Corruption overload

In October 2011, I went to Russia to do reporting for my book about Vladimir Nabokov. Two of my days there, a graduate student named Fyodor walked with me around St. Petersburg, where Nabokov had been born and spent his childhood.

That trip took place only months before Vladimir Putin, who’d been president before, would return to that office, though he had effectively remained in power as prime minister in his four years away from it.

Walking miles together, Fyodor and I talked about the relative state of our countries. We agreed Russia was more of a nightmare politically, and he underlined it by saying something along the lines of “Until an American president associates with criminal motorcycle gangs, you will never be able to compete with our government's malice and corruption."

I thought of his words again with a sense of dread more than a decade later when, when Chuck Zito, the former head of the Hells Angels, sat in attendance at Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in New York last year. It wasn’t just that motorcycle gangs can be mafia-style syndicates—or that Trump was associating with bad people. He’d certainly done that before.

No. This was an escalation. In his embrace of corruption that seeks to supplant independent justice and open society with thug enforcers and a warped economy of bribes and favors, Trump doesn’t just want to be a player, able to operate in unlawful ways in illicit spaces—he wants to run the whole game

Unfortunately, it’s clear that Trump has now taken us a good way down that road and is driving the country farther in that direction in just his first week. As we can see from him trying to flex presidential power to turn off the delivery of funds that have already been appropriated by Congress, already playing the enforcer in his deportation flight drama, his corruption is accelerating at an alarming rate. So today, I’m going to talk about the different kinds of corruption happening right now and what we can do about them.

Racism is corruption

To be clear, I’m focusing on the mechanics of corruption today, but that’s not to say that dealing with corruption alone is the answer. Trump’s deliberate invocations of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and the scapegoating of queer communities are also a key part of the engine of corruption, and serve as the rationale by which part of the population can be convinced to allow corrupt actors into the system, and corruption to take hold.

We’re going to have to address those as a country, too, but one way to get people engaged and working together and avoid getting mired in culture-war arguments in ways that only help the people deploying hateful rhetoric is to talk about who is paying the price for the policies they’re pushing. Because it’s almost all of us.

So today, I’ll mostly focus on the kinds of corruption and how to disrupt them. I want to look at the corruption of information, the corruption of politicians and the political process, the corruption of the legal system, the corruption of the office of the presidency, the corruption of everyday life, and the old-fashioned grift that Trump thrives on, which is at the heart of a lot of these other kinds of corruption. The stage was set for what’s happening today long before Trump.

Corruption of information

One of the most reliable means to corrupt a democracy is through displacing journalism with propaganda, or at the very least deluging the public in a slush of both that dilutes the ability to know what is happening at any given moment and why.

The roots of propaganda in the U.S. are deep, but they received a huge boost in the last decades of the twentieth century. Longtime head of Fox News Roger Ailes had begun a political career as Richard Nixon’s executive producer for television during the latter’s 1968 campaign. In between Nixon and the founding of Fox News, however, came a watershed moment that would change the whole journalistic landscape for broadcast media.

In 1980s, the FCC under Ronald Reagan released broadcasters from the Fairness doctrine. This doctrine had required equal airtime and balanced coverage for “conflicting views on issues of public importance” in broadcasting and had entered law in part with changes to the Communications Act in 1959.

The doctrine was repealed in 1987, though some elements of it continued to be enforced until 2000. So it’s after 1987 that the contemporary corruption of the U.S. information sphere begin in earnest. The following year, 1988, Rush Limbaugh’s political commentary on radio became nationally syndicated. If anyone at the time missed the link between the two events, it was made apparent later in a Wall Street Journal editorial, explaining as only that editorial board could, that “Rush Limbaugh was the first man to proclaim himself liberated from the East Germany of liberal media domination."

Other propaganda-style reporting outlets weren’t far behind. Rupert Murdoch unleashed Fox News on America in 1996, with Roger Ailes at the helm. Though not officially state propaganda, Fox functioned as effectively an appendage of the Republican Party, though Murdoch seemed to direct occasional forays against it to create pressure to conform to his will. A nation of grandparents’ minds, along with their votes, were captured.

The collapse of print newspapers began for reasons unrelated to the Fairness Doctrine, but the catastrophic drop in subscribers and advertising revenue in recent decades has led the footprint of reported, actual news to shrink dramatically, increasing the roles of propagandized local and national broadcasts in other media. In addition, with online technology, the massive production of garbage content has become breathtakingly easy. We are drowning in a literal shitload of information, most of it terrible, and much of it targeting gullible consumers, for financial ends, political gain, or both. The corruption of the information sphere is becoming more and more the norm. Many Americans don’t get any news at all, even on television.

And now significant chunks of the information sphere are controlled by billionaires. The Washington Post under Jeff Bezos is just one tragic example. And as J.P. Hill wrote this week about Mark Zuckerberg, “Facebook has 3 billion users worldwide, Instagram has over 2 billion, and WhatsApp also has 3 billion. This one man has a greater impact on our communications than anyone else on Earth.”

The financial corruption of the billionaire class and their cozying up to Trump further degrade access to news that matters. None of these kinds of corruption I’m detailing today are independent of one other. And it's not just the information landscape that’s involved.

 Corruption of the legal system

In a democracy, a core concept is that the ruler has to submit to the law, that leaders are accountable to the people in how they rule and carry out their duties. Due in part to a long line of unaccountable presidents, this has become a shocking, unreachable standard right now in the United States.

Think of Nixon being pardoned by Ford. Think of the Iran-Contra affair, where George H.W. Bush pardoned his colleagues from the Reagan administration. Think of the lack of accountability at any high level for the government embrace of torture and black sites in the war on terror, or for the launching of preemptive war against Iraq. Trump’s invulnerability didn’t come out of nowhere.

And now, the basic standard met by so many other countries—the ability to hold a leader to account, is missing here. France has done it twice. Brazil is doing it. South Korean justice took another step in recent days when impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol was indicted.

But here in the US, Trump has spent the last several years escaping legal penalties and is further corrupting the very ability of the country to ever hold him accountable again. We need to face honestly the historic nature of the destruction of the rule of law in American life. He’s pardoned or otherwise mitigated consequences for the brownshirt-wannabes who tried to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021—effectively extending the lawlessness down to individual and local actors, as well as encouraging a paramilitary group willing to meet his extrajudicial political needs.

The shackling of the Department of Justice by stripping it of independence and the move to steamroll and eliminate the inspectors general at various agencies, if they’re successful, will make the president completely unaccountable in any direct way to the people.

Political corruption

In theory, the judicial and the legislative branches still have the ability to check Trump, and these are possibilities we shouldn’t surrender completely just because they’re more unlikely now. Yet it has to be acknowledged that the corruption of the Republican Party and its representatives in both chambers of Congress is complete.

Trump proved skilled—in the way that a neighborhood bully is skilled—at bringing to heel anyone of stature in his own party who might have been able to act against him, at compromising them and diminishing their authority. Think of Mitt Romney’s sheepish photo at a fancy dinner with Trump after having called him a con man and a fraud. More recently, recall RFK Jr. sitting in front of a mess of McDonald’s on a plane with Trump after decrying the former president’s food choices as poison and promising to make the country healthy again. Or the generals who stood next to Trump in the moment, perhaps telling themselves they were holding the line from inside the system, only to find their later condemnations of him have no effect.

Trump insulted competitors Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, only to win their unwavering support after they realized the hold he had on the party. Through name-calling and his own theatrical shamelessness, he has exposed Republican, and even Democratic politicians, as cowards.

Political corruption has always existed. But it has expanded dramatically in the last fifteen years, with the current staggering levels of political corruption largely made possible by the intrusion of dark money into political campaigning. The Supreme Court decision in Citizens United in 2010 overturned a hundred-year-old precedent and allowed unlimited money in political campaigns, arguing that corporations have speech rights too.

As the Brennan Center reported, “But perhaps the most significant outcomes of Citizens United have been the creation of super PACs, which empower the wealthiest donors, and the expansion of dark money through shadowy nonprofits that don’t disclose their donors.”

This, I would argue, serves to corrupt government, bending it to serve the ultra wealthy, and to do it with little or no transparency about harms to American citizens, who is benefitting from this infusion, how it’s changing government, or even that it’s happening.

Even more dispiriting in terms of corruption is what seems tantamount to open bribery with several supreme court justices who have received lavish vacations, indirect financial support, or other benefits from wealthy benefactors, with no mechanism to hold them to account in the ways available for use against sitting legislators or judges at every other level of the country’s judicial system.

Abuse of the presidency

It’s not just the legislature and the courts that are furthering corruption—the office of the president is being abused like never before. Which is saying something, because the imperial presidency has overreached on power pretty consistently across my entire lifetime, and well before it.

But Trump is going the extra mile, abrogating alliances and working against the interests of the United States, ending the Paris Treaty and threatening NATO, without any of the kind of continuity that has led the U.S. to be seen as a stable partner going forward.

Trump takes that corruption farther, by mingling nearly every action as the nation’s leader with those which will benefit him financially. His son-in-law received a $2 billion investment from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who is implicated in the murder of a Washington Post columnist. The Trump organization is attempting to reacquire the prior location of the Trump Hotel open in DC during his last administration. A list of ways his family has tried to monetize or benefit financially from the office could go on for hundreds of pages.

Perhaps even worse than Trump’s personal greed is the way it enables outsize political influence from others. Elon Musk contributed a quarter-billion dollars to help Trump get elected in November, and subsequently found himself the head of an imaginary government agency. After flattery and million-dollar donations to Trump’s inaugural campaign, Zuckerberg and Bezos found themselves seated with Musk in front of Trump’s cabinet nominees for the event.

Money-back guarantee

The pardons unleashed some political extremists willing to do violence in Trump’s name. Their freedom and lack of consequences for that violence will go further toward corrupting politicians, who have already acknowledged they are afraid for themselves and their families.

It’s easy to imagine the moral corruption of hateful ideology and financial gain through corruption as separate somehow, but in truth, some of the most ideological and repressive regimes were incredibly corrupt and self-dealing, just like the countries that have historically been referred to as mafia states. Nazi Germany had tremendous levels of corruption, not only in theft from German Jews but also in self-dealing among the most powerful figures in the Reich. The Soviet Union under Communism and post-Soviet Russia have both seen staggering levels of greed.

Which Trump has embraced right here in the U.S. as well, pushing a society which has always privileged the interests of the wealthy closer to a pure oligarchy in which the people have less and less means by which to rule themselves.

In sum, Trump has corrupted every aspect of political and legal life in America. And all of that corruption is aimed at helping to create a political and economic class that controls everything about the country’s daily existence while remaining untouchable.

So what to do about it?

First, the bad news: Once a society becomes deeply corrupted, so that everyday life is affected across the board, it’s very hard to unwind. A 2018 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace looked at corruption around the world and successful efforts to fight against it. It outlined seven examples, but noted that only one, Burkina Faso, had successfully implemented structural reform and not just specific, smaller-gauge reforms. In the years since that report, Burkina Faso has had multiple military coups.

Pete Hegseth was just confirmed as Secretary of Defense, and this is not a good thing for the country. One saving grace is that for now, Trump does not have the U.S. military willing to back him with the kind of open force exerted in Burkina Faso.

More on bright sides

One other piece of good news is that the U.S. is still far less corrupt than many countries where I’ve gone for research. Even if it’s not possible to undo the current trends here completely, we can slow or stop the degradation on a national level. We can still call or write our elected representatives and demand better from them. There are a lot of places where it is impossible to do this.

And even if it’s difficult to keep up with or take on corruption nationally, it’s often much easier to limit it locally. In that Carnegie study, civilians were able to make a difference in a lot of ways on a smaller scale or with specific initiatives.

And by building little communities to tackle local transparency and information gathering, people create potential future networks and leaders to lead on the bigger issues. Often just bringing attention to how money is spent and who gets it can diminish the levels of local corruption.

Independent news outlets are key—if you have money, offer financial support for those doing shoe-leather monitoring. Bolts magazine has been fantastic on electoral issues and grass-roots initiatives for change. Check for local independent coverage like the 51st News, a worker-led nonprofit news source about life in Washington, DC. Or look for outlets focused on specific topics, like the 19th News, reporting gender, politics, and policy. Look near you to see what might be available in your area.

And if there’s no good coverage of your community, you can create what’s missing. Get a group of friends to take turns attending school board meetings and writing them up. Start a newsletter that covers your local services, even intermittently. Look at rules for candidacy in your local elections. Consider running for them. Make sure meetings that are required to be public are held in public.

Look around. The U.S. has a long history of amazing reforms led by civilians, from the workplace to voting and almost every aspect of civic life. There may already be people with experience doing the thing you want to do near you. You may have an existing community to join. If not, you can talk to others in other places who will help you make it.

Everybody knows that corrupt systems thrive on suckers. And no one wants to be the mark. The more we can call attention to the corruption in the system on every level and how it benefits the powerful, the harder it is to fool people, and the easier it is to get them to join in and demand change.

Your paid subscriptions support my work.