Perfume; or, A Bad Smell

Oxford Reference defines ‘corruption’ as ‘the abuse of entrusted power for private gain’. The word ‘corruption’ derives from Latin corrumpere ‘mar, bribe, destroy’. The standard example is a public official being bribed to look the other way, or to grant favours, in return for money or gifts. Public officials who accept bribes are thus corruptly profiting from their position. The point generalises: any person in a position of official accountability or trust who profits from that position, beyond the contracted emoluments (pay and other agreed benefits such as a company car or official residence), is corrupt.

Trump sells Trump-branded merchandise, using the White House for promotional videos, including gold-plated watches, sneakers, guitars with the MAGA logo on them, crypto currency, bibles, cellphones, digital trading cards with his picture on them dressed in superhero and other costumes, and perfumes, the latest of which has just been announced: ‘Victory 45-47’ (alluding to his being the 45^th and 47^th presidents) which he says ‘smells like masculinity’. Presumably that means it smells like the armpits of ICE agents engaged in a round-up.

This is corruption. He is using his public office to enrich himself. The New York Times reports that Trump merchandise brings in $7 million annually to Trump himself, according to his financial disclosures. This is likely to be a deliberately massive underestimate by Trump’s accountants, given how ‘modest’ they seem in the usual scale of criminal earnings, because they exclude direct bribes, facilitations, profits accrued by his family members on the back of their being his family members, &c. On becoming President, Trump’s various businesses (real estate, hotels, golf courses, etc.) were placed in a ‘Trust’ which nevertheless allows him to draw ‘net income or principal’ from the Trust at will – this despite a statement by his lawyers before the election that he would ‘completely isolate’ himself from his business activities, a requirement of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, designed to prevent corruption in the highest office of the land. One important feature of this is a prohibition against receiving money from foreign states and dignitaries. Yet those seeking to curry favour with Trump will (among other things) stay at his hotels. Saudi visitors, e.g., stay at Trump’s Washington hotel, the Trump International, and spend lavishly. As a sop to the promise that foreign money made by Trump’s hotels would be turned over to the US Treasury, the Trump Organization donated $151,470 to the Treasury (source: CNN); this is comical – one Saudi prince plus entourage will pay more than that for a week’s stay there.

In poor countries bribes and backhanders are essential for people on pitiful levels of pay. In business and politics everywhere there is doubtless a great deal of hidden corruption, often in the form of facilitations (‘tickets to the ball game’ kind of thing). But it is shaming to the United States of America to have a venal, grubby, mendacious convicted criminal as President, unashamedly flogging merchandise from the White House as if it were a street stall. Trump is without principles, that is well-known; but the ‘lie down with dogs, catch fleas’ aspect of his behaviour goes way beyond anything venal and grubby. For just one example: his own government designates Azerbaijan as a country with a history of corruption and human rights abuses, yet he is in league with the Mammadov family there who manage the Trump hotel in Bakku.

And let us say nothing about the Putin connection, suspicions about which run far and deep. Trump has always carried huge debts – CNN reports that he has five outstanding loans to pay off, each in the over-$50,000,000 bracket (his largest creditor is Deutsche Bank), and allegations that Russian money has kept some of his businesses afloat in the not-so-distant past have been often repeated. Being President not only keeps Trump out of prison for the crimes he has been convicted of, but is his opportunity to pay some of what he owes. He is hawking merchandise from the White House as flagrantly, openly, contemptibly, just as one would expect from so despicable a character; but what is worse, and should be totally unacceptable to the majority of the American people, is that he selling off the US itself – its reputation, its honour, its quality of life, its health, its democracy, its justice, its universities, its civil society, its people themselves. Cui bono? Who benefits? The far-right, billionaires, White Supremacists, racists, masculists, sexists: and not just in the US itself. These are the beneficiaries, the people made happy by Trumpism.

It is said that even a worm will turn. Americans have proved repeatedly in the past that they are not worms. We await with intense eagerness the great turning against this dreadful chapter in their history. ‘We’ is the world; we are all endangered by Trump. The ‘Great Generation’ of Americans came to the rescue in 1917 and 1941 when the world was in peril; that time has come again. But this time the trenches, the bombed cities, are in the US itself, as if the Werhmacht and the Banzai-shrieking armies were rampaging in America’s own city streets – indeed, almost literally, their Trump-unleashed analogues are doing so: ICE, and the swastika-waving demonstrators whom Trump included in his ‘there are good people on both sides’.

Trump is the end of America unless America puts an end to Trumpism. The smell that comes out of the White House is the smell of corruption and dishonour, of danger to civilised values; it’s the smell of rat poison; that’s ‘Victory 45-47’, not a perfume but a poison gas.

Another little tale of smells on which to end: the River Thames in London was for centuries an open sewer. The downriver areas of London where poor people lived suffered scourges of disease and death from cholera as a result. In the summer of 1858 the stench from the river backed up to the Houses of Parliament, forcing the politicians of the day at long last to agree to pay for a proper sewerage system – only because it was now inconveniencing them. Well: the stench from the White House has been assailing the nostrils of Americans and the world for quite some time now, and the socio-political version of cholera is epidemic there and everywhere else. It’s high (pun) time for Trumpism to go back down the sewer from which it emanates. Only the American people themselves can get that done; but how sweet it will smell to the whole world when they do it.