Editorials of The Times

President Donald Trump’s White House has been so scandal-plagued that controversies involving Cabinet members and other high-level officials that would have been front-page news in any other administration have barely registered in the public consciousness.

Where to begin? Trump officials have been accused of wasting taxpayer dollars when they travel for work — or, in the case of one Cabinet secretary, when they travel for a work trip-cum-European vacation. Others have appeared to misuse their positions to benefit special interests and political allies. Then there are those who have conscripted family members to help them do their jobs, possibly under the mistaken belief that it takes a village of people with the same last name to run a government department.

Perhaps we should not be surprised by these ethical lapses, given that the president himself has little interest in ethical niceties. He has refused to disclose his tax returns or divest businesses that may create conflicts of interest between Trump the executive and Trump the president. And he has given his daughter and son-in-law, who have no government experience, plum White House jobs.

Here are some of the recent scandals in Trumpland that deserve greater public scrutiny, or even congressional hearings and investigations.

Scott Pruitt, the champion of fossil fuel interests who is busily trying to destroy the Environmental Protection Agency, and his aides have made the ludicrous argument in recent days that he must fly first class because he is not safe in economy. This has elicited howls of laughter from aviation experts. Pruitt and his staff have racked up a tab totaling many thousands of dollars for domestic and international trips, including $1,641 for a brief flight from Washington to New York. Pruitt told The New Hampshire Union Leader that he has to travel in the front of the cabin because people in coach are mean to him. “We’ve reached the point where there’s not much civility in the marketplace, and it’s created, you know, it’s created some issues,” he said.

In other travel news, the secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, David Shulkin, last week struggled to explain why the government spent $4,000 to fly his wife to Europe so she could accompany him for what was supposed to be a trip to attend a conference on veterans’ issues. Turns out, the happy couple spent nearly half the trip checking out sites like Amalienborg Palace in Copenhagen and Buckingham Palace in London. Oh, and they also improperly accepted free tickets to watch a tennis match at Wimbledon, according to the VA’s inspector general. Shulkin said he was repaying the Treasury for the cost of his wife’s ticket, though not before producing an unusual 28-page rebuttal to the inspector general’s report.

At the Federal Communications Commission, Chairman Ajit Pai is under fire from Democrats in Congress for relaxing rules that restrict how many local TV stations a business can own in one market, weeks before a large conservative broadcaster, Sinclair, announced it was acquiring more stations by buying Tribune Media. The commission denies any wrongdoing, but has refused to respond to members of Congress who have sought information about Pai’s contacts with Sinclair executives. The Times reported in August that the chairman and his staff met and corresponded with Sinclair several times. Earlier, The New York Post reported that Trump had met with Sinclair officials and discussed the FCC rules. Clearly, there is nothing to see here.

It is hard to get good help when unemployment is at 4.1 percent. Perhaps that’s why Ben Carson, the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, saw fit to let his son, Ben Carson Jr., organize a “listening tour” for the secretary in Baltimore, despite warnings from department lawyers that doing so could violate ethics rules. One lawyer wrote in a memo that the son’s involvement could give “the appearance that the secretary may be using his position for his son’s private gain” because his son and his son’s wife might be doing or seeking business with people invited to attend events on the tour, according to The Washington Post. The secretary says that he and his family did nothing wrong and that they were “under attack by the media."

This is hardly a complete list. We haven’t even gotten to the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, his wife, Louise Linton, and their penchant for traveling on military planes when far cheaper options are available. And there are Trump appointees like Tom Price, the former health and human services secretary, and Brenda Fitzgerald, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who have had to bail out of the administration because of scrutiny they were under for expensive air travel (Price) and dubious investments (Fitzgerald).

During the election, Trump said he would stock his administration with “the best people in the world.” That is working out about as well as his promise to turn Trump University students into successful real estate investors.

The Trump administration acted in bad faith last year when it suggested that cities with corrupt police departments could fix the problem without federal oversight and when it tried to derail a police reform agreement that Baltimore had negotiated with the federal government in the waning days of the Obama administration.

The argument that Baltimore might be able to remake its grotesquely corrupt police department without federal help was blown apart Feb. 12, when a federal jury convicted two detectives of robbery and racketeering charges in a trial that has exposed pervasive corruption in the department.

The city’s elite Gun Trace Task Force has been gripped by a conspiracy in which officers covered for one another as they stole property, narcotics and money from people, some of whom had committed no crimes and had earned the money lawfully. In addition, the officers filed false reports that allowed some to pilfer vast amounts of overtime, doubling their salaries, and those who were convicted testified to seizing weapons that were subsequently sold on the street — a cardinal outrage in a city wracked by gun violence.

The Feb. 12 convictions follow guilty pleas by six other officers in connection with the case, and as The Baltimore Sun reported Feb. 6, the officers and other witnesses have now implicated a dozen additional colleagues, so more charges could be in the offing.

What makes the guilty officers’ conduct particularly brazen is that much of it occurred during a separate federal investigation into police practices, an inquiry begun in the wake of the protests and rioting that followed the death of Freddie Gray, a young African-American man who died of a broken spine suffered in police custody in 2015.

That investigation revealed an abusive form of policing, vindicating black Baltimoreans who had complained for years that they were being stopped, frisked and even arrested without cause. These practices destroyed public confidence in law enforcement, paving the way for the fiery outrage that followed Gray’s death.

Congress had cases like this one in mind in 1994 when it gave the Justice Department the authority to restructure troubled police departments that were clearly unable of root out corruption and brutality on their own. Using this authority, the Obama Justice Department negotiated a sweeping agreement that requires Baltimore to undertake a wide range of reforms, including better training and technology, community oversight and transparency measures.

A federal judge in April 2017 rejected the Trump Justice Department’s attempt to delay court approval of the agreement, known as a consent decree, which the city’s civic leaders say is absolutely essential to overhauling a police department that has a long-standing reputation for abusing the people it is meant to protect — and that has failed, at every level, to contain lawlessness in the ranks that should have been visible to everyone in charge.

The monitor who was appointed by the court to determine if and when Baltimore has fulfilled the terms of the consent decree needs to keep those failures foremost in mind.