Donald Trump had a lot to say about crime in his State of the Union speech. Most of it was untrue, including the assertion that criminality has completely disappeared in the District of Columbia, or ridiculous, especially the claim that his war on fraud supposedly rampant among immigrants would bring in enough revenue to eliminate the federal budget deficit.
He had nothing to say, of course, about the crimes committed by wealthy individuals. If the United States is really experiencing a “golden age,” as Trump declared, they are the ones who have amassed the biggest jackpots by breaking the rules.
The reason Trump did not just fail to highlight white-collar crime; his administration is actively abetting it. One way it is accomplishing this is through the weakening of enforcement. Since Trump returned to office, the systems for investigating and prosecuting offenses such as criminal tax evasion and money laundering have been collapsing.
First, the DOGE chaos forced many career prosecutors, FBI agents, and IRS auditors to leave the government. Now, large numbers of the remaining DOJ staffers are being reassigned to Trump’s mass deportation crusade.
This is a dream come true for white-collar criminals, who face a much-reduced risk of being caught and prosecuted. A recent report found that in 2025 the volume of fines collected from money laundering cases decreased by more than 50 percent from the year before. At the same time, the number of investigations of abusive tax schemes dropped by more than 60 percent.
Trump is also making life better for well-off crooks through the unscrupulous use of pardons. One particularly controversial case involves Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who pled guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the move was part of an effort to end “the Biden Administration’s war on crypto.” Leavitt conveniently left out the fact that Zhao and Binance have helped to prop up the Trump family crypto startup, World Liberty Financial. And now there are reports suggesting that Binance was doing business with sanctioned parties in Iran.
Trump’s self-proclaimed war on fraud loses much of its legitimacy in light of Trump’s pardon of individuals such as Trevor Milton, the founder of the electric truck company Nikola, who had been convicted of securities and wire fraud for lying to investors. The pardon relieved him of the obligation to repay investors hundreds of millions of dollars.
This is just one of several cases in which Trump pardons will rescind the obligation of convicted fraudsters to provide compensation to their victims. Liz Oyer, a former DOJ pardon attorney, estimates the total of those lost payments at more than $1 billion.
Trump, who was himself convicted on 34 counts of business offenses in New York State court, seems to feel a particular empathy for white-collar criminals. Since Trump clings to the belief he was unjustly prosecuted, he apparently thinks anyone convicted of similar offenses must also be an innocent victim.
Between weakened enforcement and brazen pardons, Trump is effectively decriminalizing offenses that in the past landed people in prison for long stretches and yielded billions in fines. It is an unprecedented amnesty for criminals, but only for those who committed their offenses in the suites rather than the streets.
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