DON'T TWEAK THE TAIL OF THE TIGER

By Robert P. Bomboy

In 1987, Gary Hart, a former senator from Colorado, was the frontrunner among Democrats at the starting gate, intending to vie for their party's presidential nomination the following year.

            Then a scandal erupted and, rather than backing off, Hart challenged journalists covering his campaign. "Follow me around. I don't care. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead," he declared.

            They did, and caught him red-handed.

            Today there are more than 150,000 full-time reporters, journalists, and freelance writers in the United States, and probably at least that many more around the world. From the beginning of his election campaign, and through these eight months of his presidency, Donald Trump's cloudburst of lies have been a daily challenge to anyone and everyone who wants to disprove him.

            Many hundreds of journalists, obviously, have taken up the challenge.

            During the past week, David Leonhardt of the New York Times, counted up a list of the scandals and potential scandals that are hanging over the president's head. Here's the list:

• As The New Yorker magazine, the Pulitzer Prize-winning non-profit newsroom ProPublica, and the public radio station WNYC all reported, longtime Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz donated more than $50,000 to a Manhattan district attorney who later dropped a case against Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr.

• The presidency is benefiting Trump's business in numerous ways. Government officials have stayed in hotels that bear Trump's name; for example, Trump's Mar-a-Lago club doubled its membership rates after he won the White House.

·                     Eric Trump has been giving his father quarterly updates on the financial health of his businesses, despite promises that the president would have no involvement. Those businesses have also done deals with foreign governments, despite the president's pledge that they wouldn't.

• Trump has spent more than $30 million of taxpayer money traveling to properties he owns.

• Ryan Zinke, Trump's secretary of the interior, is under investigation for chartering a $12,000 flight from Las Vegas to Montana at taxpayers' expense.

• David Shulkin, the secretary of Veterans Affairs, charged taxpayers for a trip to Europe that included stopovers in England at a Wimbledon tennis tournament and Westminster Abbey, plus a river cruise for him and his wife.

• Scott Pruitt, who runs the Environmental Protection Agency, regularly dines with donors and lobbyists from industries his department is regulating. He also used public money to pay for a soundproof booth in his office and chartered private and military overseas flights.

• Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, tried to use a government plane to fly him to Europe for his honeymoon. He may also have availed himself of a taxpayer-funded military plane to view the sun's total eclipse in August, though he says the trip had a different purpose.

• Tom Price, the former secretary of health and human services who resigned in disgrace at the end of September, spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on private planes. Trump appointed Price despite Price's history of using his position in Congress to get sweetheart stock deals for himself.

• Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, has reportedly used his closeness with Trump to secure foreign investments for Kushner's family-owned business, in exchange for granting visas.

• A Chinese government office approved trademarks for a company owned by the president's daughter, Ivanka, on the same day that China's president met with her father.

• Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, may have used his position to repay a Russian oligarch.

• Michael Flynn lobbied on behalf of the Turkish government, but Trump selected
him as national security adviser anyway (before later ousting him).

            Not since the short administration of President Warren Harding in the 1920s, as I've pointed out before, has anyone in the White House been so deeply enmeshed in the briar patch.

"Amid the chaos and dysfunction," says Jamelle Bouie of the online newsmagazine Slate, "it can be easy to miss that this White House is corrupt. Remarkably, unbelievably, corrupt."