What did Donald Trump do today?

He sold corporate access to a White House Easter event for children.

The White House held an Easter egg roll today. This is an Easter Monday tradition that dates back to the 1870s. But in a sharp break with tradition, Trump sold corporate advertising rights to it.

The event is normally sponsored by an egg industry group specifically to avoid the problem of turning the People's House into a billboard. Also, the budget is modest to begin with—even with the price of eggs astronomically high due to an uncontrolled avian flu outbreak—because the White House hosts events of this scale almost every day. 

But this year, Trump charged corporate sponsors as much as $200,000 for "custom 30'x30' branded activation" in an event space seen mostly by children. The more likely appeal to the companies that paid up, which include the parent companies of Facebook, Google, and Amazon, is that the ad packages came bundled with private meetings to Trump and his wife.

Trump routinely sells access to himself and those with influence over him, a practice that goes back to at least the start of his first term. 

The event comes alongside new reporting on the quarter-billion dollars Trump's inaugural committee took in, an astronomical amount that is nowhere near what could have been spent on the inauguration festivities themselves. (Most of those costs are borne by the government, and in any event Trump moved the inauguration itself inside for fear of once again drawing embarrassingly small crowds.) Trump made a show of demanding—and getting—money for that committee from prominent businesses.

There are relatively few limitations on what Trump can do with the hundreds of millions of dollars left over in that fund, provided it is laundered through a non-profit organization like his presidential library. (Trump and several family members are currently forbidden from serving on a non-profit board in the state of New York without its permission, due to his involvement in the sham charity known as the Trump Foundation, but he can exert influence indirectly.) 

Meanwhile, paying money into what amounts to a slush fund for Trump seems to have been a good investment. At least 19 big-ticket corporate donors have seen criminal or civil cases against them dropped, stalled, or resolved in their favor in just the first three months since Trump's second term began.

Why does this matter?

• Selling access to people in power is the definition of corruption.

• Getting things in exchange for giving money to politicians is the definition of bribery.