Amid the flurry of changes to the face of American government—the president may or may not have the right to unilaterally eliminate agencies; engaging in insurrection has been decriminalized while prosecuting it has become grounds for termination; wars of conquest are now on the table—you could be forgiven for missing the news that bribery is basically legal now, as long as you support, or are, Donald Trump.

Consider the Trump administration’s actions yesterday alone: The president officially pardoned Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor who served eight years in prison for corruption, and his Department of Justice suspended its prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams for allegedly soliciting bribes from Turkey, despite extremely compelling evidence. (Adams has denied the allegations.) Trump fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics, the chief official making sure government employees comply with ethics requirements, including those concerning conflicts of interest. And he directed the Justice Department to cease enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prevents American businesses from bribing foreign officials.

Not bad for a day’s work—but Trump wasn’t done. Today, the administration told The New York Times that Elon Musk’s financial disclosures would not be made public, allowing the shadow president to direct vast swaths of government policy with enormous stakes for his personal fortune without the public knowing the precise areas of overlap.

A running joke in the first Trump term was “Infrastructure Week,” a recurring attempt by the administration to focus media attention on a subject (passing an infrastructure bill) that had no real policy meat to it. This time around, Trump has quietly put together a policy theme—call it “Corruption Week”—for which he has actually delivered the goods. Whether Trump did this intentionally or just had numerous pro-corruption initiatives coincidentally stacked up on his desk is hard to say. What seems clear, however, is that Trump genuinely believes in corruption as a normal and acceptable way to do business.

When he first ran for president, in 2016, Trump cast himself as a master of the system who had strategically donated to public officials in exchange for favors that would advance his business career. This was not mere bluster. Trump’s breakthrough experience in business came by working the corrupt nexis between real estate and politics in New York City. The late journalist Wayne Barrett, writing in The Village Voice, exhaustively detailed Trump’s wheeling and dealing to obtain a subsidized permit to develop a prized spot of land: the Commodore Hotel deal, which put Trump on the map and seeded his reputation as a symbol of capitalism.

[David A. Graham: Eric Adams’s totally predictable MAGA turn]

Trump recognized that design and construction had little to do with success in this project. The whole trick was to gain influence among the political brokers who controlled land permitting and could dole out lucrative tax abatements.

Trump’s winning bid for the coveted land “had nothing going for it but connections,” Barrett wrote. On top of being born rich, Trump displayed a genuine talent for finding and exploiting the soft spots in the system. He not only donated to the necessary public officials; he put the governor’s top fundraiser on his own payroll. Trump sought to influence Barrett’s reporting with a mix of threats, promises of some ongoing future relationship between them, and what sounded like a bribe. After discovering that Barrett lived in Brownsville, Trump proposed, “I could get you an apartment, you know. That must be an awfully tough neighborhood.”

As a politician, Trump positioned himself as standing above the corruption of the system. That pose was also a way of defining corruption as so endemic that it could not be identified as a discrete form of behavior. Trump calls everything he opposes “corrupt”: political opposition, news reports, judicial rulings, election results, and so on.

That tactic has worked. In part because the word has grown so ubiquitous during the period when Trump has dominated news coverage, it barely registers anymore. Trump was able to continue owning a private business during his first term while refusing to disclose his tax returns, at the time a stunning violation of anti-corruption norms. Early in his second term, he not only continued those practices but opened up a lucrative new business selling a crypto memecoin that serves both to exploit his own fans and to allow anyone anywhere in the world to enrich him directly.

The chance that any corrupt behavior on behalf of Trump, Musk, or any other member of his administration will be exposed is significantly dampened by Trump’s decision to fire inspectors general en masse. If, by chance, some corruption scandal still comes to light, Trump has stacked the Justice Department with loyalists who will almost certainly look the other way.

You can call this hypocritical, but a more realistic description is that it follows Trump’s understanding of how power works: The people running the system operate it for their own benefit. Smart people figure out how to get in on the corruption and get rich themselves. The people who get left out are suckers.

Trump’s cynical model of the world is not purely a matter of self-interest. His suspension of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is an actual policy agenda to enable American businesses to bribe officials overseas without violating American law. Trump himself has no need to grease anybody’s palms. He therefore appears to support this reform, as it were, because he genuinely believes in it. And unlike most of his flailing efforts to advance policy objectives, his pro-corruption agenda is comprehensive and well designed. How the rest of Trump’s presidency plays out is anyone’s guess. The consequences of legalizing corruption, however, will be utterly predictable.

Read more...

Donald Trump plans to place 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, valued at about $50bn in 2024.

President Donald Trump is set to announce new tariffs of 25% on imported steel and aluminum, delivering a major win to the U.S. steel industry — all according to the industry’s plan.

Read more...

Updated at 7:48 p.m. on February 7, 2025

Artists embarrassed Donald Trump when he first came to Washington. Now that Trump is back in power, he is determined not to let that happen again.

Trump plans to announce the dismissal of multiple members of the Kennedy Center board as soon as today, a group likely to include recent appointees of former President Joe Biden; among those on the current board are the Democratic political strategist Mike Donilon, former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and Democratic National Committee finance chair Chris Korge. The White House has also had discussions about having Trump himself installed as chair of the board, according to two people familiar with the purge, who requested anonymity to describe plans that are not yet public.

A White House spokesperson declined to comment.

(Several hours after this article published, Trump confirmed the news, writing on Truth Social that he planned to make the Kennedy Center “GREAT AGAIN” by terminating “multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” He wrote that he planned to announce a “new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!” adding, “The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation. For the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”)

“The Kennedy Center has received no formal notifications from the White House about what you’ve reported,” Eileen Andrews, the center’s vice president of public relations, told us before Trump put out his Truth Social post.

Trump never attended the Kennedy Center’s annual gala event during his first term, as artists protested his administration and threatened to boycott Kennedy Center events at the White House. Now Trump is making clear that he will not be sidelined again from the most celebrated cultural institution in Washington.

“The attitude is different this time. The attitude is Go fuck yourself,” said one of the people familiar with the planning. “It’s ridiculous for four years for Trump and Melania to say, ‘We’re not going to the Kennedy Center because Robert De Niro doesn’t like us.’” (De Niro was a Kennedy Center honoree in 2009 and spoke at the 2024 event.)

Trump’s relationship with the arts world has long been strained. During his first year in office, all 17 members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, a nonpartisan advisory body whose members at the time had been appointed by President Barack Obama, resigned over what they called Trump’s “hateful rhetoric” following the white-nationalist demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump later disbanded the group, rather than replace the committee, which was established by Ronald Reagan.  

Later that year, three of the five artists recognized at the annual Kennedy Center Honors said they would not attend or were considering a boycott of the traditional White House reception before the gala, citing various objections to Trump’s leadership. Trump, in response, canceled the reception and became the first sitting president not to attend the gala at any point in his term since its inception in 1978.

Trump showed a similar lack of interest in the National Medal of Arts, the government’s highest award for artists and arts patrons, which the president oversees. In his first term, Trump distributed just nine medals, including an award to the musicians of the U.S. military. Obama had awarded 76 medals over eight years, and Biden gave out 33 during his four-year term.

Trump was more circumspect about the Kennedy Center, alternately praising and criticizing federal funding for the institution. “They do need some funding. And I said, ‘Look, that was a Democrat request. That was not my request. But you got to give them something,” Trump said in 2020, when asked about a proposed $25 million in additional funding as part of a COVID-relief bill. “The Kennedy Center, they do a beautiful job—an incredible job.”

Weeks later, he changed his position. “I hated putting it in the bill because it’s just not appropriate,” he said of the funding.

If Trump became chair of the Kennedy Center board, he would replace the philanthropist David Rubenstein, who has held the post for 14 years but signaled that he will move on after September 2026. A week after Trump’s second inauguration, Kennedy Center President Deborah Rutter announced her own plans to step down at the end of the year.

For his second term, Trump is taking a more assertive approach to a range of cultural institutions. Within hours of his inauguration, he abolished the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, which Biden had revived in 2022, preempting any possibility of another mass resignation. He then moved to impose his own views on government-funded cultural projects.

Nine days into his second term, he signed an executive order restarting planning for an idea from his first term: a national “Garden of American Heroes,” location to be determined. Trump had previously named 244 honorees—52 of them women—who would get statues, including figures from science, sports, entertainment, politics, and business, as well as some of the nation’s founders. (The family of at least one would-be honoree, the anti-communist Whittaker Chambers, later asked that he not be included.)

Trump also moved quickly to impose his vision on plans for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—July 4, 2026, also known as the Semiquincentennial. He created a new advisory panel, called Task Force 250, that he will chair to support a congressionally funded organization that has already begun planning events.

During the presidential campaign, Trump said he wanted the Semiquincentennial celebrations to last more than a year, from Memorial Day 2025—just 15 weeks away—until July 4, 2026. He proposed a “Great American State Fair” in Iowa as one component, an homage to the state’s own summer fair tradition but featuring pavilions from each state. He also promised the creation of a new national high-school sporting contest, called the Patriot Games, to take place alongside the fair. “Together we will build it, and they will come,” he said in 2023.

Trump’s newfound interest in the arts represents a departure of sorts. In his first term, Trump repeatedly tried to pull funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, two major sources of support for arts and cultural programs around the country. But appropriators in Congress overruled him, and by the end of his term, annual funding was up slightly from the beginning of his term, sitting at more than $167 million for each agency. (The number rose to $207 million during Biden’s presidency.)

This time around, Trump has asked the chairs of both the arts and humanities endowments to join Task Force 250. Nina Ozlu Tunceli, the top lobbyist at the nonprofit Arts Action Fund, who has worked for decades with Congress to secure arts funding, told us she is hopeful that Trump’s interest in the 250th celebration will provide “a very good lifeline” for the endowments’ funding.

Still, Trump’s executive order calling for the “termination” of all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the federal government will become a source of tension—and another way for him to assert his will on the arts. In recent budgets under Biden, House appropriators praised the endowments for “addressing equity through the arts” and “diversity at the national endowment.” “The [Appropriations] Committee directs the NEA to continue prioritizing diversity in its work,” read a section of the budget for fiscal year 2023.

Given the changes that have already begun under Trump, Ozlu Tunceli said, “those programs will definitely be removed.”

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

When it comes to tariffs for Canada and Mexico, America is ending the week pretty much as it started. Over the course of just a few days, Donald Trump—following up on a November promise—announced 25 percent tariffs on the country’s North American neighbors, caused a panic in the stock market, eked out minor concessions from foreign leaders, and called the whole thing off (for 30 days, at least). But the residue of this week’s blink-and-you-missed-it trade war will stick.

The consensus among economists is that the now-paused tariffs on Canada and Mexico would have caused significant, perhaps even immediate, cost hikes and inflation for Americans. Tariffs on Mexico could have raised produce prices within days, because about a third of America’s fresh fruits and vegetables are imported from Mexico, Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at Yale’s Budget Lab, told me in an email. But “uncertainty about tariffs poses a strong risk of fueling inflation, even if tariffs don’t end up going into effect,” he argued. Tedeschi noted that “one of the cornerstone findings of economics over the past 50 years is the importance of expectations” when it comes to inflation. Consumers, nervous about inflation, may change their behavior—shifting their spending, trying to find higher-paying jobs, or asking for more raises—which can ultimately push up prices in what Tedeschi calls a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

The drama of recent days may also make foreign companies balk at the idea of entering the American market. During Trump’s first term, domestic industrial production decreased after tariffs were imposed. Although Felix Tintelnot, an economics professor at Duke, was not as confident as Tedeschi is about the possibility of unimposed tariffs driving inflation, he suggested that the threats could have ripple effects on American business: “Uncertainty by itself is discouraging to investments that incur big onetime costs,” he told me. In sectors such as the auto industry, whose continental supply chains rely on border crossing, companies might avoid new domestic projects until all threats of a trade war are gone (which, given the persistence of Trump’s threats, may be never). That lack of investment could affect quality and availability, translating to higher costs down the line for American buyers. Some carmakers and manufacturers are already rethinking their operations, just in case.

And the 10 percent tariffs on China (although far smaller than the 60 percent Trump threatened during his campaign) are not nothing, either. These will hit an estimated $450 billion of imports—for context, last year, the United States imported about $4 trillion in foreign goods—and China has already hit back with new tariffs of its own. Yale’s Budget Lab found that the current China tariffs will raise overall average prices by 0.1 to 0.2 percent. Tariffs, Tedeschi added, are regressive, meaning they hurt lower-earning households more than high-income ones.

Even the most attentive companies and shoppers might have trouble anticipating how Trump will handle future tariffs. Last month, he threatened and then dropped a tariff on Colombia; this week, he hinted at a similar threat against the European Union. There is a case to be made that Trump was never serious about tariffs at all—they were merely a way for him to appear tough on trade and flex his power on the international stage. And although many of the concessions that Mexico and Canada offered were either symbolic or had been in the works before the tariff threats, Trump managed to appear like the winner to some of his supporters.

Still, the longest-lasting damage of the week in trade wars may be the solidification of America’s reputation as a fickle ally. As my colleague David Frum wrote on Wednesday, the whole episode leaves the world with the lesson that “countries such as Canada, Mexico, and Denmark that commit to the United States risk their security and dignity in the age of Trump.”

Related:

The tariffs were never real. How Trump lost his trade war

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The government’s computing experts say they are terrified. Trump takes over the Kennedy Center. Gary Shteyngart: The man in the midnight-blue six-ply Italian-milled wool suit

Today’s News

A federal judge said he would issue a temporary restraining order that would pause parts of the Trump administration’s plan to slash the USAID workforce and withdraw employees from their overseas posts. Donald Trump met with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba at the White House, where they discussed reducing the U.S.’s trade deficit with Japan. A plane carrying 10 people went missing in western Alaska while en route from Unalakleet to Nome.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Boris Kachka examines a new, unbearably honest kind of writing. Atlantic Intelligence: For a time, it took immense wealth—not to mention energy—to train powerful new AI models, Damon Beres writes. “That may no longer be the case.”

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Wikimedia Commons.

The Rise of the Selfish Plutocrats

By Brian Klaas

The role of the ultra-wealthy has morphed from one of shared social responsibility and patronage to the freewheeling celebration of selfish opulence. Rather than investing in their society—say, by giving alms to the poor, or funding Caravaggios and cathedrals—many of today’s plutocrats use their wealth to escape to private islands, private Beyoncé concerts, and, above all, extremely private superyachts. One top Miami-based “yacht consultant” has dubbed itself Medici Yachts. The namesake recalls public patronage and social responsibility, but the consultant’s motto is more fitting for an era of indulgent billionaires: “Let us manage your boat. For you is only to smile and make memories.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Paranoia is winning. Americans are trapped in an algorithmic cage. A Greenland plot more cynical than fiction Civil servants are not America’s enemies. The challenges the U.S. would face in Gaza

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Courtesy of Sundance Institute; Neon Films/Rosamont; Luka Cyprian; A24; Lars Erlend Tubaas Øymo.

Stay in the loop. Here are 10 indie movies you should watch for in 2025.

Discover. David Lynch’s work was often described as “mysterious” or “surreal”—but the emotions it provoked were just as fundamental, K. Austin Collins writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

During his election campaign in 2024, President Donald Trump pledged to establish a Bitcoin Reserve, sparking ongoing speculation about if and when the U.S. government might formally add Bitcoin to its asset holdings. Since then, the conversation around a federally backed Bitcoin Reserve has gained traction,…

Read more...

We compare and contrast Donald Trump’s claim that South Africa is conducting a land grab vs. his plan for the US to own.

Read more...

US president Donald trump says the US will take over Gaza to turn it into the ‘riviera’ of the Middle East.