The U.S. Gets a Taste of Corruption || Peter Zeihan

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]Hey, Peter Zin here coming to you from Vasto, Italy. Today is the 18th of May.

[00:00:05]You'll see this later in the week. Uh short version is we've probably had the single biggest step backward in rule of law in the United States uh of the second Trump term, which is, you know, saying it's saying something in of itself. And the fact that I'm telling you this from Italy is a little concerning. Uh the short version is today the Trump administration settled a lawsuit that had brought against the US government while Trump was president. So basically Trump suing Trump and then settling with Trump to establish a slush fund of about $1.8 8 billion US. Technically, it's $1 bill776 million to compensate uh conservatives who have been prosecuted by the Justice Department in the past. Uh everyone who has been shortlisted to get a payout is somebody who is one of Trump's close political allies. And in essence, this is a slush fund. Uh this is the sort of operation people in Italy have been telling you like even the most crooked of our politicians would have never joined up doing something so obvious and brazen.

[00:01:12]Uh this has a lot more in common with how uh Nigerian governments in recent decades have um handled slush funds basically suing yourself controlling both sides of the negotiation and then handing out the money to whoever you wanted to do in in the first place. Uh although even Nigeria has moved away from that model in the last 20 years. Uh the most recent governments to do things like this were Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela and Hugo Chavez. Um this is hardly the first time the Trump administration in round two has done this. I really doubt it'll be the last.

[00:01:44]The judge that oversaw the settlement basically said in legal terms, "What the actual fuck?" Um but here we are. uh this is what happens when you have an executive who sees the rule of law as part of the problem rather than part of the solution. We should expect significantly more things like this and this kind of dovetales with what has functionally happened with the tariff situation where the tariffs policies have changed so often that the only way that you can stay ahead of them is to have a really good relationship with the regulator which is another way to say bribery. Um, what was the other comparison I wanted to make? Uh, give me a minute. It'll come to me. Oh, yeah. On the regulatory question, uh, the Trump administration has gutted several of the regulatory bodies so that enforcement of the regulations that are on the books, even some of them from Trump won, uh, can't really be done in a timely manner.

[00:02:36]Uh, but they're not bothering to staff these agencies with people who could strip out regulations from, say, the Obama or the Biden years. They're just telling companies to not abide by them and put themselves in deep legal jeopardy that then a future administration might come after them for but the Trump administration is saying, you know, all you have to do is not follow the law in its current form and we're not going to prosecute you. So, it's breaking down the rule of law that allows US business to be the most dynamic in the world and basically following a model that the Russians had during the 1990s and the 2000s where you deliberately have conflicting guidance from the Kremlin and from law and from regulation. And the only way to stay on the positive side of that is to bribe everyone in sight. So, um, Masleto from Italy, a country that used to be run this way but found a different way.