With the U.S. midterm elections less than 100 days away, the focus of much of the country’s politics will turn to questions such as how quickly Donald Trump, like most two-term U.S. presidents before him, will be transformed into a lame duck, and what the results could mean for gaming out who will succeed him in two years.
As compelling as questions like these are, there are other matters, equally or even more weighty, that will shape the country’s future and its place in the world. Whatever one thinks of Trump, future historians will probably conclude that he was one of the most consequential leaders the country has ever had. Trump, no doubt, would agree with this appraisal. Consequential, unfortunately, does not equate with “good.”
With the U.S. midterm elections less than 100 days away, the focus of much of the country’s politics will turn to questions such as how quickly Donald Trump, like most two-term U.S. presidents before him, will be transformed into a lame duck, and what the results could mean for gaming out who will succeed him in two years.
As compelling as questions like these are, there are other matters, equally or even more weighty, that will shape the country’s future and its place in the world. Whatever one thinks of Trump, future historians will probably conclude that he was one of the most consequential leaders the country has ever had. Trump, no doubt, would agree with this appraisal. Consequential, unfortunately, does not equate with “good.”
Despite his campaign slogan promising to “Make America Great Again,” Trump’s eventual successor will likely spend much time and energy reckoning with the serious damage that he has wrought to the country’s democracy—and the sapping of U.S. power, influence, and global standing that has accompanied it.
To understand this, one need only think of the United States’ weakened Atlantic and Pacific alliances, which have been the envy of rival powers since the start of the postwar era. But that is only for starters. Think also of the way that Trump has attacked or degraded incarnations of unmatched U.S. excellence, such as the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the research science and higher-education infrastructure that has long led the world.
Think of Trump’s unrelenting attacks on the U.S. press, which by tradition has rightly been seen with pride as the Fourth Estate of the country’s democratic system. And think of the way he has given comfort to authoritarians such as Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and Hungary’s former leader, Viktor Orban, who was recently defeated at the polls despite unusually direct support from Washington. Available examples are not limited to small or modest-sized powers such as these. Trump has praised strongman types—when not openly envying them—for their personalized power, and this includes leaders of the country’s most powerful rival nations, Russia and China.
One could supply ever more examples of ways in which Trump has weakened traditional sources of U.S. strength or overturned the country’s attachment to democratic values, including human rights, due process, the rule of law, and ethnic inclusion. Yet it is worth paying special attention to another form of self-weakening for which Trump has few, if any, precedents: the corruption, both personal and systemic, that he has embodied and favored. Decades hence, scholars looking back may treat this as the most important source of rot of all.
This column’s topic has loomed on my radar for months now without being written. This is not due to procrastination, or even the crush of other important news. Rather, it is because each time I have begun to frame the ongoing corruption crisis in my mind, breathtaking new examples of ethical decay in and around the U.S. government have come to light. In other words, the problem is so big that one struggles to wrap one’s arms around it.
Some of this corruption centers, naturally enough, on the vast and unprecedented expansion of Trump’s personal wealth during his second term, with press reports commonly placing this northward of $2.2 billion. This derives, in part, from numerous active investments. Putting aside questions of legality, Trump has benefited from more trades executed in his name than all of the members of Congress combined.
Trump has brushed off criticism of this by trying to pose as a disinterested everyman, saying that his growing wealth is just like that of the rest of society, or at least that of the many millions of Americans who invest in traditional retirement vehicles such as 401(k)s.
This cynically overlooks the fact that some of his big policy plays have involved powerful companies that do huge and active business with his government, such as Paramount, Oracle, Dell, and Palantir, to name but a few. The founders or owners of many of these companies are people with personal friendships or political relationships with Trump, whose businesses stand to benefit from being in his good graces. They form a small part of a vast and shady universe of corporate bosses, both in the United States and abroad, who have funneled large sums into what the Wall Street Journalcalled “a sprawling network of nonprofits, cultural institutions and committees that [Trump] and his allies control.”
If this sounds familiar, it is because Trump has a demonstrated genius for mobilizing enormous amounts of money in support of his political projects. The most brazen of these involved amassing $1.8 billion in taxpayer money for what critics have called a slush fund to reward people who believe they have been unfairly prosecuted in federal courts, including those who had been charged for crimes in association with the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol to overturn the results of Trump’s defeat at the polls against Joe Biden. In its initial formulation, the fund would also have allowed Trump and members of his current or previous government to seek compensation. For now, at least, the fund appears stalled, because of both legal challenges and Republican senators withholding their support for congressional funding of the scheme.
Such blatant political use of public funds, however, may not have even been the most corrupt element of this scheme. A supplement, or rider, to the agreement to establish the $1.8 billion financial vehicle may have been the main goal all along, as it would broadly bar the government from investigating or prosecuting Trump, his family, or his businesses for tax violations.
As a candidate for reelection in 2024, Trump and the conservative media establishment that supported him made a major cause célèbre of the corruption supposedly endemic to Biden and his family. Its consistent focal point was the president’s son Hunter Biden, who was criticized relentlessly for allegedly profiteering through association with the White House. I feel no need to make a case here for the Bidens, but whatever abuses they may have committed by way of influence peddling—for which no crimes were ever charged—in monetary scale, they are tremendously surpassed by the business deals involving certain Trump family members.
Trump’s wife, Melania, earned at least $28 million from Amazon in licensing fees for a flattering biopic about her that was seen by few, raising questions about whether this was an attempt by the company to gain influence in the White House. Donald Trump Jr., to take just one of Trump’s children, has made huge gains from cryptocurrency ventures, armament manufacturing, and other enterprises that do business with or are regulated by his father’s government. And Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, has seamlessly blended the high-level diplomacy he conducts on the president’s behalf, without an official government portfolio, with high-dollar dealmaking in the Middle East, Europe, and elsewhere.
The examples multiply almost faster than they can be recorded. There is the $400 million presidential jet that Trump has described as a gift from Qatar—an arrangement that would have been unthinkable under any previous administration—which he has updated with untold sums of government money for security updates and custom renovations. There are the presidential pardons doled out with striking regularity to the wealthy, the no-bid contracts for legally dubious White House renovations, and the spottily accounted for use of revenue from Venezuelan oil production commandeered by the United States. And then there is the marketing of MAGA-related campaign swag and gimmicks—culminating, perhaps inevitably, in a gold-colored Trump telephone—which taken together produce a portrait of political power being monetized at a pace and scale without precedent in U.S. history. What is worse, this accounting is far from exhaustive.
In parallel with all of this has come a degradation of the U.S. justice system, which Trump has steadily labored to turn into an instrument of political protection and naked retribution, one that overlooks the misdeeds of those the White House favors and pursues its perceived enemies, such as in the ongoing case against former FBI Director James Comey.
The biggest challenge to the future of democratic governance in the United States, though, is bound up in a question that remains open: Has the cancerous corruption spreading through the Trump administration reset norms in lasting ways, or will U.S. institutions, including its traditional two-party system and its judiciary, be able to summon the internal resources necessary for renewal through a commitment to deep and urgent reform?