The felon in the White House

He came to Washington to drain the swamp, he said. Kill the gators. The crocs too. Destroy all those species that make a living preying on the tax dollars and the good faith of the American people.

Two years later, the swamp is bigger than ever. The gators and the crocs are still around. Donald Trump never drained the swamp. Instead, he brought into it a new, bigger, more aggressive class of predators straight from the age of the dinosaurs. At the top of this food chain, the apex predator, the scariest one of all, T-Rex, Donald Trump.

This president is, rather than slayer of predators, the predator-in-chief, a predator for all seasons, against all living things. He preys on women and boasts about it. He preys on U.S. minorities — blacks, Latinos, and all the people on the hurricane-ravaged island of Puerto Rico. He preys on immigrants. He preys on children by separating them from their parents and throwing them in cages. He preys on his own cabinet secretaries, humiliating them repeatedly, then firing them cowardly, not in a face-to-face meeting but via twitter. He preys on the handicapped, mocking their disability. He preys on gays and LGBTQ people, marginalizing them in the armed forces.

That Trump built a government modeled on his own reptilian self is no surprise. What is astonishing is the varieties of corruption that his picks for key posts have engaged in. Top officials who bill the government hundreds of thousands of dollars for private travel, for desks that cost more than a luxury car, for perks like unnecessary bodyguards and an office as impenetrable as any in the CIA—for a secretary of the environment. A National Security Adviser who, while in office worked for a foreign government (Turkey), offered the Russians a cozier relationship under Trump (despite or because of Russian election meddling) and lied to the FBI.  Then, this national security official of the highest rank had the audacity to claim he didn’t know lying to the FBI is a crime. Then there was a top aide to Trump who had to resign when a picture of the black eye he had given a former wife emerged and went viral. And this is the short list.

Trump brought to the nation’s capital a supporting cast that, during their often short tenures, committed virtually every cardinal sin. These are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. No one embodies these seven deadly sins better than Trump himself. Greed: A New York Times investigation documented the predatory way Trump built his fortune. Sloth: We have a president who doesn’t read, misses solemn ceremonies at U.S. military cemeteries because of rain or goes golfing instead. Pride, wrath, envy, gluttony? Of course. Lust is not even a question and it gets most of media attention. But greed, wrath, and pride are probably Trump’s strongest perversions.

And it never stops. The latest cabinet secretary to resign, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, left amid an ethical cloud more toxic than that in Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia and the city with the most polluted air in the world. And why does this city with very limited industrial development have this awful distinction? Coal. Trump’s favorite fuel, is what keeps the overwhelming majority of the homes in Ulan Bator tolerably warm during long, cold winters—at the expense the respiratory system and the lives of the people, especially children.

Zinke is not responsible for the bad air in Mongolia. But, the Secretary of the Interior, who the New York Times said “is the latest Trump official to exit an administration plagued by questions of ethical conflict,” did his best to move the United States in the direction of Mongolia. Shrinking the National Parks was only one of his tools in opening vast amount of public land for the extraction of fossil fuels.

Zinke, along with EPA secretary Scott Pruitt, who also had to depart over corruption, were the key players carrying out Trump’s war against the environment. As serious as are the ethical violation by Zinke, Pruitt, and others, they pale in comparison with the devastation their policies have caused. Even worse is the fact that there is always another scoundrel to take their place, a fossil fuel industry lobbyist or, as he did with his legal defense and national security teams, Trump can trot out prehistoric species like John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani.

But the neither the Zinke scandal nor the outrageous words and deeds of John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani captured the biggest headlines this past week. Instead, the top story was what Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen said under oath in court, that he was guilty of violating campaign finance law by paying off two women who claimed they had affairs with Donald Trump in order to silence them and influence the election in favor of Donald Trump.

Those are felonies and Trump, the arranger and beneficiary of the corrupt scheme, is even more culpable than Cohen, who received three years in prison. But the Justice Department has an internal rule against indicting sitting presidents. Congressional Republicans will do nothing against this president even if he murders that person he talked of killing on Fifth Avenue, and the Democrats in the House are scared of going after Trump because of the possibility of violence by hard-core Trump supporters and tepid support from the millions of wishy-washy American voters. More strategically, Democrats know that since the GOP controls the Senate and Republicans will never agree to convict Trump, by impeaching him they will pay the political cost while failing to throw the rascal out of office.

Thus we have a predator in the White House who is also, for all intents and purposes, a felon. And no one can or will do anything about that any time soon despite the unceasing, valiant effort of the incorruptible Bob Mueller.