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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
November 30, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
Dec 01, 2025
On Friday evening, the Wall Street Journal published an article about the Trump administration’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine that illuminated the administration’s approach to the world at home, as well as overseas. Authors Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Ballhaus, Thomas Grove, and Joe Parkinson explained that the administration’s plan for peace was a Russian-led blueprint for joint U.S.-Russia economic cooperation that would funnel contracts for rebuilding Ukraine, extracting the valuable minerals in the Arctic, and even space exploration to a few favored U.S. and Russian businessmen.
Many of those business leaders have close ties to the White House.
“Russia has so many vast resources, vast expanses of land,” Trump envoy Steve Witkoff told the journalists. “If we do all that, and everybody’s prospering and they’re all a part of it, and there’s upside for everybody, that’s going to naturally be a bulwark against future conflicts there. Because everybody’s thriving.”
On ABC’s This Week this morning, Representative Don Bacon (R-NE), who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said to host Jonathan Karl: “Putin’s the invader, he’s the dictator, he’s murdered all his opponents. But I just don’t see that moral clarity coming from the White House. We saw that Wall Street Journal article yesterday that many people around the president are hoping to make billions of dollars—these are all billionaires in their own right—from…Russia, if they get a favorable agreement with Ukraine. That alarms me tremendously. I want to see America being the leader of the free world, standing up for what’s right, not for who can make a buck…. I don’t want to see a foreign policy based on greed. I want to see it based on doing the right thing.”
There is far more at stake here than morality, although that is clearly on the table.
The Trump administration is replacing American democracy with a kleptocracy, a system of corruption in which a network of ruling elites use the institutions of government to steal public assets for their own private gain. It permits virtually unlimited theft while the head of state provides cover for his cronies through pardons and the uneven application of the law.
It is the system Russia’s president Vladimir Putin exploits in Russia, and President Donald J. Trump is working to establish it in the United States of America.
In the New York Times today, Cecilia Kang, Tripp Mickle, Ryan Mac, David Yaffe-Bellany, and Theodore Schleifer explored the story of David Sacks, an early technology entrepreneur with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk who now advises the White House on AI and cryptocurrency policy while investing in the companies that benefit from those policies. Sacks has brought Silicon Valley leaders, including the chief executive of Nvidia, into contact with White House officials. Shortly after, the government got rid of restrictions on Nvidia’s chip sales to foreign countries, a change that could net Nvidia as much as $200 billion.
Tom Burgis of The Guardian explained today how the Trump family is using its position in the federal government to advance its personal interests and enrich itself. Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric have thrown themselves into cryptocurrency, broken ground on new golf courses, and rushed through permissions for new buildings in foreign countries at the same time U.S. government policies over tariffs, cryptocurrency, and pardons, for example, seem to advance those interests.
“The Trumps’ most natural allies,” Burgis wrote, “first in business, now also in politics—have long been the rulers of the Gulf’s petro-monarchies, who see no distinction between their states’ interests and their families’.”
When New York Times reporters Ken Bensinger and David Fahrenthold published an article about Trump disclosing the donors who funded his transition to his second term a full year after promising to do so, they noted that the 46 individuals on the released list included billionaires and others who were later appointed to office. White House spokesperson Danielle Alvarez said: “President Trump greatly appreciates his supporters and donors; however, unlike politicians of the past, he is not bought by anyone and does what’s in the best interest of the country. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”
As wealth and power flow through the executive branch, Trump is overriding the rule of law that is designed to protect the rest of us from self-dealing by unscrupulous individuals. On Wednesday he commuted the sentence of private equity executive David Gentile, convicted in August 2024 of defrauding 10,000 investors in a $1.6 billion scheme that included securities and wire fraud. According to Kenneth P. Vogel of the New York Times, prosecutors said the victims were small business owners, teachers, nurses, farmers, and veterans: “hardworking, everyday people.” “I lost my whole life savings,” one victim wrote about his losses. “I am living from check to check.”
A judge sentenced Gentile to seven years in prison. He reported to authorities on November 14, was incarcerated, and was released less than two weeks later after Trump commuted his sentence.
There is a growing sense that an elite group of wealthy people is running the world without accountability to the law, and that the Trump administration is protecting and even advancing the people in that group. That sense is key to popular anger at the administration’s refusal to release the FBI files about its investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The documents from the Epstein estate released by the House Oversight Committee on November 12 showed a chummy friendship between Epstein and political, academic, and economic leaders eager to retain access to Epstein’s money, information, and connections even after he pleaded guilty to procuring a minor for prostitution.
MAGA voters backed Trump in the belief that he would hold such people to account, but it is now clear he is protecting them instead. Indeed, as Mona Charon of The Bulwark noted today, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon, whom Charon describes as “Trump’s consigliere, strategist, propagandist, and former senior counselor at the White House,” was on such friendly terms with Epstein that it was to him Epstein turned to scrub his public image after his initial guilty plea.
The realization that Trump is bolstering and protecting an entitled elite rather than defending everyday Americans victimized by them has dovetailed with this administration’s undermining of the economy, firing of civil servants, attacks on public health, and destruction of the nation’s social safety net to create angry references to “the Epstein class.”
Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) explained to NPR’s Scott Detrow earlier this month: “[T]he Epstein class is a group of people with extreme wealth who have donated to politicians and been part of a system where they think the rules don’t apply to them, and they have created a system that has shafted a lot of forgotten Americans. That’s why Donald Trump ran and was central to his campaign. And many people, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and others, believe he’s become part of the swamp that he said he would drain. He’s forgotten the forgotten Americans he said he would stand up for.”
Unlike the robber barons of the late nineteenth century, today’s power elite is, as Anand Giridharadas of The Ink wrote on November 23 in the New York Times, a borderless network of people connected not to nations or their fellow citizens but to each other. They exchange nonpublic information and capital to enable the members of that group to control events, disregarding the effects of their decisions on those outside their network.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggested Friday that the deep unpopularity of AI comes in part from the fact that it has become a symbol “of a society in which all the big decisions get made by the tech lords, for their own benefit and for a future society that doesn’t really seem to have a place for most of the rest of us.”
Popular anger at this “Epstein class” is sparking a political realignment. Democratic leaders have been hammering on how Republican policies benefit the wealthy at the same time that Trump’s tariffs send household costs upward and the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill of July—the one Republicans call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—slashes the social safety net and drives up the cost of health care premiums. The extraordinary demand for energy caused by the massive data centers AI requires has sent energy costs skyrocketing.
In November, voters turned away from the Republicans and toward the Democrats, expressing concerns about the economy and “affordability.” Chris Stein of The Guardian explained today how 33-year-old John McAuliff flipped a Republican seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in those elections. McAuliff attracted Republican voters by going door to door, talking with voters about data centers and the infrastructure they require and noting voters’ own rising electricity costs.
McAuliff told Stein that the rising prices are “essentially an artificial tax on everyday Virginians to benefit Amazon, Google, some of the companies with the biggest market [capitalizations] in human history. Which is not to say they don’t provide benefits to those communities, but we need to do a much, much better job of extracting those benefits, because the companies can afford them.”
Voters’ anger at the administration’s support for the Epstein class is now so palpable it has inspired some MAGA leaders to try to cast themselves as populist leaders standing against the wealthy who control the government, a stand that puts them at odds with the White House. “I’ve always represented the common American man and woman as a member of the House of Representatives which is why I’ve always been despised in Washington DC and never fit in,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) began her resignation letter.
In 1932, in a similar time of political realignment, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt attracted voters across the political spectrum when he promised “a new deal for the American people,” with “more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth.” “Let us…constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage,” he told the delegates to the Democratic National Convention when he accepted its nomination for president. “This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
Putin’s Palace: History of the Largest Bribe in the World
— latest, January 2021 movie released by Alexey Navalny after his return and immediate arrest in Moscow after the life-saving treatment in Germany for poisoning by Russian FSB (frmr. KGB) with the Novichok agent, a Russian high grade chemical weapon of mass distraction.
Дворец Путина: История самой большой взятки в мире — фильм Алексея Навального, выпущенный в январе 2021 г., после моментального ареста в Москве по возвращению из Германии после жизнеспасительного лечения от отравления ФСБ (бывшей КГБ) агентом Новичок новой версии, Российским химическим оружием массового уничтожения.
https://youtu.be/ipAnwilMncI
“He’s taking money from others and putting it in his pocket,” said Karl Sandstrom, a Democrat who served as a commissioner of the Federal Election Commission from 1998 to 2002.
Back in 2016, Trump claimed, “I’m self-funding my own campaign. It’s my money.” This was, of course, not exactly the truth.
For his 2020 campaign--which officially commenced on the very same day he was inaugurated in January of 2017--Trump has spent exactly $0.00 of his own money. But his donors can rest assured that their money is being well spent:
“Since January 20, 2017, the day Trump officially declared his intent to run for reelection, his campaign has put $1.9 million of donor money into the president’s private business.”
The Trump Foundation’s lawyer asked for trial not begin so close to the midterm election. The judge laughed.
— Citizens for Ethics @CREWcrew June 30, 2018
The trial should end on July 9, the same day Trump wants to pick a new Supreme Court Justice. #LockThemUp
We are suing the Donald J. Trump Foundation and its directors @realDonaldTrump, Donald J. Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump for extensive and persistent violations of state and federal law.
— NY AG Underwood @NewYorkStateAG - June 14, 2018
2018 Midterms #VoteThemOut
The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, et al.
Trump stipulated in a court of law that the following facts are all true:
Fake Charitable Foundation
“Directors and officers of a not-for-profit corporation are required to act in good faith and with that degree of diligence, care and skill that an ordinarily prudent person in their position would exercise under similar circumstances. ... directors and officers of a not-for-profit corporation [must] act with undivided loyalty toward the corporation, and ... directors must meet at least annually for a report of the corporation’s assets and liabilities, revenue, and disbursements...”
“The [Trump] Foundation’s Board of Directors did not meet from 1999 through November 2018, and did not provide oversight, set policy or approve the direction, operations or acts of the Foundation; did not promulgate written criteria for the consideration, approval, or monitoring of grants, or protocols for assuring compliance with the organization’s governing documents and charitable mission; and did not adopt a conflict-of-interest policy after July 2014, when such policy was required.”
“The Foundation acknowledged that it had not followed certain important corporate governance procedures by, among other things: (i) not holding regular meetings of its board of directors; (ii) not having written policies for the consideration or approval of grants; (iii) not having a written policy regarding conflicts of interest; (iv) not having a written investment policy, and (v) not having a written whistleblower policy.”
Trump Foundation Illegally Influences 2016 Election
“[A] private foundation ‘shall not make any taxable expenditure which would result in the liability of the [private foundation] for any tax imposed on such taxable expenditures’ ... [The Internal Revenue Code] imposes an excise tax on any amount paid to influence the outcome of a specific election, and ... a New York private foundation must include provisions in its certificate of incorporation expressly prohibiting the conduct...”
“On January 26, 2016, Mr. Trump, then a candidate in the primary elections for the Republican party nomination for president of the United States, announced that he would conduct the Iowa Fundraiser on January 28, 2016, in lieu of participating in a televised debate featuring other Republican presidential candidates. The Iowa Fundraiser was presented as the ‘Donald J. Trump Special Event for Veterans.’ The website for the Iowa Fundraiser, DonaldTrumpForVets.com, was developed by Campaign personnel and, with the agreement of the Foundation, featured the name of the Foundation at the top of the home page and informed visitors that ‘the Donald J. Trump Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.’”
“The Campaign planned, organized, and paid for the Iowa Fundraiser, with administrative assistance from the Foundation, and the Campaign directed the timing, amounts, and recipients of the Foundation’s grants to charitable organizations supporting military veterans. ... At Campaign events ... Mr. Trump personally displayed presentation copies of Foundation checks to Iowa veterans’ groups.On May 31, 2016, at a Campaign press conference, Mr. Trump announced the grants the Foundation made to veterans’ groups with the proceeds of the Iowa Fundraiser and, on or about the same day, the Campaign posted on its website a chart identifying the grant recipients.”
Self-Dealing and Conflicts of Interest (a.k.a. Trump Spends Trump Foundation’s Money)
The court reinstated a lawsuit challenging Trump's violation of the Constitution’s bar against receiving improper payments.
Trump has been vigorously fighting the multiple lawsuits accusing him of profiting off the presidency in violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clauses, but his track record has been somewhat spotty. Federal courts have held that “The President is subject to both Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution and that the term ’emolument’ in both clauses extends to any profit, gain or advantage.” One court, however, dismissed a lawsuit against Trump anyway, not because Trump wasn’t in violation of the Constitution, but because the judge felt that the plaintiffs--private businesses--did not have standing to sue him for it.
The federal Court of Appeals just reversed.
“The President’s establishments offer government patrons something that Plaintiffs cannot: the opportunity, by enriching the President, to obtain favorable governmental treatment from the President and the Executive branch. ... the marketplace is thus skewed in favor of Trump businesses because of his unlawful receipt of payments from government patrons.”
The court also rejected Trump’s renewed arguments that impeachment is the sole remedy for a president’s violation of the Constitution, and that no one can ever sue the president in a court for it:
“If the challenged conduct falls within what the Constitution describes as the receipt of ‘emoluments,’ the conduct is prohibited by the Constitution in the absence of congressional consent — and ... it is likely simply to continue to occur without a court ruling.”
The appellate court’s opinion full is here. Naturally, Trump is certain to demand that his loyal appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court intervene immediately, throw out the lawsuit again, and let him get back to raking in massive profits from the presidency.