Adjust your aperture away from individual outrages for a moment. Instead, focus on the nightmare that institutionalized corruption is leaving behind. It will take years – decades – to repair.
This week, a watchdog counted 57 officials in this administration worth at least $100 million, more than four times the total of the last three presidencies combined. This could be seen as populist red meat, but ask yourself: why are they there? Occam’s Razor suggests focusing on the spoils and establishing a process for securing future spoils.
Closely related, the president’s institutionalized insider trading, which Wall Street firms are happily signing up for, made news again this week. Wall Street’s fastest traders began paying his media company up to $100,000 a month for a first look at his market-moving posts.
A Trump appointee granted the president’s family crypto firm a federal bank charter. This institutionalizes a channel by which companies can funnel bribes to Trump.
In the institutionalizing corruption column, the registry that let investigators trace who owns an American company was switched off and queued for deletion.
Taken together, these events form a pattern we want to draw your attention to. The obscenely wealthy are using the power of the government – your power – against you. Not only are they barely bothering to hide it, but they are in government to ensure power over your children, too.
The rest of the world is noticing this, even though US voters are drowning in this dreck. El País spent the week documenting how a Venezuelan billionaire, under investigation for money laundering in two countries, became Washington’s back channel to Caracas. It even documented how this billionaire’s private jet scrubbed its manifest mid-flight. By the way, this manifest included an executive from a Peter Thiel-backed bank.
Policy debate about the International Criminal Court (ICC) has an old pedigree that predates Trump. Look past that and even the fact that Tokyo and The Hague are cooperating to lodge protests at the State Department over sanctions against the president of the International Criminal Court. Instead, view this through a broader prism. Shred the ICC appeals to the Trump family because it attacks the rule of law, which is the mood music of this administration.
This institutionalizing of criminality is doing generational damage to the scaffolding that made America the safest place on earth to invest. This country built it over decades. It’s doing the same thing to the rule of law in the US that DOGE did to US diplomacy and RFK Jr. did to public health. Each of Trump’s supporters has their own reasons for supporting this. Thiel gets his crypto hellscape, the donors get their mergers, Musk gets his government contracts, etc. But the Trump family gets the law out of the way of the family business – they hope, forever.
One election will not fix the damage they are causing. Five might, if Americans stay focused and beat enough money out of our system to allow the deep repairs. The comforting, Biden-esque theory that the political thermostatic reset repairs all needs to be tossed aside because the Trumps are causing real, lasting, institutional damage – by design – and it will take generations of work to repair it.
It’s a depressing thought, but “Moonshot” is typical shorthand for the country achieving great, unimaginable things. But the next generation’s Moonshot will be confined to rebuilding a competent domestic law enforcement agency in the wake of the damage being done to the FBI, or rebuilding a public health system able to tackle diseases creeping back into American society, largely controlled since the first moon landing, such as measles and polio.
Associated Press via Fortune, August 17, 2026
Public Citizen counted 57 administration officials who are worth at least $100 million, among them eight billionaires, seventeen ambassadors, and a third of the cabinet, against five such officials under George W. Bush, three under Obama, and five under Biden. More than half were donors to Trump’s 2024 campaign or its committees, a combined $65 million. The report walks through what they bought. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s old firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, now controlled by his sons, was picked to run a $1.5 billion stock offering tied to a mining company receiving federal support from his own department (longtime readers will remember this from the July 24 edition). Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg’s former firm, Cerberus, owns companies that have collected at least $90 million in Pentagon investments and contracts. Public Citizen’s Lisa Gilbert warns that governments drawn from the ultra-rich produce “misplaced incentives and corruption.” Unfortunately for our kids, they’re going to get a civics lesson in what misallocated investment capital means for an economy.
CNN, August 17, 2026
Last month, we told you former OCC officials considered rejection inconceivable. On August 14, the inconceivable duly failed to happen. The OCC granted preliminary conditional approval for World Liberty Trust Company to issue and redeem the family’s USD1 stablecoin, hold its reserves, and custody digital assets for institutional clients. Translation: If a corporation wants to funnel millions of dollars directly to the president, it will have a “legal” means of doing so. Reminder: World Liberty reported more than $526 million in income from World Liberty token sales last year, in addition to roughly $263 million from an equity sale to investors led by a UAE royal. Or you may remember the $100 million that reached World Liberty through a UAE-based entity from a British money-laundering suspect, covered here last week. The Trumps know their customer base, so stand back and stand by for more of this, which is definitely not bribery.
Trump Media Says Wall Street Firms Paying Up to $100K for Early Access to Trump Truth Social Posts
CNN, August 11, 2026
Wall Street listened to the mood music and so eagerly reached for its checkbook. On its first earnings call, Trump Media said more than 10 customers, mostly high-frequency trading firms, have signed up for Truth API, a licensed feed that gives insiders a first look at Trump’s posts (on his own media platform) milliseconds before the public sees them, at $60,000 to $ 100,000 per month. These posts move interest rates, oil, bonds, and entire indexes. Now, the company selling the head start to what used to be called the White House Press Office is majority-controlled by the man writing the posts, not the American people. An NYU economist told Fortune the arrangement lets Trump “monetize the role of the office of the president.” For scale, Trump Media lost roughly $405 million in the first quarter and generated only $900,000 in sales. Thus, these hedge funds are not buying this service because of what the business produces. Instead, they’re by the millisecond and will make millions from it. We’ve been banging the drum that states have at their disposal incredibly powerful anti-corruption laws and tools. In particular, NY AG Letitia James has what is easily the most powerful anti-corruption statute in the nation, the Martin Act. We’ve never seen clearer cases of insider trading, and last time we checked, Wall Street was located in New York. Every single one of those hedge funds is arguably committing insider trading, and the President of the United States is literally on record testifying to that fact. Prosecuting Trump is probably too much to ask, but charging these critical corruption enablers shouldn’t be. Grand corruption, like what Trump is institutionalizing in this country, only works when the enablers pay no price for being willing participants. America’s Founders gifted this country a uniquely powerful immune system for grand corruption at the federal level by reserving so much power for the states. But for reasons that escape us, America’s state government authorities are entirely unwilling to exercise them.
Alejandro Betancourt, the Under-Investigation Billionaire Linking Delcy Rodríguez to Trump
El País, August 17, 2026
El País and other Latin American press documents how Alejandro Betancourt, a Venezuelan billionaire who is under money laundering and tax fraud investigations in Switzerland and Spain and who is identified by Transparencia Venezuela as a co-conspirator in the $1.2 billion “Money Flight” case, became a diplomatic bridge between Marco Rubio’s State Department and Delcy Rodríguez’s Caracas. Mauricio Claver-Carone, until recently Rubio’s informal Venezuela emissary, acknowledged it. Betancourt’s UK extradition case closed in May (undoubtedly with the complicity of America’s closest “ally,” the UK). His private jet then flew from Palm Beach to Caracas in June and July. Speaking of that July flight, a manifest was altered mid-flight to erase his family’s names and substitute, among others, the chief strategy officer of Erebor, the crypto bank founded by Palmer Luckey and Joe Lonsdale and backed by Thiel’s Founders Fund. Reinforcing the point about institutionalized corruption, the same Comptroller Gould who just blessed World Liberty as a bank controversially granted a bank charter in February. This Thie-backed bank somehow managed to nab a deal on this Rubio-connected flight, set to conduct US diplomatic business with the replacement government in Venezuela, already holding a letter of intent with Banco de Venezuela.
But buckle up. Betancourt now reportedly advises Rodríguez on reopening oil and mining and on debt restructuring, while also negotiating with executives of Heeney Capital, a mining outfit whose Venezuelan gold deals are reportedly backed by the White House. Which US officials, intermediaries, and commercial actors dealt with him, and did that access overlap with oil, mining, sanctions relief, licenses, financial-system re-entry, or the debt workout? Claver-Carone already answered the first half on the record. Nobody involved seems embarrassed, so getting answers shouldn’t be difficult for people with the authority to compel them.
Dekleptocracy Alliance’s mission is to make anti-corruption an issue Americans cannot ignore. We accomplish that by talking about it. A lot. You can help by sharing this newsletter.
US Sanctions International Criminal Court President and Trial Lawyer
Al Jazeera, August 18, 2026
On Tuesday, Marco Rubio sanctioned ICC President Tomoko Akane, a Japanese judge, and senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye of Senegal, freezing their US assets from September 17 and, in practice, cutting them off from much of the global banking system. Japan, one of America’s steadiest allies, called the move “very unfortunate,” which is practically a scream in Japanese. The Dutch foreign minister made a show of inviting Akane in to discuss continued support. Last June, three ICC judges sued the administration. Four human rights groups sued last week, and Pete Hegseth mused days earlier that the court might investigate American boat strikes in Latin America (ICC investigations should be the least of Hegseth’s worries. War crimes are illegal in the US). This administration generates lots of outrage with its constant attacks on the ICC. But Americans shouldn’t get hung up on one episode without considering the broader theme of these attacks. The Trump administration clearly believes that its foreign policy requires a world without courts that prosecute corruption.
Treasury Kills Corporate Transparency Act, Erases Shell-Company Database
Tech Times, August 13, 2026
We covered the announcement last week. This week, the rule took effect, releasing some 33 million American companies from ownership disclosure and initiating the deletion of everything already filed, while the long-term bill came into focus. To the uninitiated, this sounds like an item that freed businesses of endless paperwork, but that is a bad-faith argument. The only kind of business this database troubled was the one nested in layer upon layer of corporate shells – the only people who want to hide corporate ownership tend to be drug dealers, money launderers, Russian oligarchs, and, ahem, Trump Organization customers. In 2024, the US was upgraded by an international money-laundering body to “largely compliant” precisely because of this. So, don’t be surprised if the Financial Action Task Force takes this act of self-sabotage into account next year.
Previously, Congress created this registry over Trump’s veto. Marco Rubio was a vocal proponent of it. Now, Trump’s Treasury sabotaged it by rule. Secretary Bessent did the usual embarrassing justifying and called it “a victory for common sense.” But this will not help American business. In time, it will hurt foreign investment in the United States (as it should). Most of Dekleptocray’s staff have spent decades trying to improve the rule of law in Eastern Europe. Americans are going to get a civics lesson on why a stable and strong rule of law makes it safe for capital investment. Rebuilding this kind of trust takes decades. America’s cowardly CEOs know this, but their bonuses are tied to short-term performance. By the time malaise sets in, they will long since have cashed their checks. The lost decade will be someone else’s problem – your kid’s problem.
The Data Center Secret in Trump’s Financial Disclosures
More Perfect Union, August 2026
How many Trump officials are invested in data centers, we wondered out loud this morning? So, we researched it. More Perfect Union combed through the president’s disclosures and found trades in at least 25 companies tied to data center construction or leasing, with up to $25 million invested at the end of last year and dozens of trades since then, while his administration rolls out policy after policy for the AI buildout. Trade publication Data Center Dynamics itemized it. Up to $5 million each in cooling and power suppliers, Trane and Eaton in March. A stake in colocation giant Equinix in February. House and Senate Democrats have asked the Commerce inspector general to investigate whether Secretary Lutnick is boosting data centers that profit his family, Cantor Fitzgerald, which was transferred to Lutnick’s sons, is heavily invested in them. To reinforce: your utility bill effectively subsidizes these things. They eat tons of electricity, and the only way they can achieve the profitability that the tech bros and the investment class demand is if American households help pay for those enormous electricity bills. Some tech bros, like Thiel, spent millions of dollars over the past decade cultivating this moment. Their profits have skyrocketed at the same velocity as your utility bills. By design. This criminal-enterprise model of government is called government capture. Former Thiel employee and massive recipient of Thiel’s election largesse, Vice President personifies this form of government banditry.
Princeling Monitor
Sources
Associated Press via Fortune, August 17, 2026
Common Dreams, August 17, 2026
The National News Desk, August 11, 2026
Banking Dive, February 9, 2026
US Treasury and FinCEN, August 11, 2026
More Perfect Union, August 2026
Data Center Dynamics, July 2026
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