Call the state department's ad for Mar-a-Lago what it is: a plea for corruption | Ross Barkan

No sitting president in American history has been so engrossed with personal profit as Donald Trump. Moving into the White House has not altered his lifelong obsession with making money. He is still trying to trademark his name in dozens of countries. Foreign diplomats can buy influence at his hotels and golf courses. He has not divested from his businesses or released his tax returns.

Now the state department wants to sell Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s waterfront Florida estate. Or wanted to, until public backlash forced a rare reversal for a Trump administration seemingly immune to shame.

It started on Monday, when the state department shared a blogpost touting the virtues of Mar-a-Lago through Share America, a program for US embassies. The post displayed pictures of the lavish private club, where Trump now hosts world leaders, and noted that the mogul “is belatedly fulfilling the dream of Mar-a-Lago’s original owner and designer … The ornate Jazz Age house was designed with Old-World Spanish, Venetian and Portuguese influences.”

Trump is profiting handsomely from Mar-a-Lago, where he operates an exclusive club. Membership fees recently doubled to $200,000 annually. Democrats and ethics watchdogs pounced on the state department for using taxpayer dollars to promote the president’s private venture.

For once, sanity, good governance or old-fashioned shaming won out: the post was removed. “The intention of the article was to inform the public about where the president has been hosting world leaders,” read a statement on Share America. “We regret any misperception and have removed the post.” Ultimately, this misstep will be forgotten, lost in an ever rising tide of controversy. There is only so much outrage available at any one time.

When Trump was self-immolating on the campaign trail, it looked like he was going to be bad for his own business, but he ended up scoring the greatest branding opportunity of them all: leader of the free world. Trump may be in violation of the constitution’s emoluments clause, which is supposed to prevent presidents from accepting gifts from foreign governments. Nobody’s threatening to take away any of his golf courses over that, so why should he care?

The state department post was emblematic of all that Trump is and always will be, a sign of the times and an overlord of them, the avatar of America’s worst pathologies. Grotesque capitalism begets the grossness of Trump, in which every person and thing has a price and ethics are negotiable.

There is nothing new about Trump’s behavior, no real novelty to oligarchs believing they are beyond all laws and conventions. What is new is that someone like him now has the power to blow up mankind. Ronald Reagan may have pioneered a certain celebrity vapidity in the White House – a “tenure … seen to derive from his tendency to see the presidency as a script waiting to be solved”, in the words of Joan Didion – but at least he was not trying to monetize every waking moment of his time in office.

Were Mar-a-Lago something other than a profit-making venture, promoting it wouldn’t be such a big deal. If George W Bush had a ranch, Trump can have a beach house.

But when wealthy men and women can effectively purchase favors from the federal government through membership at a club, corruption is the only outcome. When public money is used to advertise this corruption, the norms that govern a fragile democracy wither away. No matter what happens in the next four or eight years, Trump will probably walk away from all of this wealthier than he was before.