Grift and Graft: A White House Simply for Sale

Jeff Robbins on Mar 10, 2026

In the end, it wasn't the disturbingly Gestapo-like tactics of her U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, smashing cars, pulling innocents off the streets and executing two American citizens, that did Kristi Noem in. It wasn't the sneering contempt of court orders or the incessant lying that ended President Donald Trump's support for the Secretary of Homeland Security before she was abruptly consigned to the new position of "Special Envoy for the Shield of Americas," whatever the heck that is.

It wasn't the amusingly self-aggrandizing $230 million ad campaign, nominally to exhort those here illegally to self-deport but obviously All About Kristi, a monumental waste of American taxpayers' dollars. It wasn't the fact that Donald Trump's very own Evita funneled the ad contract to the guy who'd helped her win her South Dakota gubernatorial race, just coincidentally married to a top Noem aide. And it wasn't even Noem's false denials to Congress that her apparently more-than-just-special government employee, Corey Lewandowski, was intimately involved in the massive sweetheart deal at taxpayers' expense.

What Trump found unacceptable was that Noem testified that he was aware of the ad campaign, which seems more than highly likely, since everyone in America knew about it. Trump ally Sen. John Kennedy dutifully told the press that Trump was "mad as a hornet" that Noem had said he knew about the ad campaign, because Trump wanted America to know that he was in the dark. Like the on-the-take "Casablanca" police chief who was shocked, shocked to hear that gambling was going on in the casino, Trump, who maintains with a straight face that he is all about "draining the swamp," wanted to pretend that this was the first he'd heard about it.

He needn't have bothered. Trump's second term has been an extravaganza of self-enrichment and conflicts of interest, degrading the presidency and cheating Americans out of honest government. Noem could be forgiven for believing that the ad campaign grift was chicken feed next to Trump's -- because it was.

If Trump's assault on American democracy -- the threats to undermine free elections, the phony charges against political opponents, the use of federal agencies to threaten or bludgeon critics -- seems abstract to some Americans, the use of the presidency to line the president's pockets shouldn't.

Trump's solicitation of hundreds of millions of dollars in investments in his cryptocurrency ventures and his marketing of his "meme coins" have steered gargantuan sums of money into his and his family's bank accounts. The billions of dollars of Trump family real estate projects worldwide, secured by capitalizing on Trump's office, are going to make the Trump family as rich as Croesus. The favor-seekers who have paid tens of millions of dollars in tribute to Trump to obtain favorable regulatory treatment -- Amazon, Meta and Paramount are at the front of a long line -- have done so in plain sight.

Here's an example that has garnered relatively little attention. Trump has demanded that the Justice Department he controls pay him over $200 million in taxpayers' dollars to "compensate" him for the "damage" he claims he incurred due to the federal investigations into evidence that he committed a raft of federal crimes against the people of the United States.

That's right. Two separate federal grand juries indicted Trump for defrauding our country, obstructing justice, trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election and committing several dozen violations of the Espionage Act, finding probable cause to conclude that he had done all of these things. The reason the indictments were dropped was that Trump was elected president. The Justice Department that reports to Donald Trump was most assuredly not going to put Donald Trump on trial.

Give it to Trump: He knows a money-making opportunity when he sees one. And, boy, does he see them. Unless the Attorney General who does what he tells her tells Trump "No," we're going to hand over a whole lot of our money to him, to reward him for having evaded prosecution for violating our criminal laws.

Kristi Noem must be wondering what she did wrong.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment and a longtime columnist, he writes on politics, national security, human rights and the Middle East.