From Fraudster To Ethics Police: How Donald Trump Is Reframing What Counts As Criminal

This week, we watched Donald Trump, a racist white man convicted on 34 felony counts in New York in 2024 for falsifying business records, attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook over alleged mortgage fraud. Trump is the most documented financial criminal in presidential history, and he is the embodiment of what happens when America’s racial double standard marries impunity for white men in power.

The criminal-in-chief announced on Truth Social that Cook was “fired effective immediately” because she reportedly claimed two primary residences to get favorable loan terms. Cook denies it, and more importantly, the law denies Trump the power to remove her. Fed governors serve 14-year terms and can only be removed “for cause” through formal proceedings and not because a president threw a tantrum online. The Fed itself had to step in and remind him that the central bank is not his personal pawn.

This is the sheer gall of a deviant, whose life is a rap sheet of financial crimes. He left behind a trail of bankrupt casinos, stiffed contractors, fraudulent “universities,” and a fake charity so dirty that the New York Attorney General forced him to dissolve the Trump Foundation in 2019. In 2022, the Trump Organization was convicted on 17 criminal counts of tax fraud, falsifying records, and conspiracy. His empire was ruled fraudulent in a 2023 civil case in New York where Judge Arthur Engoron found he inflated his assets by billions to scam banks and insurers, yet somehow, this man now pretends he’s the ethics police..

And it doesn’t stop there.

This is the same man who pardoned crooks like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn while insisting he was the victim. Not to mention, he also incited an insurrection at the Capitol and cozied up to sex traffickers and pedophiles, from Jeffrey Epstein to his own inner circle of creeps. This man has been swimming in fraud for decades, and yet here he is, screaming “fraud” at Lisa Cook, who hasn’t even been charged with a crime. 

You can’t invent hypocrisy this bold.

And let’s not overlook the racial and gendered dynamics here. Lisa Cook is the first Black woman to ever serve on the Fed board, a trailblazer in a space that has been almost exclusively white and male since its founding. That makes her a perfect target. She represents not just professional expertise but also progress, diversity, and credibility. Trump knows the mere whiff of misconduct is enough to smear her in the public imagination because the racist double standard always works that way. A Black woman has to be flawless to keep her seat at the table, while a white man can be a career criminal and still run the damn country.

This is what white supremacy looks like in practice: the audacity to call a Black woman “corrupt” while embodying corruption at every level. It’s the same twisted logic behind his crackdowns on Black and Brown cities as part of a larger white supremacist project. He deploys federal troops to “fight crime” in places like Baltimore, Chicago, and D.C., while white men radicalized in white suburbs commit mass shootings in churches, schools, and malls without ever being labeled as criminals or terrorists. He howls about “fraud” in Black communities while the fraud stares and points three fingers back at him in the mirror.

Trump has redefined what it means to be a criminal in America. He has normalized the idea that the president of the United States can be a felon, his company can be convicted, his foundation can be dissolved for corruption, and he can still be the head of state. Crime, under Trump, isn’t about the law. If you’re white, rich, and powerful, even convictions are just badges of adversity, not disqualifications. He can sit in the Oval Office, call others “crooked,” and twist the law to suit his interests.

And the press is treating this latest debacle as just another Trump controversy. They’ll cover the fed’s pushback or note that markets shrugged, but they rarely connect the dots. This isn’t a quirky “Trump vs. Fed” dispute.  No, it’s an authoritarian move by a career criminal to criminalize his opponents. Lisa Cook isn’t in his crosshairs because of mortgage forms. She’s in his crosshairs because she’s a Black woman in power.

Lisa Cook is fighting back with a lawsuit. Her lawsuit is a lightning rod. It’s not just about saving her job, it’s about defending the last vestiges of institutional integrity from a criminal-in-chief who sees the rule of law as optional. It’s a bold statement that institutional norms still have defenders, and that the criminal-in-chief isn’t untouchable just because he refuses to face consequences himself.

The irony would almost be funny if it weren’t so dangerous. This isn’t just another news cycle story about Trump being Trump. This is the blueprint of authoritarianism: criminalizing your enemies while insulating yourself from the rule of law. The question isn’t whether Trump will get away with trying to fire Lisa Cook. The question is how much longer America is going to let a convicted fraudster, a walking crime scene, dictate who counts as a criminal and who doesn’t.

And there’s an even deeper layer we must consider.

This isn’t just about Trump’s hypocrisy. It’s about what America requires from men like him. A racist capitalist system doesn’t just tolerate his criminality; it depends on it. His frauds, his scams, his insurrections, his open contempt for the law aren’t disqualifying; they’re qualifications. They prove he’s willing to bend every rule and break every norm to preserve white power. That’s why his felonies don’t end his career but fuel it. That’s why his corruption doesn’t exile him from politics but cements his place at the center of it. The system needs a Trump, because without men like him, the lie of white innocence and Black guilt collapses.

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.

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