NJ.com: By one measure, Trump keeps winning
For 11 years, Walter Shaub was the moral compass for 2.5 million civilian employees in the executive branch of the federal government, but he left his position as director of the Office of Government Ethics last month with this dire warning:
The U.S. government, he said, is at risk of being a kleptocracy.
That's a word you usually hear thrown around about Russia or in the developing world, or wherever corruption is manifested in a rule-by-thieves ethos.
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So does all this mean we are governed by one who seeks personal profit at the expense of the governed? Shaub thinks so, and he put up the governmental guardrails at OGE, a non-partisan office that advises administrations on how to avoid ethics violations.
Indeed, the laws are complicated and nuanced and evolving, but the difference with Trump's administration, Shaub says, is that it simply doesn't care about the laws.