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The completion of the Paramount Payoff, i.e., the company’s decision to settle a frivolous lawsuit brought by Donald Trump in the hopes of getting his administration to sign off on a merger, has given us a whole new appreciation for all presidents who came before him.

Apparently, it is quite easy to coerce businesses into offering barely concealed bribes, cajole entire countries into bestowing lavish gifts on commanders-in-chief, and use campaign donations for personal benefit.

And it also doesn’t seem difficult to abuse executive powers for other corrupt purposes, to turn the White House into a personal gift shop, and to engage in all kinds of grifts.

Kudos to all who preceded Trump for having resisted the temptation to do any of the above.

It doesn’t even matter how you feel about the ex-presidents and their politics.

Yes, George W. Bush maneuvered the US into the Iraq war under false pretenses, and tens of thousands of people lost their lives as a result, but he didn’t sell Bush-branded bibles at $60 a pop.

And Barack Obama may have “socialized health care,” but he never made lawmakers stay at Barack and Michelle’s B&B, launched “Barack Bucks,” or got a jet from a foreign country.

We are not trying to sound facetious here.

They, and just about every other president in history, did what they did because they believed that it was the right thing to do, not because they expected some kind of a payoff or were looking for personal gratification.

With Trump, it’s the opposite.

Everything he is doing is for his own benefit in some way, and he does it in the grossest and most odious manner possible. 

And what is equally gross is how many individuals, companies, officials, and countries are going along with it. 

In the case of Paramount, Trump had sued because CBS’s 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris. Mind you, Trump’s own Fox News interviews are heavily edited all the time to take out some of the weird things he says, and it’s tough to see how he would have prevailed in court. 

But the lawsuit was always more about intimidating a news organization and shaking down its parent company. And, since Paramount plans a multi-billion dollar merger, it worked. 

In the end, Trump received $16 million dollars to cover his legal costs, with any money left over going to his presidential library. And you better believe that some of that money will flow into the president’s own pockets once that is being built. 

For example, maybe that “library” will be housed in a Trump property and charged 50 times the ordinary rent. Or it will be made out of leftover Trump sneakers, bibles, perfume bottles, books, etc. 

But, of course, this isn’t about that frivolous lawsuit at all. Instead, it’s about Trump using his authority to block the planned merger of Paramount and the Hollywood studio Skydance.

Everybody involved understands that the $16 million is just the price that Paramount is paying to grease the wheels a bit. 

And everybody understands that this is just how things work now. If you want Trump to do something for you, you have to find a way to line his pockets.

The president isn’t even hiding it. He is just grifting in plain sight… and everybody goes along with it.

If he were any other president in history, the country would be in an uproar, but it’s so apparent that Trump is corrupt that nobody is even batting an eye anymore, no matter how unethical (at best) and illegal the things are that he does.

In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.