Transcript: Eric Trump Drops Hint About Dad’s Coming 2025 Corruption
Michel: There are a few things that I focus on in particular: I’ve written about the world of kleptocracy, international money laundering. My first book, American Kleptocracy, looked at how the United States of America had developed into the global center of offshore finance, hidden finance, and illicit money laundering. That was certainly true up through the early 2020s, but under the Biden administration and thanks to congressional allies as well as some bipartisan support, we’ve seen a few primary areas of progress. One, we have a brand-new shell company registry, which means you can no longer form an anonymous shell company in the U.S. Two, we saw new regulations coming down the pipeline for things like real estate transparency and private equity transparency. With a new administration coming in, we’re going to see all that progress either stopped or rolled back entirely and it is going to set things back considerably right here in the U.S.
Sargent: And you’ve got Elon Musk in the picture, right? He’s overseeing this new DOGE thing that’s supposed to recommend enormous spending and regulatory cuts. He personally is known to hate very specific regulations that operate directly on his own companies, like SpaceX for instance. We’re told that it’ll only be advisory and so forth, but he has the ear of the president and he can tell the president in subtle terms, or not so subtle terms, If you do this for me, I will do X for you. He’s now in control of the sprawling disinformation machine that helped Trump win the election. So there is another locus of immense potential corruption, no?
Michel: No, it absolutely is. And I should say, another locus of potential foreign influence for all the dictatorships that Musk himself has financial interests in. His Tesla factories are in places like China, and he has reportedly had the conversations with Vladimir Putin over and, again, to the extent of preventing Musk from helping Ukrainians more. Those are the only ones that have been reported thus far.
