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The outgoing head of the Office of Government Ethics is warning that Trump has created an ethics crisis and turned the United States of America into a laughingstock.

In an interview with The New York Times, Walter Shaub said:

“It’s hard for the United States to pursue international anticorruption and ethics initiatives when we’re not even keeping our own side of the street clean. It affects our credibility,” Mr. Shaub said in a two-hour interview this past weekend — a weekend Mr. Trump let the world know he was spending at a family-owned golf club that was being paid to host the U.S. Women’s Open tournament. “I think we are pretty close to a laughingstock at this point.”

This is the part of the Trump story that does not get enough attention. Every single day, Donald Trump is deepening the ethical crisis in the federal government. Trump used the presidency to promote his private golf course five times in two days last weekend. Trump has a “presidential viewing stand” set up at the US Women’s Open that was held on a Trump property so that he could meld the presidency into his private business interests.

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Presidents set precedents. Trump is setting a precedent that if unchecked will open the door to larger ethical abuses by future presidents. Trump has turned the United States into a joke, but some of the biggest tragedies that are taking place under this administration involve the conversion of the presidency into a third rate banana republic personal ATM for the President and his family.