A Hundred Years of Grift: Same Plot, New Clowns
Reading about Donald Trump commuting George Santos’s sentence feels like déjà vu from another century. The details have changed — wire fraud instead of oil leases, campaign donors instead of petroleum tycoons — but the structure is the same.
In the 1920s, Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall sold drilling rights on federal land and became the first U.S. cabinet official to go to prison. In the 2020s, Congressman George Santos sold a counterfeit version of himself and siphoned campaign money into his own accounts, only to be rewarded with clemency from a president skilled in normalizing corruption.
I thought of the connection on a walk and started making this list on my phone:
ON A RELATED NOTE
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