The Washington Roundtable discusses the unprecedented corruption of the federal government, including Trump Administration members’ self-enrichment through cryptocurrency schemes and the inaugural committee, and the gutting of parts of the government that are responsible for rooting out self-dealing from public life. It is a level of corruption so “outright” and “brazen,” the staff writer Evan Osnos says, that it constitutes “a new phase in American politics.”

This week’s reading:

“Mike Waltz Learns the Hard Truth About Serving Donald Trump,” by Susan B. Glasser
“How Donald Trump Is Expanding His Authority While Shrinking the Government,” by Jon Allsop
“What Canadians Heard—and Americans Didn’t,” by Adam Gopnik
“Trump’s Deportees to El Salvador Are Now ‘Ghosts’ in U.S. Courts,” by Jonathan Blitzer
“Will the Trump Tariffs Devastate the Whiskey Industry?,” by Charles Bethea
“A Life-Changing Scientific Study Ended by the Trump Administration,” by Dhruv Khullar
“The Bureaucratic Nightmares of Being Trans Under Trump,” by Grace Byron
“How Trump Is Helping Tycoons Exploit the Pandemic,” by Jane Mayer (July, 2020)

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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