The guy has made ~3500 stock trades in the last 3 months, and there's a pattern of him publicly pumping stock by mentioning a company in a tweet or public statement.
The problem is, the framers of the Constitution believed the American people would never elect someone so criminal and unfit, so the President is exempt from many criminal laws, including those that would stop this.
The framers of the Constitution were looking at a different world, where there was not the instant communication and sense of one "America" that we have. They figured that, while attempts at corruption were inevitable, the different states would protect themselves by not allowing representatives from another state to succeed at any self-serving corruption. But the rise of national party instead of state as primary political identity (which Washington warned about), and the huge propaganda pipe that is the internet, have destroyed the (supposed) protection of many individual state identities.
Of course that made a lot more sense in the 18th century than it does in the 21st, we tend to view states that routinely engage in violent coups as failures, and the man who famously said of Shay's Rebellion that "the tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of tyrants and patriots" ran from Monticello like a coward when the British showed up and left its defense to his slaves.
But the last line of defense is supposed to be "we just kill them all." What the founders didn't anticipate was that the militias would side with the tyrants, or that society and its morals would advance to the point where political violence was no longer seen as a noble act except by extremists.
They may not have been able to foresee the sheer levels of corruption we have today, but they should have been able to see that in trying to keep Congress from becoming too powerful, they made it too weak to do its job. The fact that Congress has hundreds of members, plus the veto in the executive branch, plus the Supreme Court being able to overturn legislation, was plenty to keep it in line.
It was inevitable that the executive branch would end up taking over a lot of their functions.
Nixon resigned when he was told that he would likely be impeached. Unfortunately the current Republicans in Congress are completely spineless.
“Checks and balances.”
More like cheques and (bank) balances.
From Article II, Section 1:
The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be encreased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.
Trump, on the other hand, openly goes out of his way to cash in on his office, even to the extent of accepting bribes in the form of planes from foreign countries, large donations of foreign and domestic powers via his cryptocurrency, and accepting direct payments for pardons.
I should note that bribery is one of the explicitly mentioned crimes for which impeachment is designed, as mentioned in Article II, Section 4:
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.By 'on the side', I mean things like book deals and at the time legal insider trading. As for making a billion after being elected president in the past it was foundations you've set up and receive donations to, not directly like trump. I think the Clintons were probably the most extreme even taking it I remember a billion dollar donation from Saudi Arabia. But nothing comes even close to trump.
It was treated as a massive scandal when they received $32 million donation from the Crown Prince of Bahrain, which resulted in a meeting with Hillary Clinton.
I don't know if he is daytrading now. Every day in the recent week it was "an Iran deal is imminent" during the day and "we'll bomb them" after market closure, followed by Iranian denials that a deal was ever imminent.
As we stand now, the disassembly and selloff of the state (or direct destruction of same) is probably overtaking our ability to act in an expansionist capacity, or even to assemble and coordinate the considerable overhead required of an actual autocracy, that's purely internally.
More pertinent to this subject, the diminishment of the USD is going hand in hand with the oligarch's exchange of assets for slices of the state, which the current executive enjoys quite unabashedly. And obviously the oligarchs feel they are getting fantastic deals, exchanging dissolving assets for monopolies on force, land, and access to state economic resources. But like the liquidation of the USSR by the Soviet security apparatus, tycoon and grifter alike will be more than a little dismayed to see how rapidly both dollars and "state power" lose their sheen when the underlying national context is destroyed.
Particularly since the vaporization of national context is by no means a universal or global phenomenon. I do wonder how well the balkanized techno-feudal dream works when confronted with the reality of, say, China, or even a monolithic domestic block, like the Mormons.
[1] Except today is today, and not the early 20th century. Rather than learning the West's harsh lessons at the hands of B-17s and the Red Army, the United States (and a lot of the northern hemisphere) would learn the same by way of thermonuclear bonfire.