Washington – In addition to hitting the Americans with billions of dollars of new taxes and spitting the stock market, the arbitrary pricing regime of Donald Trump offers another opportunity for a president who has already shown his desire to use his office for personal purposes, fear criticism.
The new prices, which began to take effect on Saturday, already have exemptions for specific industries, establishing the previous one for companies or even whole countries to win races for themselves.
And, government surveillance dogs and other experts are concerned, Trump having long demonstrated a desire to take official measures in exchange for a private or political advantage, a vast new field of potential corruption has opened its doors.
“There are concerns about additional registry and cronyism,” said Melinda St. Louis, Director of World Trade at Public Citizen.
Rajeev Goel, Economist of Illinois State University, co-wrote an article in 2023 noting that multilateral trade agreements help fight “public sector corruption” by creating transparent and level playgrounds to buy and sell goods through borders.
“Current prices make the opposite of what we studied earlier,” he said.
“If you define corruption as facing the Trump administration for special exemptions, this is certain on a large scale, and may well be the intention of tariff taxation itself,” said Bill Megginson, professor of finance at the University of Oklahoma, and co-author of a 2025 tariffs which studied Trump’s political district.
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Trump’s White House, responding to HuffPost requests as to whether it would be ready to arrangements for Quid-Pro-Quo which benefit him in exchange for exemptions from new prices, said he was only interested in helping the country.
“The only people President Trump is in favor of the favor of the Americans who have faced the devastating consequences of the backgrounds,” America “which led to millions of job losses, from vulnerabilities to our national security and a weakening of our domination,” said the White House spokesman Harrison Fields.
Trump, however, has established over the years a story of such transactional behavior and mixes his official functions with his personal financial interests – actions that are the very definition of corruption. Thursday evening, for example, Trump traveled to taxpayers’ expenses to Miami to attend a closed -door dinner for the golf tour supported by Saoudie – a commercial entity he benefits.
Not long ago, Trump called cryptocurrencies “a scam”, but changed his position last summer after the chiefs of industry began to make massive donations to help him make the election. As President, Trump creates a “strategic” bitcoin reserve, giving the American government printer to an “asset” that has no intrinsic value. He also forgiven the creator of a website designed for the sale of drugs and other smuggles after promise of crypto lovers, he would vote for him.
In his first mandate, Trump pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to open an investigation into his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, using military aid approved by Congress as a lever effect. If a federal official who had not done presidential immunity had done the same thing, he would have been accused of extortion, said former prosecutors.
And unlike the previous presidents who wanted to separate from their private activities and their financial assets during their mandate, Trump did the opposite. During his first mandate, his party and his officials of his administration made her hotel not a few blocks from the White House houses a gathering place for meetings with foreign and domestic interest groups. The foreign delegations reserved rooms and, sometimes, even large blocks of rooms during their stays.
At one point, Trump even tried to hold the G7 summit of the leaders of the largest democratic economies in the world in Doral, his golf station troubled near Miami airport.
Trump began his second mandate with an even more blatant use of his office for his personal gain by selling a crypto “piece”, a vehicle that those looking for his favor could use to enrich it without public trace.
Then, in office, among its first acts, there was to dismiss all the independent general inspectors of executive branch agencies and to order the Ministry of Justice to suspend the application of the law on foreign corruption practices, which made it illegal for the Americans to bring civil servants abroad.
“It will mean much more business for America,” said Trump.
Melinda St. Louis de Citizen said that if Trump is starting to make exclusions to prices according to well -connected business calls, she will not be different from what he did in the first mandate.
In fact, this is the subject of the Megginson newspaper and its co-authors published earlier this year entitled “the political economy of price exemptions”. He found that companies requesting derogations from prices in the first term of Trump were twice as likely to succeed if their CEOs had given the Republicans if they had donated to the Democrats.
“The big point to remember for us is that American institutions are not robust on an administration which chooses to impose completely complex and confused prices, then decide to extract advantages in exchange for exemptions,” said Veljko Fotak, finance professor at the University of Buffalo and Co-Autor of paper.
Norm Eisen, the best Barack Obama’s White House ethics lawyer, has agreed that Trump’s pricing program is an easy vehicle for corruption. “By affirming these imperial whims, Trump opens to undoubtedly influence the attempts of foreign countries to try to reverse the prices,” said Eisen. “It can be as simple as buying your digital coin or as complicated as providing patronage or favors for its foreign or domestic properties. This is a serious risk of corruption in addition to many others that have struck. ”
A public citizen report last month stressed that the Russian oligarch sanctioned Oleg Deripaska had won an exemption from Trump’s aluminum rates shortly after Trump met the friend of Deripaska, the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, in private. This renunciation was reversed after a public outcry.
Indeed, even a report by the Inspector General of the Ministry of Commerce in 2019 found evidence of an “unofficial call process” for derogations and undocumented discussions between petitioners and civil servants. “We believe that these questions give the perception that the process of examining the request for exclusion of article 232 is neither transparent nor objective,” said the report.
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St. Louis said the cutting process in the new prices already has signs of these same problems, highlighting the exemption from the fossil fuel industry – that Trump would have demanded $ 1 billion for his re -election last year.
She said the arbitrary prices based on the balance of trade as well as the corruption potential made her a question of the alleged objective of administration to help American workers. “Whether or not it helps workers seem to be a kind of idiot, in our opinion,” she said.
As for the oil and gas industry, they have already expressed their appreciation. “We welcome President Trump’s decision to exclude oil and natural gas from new prices,” the American Petroleum Institute said in a statement.
