, Columnist
A Swamp Tour of Trump’s Washington
The current administration is awash in government ethics violations, business conflicts, potential criminal acts, and flagrant lying.
O’Brien is executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion.
Mark Twain published The Gilded Age, his tour of unbridled avarice and unchecked political corruption, 145 years ago. A central character in the novel is a young woman who fashions herself as a Washington lobbyist to promote her family’s financial interests. Her efforts anchor a satirical, caustic work that defined an era and was laced with pointed warnings that are still relevant today. “No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only machinery for its execution, nothing more,” Twain wrote.