The Los Angeles Lakers are one of the marquee sport franchises, and yet they just got flipped like a run-down beach house in Tampa. 

In a move that shocked NBA insiders, Guggenheim Partners CEO Mark Walter, who bought the team less than a year ago for a jaw-dropping $10 billion, just sold the storied squad to former Disney CEO Bob Iber and venture capitalist Josh Kushner for $12 billion. (Kushner is the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared and son of billionaire convicted felon turned Trump-pardoned ambassador Charles Kushner.)

Walter had a reputation as a private equity shark. He also owns the Los Angeles Dodgers—buying the baseball team in 2012 for $2.5 billion—and has spent the last year trying to “merge” the two iconic LA teams—which, in private equity speak, means instituting slash and burn layoffs and squeezing every last penny out of the franchises and their fans for their investors. Among oligarchs and private equity stripminers, he’s considered to be on the cutting edge, known for dramatically overpaying for sports franchises as a way to park money in an asset that historically only rises in value. In the process, Walter has exposed himself as a paper tiger, over-leveraged and searching for financial support to pay for his original Lakers deal and for the Dodgers’s astronomical contracts. The fact that the Lakers compete in a building called Crypto.com Arena is almost too perfect. 

But more important than Walter’s portfolio are his alleged financial felonies, and they are ample. Walter has found himself in the crosshairs of both Todd Blanche’s Department of Justice and the Security and Exchange Commission for over $16 billion in—again, allegedly—improperly reported loans. We shall now see whether selling to Kushner will make Walter’s legal troubles magically go away. Walter needs the $2 billion to pay lawyers, or potentially to settle with the DOJ. That will be up to Blanche, an unqualified, deeply corrupt lackey, who is more Trump’s personal attorney than Attorney General.

And with that, what could be the most lazily choreographed corruption scheme of the Trump era, the president gets another billionaire in his pocket. If he gets a cut from the buy on top of that, no one would be shocked. That’s just business as usual for an administration enriching its own and looting the country. 

This also explains why Walter just brought the Dodgers to the White House over objections from players, the media, and fans. At the ceremony, he even gave Trump a Dodgers World Series ring. Walter may as well have proceeded to kiss it. Future generations will get to debate over whether the open-air corruption of this administration is cartoonishly evil or just indolent. Either way, it serves a political purpose: claim absolute power and dare anyone to say otherwise. The brandishing of impunity in the face of preexisting ethical frameworks is a timeworn expression of despotism.

Selling to Bob Iger, who is more of a figurehead than the moneybags here, also has its advantages. In March, Iger left his post as CEO of Disney, which oversees ESPN, after a dramatic fall from grace. His newfound control of Los Angeles’s glamor franchise represents a return to power for someone who has been on the outside looking in. And so far, the Kushner connection to this deal has gone uninvestigated and underdiscussed at ESPN.

This is not necessarily because of Iger, although one could be forgiven for wondering. But Iger doesn’t even need to call up ESPN HQ to keep it that way. The network has made a dramatic right turn in recent years, with boss Jimmy Pitaro muzzling any political discussion that isn’t MAGA or MAGA-adjacent. They have laid off any journalists or opinion writers with a social conscience while shelling out millions to carnival barker Stephen A. Smith and Pat McAfee—or, as pro-wrestler CM Punk likes to call him, Pat MAGAfee. The editorial position of the network—and their muted journalists—is already built around suppressing any criticism of Kushner and Iger. The MAGA is now baked into what was once the World Wide Leader in sports. Expecting it to hold the powerful to account would be like asking a dog to meow.

NOlympics LA, a local grassroots organization investigating the many ways financial exploitation sneaks into cities through the Trojan Horse of sports, says Kushner is more than just a private equity scion. “Kushner is a slumlord who has helped fund chatGPT and Anduril, the military drone maker run by Palmer Luckey,” said Eric Sheehan, an organizer for NOlympics LA. “The coming together of weapons makers and children’s entertainment to buy and trade legendary sports institutions exclusively as assets ensure fiduciary responsibilities that overwrite any human impulse. As our treasured cultural institutions are encircled and captured by capital, the Lakers being bought by a slumlord who funds AI and military weapons is par for the course.”

In addition to the Trump-adjacent stench, the problem with these ego-driven franchise valuations by private equity is that the people in charge are showing zero regard for the communities where these teams have taken root. One could certainly argue that this has been true of sports since the notorious Walter O’Malley absconded with the Brooklyn Dodgers and brought them to Los Angeles, where they eventually uprooted the working-class Mexican community of Chavez Ravine to build Dodgers Stadium. But now the volume has been turned up to 11. Franchise owners no longer depend upon community support for their profits. Public subsidies, the addiction economy of legalized gambling, and, most of all, broadcast TV rights provide the revenue streams, and if there are greater cable deals and taxpayer-funded stadium plans in other cities, then goodbye to the hometown squad. It’s pitiless profiteering for the rich, abandoned stadiums or prohibitive ticket prices for the rest of us.