​U.S. President Trump now descends into New Depths of Corruption and Distortion.

It is plain to see that Donald Trump has steered the U.S. ship of state into new depths of corruption. He is also giving a distorted and false definition to the word genocide, while looking the other way as the Israeli government practices real genocide in Gaza.
 
This is a complicated ball of wax, so let us begin with the most blatant recent example of Trump’s erratic and dangerous foreign policy.
 
                                    Tale of Trump corruption starts with a jet plane.

Trump this week accepted a $400 million luxury 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar for use as Air Force One and later as a mainstay of Trump’s personal presidential library.

“Only a FOOL would not accept this gift on behalf of our country,” said Trump, claiming that the “free” gift will save the United States money that can instead be spent to “Make America Great Again.”

Trump added that the jet is being given to the United States Air Force/Department of Defense, “NOT TO ME! It is a gift from a Nation, Qatar, that we have successfully defended for many years.”

He claimed that other countries have far superior planes to the current Air Force One: “We’re the United States of America and I believe we should have the most impressive plane…I get nothing, I get to fly it like any other President would," he added, stating the Qatar-gifted jet will be "decommissioned" once the U.S.-ordered Air Force One plane is ready.

Trump’s planned acceptance of this gift has raised legal and ethical concerns from both Democrats and Republicans.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday that he would be placing a hold on Justice Department nominees awaiting Senate confirmation until the White House delivers a full accounting of the deal.

“This is not just naked corruption, it’s the kind of thing that even Putin would give a double take,” Schumer said on the Senate floor.
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Republicans such as Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas also voiced their concerns over the gift.

                         Trump defines the word ‘genocide’ for his own purposes.
 
It should be noted that on his first day in office, Trump suspended refugee admissions to the United States. Low and behold, after Trump uttered casual talk about “genocide” in South Africa, he claimed that the current South African government has done “terrible things, horrible things.”

​​The Trump Administration has now welcomed a large contingent of Afrikaners to the USA. All were handed small American flags, hardly comparable to the undocumented immigrants to the U.S. who were rounded up by US agents and put on planes in chains for their flight to prisons in Central America.

                                         Afrikaners have a soft landing in the USA.
 
In fact, white South Africans have fared very well under the current government.

While accounting for just 7 per cent of the population of sixty-four million, the descendants of members of the former race-based apartheid regime own half the nation’s farmland.

On Monday, the State Department announced it will welcome more Afrikaners in the coming months, “to protect victims of racial discrimination.” Critics of the welcome mat for the Afrikaners, suggest that the powerful hand of billionaire Elon Musk, a native of South Africa is behind the initiative.
 
                                                           No hunger in Gaza?

​Meanwhile, Trump and his administration have looked the other way on the actual genocide being practised by the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza. The Israeli Prime Minister continues to use “making war” as his best way to retain power and avoid corruption charges of is own.

The key Israeli government argument that there is “no hunger in Gaza” is very difficult to believe. The same goes for the claim of David Mencer, Israeli government’s spokesperson that there is food in Gaza, and that markets are open.

Great Britain’s Guardian newspaper reports the vast majority of the 2.3 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip cannot afford to buy what they need to survive, and if they could, stocks of food would be adequate for only a tiny number.

Mencer stressed that he was speaking on behalf of the prime minister, including the accusation that Hamas – which he describes as a “genocidal death cult” – uses civilians as human shields.

But the vast majority of the 2.3 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip cannot afford to buy what they need to survive, and if they could, stocks would be sufficient for a tiny number.
There is obvious evidence of a malnourished people – often children.

Almost 53,000 people have been killed since the Israeli offensive began. Sanitation systems, water supplies and health services are in ruins. Roads are choked with debris, and the Israeli military targets bulldozers essential for clean-up.

Israeli officials argue that “Hamas steals and sells aid to fund its military and other operations. Therefore, they say, the restriction of aid is necessary to defeat the militant Islamist organisation, which killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in its raid on Israel on 7 October 2023, and to secure the return the 57 hostages, of the 251 taken that day, who are still held in Gaza.

                       Trump using his crypto gambit to enrich himself and his family.

President Trump has dipped into the murky world of crypto currency to use this underregulated industry to enrich himself and his family members and court foreign influence in the United States.

Far be it for the Against the Flow blog to claim to understand fully this industry. But where there is smoke, there usually is fire.

One analyst in a position to know, Kyle Chayka writing in The New Yorker magazine, put it this way: Imagine that someone in a position of great political power creates a hundred billion raffle tickets and makes them available to the public for purchase. If you or your friends or family members were to buy the tickets, eventually you would receive a reward: a quantity of “magic beans” and eventually each magic bean would be exchangeable for one United States dollar.

This is a very rough portrait of the workings of a new cryptocurrency created by World Liberty Financial, a company affiliated with the Trump family, with President Donald Trump serving as its “Chief Crypto Advocate.” In January, Donald Trump and sons quietly assumed a controlling stake in World Liberty.

World Liberty deals in the fledgling industry of “decentralized finance,” in which cryptocurrency tools allow users to circumvent the traditional, regulated banking ecosystem for moving, holding, and lending money.

This scheme may well be a way of Trump and his family members to head off or change such very current measures such as tariffs, which Trump describes as a “beautiful word.” The World Liberty website has as a legal disclaimer: “World Liberty Financial does not consider the tokens it sells to be securities.”
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Three days before his Inauguration, Trump launched a so-called meme coin, cryptocurrencies based on an online profile that becomes a de-facto pyramid scheme, as early buyers sell off to later ones at higher prices. The New Yorker article suggests that this scheme amounts to an entire Trump-sponsored underground economy.
 
Whether it is accepting the gift of a jumbo jet, the spurious definition genocide of descendants of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the Trump administration “looking the other way” on actual genocide in Gaza, or the pyramid bitcoin schemes of Trump and members of his family, looking behind the curtain of the Trump administration is a frightening lesson for Americans and for citizens of the world.