Every scandal-filled period of American government exists. Trump’s innovation is to incorporate scandal into the political philosophy. The Trump regime’s corruption is a perversion of American democracy, but the truth is more unsettling: it’s a mirror. It’s open profiteering, using the state as an instrument of vengeance and self-enrichment. Trump’s era and those before it differ in one way: there isn’t corruption, but there is visibility and the nation’s inability to feel scandalized as a result.
In the United States, corruption has been moralized as a disgrace for decades as a disgrace to an otherwise valid system. American capitalism has always depended on the conversion of public office into private profit, from the railroad barons and company towns of the 19th century to Wall Street’s and Washington’s revolving door in the 20th and 21st. The mechanisms of corruption were disguised as professionalism, efficiency, or expertise when politicians became lobbyists and habitual insider traders, corporations wrote legislation, bank executives and political donors received bailouts from the government, and hospital executives became wealthy on public subsidies as their patients and workers fell into precarity. We were taught to value morality in market value and to associate success with it by the neoliberal order.
By the time Trump arrived, corruption was recognized as realism. Trump merely stripped it of its polite fictions in both domestic and foreign policy, where the US has long used language of democracy and human rights to justify its violence. For instance, Trump’s extrajudicial killings of unidentified people by unilateral military strikes in Latin American waters are a naked display of the practice that previous administrations have carried out under the guise of impunity and euphemism. Similar to Trump, there hasn’t been a single instance of brutality or cruelty against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Instead, it was largely a dramatized, made-for-TV adaptation of what Barack Obama pioneered as he developed Tom Homan’s, now-Trump’s so-called border czar career. Obama and Trump both had admirations for Homan, winning him the 2015 Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service in recognition of his passion for detaining immigrants, separating children from their parents, and incarcerating people in detention facilities.
We are already aware that Trump’s corruption and cruelty, including nepotism, grift, self-dealing, the open auctioning of government contracts and justice, serve the wealthy people who own them, whether directly or indirectly through their donations and lobbyists or via networks of influence, bribery, and extortion. A weary acceptance that things have always worked this way replaces the outrage that might have once followed.
In this way, Trump is a revelation as opposed to an aberration. Trump uses capitalism as pure id: unrestrained appetite and unashamed greed, as opposed to earlier administrations who moralized it as a meritocracy to boost the egos of billionaires and the politicians they allowed into power. His corruption is the disavowed truth made flesh rather than a disease of the system.
Legality has been destroyed, but it also contains the psychic structure that once made it seem objectionable. What was once thought to be transgression is now thought to be truth-telling. We are no longer subject to prohibitions, but instead the superego commands us to watch blatant displays of power and our own complicity.
The exposure of corruption does not lead to a collective moral renewal in a society where every aspect of life has been subordinated to the logic of accumulation, where medicine, education, and even care itself are governed by profit. Everyone has a suspicion that there isn’t any moral precedent to defend, which it confirms. The end result is some sort of political paroxysm. We can identify corruption, but we can’t stop it because it would require the dismantling of the very system we’ve been taught to believe is inevitable and the foundation of our country as we know it.
For the same reason, liberal responses to corruption falter. They make no objection to the fact that these values have lost their institutional and cultural foundation, instead appealing to morality, decency, fairness, and honesty. Meanwhile, the right has developed strategies to exploit this emptiness. Trump’s genius lies in his ability to make corruption look like it’s real, and to portray it as being violent like freedom. His supporters are correct to say that corruption permeates elite life and that it is at the source of it. They observe a lack of decadence in bureaucrats as opposed to billionaires and monopolies as immigrants.
If corruption no longer causes a meaningful response, let alone a popular uprising, it’s because, as the Democratic Party claims, “the resistance” has been made profitable. Cynicism is a badge of sophistication, while anger has evolved into a lifestyle. Political criticism and condemnation have been extensively commodified, making them popular in the culture industry, a process that produces aphorisms about tyranny and publishes corrupt politicians’ memoirs alongside. When politics turn into entertainment and outrage turns into a corporate aesthetic, fascism no longer needs to hide its virtue; it simply needs to put on a show that is better than its alleged foes.
Trump’s corruption continues unchecked because no one else notices it, but because they no longer consider it to be possible. After all, to be scandalized is still to believe in a morally righteous world. A society that no longer believes in its own chance of redemption is what we are currently dealing with.
More than just exposing corruption, it will take a lot to rekindle an ethical imagination. It will require investing in forms of collective, reciprocal caregiving that give democratic ethics concrete life and value, as well as creating real public and civic institutions that are meant to serve working-class people as opposed to the interests of the wealthy.
Corruption flourishes in solidarity’s crumbling remains. We must create a society where truth and honesty are not a matter of individual performance but rather of shared public purpose, confrontation with our oppressive past, and real detachment from it.
