The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

This year’s Munich security conference exposed the chasm in core values separating the Trump administration from most Europeans and sparked deep alarm at US efforts to control the Ukraine peace process and exclude European governments from it.

Here is what some of the main European and US newspapers had to say about it.

Le Monde
Through JD Vance, its vice-president, the US has “declared ideological war on Europe”, wrote Sylvie Kauffmann for the French title. If Vladimir Putin turned on the US in a famous 2007 speech at the conference, in 2025 it was the US that turned on Europe.

In a “virulent diatribe against European democracies he accused of stifling freedom of speech and religion”, Vance said the greatest threat to the continent was not Russia or China but Europe’s own retreat from some of its “most fundamental values”.

Worse, his relative silence on “the topic Europe most wanted to hear him on”, Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, “prolongs the incomprehension and confusion over Trump’s initiative aimed at ending the war”, Kauffmann said.

“A thick fog now surrounds Washington’s intentions; between the public statements of Vance and the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the various interviews followed by denials, contradictory positions have multiplied,” she said.

New York Times
The US administration had done nothing less than “offer what may be a preview under Mr Trump of a redefinition of a transatlantic relationship built on postwar bonds of stability between allied governments”, the paper said.

It too reminded readers of Putin’s 2007 speech in which the Russian president “demanded the rollback of American influence and a new balance of power in Europe more suitable to Moscow”, adding that he “didn’t get what he wanted – then”.

Now, top Trump officials had “made one thing clear: Putin has found an American administration that might help him realise his dream”. The comments raised fears the US may now “align with Russia and either assail Europe or abandon it altogether”.

Such a shift, the paper said, would amount to “a previously unthinkable victory far more momentous for [Putin] than any objectives in Ukraine”.

Süddeutsche Zeitung
Commentator Daniel Brössler said in the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung that Vance had not come to the German city to give “a friendly wake-up call”, but as “an arsonist”. The US vice-president’s mission was “the triumph of rightwing populism – with the backing of America’s billionaire chief Elon Musk”.

His silence on security policy was because “work has already begun on a deal with Putin at the expense of Ukraine, but also of Europe … This much is clear: Trump will make the deal, and the Europeans will have to pay and secure peace militarily.”

Europe, Brössler said, was being attacked “by Putin, who has come a good deal closer to his goal of revising the European order in recent days. And by Trump, who no longer even recognises common interests – and certainly not common values.”

On the one hand, the US “is demanding Europe finally become capable of defending itself against Russia. On the other, it is backing Putin’s henchmen and appeasers”, from Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, to the Alternative für Deutschland co-leader Alice Weidel.

The continent, he said, “will have to rise above itself”. Editorialist Detlef Essinger said Vance had deployed “a trick that populists and authoritarians have used for years … The principle is: accuse others of exactly everything that you do yourself.”

This “confuses them. It puts you on the offensive, and your opponents on the defensive. It gives you sovereignty over the terms. And a debate is not won by the person who has the better arguments, but by the person who owns the terms.”

The Kyiv Independent
“The US administration is ready to hand Russia a win in its brutal war against Ukraine. That’s the only conclusion we can make,” the paper said in a blunt editorial. The words and acts of Trump and his team go “beyond appeasement”.

But, it added, while the US may be “the biggest and richest ally Ukraine has”, it is far from the only one: “That means all eyes are on you, Europe. The real decision on whether Russia wins the war doesn’t actually sit with Trump now – it’s with Europe.”

Europe’s leaders, if they are “real leaders of their nations and not political opportunists, need to recognise the urgency of the situation, and act now. After all, if the US is out and Ukraine falls, Europe will be left to face Russia one-on-one.”

Russia, the paper said, “is not at war with Ukraine, it’s at war with the west. And if a significant part of the west deserts, the rest needs to make sure to show up for battle.” Nobody, it said, wanted the war to end more than Ukrainians do.

“But we understand that any compromise with Russia won’t be the end of the war. There can’t be a compromise in this war. Russia wins – the west loses. The west wins – Russia loses. Europe, the time is now.”

Hungary's Viktor Orbán, who has long been a free radical with a rather corrosive effect, has long been toying with the idea of turning his back on the EU. ‘Népszava’, Hungary's largest newspaper, quoted him as saying on Sunday: ’Hungarians already know that the future lies elsewhere - we cannot remain within the framework of the European Union alone.’

There could also be centrifugal forces in Italy, where head of government Giorgia Meloni has a close relationship with Trump acolyte Elon Musk. However, the current development is something that will not spare Italy either, writes the investigative Italian magazine ‘L'Espresso’, which is considered left-wing - and already adorned its cover on 31 January with a Trump caricature that gives Europe a painful kick.

However, the assessment of US activities is similar across the political spectrum. The liberal-conservative ‘La Stampa’ from Turin also observes ‘how America is destroying our idea of the West’. Mario Draghi, former Italian Prime Minister and President of the European Central Bank, is quoted as saying that the disinvitation of the EU has shown how ‘irrelevant’ the association of states has become for the big players at the table: it will be ‘difficult to get a role back’.

In a “virulent diatribe against European democracies he accused of stifling freedom of speech and religion”, Vance said the greatest threat to the continent was not Russia or China but Europe’s own retreat from some of its “most fundamental values”.

I wonder if Mr. Vance feels as strongly about the defunding of scientific research, the erasure of sexual minority rights, and the banning of official reference to climate change in the USA and whether it represents a similar "retreat".

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It certainly appears that those in charge of the firings didn’t know what they were doing: on Thursday they fired more than 300 workers at the National Nuclear Security Administration, apparently not aware that they were the people who oversee the nation’s nuclear weapons. Today, Peter Alexander and Alexandra Marquez of NBC News reported that officials are now trying to rehire them but can’t figure out how to reach them because the workers lost access to their work email when they were fired.

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hcr

The sixty-first Munich Security Conference, the world’s leading forum for talking about international security policy, took place from February 14 to February 16 this year. Begun in 1963, it was designed to be an independent venue for experts and policymakers to discuss the most pressing security issues around the globe.

At the conference on Friday, February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance launched what The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour called “a brutal ideological assault” against Europe, attacking the values the United States used to share with Europe but which Vance and the other members of the Trump administration are now working to destroy.

Vance and MAGA Christian nationalists reject the principles of secular democracy and instead align with leaders like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They claim that the equal rights central to democracy undermine nations by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. They want to see an end to the immigration that they believe weakens a nation's people, and for government to reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal values.

Vance attacked current European values and warned that the crisis for the region was not external actors like Russia or China, but rather “the threat from within.” He accused Europe of censoring free speech, but it was clear—especially coming from the representative of a regime that has erased great swaths of public knowledge because it objects to words like “gender”—that what he really objected to was restrictions on the speech of far-right ideologues.

After the rise and fall of German dictator Adolf Hitler, Germany banned Nazi propaganda and set limits on hate speech, banning attacks on people based on racial, national, religious, or ethnic background, as these forms of speech are central to fascism and similar ideologies. That hampers the ability of Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to recruit before upcoming elections on February 23.

After calling for Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” Vance threw his weight behind AfD. He broke protocol to refuse a meeting with current German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and instead broke a taboo in German politics by meeting with the leader of AfD Trump called Vance’s speech “very brilliant.”

Bill Kristol of The Bulwark posted: “It's heartening that today the leaders of the two major parties in Germany are unequivocally anti-Nazi and anti-fascist. It's horrifying that today the president and vice-president of the United States of America are not.” German defense minister Boris Pistorius called Vance’s speech “unacceptable,” and on Saturday, Scholz said: “Never again fascism, never again, racism, never again aggressive war…. [T]oday’s democracies in Germany and Europe are founded on the historic awareness and realization that democracies can be destroyed by radical anti-democrats.”

Vance and the Trump administration have the support of billionaire Elon Musk in their attempt to shift the globe toward the rejection of democracy in favor of far-right authoritarianism. David Ingram and Bruna Horvath of NBC News reported today that Musk has “encouraged right-wing political movements, policies and administrations in at least 18 countries in a global push to slash immigration and curtail regulation of business.”

Musk, who cast apparent Nazi salutes before crowds on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, wrote an op-ed in favor of AfD and recently spoke by video at an AfD rally, calling it “the best hope for Germany.” In addition to his support for Germany’s AfD, Ingram and Horvath identified Musk’s support for far-right movements in Brazil, Ireland, Argentina, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands, and other countries. Last month, before Trump took office, French president Emmanuel Macron accused Musk of backing a global reactionary movement and of intervening directly in elections, including Germany’s.

Musk’s involvement in international politics appears to have coincided with his purchase of Twitter in 2022. And indeed, social media has been key to the project of undermining democracy. Russian operatives are now pushing the rise of the far-right in Europe through social media as they did in the United States. Russian president Vladimir Putin has long sought to weaken the democratic alliances of the United States and Europe to enable Russia to take at least parts of Ukraine and possibly other neighboring countries without the formidable resistance that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would present.

Russian state television praised Vance’s speech. One headline read: “Humiliated Europe out for the count. Its American master flogged its old vassals.” Russian pundits recognized that Vance’s turn away from Europe meant a victory for Russia.

Vance’s speech came after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told other countries’ defense ministers on Wednesday, February 12, that he wanted to “directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Since 1949, the United States has stood firmly behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that said any attack on one of the signatories to that agreement would be an attack on all. Now, it appears, the U.S. is backing away.

In that speech, Hegseth seemed to move the U.S. toward the ideology of Russian president Vladimir Putin that larger countries can scoop up their smaller neighbors. He echoed Putin’s demands for ending its war against Ukraine, saying that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and that the U.S. will not support NATO membership for Ukraine, thus conceding to Russia two key issues without apparently getting anything in return. He also said that Europe must take over assistance for Ukraine as the U.S. focuses on its own borders.

On Wednesday, Trump spoke to Putin for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.

Also on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and offered U.S. support for Ukraine in exchange for half the country’s mineral resources, although it was unclear if the deal the U.S. offered meant future support or only payment for past support. The offer did not, apparently, contain guarantees for future support, and Zelensky rejected it.

On Saturday, while the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators have not been invited either. While the talks are being billed as “early-stage,” the United States is sending Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security advisor Michael Waltz, suggesting haste.

After Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. It said the call had focused on “removing unilateral barriers inherited from the previous U.S. administration, aiming to restore mutually beneficial trade, economic, and investment cooperation.” On Friday, Russia’s central bank warned that the economy is faltering, while Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”

But the U.S. is not speaking with one voice. Republican leaders who support Ukraine are trying to smooth over Trump’s apparent coziness with Russia. Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) called out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “rookie mistake” when he offered that the U.S. would not support Ukraine’s membership in NATO and that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to demand a return to its borders before Russia invaded in 2014, essentially offering to let Russia keep Crimea. Wicker said he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments and added: “I don’t know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.” Carlson, a former Fox News Channel personality, has expressed admiration for Orbán and Putin.

“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys,” Wicker said. “They invaded, contrary to almost every international law, and they should be defeated. And Ukraine is entitled to the promises that the world made to it.”

Today on Face the Nation, Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) said: “There is absolutely no way that Donald Trump will be seen—he will not let himself go down in history as having sold out to Putin. He will not let that happen.” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark said: “I guess Republicans think this is how they manipulate Trump into doing the right thing. But Trump’s been selling out to Putin since Helsinki when he publicly sided with Putin over America’s intelligence community. And he hasn’t stopped selling out since. And the [Republican Party] lets him.”

European leaders reported being blindsided by Trump’s announcement. German leader Scholz on Friday asked Germany’s parliament to declare a state of emergency to support Ukraine, and on Sunday, European leaders met for an impromptu breakfast to discuss European security and Ukraine. Macron invited leaders to Paris on Monday to continue discussions. Representatives of Germany, Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, and Denmark will attend, as will the secretary-general of NATO and the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission.

After the Munich conference, in Writing from London, British journalist Nick Cohen wrote that those Americans trying to find an excuse for the betrayal of Ukraine are deluding themselves. He wrote: “[t]he radical right in the US is not engaged in a grand geopolitical strategy. It is pursuing an ideological campaign against its true enemy, which is not China or Russia but liberalism. The US culture war has gone global. The Trump administration hates liberals at home and liberal democracies abroad.”

Proving his point, on Saturday after Vance’s speech, Trump’s social media account posted: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” This message, attributed to French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte, not only claims that the president is above all laws, but also signals to supporters that they should support Trump with violence. And that is how they took it. Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec responded, “America will be saved[.] What must be done will be done,” to which Elon Musk responded: “Yes[.]”

Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas posted: “There is now total clarity, no matter how unimaginable things might seem. And they amount to this: The U.S. government has been taken over by a clique of extremists who have embarked on a process of regime change in the world’s oldest democracy…. The arrogance on display is staggering. They think their actions will increase U.S. power, but they are in fact wrecking their own country and, in the process everyone else.”

He continued: “The only hope lies in the sheer enormity of the threat: it might awake us out of our slumber before it is too late.”

A year ago today, on February 16, 2024, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died at the hands of Russian authorities in the prison where he was being held on trumped-up charges.

One of the greatest tricks that Donald Trump and Elon Musk ever pulled is to convince millions of people that DOGE, the self-styled Department of Government Efficiency, is about government efficiency.

DOGE isn’t really a department; it’s not an agency; it has no statutory authority; and it has little to do with saving money, streamlining the bureaucracy, or eliminating waste. It is a name that Trump is allowing a favored donor and ally to use in a reckless campaign against various targets in the federal government. The whole enterprise is an attack against civil servants and the very notion of apolitical expertise.

Trump allies make noises about expert failures—and yes, experts sometimes do fail. In particular, MAGA world continues to demonize what its constituents believe was the medical establishment’s attempt to curtail civil rights during the coronavirus pandemic. (Those are arguable charges; Trump himself presided over a wave of shutdowns in 2020.) None of these complaints explains why DOGE teams have been unleashed in places such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the National Reconnaissance Office, which is responsible for American spy satellites. Worse, Musk’s team accidentally posted sensitive information from NRO in what one intelligence official called a “significant breach” of security.

DOGE also blundered into dismissing hundreds of people from the National Nuclear Safety Administration, the agency within the Energy Department that is responsible for the stewardship of the nation’s nuclear-weapons stockpile. It’s one thing to be angry about having to wear a mask at Costco; it’s another to engage in the apparent indiscriminate firing of more than 300 people who keep watch over nuclear materials. (The agency backtracked on Friday and rescinded some of those terminations.)

Populists are generally wary of experts, especially those who work for the government, but Musk is no man of the people: He is the richest human being in the world, and he runs major companies that rely both on government-provided expertise and significant government subsidies. As my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote, “Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut”—a willful indifference that gives away the game.

Musk’s assault on expertise is coming from the same wellspring that has been driving much of the public’s irrational suspicion hostility toward experts for years. I have been studying “the death of expertise” for more than a decade, and I have written extensively about the phenomenon in which uninformed laypeople come to believe that they are smarter and more capable in almost any subject than experts. The death of expertise is really about the rise of two social ills: narcissism and resentment.

Self-absorption is common these days, but Musk embodies a particular brand of narcissism found among certain kinds of techno-plutocrats who assume that their wealth is evidence of competence in almost any field. After all, if you’ve made a zillion dollars inventing an app, how hard can anything else be? And although it is a truism at this point to observe that Trump is narcissistic, one thing that binds Trump and Musk and many others is their sense that their talent and inherent greatness have been dismissed by experts. Much like ordinary citizens who have “done their own research” and yet are furious that doctors won’t listen to them, Trump and Musk seem constantly angry that their wealth and power can gain them anything except respect.

You can see this resentment almost every time President Trump (and Co-President Musk) speak. No one is allowed to know more about anything than Trump. When pressed, Trump will defensively say things such as “I’ve read a lot on it,” an implausible claim from a man who is famously reluctant to read. Musk, for his part, commands a personal fortune so large that it dwarfs the GDP of many small countries, and he brags about having a top U.S. security clearance—but he bristles at any doubts about whether he is, in fact, the most accomplished player of the video game Diablo IV.

For Trump and his allies, this kind of resentment is tightly threaded into practical and self-interested concerns: Apolitical experts in a democracy are a strong line of defense against politically motivated chicanery. Meanwhile, Musk and others believe that money should translate directly into power, and that their wealth should confer intellectual legitimacy. Such people chafe at the reality that getting their way still sometimes requires arguing with experts, and that opposing those experts requires knowledge. Their solution is not to listen or learn but to try to replace those troublesome pencil necks with pliable servants.

I’ve experienced this phenomenon firsthand: More than a year ago, Musk’s occasional sidekick David Sacks was so offended by an online disagreement with me about the Russia-Ukraine war that he publicly made a large donation to the GoFundMe page of a part-time professor in Canada whose views more closely aligned with his own. He did this in my name, as if that would help him gain the upper hand in an argument that required facts and expertise.

Another dynamic at play is that Trump, Musk, and many others treat “experts” and “elites” as functionally indistinguishable. This is a dishonest claim, but it is useful in mobilizing public sentiment against experts in the name of a mindless egalitarianism. It is also part of the overall ruse: The DOGE assault has nothing to do with merit or equality. Indeed, Musk’s attack on federal agencies, with one group of privileged and educated people trying to displace another, is the most intra-elite squabble Washington has seen in years.

A similar resentment may also drive the young volunteers who are waving Musk’s name in front of career government servants. Washington has always been full of disappointed strivers who feel they’ve been kept out of the game by snotty social and intellectual gatekeepers—and, as a former young striver in the capital, I can affirm that there’s some truth in that. Now they’re in charge and more than ready to become obnoxious new elitists themselves. (“Do I need to call Elon?” one young DOGE-nik reportedly snapped when a federal official had the temerity to deny him access to sensitive information.)

In the early 20th century, the Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset warned that such resentment would eventually become the enemy of talent and ability. “The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different,” he wrote in 1930, “everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.” Trump and Musk not only feel this same impulse; they have harnessed it for their personal use.

Eventually, such attacks run out of steam when the costs begin to accumulate. No matter how many times Stalin told his scientists to plant wheat in the snow so that it could evolve to grow in the winter, the wheat (which had no political allegiances) died. Today, vaccine refusal might seem like a brave stand against white-jacketed overlords—until your children are stricken with measles or whooping cough.

Modern societies, as Americans are soon to learn, cannot function without experts in every field, especially the many thousands who work in public service. The first step in containing the damage is to see Trump’s and Musk’s goals for DOGE clearly: It is a project rooted in resentful arrogance, and its true objective is not better government, but destruction.

The president is trying to implement an official political correctness, swapping in his preferred 'ideologies', thus redefining what will be considered politically correct

The Oval Office meeting convened by President Trump brought together the most important leaders in the world of professional golf: Jay Monahan, the top executive at the PGA Tour, and, via telephone, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the chairman of the Saudi Arabia-backed league known as LIV Golf.

The stated goal was to figure out a way to eliminate roadblocks preventing the planned merger between the rival two groups.

But the gathering earlier this month said something even more important about the Trump administration itself. Mr. Trump was not simply using the power of his office to forge an agreement — something that presidents have done for centuries. In this case, Mr. Trump was pushing a merger that relates to his own family’s financial interest.

The Trump family is a LIV Golf business partner. The family has repeatedly hosted LIV tournaments at its golf venues, including one planned in April at the Trump National Doral in Miami for the fourth year in a row.

In other words, according to half a dozen former Justice Department prosecutors and government ethics lawyers, Mr. Trump’s participation in this discussion was a brazen conflict of interest — one of a series that have played out over the past few weeks, with a frequency unlike any presidency in modern times, even in the first Trump term.

Mr. Trump has re-entered the White House with a massively expanded portfolio of business interests, some of which require government approval or regulation, others of which are publicly traded, and still others involving foreign deals.

Presidents are not subject to the conflict of interest laws that regulate the rest of the government, but the recent actions underscore how emboldened Mr. Trump feels in his second term. It demonstrates his confidence that the lines dividing various Trump interests, and his desire to reward friends and punish perceived enemies, won’t trigger congressional oversight in a political ecosystem that he helped change.

“None of this is very surprising unfortunately,” said Hui Chen, a former federal prosecutor and corporate lawyer who later became a Justice Department adviser on fraud cases. “The entire force and power of the United States government is now part of the business support structure for the Trump family.”

Even some local matters that involve the president’s businesses require government approval. A crisis that unfolded at the Justice Department in the past week over an action in New York has fueled concerns about the department’s independence and Mr. Trump’s myriad conflicts in issues involving the city.

Last week, the Trump Justice Department directed federal prosecutors in Manhattan to dismiss charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York. Mr. Trump has said he did not ask for the dismissal, but Mr. Adams oversees a vast bureaucracy in the city where Mr. Trump’s private company has a number of properties, and the mayor has made a concerted effort to forge a relationship with the president.

‘He Will Not Allow Conflicts’
Mr. Trump in comments, social media posts and interviews, has rejected any suggestions that he is violating ethics standards and has accused those criticizing his actions as political partisans. Mr. Trump and his advisers have described the country as being in a state of existential decline as the president begins his second term.

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he wrote Saturday on his social media site.

That assertion — an apparent repurposing of a quote of unknown sourcing but attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte — is expressly counter to the founding fathers’ vision of a government based on checks and balances among executive, legislative and judicial branches, in which no one branch holds too much power.

The democratic system in United States never really anticipated what is happening in the Trump administration, said Alan Rozenshtein, a former Justice Department national security lawyer who is now a law professor at the University of Minnesota.

“The presidency requires virtue — it requires a basic level of decency and loyalty to the country,” Mr. Rozenshtein said. “If you don’t have that kind of person, there is not much one can do unfortunately at that point, especially if Congress is supine.”

Mr. Trump’s allies point to ethical quagmires that President Bill Clinton and President Joseph R. Biden Jr. faced during their time in office, including Mr. Biden’s son Hunter’s convictions and eventual pardon by his father.

Still, Mr. Trump’s business ventures have created a climate for potential conflicts unlike any other U.S. president. And the list of matters sparking controversy in the second Trump administration is extensive.

Not long before Mr. Trump took office, his family started to sell its own cryptocurrency token — earning along with its partners an estimated $100 million in transaction fees — just as Mr. Trump was preparing to sign an executive order directing his administration to draft new cryptocurrency regulations easing oversight of the industry.

Mr. Trump has separately tasked Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to oversee a structure approving specific hires for agencies, even though some of those are investigating Mr. Musk’s companies or cumulatively paying them billions of dollars a year.

In Washington, Mr. Trump appointed the lawyer Edward R. Martin Jr. to serve as the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Mr. Martin resigned from representing a criminal defendant before moving in his capacity as a federal prosecutor to dismiss the charges filed against his client.

Ethics complaints that have been filed against Mr. Martin claimed he violated professional code of conduct rules for lawyers. Mr. Trump announced on Monday that he will nominate Mr. Martin to take the post permanently, saying he had a long history of public service — “always with the same goal, of serving his community, and creating a brighter future for all.”

In a statement, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said: “President Trump is the chief executive of the executive branch and reserves the right to fire anyone he wants.” Of concerns about Mr. Musk’s conflicts of interest, she said that Mr. Trump “has stated he will not allow conflicts, and Elon himself has committed to recusing himself from potential conflicts.” She did not address questions about deals connected to the Trump family.

Nonetheless, each of these actions violates traditional norms of ethics in government, according to these former prosecutors and ethics lawyers.

Dismantled Safeguards
What makes the situation most worrisome, these lawyers said, is that so much of the system erected since the Watergate era to monitor and punish individuals involved in ethics violations has rapidly been dismantled since Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

“They are taking a wrecking ball to organizations across the executive branch that play a role in integrity, oversight and accountability,” said David Huitema, who was confirmed by the Senate as the new head of Office of Government Ethics in November for a five-year term, but then fired by Mr. Trump this month.

Mr. Trump not only fired nearly 20 inspectors general who investigate waste, fraud and abuse, he also fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, who examines public corruption, and the head of the Office of Government Ethics, which provides guidance to agencies across the government on what is right and wrong. (Mr. Trump has asked the Supreme Court to confirm his ability to dismiss the Office of Special Counsel director, Hampton Dellinger.)

At the Justice Department, which can take up criminal violations of ethics laws even without referrals from separate federal agencies, Mr. Trump has appointed members of his former criminal defense team to top posts, including Emil J. Bove III, the acting U.S. deputy attorney general who helped defend Mr. Trump against charges in New York that he falsified business records.

The Supreme Court ruling last July — concluding that as president Mr. Trump has “presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts” — only heightened his sense of impunity.

A Key Exemption
Despite the exemption from the criminal conflict of interest law that prohibits federal employees from taking any action that directly affects their family financial holdings, presidents have generally sought to honor it as the standard, said Richard Painter, who served as a White House ethics adviser during George W. Bush’s tenure.

One of the clearest conflicts of interest was Mr. Trump’s Oval Office meeting on professional golf, the ethics lawyers said.

Federal employees are allowed to participate in decisions or meetings that might impact their own family finances if it is a general policy, such as the income tax rate that millions of Americans pay.

But if it is a “particular matter” involving specific parties that relate to a business deal their family is directly involved in, it is a criminal offense for federal employees to participate in these deliberations, especially when the outcome might bring financial benefits.

Mr. Al-Rumayyan, the chairman of LIV Golf, is also the governor of Saudi Arabia’s $925 billion sovereign wealth fund, which has bankrolled LIV Golf, as well as the private equity fund set up by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Mr. Al-Rumayyan visited with Mr. Trump in 2022 at the Trump family’s Bedminster golf club during one of the first LIV tournaments there and the two have stayed in touch since, including joining Mr. Trump in November at an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight at Madison Square Garden.

The Trump family, for years now, has wanted to host more professional golf tournaments at its 15 courses in the United States, Europe and the Middle East — an effort that suffered a setback in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, when PGA of America canceled a planned tournament at Bedminster.

Mr. Adams, the New York mayor, also has a link to the family’s golf efforts and Saudi Arabia.

It was Mr. Adams who resisted pressure from the New York City Council in 2022 to cancel a Saudi-backed Aramco Team Series at Ferry Point, a city-owned golf course then leased to the Trump family, said Eric Trump, the president’s middle son who runs the Trump organization.

Mr. Adams’s relationship with the Trumps continued to grow, and he along with a top adviser joined Eric Trump and Mr. Trump for a meeting in Florida during the presidential transition.

Eric Trump told a radio host this month, that he did not know much about the criminal case against Mr. Adams, but that what he did know he saw as thin. He added that Mr. Adams was “always supportive” and had not tried to hinder the Trump family business in New York City, as he said Mr. Adams’s predecessor, Bill de Blasio, had repeatedly.

When Mr. Bove, in the Justice Department, moved to dismiss the charges against Mr. Adams he said it was done, in part, to allow the mayor to do his job effectively, including helping with the president’s desired migrant crackdown.

In recent days, multiple lawyers at the Justice Department’s public integrity division, which prosecutes public corruption cases, have resigned, after refusing to play a role in the dismissal of the charges.