"In a Century's Time, When Future American Students Think of Presidential Corruption, They'll Immediately Think of Donald Trump"

"Against the past few years, Teapot Dome appears almost quaint—a relic of a bygone, back-slapping era, a time when Americans paid off Americans, all for other Americans' benefits, all in a neat, tidy circle of domestic graft. It's not just the magnitude of the Trump-era corruption that challenges our notion of what an American president dedicated to financial misconduct can accomplish. It’s that now, the players are transnational in scope—crossing borders, crossing boundaries, taking full advantage of the financial secrecy tools wherever they may be, and the fecund opportunities that a president like Trump can provide."

Casey Michel at The Bulwark writes that "[a] century on, it’s clear that Teapot Dome is no longer the lodestar of presidential larceny, the shorthand for shortchanging the public, the metric against which all other corruption scandals are compared."

"I Would Vastly Prefer a Limited Career with the Consciousness of Having Done the Right Thing"

"Finally, as the new postwar president, 'I thought the spirit of clemency was quite in harmony with the things we were trying to do in Washington; that Debs had never been guilty of any overt act; that he never countenanced destruction of government by force, and probably I could persuade him to become a factor in contributing to tranquility throughout the land.'"

Ron Radosh at The Bulwark tells the story of when President Warren Harding freed Eugene Debs from federal prison.

"A Long, Four-Decade Pause"

"It's not the first time politicians have latched on to economic unrest and public safety concerns to press a hard-line, anti-immigration agenda. In 1921, Congress passed, and President Warren G. Harding signed, the 'Emergency Quota Act,' sharply reducing the number of immigrants permitted to enter the country. A putative response to rising unemployment and social unrest, in reality the law represented the culmination of decades of racial and religious-motivated bigotry against newcomers from southern and Eastern Europe and Asia. It also portended a long, four-decade pause in the country's openness to immigration."

Joshua Zeitz at Politico compares Donald Trump to Warren Harding.

"The Fish Rots from the Head"

"Well, our system depends upon something like a consensus, something like majority rule. But now we have a president who outright lies about... everything. He lies about the number of votes he received, about the size of his inauguration crowd, about his own achievements, about Muslims cheering in the streets after 9/11, and so on. He lies about basic observable facts.
"I think the cumulative effect of all this lying is to make people deeply cynical about out entire system, and that's very corrupting."

Sean Illing at Vox interviews historian Robert Dallek about Donald Trump.