Column By John Young
Of course, you’d want it secret. If you were hiding high-level bribery, you’d want to keep it secret.
If you were a president withholding names of favor-seeking givers to your pointless pet project, you’d want that.
If you were one of those benefactors who bought influence with your booty, same.
Fortunately, The Washington Post didn’t think it should be secret.
The Post revealed the names of bigwig donors for a White House ballroom that only one person on this planet thinks necessary. A Daily Beast headline calls it the “Suck-Up Ballroom.”
The Post called the heavily masked “gimme” campaign “extraordinary for its size and opacity.”
AI giant Nvidia, Apple, and the Adelson casino empire each gave $25 million. The fruits of 67 donors yielded a sum of $330 million.
One donor, international banker Julio Herrera Velutini, went to prison for bribery. Then, ahem, he bribed his way to a pardon with a $3.5 million donation to MAGA Inc.
Conspicuously missing from the list of donors, this won’t surprise you, are the names of the Suck-Up President or his vacuum-it-up children.
How corrupt are they? We cannot count the ways.
Oh, yeah. Big Daddy said he’d chip in bigly. Of course, he hasn’t. But why should he? Taxpayers will pick up the rest of the $600 million tab. True, Congress voted not to fund it. But what is Congress?
Let’s agree that even if taxpayers weren’t on the hook for this ridiculous scam, “national security interests,” the administration told the Supreme Court, this is wrong, wrong, wrong.
This is more of the same from the most corrupt president in U.S. history — and from a party that, to its lasting disgrace, couldn’t care less.
Every one of those donors expects something in return and, like Julio Velutini, will get it.
JD Vance told CBS News the other day that anyone “selling access to the White House” should “suffer consequences.” Um, yeah.
Access? Nvidia is buying hands-off policies on AI. So, too, with crypto lizards Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss – in for $5 million for the ballroom no one asked for.
A new Fox poll finds that corruption in government — even more than gas and groceries — is the No. 1 issue bothering voters: 85 percent “extremely concerned.”
That concern seems to be working for Texas Democrat James Talarico, who’s giving Republicans nightmares about losing a Senate seat they assume is theirs forever.
Talarico has mounted a steady, convincing assault on Republican Ken Paxton’s crookedness.
Somehow, Paxton, a MAGA striver par excellence who makes $150,000 a year as Texas attorney general, has amassed $13 million in office. Maybe from selling his baseball card collection?
As he denies prolific self-dealing, The New York Times finds video of Paxton partying in 2024 in Dubai with federal fugitives Anosh Ahmed and Sameer Suhail. These simple sods are wanted on charges of embezzling millions from a nonprofit hospital in Chicago.
What’s wrong with Paxton palling around with them? Well, you tell me. Aside from their fugitive status, he benefited from their friendship with a $190,000 campaign donation.
In his barn-burning re-election run, Democratic Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, who helps crowds visualize heinous corruption with the term “Epstein Class,” connects high-level self-dealing to the economy’s warpedness and the despair of average families.
“You aren’t the problem, and neither are your fellow Americans,” he says on the stump. “Corruption is why things don’t work for the American people.”
No wonder Republicans are fox-trotting around the issue.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email him at jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author.
