No Mercy / No Malice: Criminal

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Speaker B: Support for the show comes from Whatnot. If you love what you're selling, you need a way to convey that enthusiasm to your customers. Live shopping lets you do exactly that. Whatnot is the largest dedicated live shopping platform. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury, fashion, even cookies, sellers are building real, thriving businesses anyone can sell. Whether your business is big, small, or yet to exist, people selling on whatnot sell 10 times more than other major marketplaces. That's because you're not just listing products, you're building real connections with buyers. Search Whatnot Whatnot in the App Store, download, and you can start selling right away. I'm, um, Scott Galloway, and this is no mercy, no malice. President Trump is a criminal. Criminal as read by George Hahn.

Speaker C: Every American entrepreneur takes the same risk I've taken nine times. They build something. Worst case, it fails. In other countries, the worst case might be criminal prosecution or violence to seize the business. The gap in outcomes represents America's advantage in Donald Trump's second term. America's advantage shrinks with each corrupt act. A jet gifted by Qatar, refurbished at government expense that Trump considers a parting gift for his presidential library. Dozens of vanity projects at a cost of $1.8 billion to the taxpayers, including a golden ballroom where the East Wing once stood and the Arc de Trump, a monument to himself. A slush fund for January 6th. Rioters dead for now, but likely to return. An endless Oval office parade of CEOs bearing gifts, including one who literally brought a gold bar. I believe in America is the opening line of the Godfather. The speaker is an undertaker named Bonasera. After the courts fail to punish two boys who assaulted his daughter. Bonasera turns to Don Corleone, who delivers justice in exchange for a favor. It's a chilling scene that captures the moment a man stops believing in the rule of law and starts believing in gangsterism. When nations make the same choice, their economies stagnate, according to economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize with Simon Johnson. In their 2012 book why Nations Fail, Acemoglu and Robinson wrote, countries differ in their economic success because of their different institutions, the rules influencing how the economy works, and the incentives that motivate people. Inclusive systems, they argue, protect property, enforce contracts and allow everyone to compete. Extractive systems funnel wealth to the politically powerful. The former produces a middle class Silicon Valley and the world's deepest capital markets. The latter produces mega yachts, capital flight and failed states. In a 1995 study of 67 countries, IMF economist Paolo Mauro found that a modest improvement in a country's corruption score raised investment by 2.9% of GDP, increasing annual growth by as much as 1.3%, compounded over a generation. You get Singapore, let corruption fester. You get Russia. Russia has been running the extractive experiment for decades. In the lawless 1990s, owning a business required submitting to the right protection racket. Difficult to decipher. As the line between gangsters and state officials was drawn in pencil, owners who guessed wrong lost their companies and sometimes their lives. Russians called these shakedowns ridershtva, a bastardization of the Wall street corporate raider concept. Minus the tender offer, Ridershtva has measurable costs. In a 2016 paper, researchers at the World bank and Moscow's Higher School of Economics surveyed nearly 2,000 Russian manufacturers and found that firms in regions with heavy rating were a third less likely to make capital investments than those in regions with low levels of raiding. Under Putin, Ridershtva became state policy with the 2003 dismantling of Yukos, then the largest oil company in Russia. From that point forward, one Russia Analyst wrote in 2025, the message was unmistakable. Property rights existed at the pleasure of the Kremlin. The first thing we do is let's kill all the lawyers is uttered by the villainous right hand man to Jack Cade, who's leading a rebellion against the king. In Shakespeare's Henry VI Part 2, the line has multiple readings. See Shakespeare. But as ah, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in a 1985 opinion, Shakespeare insightfully realized that disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitari form of government. Trump grasps this intuitively. No Shakespeare required. In his second term, Trump has fired or pushed out half the lawyers working at the Justice Department. At the sec, the agency tasked with enforcing laws that are foundational to the world's deepest capital markets, one in six employees has been nudged to the exit. More important for wrongdoers with the right connections, the SEC has brought only five enforcement actions all year, down from 80 two years ago. Meanwhile, Trump bought shares in Oracle while brokering a raiderstva style deal for the company to acquire TikTok. Um, he purchased Nvidia shares, then cleared the way for it to sell chips to China. Despite national security concerns and while dangling his regulatory blessing for a sale of Warner Brothers Discovery to either Netflix or Paramount, Trump bought shares in all three companies. At the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, an obscure federal regulator that has jurisdiction over crypto, Trump has reduced staffing by 22%, causing enforcement actions to fall to 80% of the annual average over the past decade. Good timing, as Trump went on to earn $1.4 billion from his meme coin and crypto empire last year despite previously calling crypto a scam. Last week, a lawsuit against World Liberty Financial accused Trump of defrauding shareholders and violating constitutional restrictions on accepting foreign Finally, Trump has gutted the IRS, reducing the total headcount by 25% while slashing the unit that audits high net worth individuals by nearly 40%. Audit rates have hit a historic low. Not that Trump is personally worried he secured immunity from audits. If you're a white collar criminal, this is your golden age. Comedian Eddie Izard once joked that humans are incapable of comprehending crimes at scale. If somebody kills someone, you go to prison, he said. Someone who's killed 100,000 people, we're almost going. Well done. You killed 100,000. You must get up very early in the morning. Trump is an early riser. Journalist Isaac Saul, founder of the nonpartisan news site Tangle, attempted to document the scale of Trump's corruption in a post from May and a follow up this month. He identified nearly 100 instances of alleged corruption, self dealing and conflicts of interest. Examples include bribes for regulatory favors, pay to play pardons, crypto schemes, trading on inside information in the equities and prediction markets, an insider trading subscription service run through Truth Social foreign governments pouring money into Trump family ventures ahead of favorable U.S. policy decisions, and the president's children taking stakes in companies awarded federal contracts. Exact numbers are buried in lagging disclosures and opaque books, but a New York Times investigation estimates the president made $2.2 billion his first year back in office. A decade ago, Trump campaigned on a promise to drain the swamp. The charge resonated because corruption, self dealing and conflicts of interest are bipartisan, fueling sentiment that the greatest gains accrue to the most powerful. A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that analyzed lawmakers stock trades found that congressional leaders outperformed rank and file lawmakers in investment gains by as much as 47 percentage points. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who's long been criticized for opposing a ban on congressional stock trading, registered a 160.66x increase in her stock portfolio from 1987 to 2024. But compared to Trump, Pelosi's an amateur. Since 2014, she's made 213 stock trades in a single day. Shortly before pausing his Liberation Day tariffs, he made 327 trades. Trump isn't draining the swamp. He's swamping our ability to keep up with his crimes. Power corrupts But Robert Caro, who spent five decades studying power as he chronicled Lyndon Johnson's rise and fall, came to believe something else, too. Power always reveals. Give someone enough of it and you find out what they wanted all along and what they're willing to do to get more of it. Of all Trump's corruption, two acts reveal the most about his motives. In presiding over the forced sale of TikTok's US business at an estimated 94% discount, Trump, along with the buyers, betrayed the free market. On the front end, he abused his power, forcing a sale on his terms. On the back end, he divided up the spoils with his political allies, similar to the lesson Russian investors learned when Putin dismantled Yukos. American investors now know the president, not the markets, dictates valuations, deal terms, and who can buy what. Trump's betrayal of Ukraine and by extension the west, cuts even deeper. Less than a month after signing the bipartisan Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, Trump waived sanctions on Russia, cutting a deal to buy diesel. Later, he effectively ratified Elon Musk's decision to restrict Ukrainian access to Starlink and starshield. Put simply, we're financing Russia's war and sabotaging Ukraine's defenses. But wait, there's more. By helping Russia, which gives Iran intelligence, technology and diplomatic backing, we're indirectly helping our enemies in Tehran. As Tom Nichols, retired professor at the U.S. naval War College, explained, Trump either believes he has Putin on a shorter leash regarding Iran, or he just doesn't care that US Tax dollars are funding the Iranian weapons killing American troops. There's a word for that, traitor. What does Trump gain in exchange for selling out America and our allies? Answer, we don't know. But every autocrat sees the signal. American foreign policy is for sale. Winning back. Congress won't fix this mess overnight, but subpoenas and investigations can unearth corruption and ultimately arm a reconstituted DOJ with the evidence it will need to achieve a, uh, reckoning. When I sold L2, the process was boring. There were rules we all played by and an absence of fear and that bad political actors would insert themselves into the process. That's what a country looks like when the rules apply to everyone. On November 3rd, let's make America boring again.

Speaker B: Life is so rich.

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