What did Donald Trump do today?

He got sued for his domestic corruption while he brought his family's private business to China.

Trump has been revealing increasingly gaudy plans for his future presidential "library" in Miami, although by his own insistence, it won't actually have a library. Instead, Trump envisions it as a 50-story for-profit hotel atop a "presidential center" featuring giant golden statues of him. (These are not to be confused with the giant golden statue he's recently had installed at one of his golf courses.) 

Screenshot from AI-generated Trump video announcing the "library"

Presidential centers—that is, the bottom floors of Trump's proposed hotel—are privately-funded nonprofits. Trump, whose fraudulent New York charity was shut down and dissolved after he was caught using it for any number of illegal activities, has been using these kinds of entities as pay-for-access bribes, from his inauguration fund to the one for his pet "ballroom" project. 

But that isn't the corruption that got him sued today in Florida. Instead, it's the massive $300 million giveaway of valuable public land belonging to Miami Dade College that Trump-friendly governor Ron DeSantis and his handpicked college trustees has engineered in an apparent attempt to curry favor with him. Trump himself called it "the best block in Miami," and that's probably not far from the truth in economic terms. 

The parcel is almost certainly worth more than MDC's entire endowment. DeSantis's appointees sold it to Trump's presidential center for $10. Trump has always struggled to turn a profit with hotels, even with the help of decades of fraud to prop them up, to say nothing of his habit of forcing the US government to pay top-dollar rents to them. In spite of those illegal and gray-area advantages, he's famously bankrupted many of his hospitality properties while others strugglefra. But a hotel built on free land in a major tourist destination would have an enormous advantage over all other competition.

Trump didn't comment on the corruption lawsuit today: he was busy flying to China for a visit with its president, Xi Jinping. Traveling with him was his son Eric, a private citizen whose company is actively pursuing a deal with the Chinese government to build data centers in the United States.

Why does this matter?

• Corruption is always bad, even when Americans have gotten used to it from Trump. 

• When you have to buy the president's attention, only the corrupt and powerful will benefit.