In July 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump called on the Russian government to hack the emails of his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. It wouldn’t be long before the scandal of Russian election interference would dominate headlines for much of the campaign and Trump’s presidency. And Trump has since claimed that his public call — for Russians to “find the 30,000 emails” so that “our press” could have a field day — was somehow a joke.
But in the intervening years, the former and perhaps future leader of the free world has provided ample evidence that he wasn’t, well, joking at all. In a 2019 interview with ABC, the then-sitting president explicitly stated that “I think I’d take it,” when asked if he would accept dirt on a political opponent that was offered up to him by a foreign power. Trump only added he’d “go maybe to the FBI” if he thought “there was something wrong.”
Today, the shoe is entirely on the other foot, with Trump and his campaign now the victims of an alleged foreign hacking and leaking operation during the most crucial months of a close American presidential contest. This time, it doesn’t seem to be Russia. Team Trump is pointing the finger at Iran; Rolling Stone has yet to independently verify that claim. The FBI is investigating the alleged hack.
According to two sources familiar with the matter, the Trump team has been scrambling to assess the extent of the damage, and how, exactly, the apparent hacking may affect different facets of the Trumpworld elite, not just the presidential campaign’s staff. “It’s very scary stuff,” one source close to Trump, who has been communicating with campaign officials in recent days about the alleged hacking operation, succinctly notes to Rolling Stone.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung claimed in a statement that Iran was responsible for the apparent hack of a senior campaign staffer’s internal communications. No outlet has published any leaked documents yet. Cheung preemptively criticized any journalists who dare to report on them.
“Any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want,” he said.
That’s a radical departure from 2016, when Trump openly called on Russia to hack and release Clinton’s emails. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said at a press conference. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Russian actors reportedly targeted Clinton’s campaign and personal office on or around that same day. Trump argued the source of the Clinton campaign materials shouldn’t matter — the content was more important. In October 2016, Trump complained that the hacked emails released by WikiLeaks were not getting enough coverage from reporters. “Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks,” he posted on X (formerly Twitter).
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Monday asking whether the former president still believes that it is acceptable for media outlets and political candidates to cover and highlight a campaign’s internal documents or communications if they were hacked.
News of the hack comes at a time when Trump is mired in the final two-and-a-half-month blitz of his 2024 crusade to retake the White House. It’s an election with remarkably high stakes for the American public — and for Trump personally. The outcome of the race between him and Vice President Kamala Harris won’t merely decide whether Trump gets a chance at implementing his increasingly authoritarian vision for the nation. Election Day in November could very well determine whether or not Trump ever faces actual prison time.
And it’s in this environment in which a foreign actor, allegedly the Iranian government, is trying to mess with Trump’s electoral chances at returning to power. Iranian officials are still furious with Trump for, among other things, blowing up Qasem Soleimani, and have wanted vengeance for years.
However this alleged attack by Iran on the Trump team’s private communications shakes out, it will be done in the shadow of years of MAGAland openly gloating and mocking elite Democrats for getting breached by Russian hackers.
For instance, in December 2016, senior veterans of the Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns gathered at Harvard University, to make first-draft-of-history-style presentations for the assembled crowd and journalists. With the wounds of 2016 still fresh, the event quickly devolved into chaotic sniping, insults, and hurt feelings. At one point, when the issue of Russian election interference, which was designed to help Trump win, came out, Trump lieutenant Brad Parscale told the lineup of Clinton officials that there was such a thing as two-step verification for email accounts… and that maybe Democrats should try it.
Years later, in the lobby of what was, at the time, Washington, D.C.’s Trump International Hotel — just walking distance from the Trump White House — this reporter caught up with Parscale about what he said to the Clinton senior staff. He smiled, recalled that it was a “funny” line that he trotted out, and reveled briefly in his trolling of Trump’s political nemeses.
Things are different now.
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Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.