Every era of American government has its scandal. Trump’s innovation is to turn scandal into a governing philosophy. While it is tempting to view the corruption of the Trump regime – its outright profiteering, its use of the state as an instrument of revenge and personal enrichment – as a distortion of American democracy, the truth is more disturbing: it is a mirror.
The difference between the Trump era and the previous ones is not the presence of corruption, but its visibility and the nation’s collective inability to be scandalized by it. For decades, corruption in the United States has been moralized as a deviation from an otherwise legitimate system. From the railroad barons and company towns of the 19th century to the revolving door of Wall Street and Washington in the 20th and 21st centuries, American capitalism has always relied on turning public office into private profit. When politicians became lobbyists and regular insiders, when corporations wrote the legislation, when the government bailed out bank managers and political donors, when hospital managers got rich off public subsidies while their workers and patients drowned in uncertainty, the mechanisms of corruption were disguised as professionalism, efficiency, or expertise. The neoliberal order taught us to equate virtue with success and to see morality in market value.
When Trump came to power, corruption was already normalized as a reality. Trump simply stripped it of its polite fictions – not only in domestic politics, but also in foreign policy, where the US has long cloaked its violence in the language of democracy and human rights. The extrajudicial killings of unidentified individuals through unilateral military strikes in Latin American waters, for example, are not a break with American precedent but its most overt expression, the open execution of practices that previous administrations have pursued under the guise of denial and euphemism. Similarly, the brutality and cruelty of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump are nothing new. Instead, they are largely a dramatized, made-for-television version of what Barack Obama - who earned himself the title of "deporter-in-chief" - instituted during the years he built the career of Tom Homan, now Trump's so-called border czar. Like Trump, Obama was a great admirer of Homan and awarded him the 2015 Presidential Medal of Freedom to honor his passion for arresting immigrants, separating children from their parents, and locking people in detention camps.
The brazenness of Trump’s corruption and cruelty – the nepotism, the fraud, the self-serving, the open sellout of government contracts and justice – doesn’t shock us because it seems like an honest expression of what we already knew: that the American government and institutions serve the rich people who own them, whether directly or indirectly through donations and lobbyists, or through networks of influence, bribery, and extortion. The outrage that would once have followed has been replaced by the tired recognition that this is how things have always worked.
In this sense, Trump is not an aberration, but a revelation. If previous administrations moralized capitalism as a meritocracy that supported the egos of the billionaires and politicians they allowed to power, Trump turns it into pure ego: an unbridled appetite, a shameless greed. His corruption is not a disease in the system, but the disproved truth of the system made flesh.
What has been destroyed is not legality but the psychic architecture that once made illegality unacceptable. What was once perceived as a crime is now used as an expression of truth. The superego no longer forbids us, but commands us, to enjoy the overt displays of power and our own complicity in them.
In a society in which every sphere of life is subordinated to the logic of accumulation – where medicine, education, and even care itself are driven by profit – exposing corruption does not lead to a collective moral renewal. It confirms what everyone suspected: that there is no longer an ethical order to defend. The result is a form of political paralysis. We can name corruption, but we cannot act against it, because that would require dismantling the very system we have been trained to believe is inevitable and on which our nation as we know it is built.
Liberal responses to corruption fail for the same reason. They appeal to morality – to decency, justice, honesty – without confronting the fact that these values have been stripped of institutional substance and a stable cultural foundation. Meanwhile, the right has learned to use this emptiness as a weapon. Trump’s genius lies in his ability to turn corruption into a spectacle, to make its shamelessness seem to many like authenticity, its violence – like freedom. His followers rightly recognize that corruption permeates the lives of the elite; what they are mistaken about is its source. They see decadence in bureaucrats, not billionaires; in immigrants, not monopolies.
If corruption no longer provokes a significant reaction, let alone a popular uprising, it is because – under the brand of the Democratic Party – "Resistance" has become commercialized. Indignation has become a way of life, cynicism a sign of sophistication. Political criticism and condemnation are completely commercialized, woven into the culture industry - a machine that turns moral disgust into a product, and aphorisms about tyranny - into New York Times bestsellers alongside the memoirs of corrupt politicians. When politics becomes entertainment, and indignation becomes a corporate aesthetic, fascism no longer has to masquerade as virtue; it simply has to put on a better show than its supposed opponents.
Trump's corruption continues to flourish unchecked, not because people don't see it, but because they no longer believe that anything better is possible. After all, to be scandalized is to believe in a moral world that may be broken. What we are now facing is something darker: a society that no longer believes in its own possibility of redemption.
Rebuilding the ethical imagination will require more than exposing corruption. It will require building genuine public and civic institutions designed to serve working-class people, not the interests of the wealthy, and investing in forms of collective, mutual care that give concrete life and value to democratic ethics.
Corruption thrives on the ruins of solidarity. To meaningfully confront it, we must build a society in which truth and honesty are not a matter of individual achievement but of a shared societal purpose, of confronting our dark national past and truly breaking away from it.
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* Eric Rinehart is a political anthropologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalytic clinician based in Chicago.
translation: Nick Iliev