President Donald Trump rejects the very idea of white collar crime, says The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos.
Osnos told The Daily Beast Podcast that Trump’s decision to dissolve Task Force KleptoCapture, a 2022 Biden-era anti-corruption program meant to seize the assets of Russian oligarchs, was because he was “offended by it on multiple levels.”
“Look, Trump is basically eliminating the category of white collar crime as an idea. He finds that offensive,” Osnos told host Joanna Coles. “I think having been through it himself, it brings a lot up for him.”
“And so you see him pardoning people who have been convicted or pleaded guilty to white collar crimes over and over again. And this is in a way the geopolitical dimension of that,” he added.
The Biden administration announced the task force one week after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. “To those bolstering the Russian regime through corruption and sanctions evasion: We will deprive you of safe haven and hold you accountable,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco said in a press release.
“Oligarchs be warned: We will use every tool to freeze and seize your criminal proceeds,” she added.
One of Trump’s first moves as president was to dismantle the task force completely, with Attorney General Pam Bondi announcing in a memo in February that “resources currently devoted to those efforts shall be committed to the total elimination of Cartels” and Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCO).
Osnos explained that, in short, Trump was telling Russian oligarchs who have had their yachts seized as a result of the task force that they’re “free to go” and “sorry for the misunderstanding.”
“In a way, I think he’s also saying that he doesn’t believe that there is such a thing as an expression of illegitimate acquisition of wealth. He’s rejecting the premise of oligarchy,” Osnos said.
Coles and Osnos also discussed how Trump was able to pull something off that many ultra-wealthy figures hope to someday achieve: becoming president.
“I mean, almost every Silicon Valley entrepreneur that I’ve come across harbors presidential ambitions, and some of them are never going to get there because socially, they just can’t even connect with an audience in certainly the way that Donald Trump can,” Coles noted.
“But clearly for people like that who are ambitious, who’ve had success, it’s still something that they want to reach out for,” she added. “It’s the brass ring.”
Osnos agreed, explaining that the Trump era has made these billionaires and entrepreneurs believe that if a “buffoonish piece of the New York media furniture” can go on to be the president of the United States, then “surely if he can do it, then I would be able to do a much better job.”
“That has been a running commentary for much of the last decade,” Osnos said.
“Yet I do think it under-appreciates something, which is that … he has a particularly idiosyncratic social, political genius,” he remarked. “I think a lot of us find it to be a terrible cancer upon the land, but it is a kind of genius.”
Osnos said that Trump has the unique ability to take his “extraordinary advantages” of being born into a real estate fortune and still manage to position himself as a staunch critic of the elite, becoming an “aspirational figure for hardworking people around the country.”
“I think [people are] appalled by abuses of power, by the disproportionate ways in which the powerful are galloping ahead,” he said. “But I think in him, his crudeness is also his credibility.”
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