I hope everyone had a happy 4th and is getting into the heart of the summer. The official “Federal” 4th of July and Semiquincentennial celebrations were, frankly, pretty lame. Communities across the country came together with their own celebrations. My hometown of New York City had such a great time that we apparently set the Brooklyn Bridge on fire.
It’s important to remember that the Semiquincentennial is not one day- it’s a full year. I am confident that this year is going to unfold in a way that is going to reaffirm the American spirit of reinvention and replenishment, even if our central government is, at the moment, inept at the actual work of governing, prosecuting a war and, thankfully, prosecuting their political opponents. It’s not that hard. You just need credibility. This junta has none.
There is one place where Trump and his sycophants thrive: corruption. You can read all about it here in President Trump’s 927 page “certified annual financial disclosure report.” which pretty much details all the ways that Trump has monetized being President. He is not hiding it. In fact, he is relishing in it, almost glib at his ability to steal at will. This is not being done in the shadows. It’s all right there. It’s almost a taunt: catch me if you can.
Trump has gone so far as to nominate his personal attorney, Todd Blanche, to be the attorney general. As I’ve written about many times, these are not smart people, and not good lawyers. That is the point. The only thing they are there for is to make it impossible for the Department of Justice to go after wrongdoing among Trump and his sycophants. And so we get a 927 report that all but outlines all the wrongdoing. Trump could have violated the disclosure laws with a lame excuse about executive privilege (remember that from the first Trump administration) but, alas, he just put it out there.
To understand that Trump’s financial disclosures are gloating and not an attempt to bury the truth, you first have to understand how this Administration thinks about transparency. Remember, this is an administration that had to be sued to keep following a plain disclosure law it had already been obeying. When OMB quietly pulled the Public Apportionments Database offline in March 2025, a federal judge ordered it restored and told the government, almost in these words, to stop violating the law (CREW v. OMB (D.D.C. July 21, 2025)). Add the DOGE records they insist aren’t subject to FOIA, the auto-deleting Signal chats, and the federal datasets scrubbed overnight, and the pattern is unmistakable. The 927 page disclosure report is an anomaly.
Do Americans tolerate this level of corruption? It depends. Certainly, if life was getting better for the average American, they would likely overlook this - after all, if we have some aversion to paying government officials well, we might as well let them enrich themselves “off the books.” That is how poor countries that can’t actually afford to pay public servants operate: their governments just steal (legally because the thieves make the laws) and the corruption becomes endemic. These countries tend not to have democratic systems. When the country does well, everyone looks the other way. But once things go badly, governments get overthrown. America is not a poor country and we’re a democracy. But the dynamic is the same: we don’t pay our public officials very well and most people will overlook public corruption if things are going well for them. But a system that only exists to enrich a few people at the top won’t last long.
The same logic runs through executive compensation in the private sector, which has grown from generous to almost unaccountable. The mechanics are simple. When a company is performing, shareholders rarely scrutinize what the CEO takes home (in oligarchs we trust). When it stumbles, they start asking questions. But their only real leverage, their decision to sell the stock if executive compensation gets out of line with share value, depends on connecting two facts: what the executives were paid, and what shareholders received for it. Sever that link and the questions stop. You do not have to defend the pay. You just have to make sure no one can measure it against the results.
So it’s no surprise that this is what Trump’s SEC is now proposing. Release No. 33-11419 (May 19, 2026), billed as the largest overhaul of public-company reporting in twenty years, would raise the “large accelerated filer” threshold from $700 million to $2 billion in public float, moving roughly 80% of public companies into a reduced-disclosure tier. Those companies could drop the Compensation Discussion and Analysis, the CEO pay-ratio figure, and the pay-versus-performance table (the one disclosure built to tie pay to results), and could stop holding say-on-pay votes entirely.
None of this happens in a vacuum, and the backlash is already here. Socialists winning real elections is not an accident. It is a reaction to precisely this, the same concentration of wealth that fueled the last socialist bloom a century ago. Around 1910, at the peak of Gilded Age inequality, roughly 1,200 socialists held elected office in this country. Today the number is closer to 100, but it is climbing again for the same reason it climbed then: when a handful of people capture an obscene share of the gains and stop bothering to hide it, everyone else starts shopping for an alternative. I do not think their alternative works. Demand-side economics rarely delivers what it promises, and the places where some version of it has functioned (a few wealthy, homogeneous Scandinavian countries) do not scale (a subject for another day). But the genuinely interesting thing about the American version is not the economics at all. It is that this movement is post-racial. It reads the country through class rather than race, which is a real break from the past and, honestly, a more consequential development than any of its spending plans, most of which will never work as intended.
Whether or not the socialists have the answer, they have correctly read the problem, because we are drifting toward a world where the people who are supposed to be in charge (voters and shareholders) can no longer see enough to hold anyone accountable. Transparency was never a courtesy the powerful hand out when things are going well. It is how the rest of us find out when they are not. Strip it away and the vote does not matter, the sale does not matter, and the disclosure law is a formality. What is left is a single operating principle, quietly running under all of it, from the apportionments database to the proxy statement: in oligarchs we trust.
Keep thinking, keep building,
Jesse
Hi, and welcome to my newsletter! I’m Jesse Strauss, Your Fractional General Counsel. I’m a lawyer with a private practice based in New York City, helping clients in the United States and globally with their U.S. legal needs. My expertise spans various areas, including raising funding rounds, employment issues, negotiating master service agreements, intellectual property, compliance, legal process management, and dispute resolution. My focus is on founding and nurturing great companies from seed to exit. Discover more at YFGC.AI and book a complimentary 30-minute consultation. You can also follow me on Threads @lawyerjesse1977, on BlueSky @lawyerjesse.bsky.social, subscribe to my Substack here, and follow me on LinkedIn here.
Originally published at Fractionally Yours, Jesse's Substack.