Our consolidated corporate press doesn’t really make this clear, surprisingly, but the United States is too corrupt to function. There’s simply no shortage of evidence across every arena that matters. Trump’s corruption is utterly historic, yet it’s just endlessly normalized. To the point where most press outlets don’t really even mention Trump’s corruption clearly when discussing policy moves.
But it exists all the same.
Recently, the administration issued yet another executive order; this one purportedly aimed at “expanding U.S. commercial space transportation.” How? Mostly by urging the U.S. government agencies to market U.S. commercial space options. There are also some vague calls for new export controls; as well as a push to make it easier for SpaceX to obtain land.
The goal purports to be to orient the U.S. to support more than 1,000 launches and reentries annually by 2030. But a lot of the order, as is typical for Trump EO’s, just a bunch of words jumbled together to make it sound useful and official:
“The Memorandum directs the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Commerce to ensure U.S. space transportation market access to promote and enable U.S. space transportation capabilities and standards.”
Primarily the order is about easing regulatory oversight and putting the government at the direct beck and call of top donors like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
The fun part: financial disclosure statements indicate that the president purchased $5 million in SpaceX debt two days before he signed his policy attempting to expand U.S. commercial space transportation (that same day, Trump acquired $25 million in Meta shares).
But worry not! White House spokesperson Davis Ingle insisted to the press that everything was completely on the up and up, and the president has no insight into or control over the financial decisions of “independent managers”:
“Neither President Trump nor any member of his family has any ability to direct, influence, or provide input regarding how the portfolio is invested or when investments are bought or sold,” Ingle continued. “All investment decisions are made entirely by independent managers. There are no conflicts of interest.”
In a functional country, the president divests individual stocks or relies on blind trusts or diversified funds to avoid potential conflicts of interests. The Trump administration, by contrast, is just one largely-unchecked financial conflict of interest.
Last week Trump awarded Musk — who has spent $366 million to try and ensure Republicans maintain control during the midterms — the National Medal of Science at the White House’s “Science: A New Golden Age” summit.
The corruption is unsubtle, but the vast majority of U.S. corporate “tech and business journalism” fails to clearly mention that Musk effectively purchased an authoritarian government, had that government butcher all meaningful regulatory inquiries into his multiple legal, environmental, and labor violations, and generally made billions off of regulatory capture under the cover of space innovation.
It’s just somehow not really deemed useful context for the reader.
