Photo credit: Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead
When Steven Mnuchin, Donald Trump’s treasury secretary, announced he would violate a 95-year-old federal law to hide Trump’s tax returns from a congressional investigating committee, his presidency permanently secured its place in history. It officially became the third corrupt Republican presidency in American history to begin battling a public investigation into whether the president of the United States and his political cronies were a pack of criminals.
Many people these days trace Republican political corruption to the 1970s Watergate scandal of Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon. (Spoiler alert: He was.) The president and his gang tried to cover up a burglary ring operating out of the White House that had broken into Democratic National Committee headquarters and the office of the psychiatrist of an anti-war activist. But tracing back only to Watergate completely overlooks the very first corrupt Republican presidency in U.S. history.
Until Watergate, Warren G. Harding’s Republican administration in the 1920s was America’s most scandal-ridden presidency. It actually prompted that 1924 law requiring the Internal Revenue Service to turn over the tax returns of administration officials for congressional investigation. Criminals surrounding President Harding included his attorney general who sold government alcohol supplies during Prohibition as well as pardons; his Veterans Bureau chief imprisoned for soliciting bribes; and his interior secretary, Albert Fall, who holds the distinction as the first cabinet secretary ever convicted and imprisoned for a felony in what infamously became known as the Teapot Dome scandal.
Fighting Bob Took a Tough Stand
Wisconsin’s progressive Republican Sen. Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette led the Senate investigation uncovering the details of Teapot Dome, named after the shape of a Wyoming mountain holding government oil reserves. Fall leased those oil reserves without competitive bidding to two multimillionaire oil men in exchange for bribes and no-interest personal loans worth more than $5 million in today’s dollars.
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La Follette’s major role is significant. Many people forget that his progressive movement was the liberal, activist wing of Wisconsin’s Republican Party. Unlike modern-day Republicans, La Follette opposed government corruption committed by members of his own party. During Watergate, it also was three powerful veteran Republicans—Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, Pennsylvania Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott and Arizona House Minority Leader John Rhodes Jr.—who met with Nixon and convinced him to resign.
Only a tiny number of elected Republicans have ever had enough political courage to stand up to Republican presidential corruption. The first current Republican senator to publicly oppose Trump’s brazen corruption of the presidency will be one in a row. That’s unfortunate, because Trump has at long last achieved his dream of appointing an attorney general who will tell him he can do anything he wants. Atty. Gen. William Barr now backs Trump’s open defiance of congressional subpoenas of financial records and testimony sought to investigate criminal activity in the government, as well as Trump using the presidency to enrich himself and his family through money laundering and profiteering in his private businesses.
The only significant legislation successfully passed by Republicans in 2½ years of Trump’s presidency was a $1.5 trillion tax cut that overwhelming went to multimillion-dollar corporations and the wealthiest individuals in America, including Trump and his family. But that didn’t stop Trump from publicly lying to the American people and claiming he received absolutely no personal benefit.
Our Right to Know
You and I and every other American, regardless of political party, has a right to know whether our president is pursuing policies that benefit our country or to simply fill his own pockets. Instead, Trump denies our elected representatives have any right to investigate his corruption of the presidency. They do. Those powers are spelled out explicitly in Article One of the U.S. Constitution.
Trump doesn’t merely claim whatever he does as president is none of our business; he bellows it to the heavens like a madman. He stormed out of a White House meeting with leading Democrats last week to hold a raving, incoherent press conference in the Rose Garden declaring he will never again work with Democrats on any legislation until they cease all their infernal investigations and allow him to commit his crimes in peace.
This recounting of historically corrupt U.S. presidencies can be criticized for failing to recognize Ronald Reagan’s substantial contributions to Republican corruption. It was his presidency that illegally sold U.S. missiles to the hostile government of Iran to finance a secret war in Nicaragua. Fourteen administration officials were indicted, and 11 were convicted—many of whom were pardoned later by President George Bush (who was Reagan’s vice president). Somehow, Republicans succeeded in papering over Reagan’s corruption with heroic conservative mythology. Republicans weren’t even ashamed to name airports and government buildings after him.
It’s encouraging that the universally recognized corrupt Republican presidencies of Harding and Nixon both ended badly. If the nation successfully rids itself of the corrupt Trump Republican presidency, history suggests it could be another 50 years before Americans have to suffer through anything like it again.
