Maryland Governor Larry Hogan repeatedly steered state transportation development money to projects that would increase the value of his real estate holdings, according to a lengthy investigation by Washington Monthly’s Eric Cortellessa.

Cortellessa reports that Hogan, who ostensibly left his brother in charge of his real estate brokerage firm when he was elected, has, in fact, maintained ownership and control while serving as governor; the trustees he handpicked to run his company have continued to keep him apprised of its business dealings. And as governor, he has advanced highway and road construction projects that directly boosted the value of land owned by his company.

Those efforts have proved extraordinarily lucrative: During his first three years in office, Hogan reported $2.4 million in income, more than four times his salary. No other governor in the history of the state has made as much, according to Maryland’s former Secretary of State John Willis. Hogan, he told Washington Monthly, is the only governor in the history of Maryland “to have made millions of dollars while in office.”

Larry Hogan is a Republican governor of a solidly Democratic state. He is also, according to one survey, the single most popular governor in the country. In a state where only 37 percent of likely voters approve of Donald Trump, 73 percent of Democrats approve of Hogan.



I’ve argued that, in many respects, the presidency of Donald Trump is more “normal” than some people would like to admit. That is, it’s a logical end point of where conservatism has been moving, rather than an inexplicable break from a system that was working as intended. But even so, in his personal behavior and incendiary rhetoric, Trump is aberrant—and, it should always be noted, he is deeply unpopular. The country, by and large, doesn’t want what Trump has wrought. His election was both overdetermined and something of a bizarre fluke, which would, arguably, not have happened had it not been for geography and our illogical modern interpretation of archaic founding documents.

