Civic Witness Series - Questions from the Attic
What patterns are quietly keeping you up at night right now?
Civic Witness Series: Questions from the Attic, is founded on a simple premise: the people living through democratic erosion have questions the ‘experts’ aren’t addressing; it is inspired by and in honor of Adia in the Attic. Those questions matter because they provide an opportunity for sharing and documenting what democratic erosion feels like to people living through it. We don’t pretend to have “The Answer” to these questions, but we hope to stimulate the conversation her questions have prompted.
It’s Not Just the Vicuña Coat Anymore
What patterns are quietly keeping you up at night right now? For me, it’s corruption.
In 1958, I was a high-school student in Peoria, Illinois, a small city in America’s heartland. That was the year President Dwight Eisenhower’s top aide, Sherman Adams, was caught accepting a full-length vicuna coat, along with other expensive gifts, from a dodgy industrialist named Bernard Goldfine, whose business practices and financial affairs were under mounting scrutiny from Congress and federal regulators.
There was a national outcry. Adams resigned, disgraced. Nobody had to tell us in Peoria that accepting vicuña coats from those who wanted government favors was wrong. We just knew it.
By the 1960s and-1970s, I was running congressional investigations for Republicans and Democrats each. I watched presidents of both parties do real damage --- Lyndon Johnson lying repeatedly about Vietnam, Richard Nixon lying and then breaking the law outright. I saw Democrats taking the lead in uncovering Johnson’s Vietnam misdeeds, and Republicans I worked for --- Sen. Charles Percy, Rep. Pete McCloskey – were forthright about standing up to Nixon’s abuses.
Fast-forward to today.
The personal gifts to purchase favor with the President are legion. Here are but a few:
On June 28, a group representing Antwerp’s diamond industry presented the U.S. ambassador to Belgium with a stunning watch-sized gold ring intended for President Donald Trump. It was encrusted with “321 diamonds, 56 sapphires, 13 emeralds and six rubies.” Dozens of the diamonds spelled out “two giant letter T’s next to the Stars and Stripes.” Dozens more framed “the numbers 45 and 47 in the shape of Superman’s logo.”
The diamond dealers were angling for relief from Trump’s punitive 10% tariffs. A few weeks later, the president slashed them to zero.
A group of Swiss billionaires gave Trump a gold Rolex desk clock and a $130,000 engraved gold bar “weeks before Trump decided to slash 39% tariffs on Swiss imports” to 15%, the Guardian reported late last year.
All the cringeworthy gifts were trivial compared to the super-luxurious Boeing 747 provided in response to Trump’s request, valued upwards of $400 million and now pressed into service as Air Force One, courtesy of the Qatari royal family.
The Oval Office as a Money-Making Machine
Trump’s second term in the White House has certainly kept him busy --- making money.
According to his 927-page 2025 financial disclosure form, the president took in up to $2.2 billion last year --- roughly $1.4 billion from crypto-currency ventures, while reporting more than 21,000 securities transactions and small change from Trump Watches and God Bless the USA Bibles.
Another new venture, the president’s Trump Media & Technology Group, has been charging bankers, hedge-fund and high-frequency traders $60,000 to $100,000 a month for a product called Truth API, which it markets as “the fastest access to Truth Social’s most influential” accounts --- foremost among them the president’s announcements --- delivered “in milliseconds.”
As those government announcements --- on new tariffs, policies on Iran, etc. --- move markets, even advance milliseconds can mean big bucks for big-boy speculators. The Steady State has transmitted a criminal referral to the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, asking them to determine whether laws have actually been violated.
Objections Without Consequence
The president insists he has done nothing illegal --- and it is ludicrous to believe his political appointees in the Department of Justice will dare to investigate. And while congressional Democrats have called for public hearings that would inform the American public, Trump’s Republican allies in Congress have turned blind eyes.
As a former congressional aide who probed White House lies during Vietnam and Watergate a half-century ago, this is what keeps me up at night. If Congress continues to abdicate its constitutional obligations for oversight of the executive branch, corruption will spread, risking a Pay-to-Play system at every level.
America, to be sure, has always been marked with a resilience of spirit. We’ve overcome difficult moral times before. We will soon find out where moral strength now stands in America’s heartland. On Nov. 3, will voters throw the rascals out?