Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recently said President Donald Trump is "more mature and restrained than during his first term." I could not help but be surprised by this remark. The comment is incomprehensible when one considers his clumsy attempts to annex Greenland and Canada, his tariff hikes targeting most of the world, and the wars he abruptly launched without even a clear strategy.
Trump's first term was restrained because he was constrained. Even reluctantly, he accepted the views of the Republican establishment and national security elites. His early legislative agenda was shaped by then-House Speaker Paul Ryan and executed by Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. Chief economic adviser Gary Cohn repeatedly persuaded Trump to abandon the global tariff increases he had long wanted. U.S. military generals urged a cautious approach to Iran, support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and arms aid for Ukraine.
Trump appears to have learned a lesson during his first term. The lesson was not that expertise around the White House matters, but that experts must be loyal. Trump seems to prefer staff with thinner résumés, because such people owe everything they have to him. The process of governing has given way to impulse, procedure to instinct, and government to gut feeling.
In fact, the starkest difference between the first and second Trump administrations is wealth accumulation. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that the Justice Department will grant Trump, his family, and his businesses immunity from audits and investigations into all past tax-related misconduct. Trump disclosed that his stock portfolio executed roughly 3,700 trades in the first quarter alone, many of which followed suspiciously fortuitous patterns. He bought stocks just before government actions or statements that benefited those holdings. On January 6 of this year, Trump's portfolio purchased $500,000 worth of Nvidia stock. A week later, Nvidia received U.S. government approval to sell its H200 chips to China. Other examples include the United Arab Emirates' (UAE) $500 million investment in the Trump family's cryptocurrency venture, a $2 billion UAE investment using that company's stablecoin, the flood of new real estate deals at the Trump Organization, and a drone company that won a U.S. Defense Department contract after the Trump family invested in it. Reuters estimated that Trump Organization revenue surged from $51 million in the first half of 2024 to $864 million in the first half of 2025. This shows precisely that the presidency is being used as a money-making tool.
The deeper question to examine is why this is possible, and why there is so little resistance. Scholars who study corruption explain that "corruption in advanced democracies takes subtle and institutional forms such as campaign contributions, lobbying networks, and consulting contracts." But Trump has used the sophisticated systems of an advanced industrial nation in a far more blatant way.
The general public is concerned about this. But the "MAGA" base does not appear to be. In an extremely polarized country, corruption is no longer judged as a moral failing but is interpreted through the filter of partisanship. Anything done by our side becomes either fake news, clever politics, or justified revenge. This reveals a deep weakness in America. The Founding Fathers built a fine constitutional system, but it rested on assumptions they did not codify. That assumption was that public officials would maintain a shared commitment to upholding unwritten civic norms.
Legal safeguards are far weaker than most Americans realize. The president is largely exempt from the general federal conflict-of-interest laws. Many of the actions described above are at a level that could plunge even the highest-ranking cabinet secretary into serious legal jeopardy. But for the president, the only remedies are impeachment and conviction by a two-thirds majority of the Senate. In a partisan era like the present, that is tantamount to a miracle.
The mature response to this absurd farce is the restoration of the rule of law. After Trump's tenure, America's urgent task will be to codify unwritten norms into law, narrow the president's ethical immunity, and put in place legal mechanisms to ensure that the world's highest public office never again becomes a stepping stone for the family business.
