President Trump committed yet another grotesque violation of the Constitution on his recent trip to Scotland, when he used nearly $70,000 in public money to pay for rooms at a hotel in Scotland he owns directly, The Scotsman reports.
This kind of bald corruption is chewing at the roots of the United States as a functioning nation. If constitutional democracy is to survive here, there must be a reckoning with this scandal — and that means prosecutions and prison sentences.
It is simply unquestionable that Trump’s behavior is a violation of constitutional stipulations about how the president is to be compensated. Here’s what it says:
The president shall, at stated times, receive for his services, a compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that period any other emolument from the United States, or any of them. [The Constitution of the United States]
I have written before about how “originalism” is a ridiculous and impossible doctrine, particularly when it comes to thorny issues of rights and due process. But some things are just bleeding obvious, like how the 13th Amendment clearly abolishes chattel slavery.
This certainly was not some kind of simple travel reimbursement. When the president travels on official business, the government pays for his expenses according to ethics rules established to conform to the Constitution and U.S. law — for obvious reasons, you can’t just stay at or buy whatever you want on the government nickel. But more importantly, as a Congressional Research Service report details, “when a trip is for political or unofficial purposes, those involved must pay for their own food and lodging and other related expenses,” as well as reimburse the government for the equivalent of a commercial airline fare. Trump played two rounds of golf at his resort, and The Scotsman reported that Trump’s son Eric — who is not even a government employee — was put up in the most expensive room in the place, a two-bedroom “lighthouse suite” that runs £7,000 per night (or about $9,100). What the government was charged for exactly isn’t yet available, but Eric Trump’s claim that the hotel was the cheapest option is utterly preposterous.
An emolument is just a payment of some kind. Trump very obviously used his presidential power to pay himself tens of thousands of dollars, and give a family member a handsome goodie to boot.
Whether one takes the clear view of the constitutional drafters, or closely examines precedent, or reads the text according to modern usage, or interprets it in light of what is sensible and necessary for a modern state, all possible schools of interpretation point in the same direction: It is absolutely unacceptable for the head of state to use government power to directly enrich himself. It is practically the dictionary definition of abuse of power.
Indeed, this is considerably worse than the sordid behavior of some gangster-riddled post-Communist Eastern European state. Romania, for instance, recently decriminalized abuses of office where the financial damage is less than $48,000. But as Matt Steinglass points out, a former Romanian deputy prime minister and current head of the largest party was recently convicted of corruption and sentenced to three and a half years in prison for merely using his authority to keep two party members employed at a public agency. That is maybe 0.1 percent of what Trump is doing here — and this is not remotely the first time he’s done this kind of thing. Indeed, it’s not even the first time he’s spent public money on this individual hotel, not to mention how nearly every single one of his top officials also has had both hands in the public till.
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There must be a reckoning
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