The US of A, now featuring Putinesque kleptocracy

"The most brazenly corrupt thing a president has ever done," said Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy about Trump's "coin scam."

"[It's] a stunning public display of corruption," said Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley.

"President Trump’s financial entanglements to the $TRUMP coin ... represents an unprecedented, pay-to-play scheme to provide access to the Presidency to the highest bidder," said Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

Critiques of Sleazetrafficking Unlimited and subsidiary Boodle Be Me, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington D.C., have been a trifle lopsided after complicit Republican senators scurried to undisclosed locations, set their phones to voice mail and began practicing, again, their fluency in "I'm unfamiliar with that story, haven't heard about it."

The Rumsfeldian known-unknown subject that GOP politicians — their voters too — are knowingly unfamiliar with is "one of the most blatant and appalling instances of selling access to the presidency I've ever seen," as the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Donald Sherman, put it. (He's working in the wrong city.)

Mr. Sherman, one of the most? Ulysses Grant was, regrettably, indulgent when it came to corrupt friends, but ex-President Ulysses died uncorrupted and broke. Warren Harding was merely a boob, oblivious to his high office's bottom-feeding crooks. And the historic dirty dealings of Richard Nixon were grounded in obsessive power-grabbing rather than personal accumulations of riches.

Which is to say, nothing and no one in America's presidential past have come even remotely close to the self-dealing vulgarity of Donald J. Trump. To be fair, though, the bloated criminality now befouling the White House is no U.S. presidency. Its embodiment campaigned as a tyrannical despot, and a tyrannical despot he has been.

Indeed, Trump is so confident in his criminal freedom as America's first autocrat he flaunts his corruption. One minute it's a flying $400 million bribe from Qatar and the next minute, arriving tonight, is his golf-resort dinner with 220 largely foreign conspirators in his $394 million crypto scheme. One analysis "found that Trump and business entities connected to him made more than $1.3 million in trading fees in the days after the dinner was announced."

As the above Democratic senators noted, every aspect of this Trumpian filth is "brazenly," "stunningly," "unprecedentedly" unlawful and unconstitutional. Trump also happens to be illegally enriching himself even further and more grotesquely just as he and his House minions are screwing the impoverished via their unspeakably vile "big, beautiful" tax bill.

Where is the end? When will it all stop? Will it, is what I won't ask. That's unthinkable.