Every time Donald Trump has run for president, he has vowed to drain the swamp in Washington. But ever since he returned to the White House, not only has he not even tried to drain the swamp, he has pushed to gild it. Trump has used all the gold and glitz he can to cover up an increasingly putrid swamp – a morass filled with million-dollar donors scrambling for access, criminals seeking to buy pardons, corporate executives appointed to high-level government jobs and billionaire sycophants sucking up to Trump.

Making the swamp smell even worse, the president and his sons have somehow managed, through crypto and other means, to increase their wealth by an estimated $4bn since Trump won a second term. At this point, we should probably call Trump’s Washington not a swamp, but a colossal cesspool.

For the sake of accuracy, Trump should put a big neon sign outside the White House saying: “Conflicts of Interest R Us”. Trump pardoned a crypto billionaire who, through some behind-the-scenes maneuvering, helped increase the value of the Trump family’s crypto company, World Liberty Financial, by roughly $2bn. After Trump’s campaign and affiliated Pacs received a gusher of donations from oil and gas companies, an estimated $75m, Trump gutted environmental regulations that the fossil fuel industry disliked, while also pushing to undermine electric vehicles as well as solar and wind power.

The Trump family’s conflicts of interest have escalated during the US war with Iran. Trump’s oldest sons, Don Jr and Eric, are investors in a drone manufacturer that has sought to sell drones to Gulf states that have faced attacks from Iran and depend on the Trump administration for military aid. In a move that several Democrats called “corruption in plain sight”, the Pentagon awarded a $24m contract last month to a robotics startup – Eric is the company’s “chief strategy adviser” – to test an android with the US Marine Corps.

According to the New York Times, even as Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner serves as a top Middle East peace envoy, his investment firm, Affinity Partners, has been seeking to raise $5bn, with Affinity representatives meeting in recent months with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. That conflict of interest seems all the more egregious considering that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has repeatedly urged Trump to attack Iran to destroy its hardline regime.

“This is going to be the first family of a president to make a lot of money off war,” Richard Painter, a White House ethics lawyer under George W Bush, told the Associated Press. (The White House denies any Trump family conflicts of interest.)

A particularly putrid part of the swamp involves Trump’s ties with Jeffrey Epstein, a one-time buddy. While running for president, Trump vowed to release the Epstein files, but after he won, he dismissed calls to release them. The files became public only after a bipartisan congressional petition effort forced their release.

Trump’s planned gilded ballroom – with an estimated price of more than $400m – has become a huge swamp in itself. Trump’s money machine has hit up corporations and billionaires for millions in donations that are often made with the hope, even the expectation, that donors will receive important favors in return. Since Trump won a second term, he and his allies have raised almost $2bn for his pet causes and projects, including the ballroom. According to a New York Times study, 346 donors have given at least $250,000 each to Trump’s projects and causes, and more than half of those donors or their industries have benefited from subsequent actions or statements by Trump or his administration. Take the tech company Palantir, which donated $10m to the ballroom. Palantir already has hundreds of millions in federal contracts and hopes to win more to help build Trump’s $1.2tn “Golden Dome” missile defense project.

Remember back when Trump boasted that he’s so rich that “I don’t need anybody’s money”? Well, Elon Musk gave a record $270m-plus to support Trump’s 2024 campaign, and soon after, Trump appointed the world’s richest person to head the slash-and-burn “department of government efficiency”. Meanwhile, Musk’s SpaceX company continued to win billions of dollars in federal contracts.

Billionaire Larry Ellison, a major donor to Republican causes, helped his son David’s Skydance company acquire CBS (and its parent Paramount), a move that has made CBS News gentler toward Trump. The president later gave Oracle, a company Ellison co-founded, a big stake in TikTok’s US operations.

Jeff Bezos took some particularly malodorous actions that benefited Trump. He neutered the Washington Post’s liberal editorial page, and his company Amazon spent $40m for the rights to Melania Trump’s widely panned documentary. The company later spent $35m more to market it. And now smarmy, swampy Amazon might bankroll a new version of The Apprentice starring Don Jr. In Trump’s first term, the Pentagon awarded a $10bn cloud computing contract to Microsoft even though Amazon had been considered the frontrunner. Amazon sued to block the contract, asserting that the Pentagon had wrongly bowed to pressures from Trump. The Pentagon insisted that the award was fair and followed all rules. (A judge ended the lawsuit after the Pentagon dropped the contract.) In good news for Bezos, this past January Amazon Web Services won a $581m cloud computing contract from the US Air Force. And last October, Bezos’s company Blue Origin won a $190m contract to take Nasa’s lunar rover to the moon.

Trump has repeatedly used his pardon powers in extremely swampy ways. After a woman donated $3.5m to Trump’s Maga Inc Super Pac, the president pardoned her father, who faced charges of bribing Puerto Rico’s governor. Soon after, a healthcare executive attended a $1m-a-guest fundraising dinner with the president, and Trump pardoned her son, Paul Walczak. As a result, Walczak, convicted of embezzling employees’ withholding taxes, didn’t have to pay nearly $4.4m in restitution or report to prison for his 18-month sentence. Last October, Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the crypto billionaire who helped increase World Liberty Financial’s value by nearly $2bn – Zhao had spent four months in prison after pleading guilty to money-laundering charges.

In a enthusiastic dive into the oil-and-gas swamp, Trump has filled his administration with fossil fuel executives and lobbyists and killed many environmental regulations that fight global heating. According to one study, Trump has named 43 people who were employed by oil, gas or coal companies to serve in his administration, including in the energy department, the interior department and the EPA. The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, was the CEO of a fracking company.

Last May, in an egregious money-making venture for a sitting president, Trump held a 220-person dinner for people who spent more than $1m per seat on average to buy Trump’s cryptocurrency. Trump has fully embraced the crypto industry, adopting myriad crypto-friendly rules and sharply rolling back the Biden administration’s enforcement efforts against that scandal-plagued industry. Trump and his three sons jumped into bed with the crypto industry by co-founding World Liberty Financial.

Let’s not forget that, in part apparently to minimize investigations of his administration’s swampy shenanigans, Trump fired more than 15 independent inspectors general. If those agency officials were still in office, they would probably be blowing the whistle on many Trump administration conflicts of interest and ethical messes.

Dear reader, I’m sorry if I’ve made you hold your nose while reading this. It all stinks. And I haven’t even mentioned that Don Jr sought to cash in on daddy’s second term by co-founding a swank private club in Georgetown called Executive Branch (a name that shouts conflict of interest). Memberships cost a stratospheric $500,000.

I wish I could send some air freshener to every reader to reduce the swampy smell. But frankly, the only thing that will reduce the stink in the foreseeable future will be for Democrats to win control of the House, and hopefully the Senate, too. That way they can use Congress’s investigative powers to shine a probing spotlight on Trump’s cesspool of corruption and conflicts of interest. A slew of subpoenas and congressional hearings could be a real start to draining the swamp.

• Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues