every chief executive likes to roll out in the waning days of their time in office.
No, Trump is very much treating the Executive branch and its numerous agencies as an extension of his flailing, cash-strapped campaign. Whether the goal is to cast a cloud over the candidacy of Joe Biden, spread disinformation about voting by mail, or paint a rosy picture about the administration’s handling of the coronavirus, all of these acts, in the aggregate, can be seen as a coordinated, government-run operation to get the president re-elected. Some efforts are brazen, others subtler. Some have taken off, others have met resistance or congressional investigations. None of it is normal. All of it involves taxpayer dollars.
Coronavirus postcards. In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States Postal Service sent some 138 million households a postcard listing various health and safety guidelines to prevent the spread of the virus. In all uppercase letters, “President Trump’s coronavirus guidelines for America” was written on one side of the cards, the printing and mailing of which reportedly cost the cash-starved postal service $28 million that the Trump administration, as of September, had yet to reimburse. The mailers, which gave the illusory impression that the president cares about combating the pandemic, were apparently favored over another plan, scrapped by the White House, that would’ve sent three face masks to every mailbox in the nation.
https://www.gq.com/story/trump-corruption-and-reelection-campaign
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