US President Donald Trump’s unorthodox behaviour has raised ethics concerns and highlighted a disregard for presidential norms. Global Insight asks what this means for US democracy and the rule of law.

Richard Nixon, in office from 1969 to 1974, is often cited as the most corrupt US president for his direct involvement in a political spying and illegal campaign finance conspiracy known as the Watergate scandal. A bungled burglary led to a police investigation that Nixon and his White House aides attempted to suppress. Facing near-certain removal by Congress following impeachment proceedings, Nixon resigned and was subsequently pardoned.

Meanwhile, Ulysses Grant, after leading Union troops to victory in the US Civil War, served two terms as president from 1869 to 1877. Considered an honest man by most accounts, Grant presided over an administration plagued with scandal. Among the more notable of these, Grant’s private secretary was implicated – but not convicted – in the Whiskey Ring, a bribery and tax embezzlement scheme involving distilleries in the Midwest. Grant’s vice president was implicated but absolved in the Crédit Mobilier scandal involving fraudulent construction contracts for the Union Pacific Railroad.

History has also not been kind to Warren Harding, who was president from 1921 to 1923 when he died of a heart attack. Harding was later revealed to have engaged in extramarital affairs at the White House while his interior secretary was accepting bribes for oil leases in Wyoming in what became known as the Teapot Dome scandal.

Moving to the current day, President Donald Trump’s second term has been marked by a series of high-profile ethics and corruption allegations, many of which echo patterns from his first administration, during which historians were already placing him in the pantheon of the most scandal-prone presidents. Trump and his family have continued and expanded the practice of leveraging the presidency for gain. His reported acceptance of a $400m luxury jet from Qatar for conversion into a new Air Force One plane and his use of the White House to promote his own crypto token are two notable cases.

President Trump has not placed his assets in a blind trust as recent predecessors have – although it’s not a legal obligation – and continues to intermingle his private business interests with official duties. Bloomberg has estimated the Trump family’s wealth at $6.8bn, a number increasingly tied to cryptocurrencies. And President Trump reportedly derived more than $1.4bn in income during the first year of his second term in office.

President Trump empowered Elon Musk, who had significant conflicts of interest, to shut down government agencies and disable watchdogs, all while promoting his own companies. Speaking in February 2025, the president said that if the White House thought there was a lack of transparency or a conflict of interest, ‘we would not let him [Musk] do that segment or look in that area’. The president fired inspectors general across some 17 agencies, with termination emails reportedly citing ‘changing priorities’, along with the Director of the Office of Government Ethics and a commissioner of the Federal Election Commission. These moves have weakened many of the accountability mechanisms that once held presidents in check.

Indeed, the scale and brazenness of President Trump’s manoeuvres have shifted the boundaries of acceptable conduct in Washington. Worse, public outrage has diminished amid the ongoing parade of scandals that would have brought down earlier lawmakers.

President Trump’s rank in history, of course, will wait for completion of the legal and archival records. But even during his first term in office from 2017 to 2021 – during which Trump was impeached twice – historians were already comparing him to Grant and Harding. Presidential historian Robert Dallek said in 2017 that ‘what makes this different […] is that the president [Trump] can’t seem to speak the truth about a host of things’.

After leaving office in 2021, Trump was convicted of covering up hush money payments to an adult film star and of civil fraud in his real estate business. The hush money conviction is being challenged, with the appeal and a related effort to remove the case to federal court ongoing. He was also charged by the US Justice Department (DoJ) with illegally retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, and with criminally trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election he lost to Joe Biden.

Former DoJ Special Counsel Jack Smith testified to the House Judiciary Committee that his investigation found Trump had engaged in a ‘criminal scheme’ to overturn the election, according to testimony released in December. Further, Smith said Trump had ‘repeatedly tried to obstruct justice’ by hiding his continued possession of classified documents. President Trump pled not guilty in both cases and the charges were dismissed by Smith following the 2024 election.

Cryptocurrencies and jumbo jets

If not criminal, President Trump’s actions in his second term at a minimum fall outside the boundaries of what would usually be considered acceptable conduct in Washington, ethics experts tell Global Insight.

Former White House ethics counsel Richard Painter, now a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, points to President Trump’s substantial financial investment in cryptocurrency businesses, coming at the same time that his administration is promoting crypto markets through regulation. ‘This is a president who, just three years ago, said that Bitcoin was a scam and really said derogatory things about cryptocurrency. And now cryptocurrency is all the rage,’ Painter says.

President Trump’s sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, are deeply involved in multiple blockchain and digital currency projects. These include the crypto mining company American Bitcoin Corp, which Eric Trump co-founded and of which Trump Jr is a stakeholder, while they lead World Liberty Financial, a family-backed crypto startup. Public filings reveal stakes worth hundreds of millions in these companies, and substantial revenues have been generated through token sales and mining.

Federal conflict-of-interest statutes would criminalise such holdings for almost all US executive officials, but the president is explicitly exempt by statute. This exemption, Painter argues, creates a dangerous gap in accountability. ‘My concern is that the president of the United States has such an enormous financial interest in cryptocurrency, while he will be heading up the executive branch and the agencies that are regulating crypto,’ Painter says. ‘This is a very, very serious matter and could have a severe impact on our financial markets.’

In October, Donald Trump Jr dismissed the idea of any potential conflicts of interest as ‘nonsense’. He added that World Liberty Financial was not a political organisation.

Kedric Payne, Senior Ethics Director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan good-government advocacy in Washington, DC, argues that President Trump has not merely abandoned the norm of avoiding conflicts of interest but has inverted it, publicly embracing a pay-to-play model of governance.

‘We saw this with the allegations that the free jumbo jet that the Government of Qatar provided to the president will be something that he can have personally,’ Payne says. ‘It seems as though that was part of a plan to get favourable treatment by the US and trade deals and other relationships between the two countries.’

The White House insisted that taking the aircraft is legal, and said it’ll be donated to President Trump's presidential library once he leaves office. According to a memorandum of understanding between Qatar and the US seen by reporters, the parties affirm that the donation is a bona fide gift.

President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s investment company received $2bn from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund just months after he left his White House role. Kushner denied the investment represented a conflict of interest or was otherwise unethical. Now, the Trump Organization, led by the president’s two oldest sons, has significantly expanded its Middle East footprint in the past few years, with new ventures in Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to reports. President Trump said in November while hosting Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince in the US that he has ‘nothing to do with the family business […] what my family does is fine. They do business all over. They’ve done very little with Saudi Arabia, actually.’ He denied any conflict of interest.

More generally, speaking at the time of a visit by President Trump to the Middle East in May 2025, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said it was ‘ridiculous’ to ‘suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit’ and stated that ‘the president is abiding by all conflict of interest laws’.

Meanwhile, President Trump has continued to frequently visit his own golf clubs, generating revenue while creating an expense to taxpayers through travel and security costs. An executive club linked to Donald Trump Jr reportedly carries a $500,000 membership fee. President Trump has also monetised the presidency through the sale of branded products, including fragrances and political merchandise.

What’s at stake

Jonathan Katz, a fellow in Governance Studies at think-tank Brookings, points to the Trump administration’s dismantling of enforcement mechanisms in the DoJ and the FBI, the weakening of a key US law – the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act – and the curtailment of oversight of foreign influence.

‘American democracy and the rule of law is at stake,’ Katz says. Meanwhile, ‘Congress is failing to be that third branch providing critical oversight’ while the administration launches social media attacks against the judiciary and retaliates against law firms and public officials. ‘You’re seeing the undermining of the legal system in order to gain advantage, and that’s problematic,’ Katz says.

Were Democrats to regain control of the House of Representatives in November’s congressional elections, committees led by the party would be likely to investigate the multiple allegations of conflicts of interest relating to President Trump.

Looking ahead to a post-Trump future, sweeping ethics reform akin to the post-Watergate era will be needed to restore public confidence in the US government. President Trump’s rise to power shows that relying on democratic norms to ensure ethical government is no longer sufficient. The US will need new, independent ethics bodies and enforceable legal constraints on future presidents.

William Roberts is a US-based freelance journalist and can be contacted at wroberts3@me.com

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