The Most Corrupt Administration In History
FRED WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | July 16, 2020
“President Trump rode into office on a big lie that he was going to drain the Washington swamp. If Vice President Biden sends him home in November, that will be the first and most important act to actually start draining the swamp in Washington.”
President Trump will go down in history with at least two first-place finishes as President: the worst President in the history of the country and the head of most corrupt Administration in our history.
The latter is a special achievement for a President who in the 2016 campaign never stopped claiming, falsely of course, that he was going to drain the swamp in Washington. This Trump mantra in 2016 also might contribute to a third first for the President: the biggest conman/liar in the history of the presidency. There will no doubt be many other aberrational firsts for Trump.
Examples of corrupt practices in the Trump Administration occur on an almost weekly basis.
To give just one, in a report released yesterday, the Inspector General for HHS found that Seema Verma, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), had improperly channeled contracts worth millions of dollars to GOP-associated communications consultants in violation of federal contracting rules. The IG found that “CMS improperly administered the contracts and created improper employer-employee relationships between CMS and the contractors,”
On many fronts, the Trump Administration has turned over key departments and agencies to representatives of the industries they are supposed to regulate.
The President has given these representatives carte blanche to do whatever the industries want. According to The New York Times, for example, there have been “nearly 70 environmental rules and regulations officially reversed, revoked, or otherwise rolled back under Mr. Trump. More than 30 additional rollbacks are still in progress.”
It will take years to reverse the extraordinary damage that Trump has done to our country.
And it needs to start by cleaning up Washington, repairing our democracy, and freeing our representatives from the current iron grip of influence-seeking political money.
H.R. 1, which passed the House last year, is historic anti-corruption, voting rights, and government ethics legislation that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said will be the first order of business in the House in 2021.
President Trump rode into office on a big lie that he was going to drain the Washington swamp. If Vice President Biden sends him home in November, that will be the first and most important act to actually start draining the swamp in Washington.
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