Every era of American government has had its scandal. Trump’s innovation is to make scandal itself a governing philosophy. Although it is tempting to see the Trump regime’s corruption – its open profiteering, its use of the state as an instrument of vengeance and self-enrichment – as a perversion of American democracy, the truth is more unsettling: it’s a mirror. The difference between Trump’s era and those before it is not the presence of corruption, but its visibility and the nation’s collective incapacity to feel scandalised by it.
For decades, corruption in the United States was moralised as a deviation from an otherwise legitimate system. From the rail barons and company towns of the 19th century to the revolving door of Wall Street and Washington in the 20th and 21st, American capitalism has always depended on the conversion of public office into private profit. When politicians became lobbyists and habitual inside traders, when corporations wrote legislation, when government bailouts were given to bank executives and political donors, when hospital executives grew rich on public subsidies while their workers and patients sank into precarity, the mechanisms of corruption were disguised as professionalism, efficiency, or expertise. The neoliberal order taught us to equate virtue with success and to see moral worth in market value.
By the time Trump arrived, corruption had been normalised as realism. Trump merely stripped it of its polite fictions – not only in domestic politics but in foreign policy, where the US has long cloaked its violence in the language of democracy and human rights. Trump’s extrajudicial killings of unidentified individuals via unilateral military strikes in Latin American waters, for example, are not a break with American precedent but its most naked expression, the open performance of practices that past administrations enacted beneath the cloak of deniability and euphemism. Likewise, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brutality and cruelty under Trump were not new. It was instead largely a dramatised, made-for-TV version of what Barack Obama – who earned the title of “deporter in chief” – pioneered over the years in which he built the career of Tom Homan, now Trump’s so-called border czar. Like Trump, Obama was a great admirer of Homan, awarding him a 2015 Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service to honour his passion for rounding up immigrants, separating children from their parents and caging people in detention camps.
The brazenness of Trump’s corruption and cruelty – the nepotism, the grift, the self-dealing, the open auctioning of government contracts and justice – does not shock us because it feels like an honest expression of what we already knew: that American government and institutions serve the wealthy individuals who own them, whether directly or indirectly through their donations and lobbyists or via networks of influence, bribery and extortion. The outrage that might once have followed is replaced by a weary recognition that things have always worked this way.
Trump, in this sense, is not an aberration but a revelation. If earlier administrations moralised capitalism as a meritocracy that shored up the egos of billionaires and the politicians they allowed into office, Trump performs it as pure id: unrestrained appetite, unashamed greed. His corruption is not a sickness in the system but the system’s disavowed truth made flesh.
What’s been destroyed is not legality but the psychic architecture that once made illegality feel objectionable. What was once experienced as transgression is now enjoyed as truth-telling. The superego no longer forbids but commands us to enjoy naked displays of power and our own complicity in them.
In a society where every sphere of life has been subordinated to the logic of accumulation – where medicine, education and even care itself are governed by profit – the exposure of corruption does not generate collective moral renewal. It confirms what everyone suspects: that there is no ethical order left to defend. The result is a form of political paralysis. We can name corruption but cannot act against it, because doing so would require dismantling the very system we’ve been trained to believe is inevitable and upon which our nation, as we know it, is built.
Liberal responses to corruption falter for the same reason. They appeal to morality – to decency, fairness, honesty – without confronting the fact that these values have been emptied of institutional substance and stable cultural ground. The right, meanwhile, has learned to weaponise this emptiness. Trump’s genius lies in his capacity to turn corruption into spectacle, to make its shamelessness feel for many like authenticity and its violence like freedom. His followers recognise, rightly, that corruption pervades elite life; what they mistake is the source of it. They see decadence in bureaucrats, not billionaires; in migrants, not monopolies.
If corruption no longer provokes meaningful response, let alone popular revolt, it’s because – under Democratic Party branding – “the resistance” has been commercialised. Indignation has become a lifestyle, cynicism a badge of sophistication. Political criticism and condemnation have been thoroughly commodified, folded into the culture industry – a machine that turns moral disgust into product and aphorisms about tyranny into New York Times bestsellers alongside corrupt politicians’ memoirs. When politics becomes entertainment and outrage becomes a corporate aesthetic, fascism no longer needs to disguise itself as virtue; it simply needs to put on a better show than its supposed opponents.
Trump’s corruption rages on unchecked, not because people don’t see it, but because they no longer believe anything better is possible. To be scandalised, after all, is still to believe in a moral world that can be violated. What we face now is something darker: a society that no longer believes in its own possibility for redemption.
Rebuilding an ethical imagination will require more than exposing corruption. It will require building genuine public and civic institutions designed to serve working-class people rather than the interests of the wealthy and investing in forms of collective, reciprocal caregiving that give democratic ethics concrete life and value.
Corruption thrives in the ruins of solidarity. To meaningfully oppose it, we must build a society in which truth and honesty are not matters of individual performance but of shared public purpose, confrontation with our sordid national past, and a genuine departure from it.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
