Americans think everyone is corrupt

Donald Trump is running easily the most corrupt administration in decades. Whether selling off pardons for cash, delivering sweetheart deals on rare earth metals to donors, or earning hundreds of millions in deals with the United Arab Emirates while authorizing them to buy America’s most powerful computer chips, he is at every opportunity leveraging political power for personal financial gain.

This hasn’t translated to political success, though. After starting his second term much more popular than he was in 2017, he’s converged on his own poor approval ratings from his first term.

And yet, it’s not as if there’s been massive political mobilization against his corruption.

The money machine works in part because Trump has, through persuasion or intimidation, induced the vast majority of Republicans to refrain from criticizing or challenging him on any of this in any kind of meaningful way.

So will the party pay a price for Trump’s corruption? They’re set to lose the House, which almost always happens to the president’s party during a midterm, but remain the odds-on favorites1 to hold the Senate, in which case Trump will be able to keep MAGAfying the judiciary and getting away with his corrupt schemes.

So how does he get away with it? Some people think it’s because the voters don’t care about corruption, but I think that’s probably wrong.

Searchlight Institute polling on this shows that voters just have an incredibly low estimate of the baseline level of integrity of politicians. Seventy-one percent say the “typical politician” is corrupt. Typical Republican? Sixty-eight percent. Typical Democrat? Sixty-one percent. Seventy-two percent say that “long-term elected officials” are probably corrupt.

I think it’s hard to make political hay out of Trump’s corruption because, while it looks extraordinary to me (and probably to you if you’re reading this), many voters see it as pretty normal.

Voters take a very expansive view of corruption

To be totally honest, I think this is a pretty risible slander against America’s hard-working elected officials.

I have a lot of bad things to say about Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton, but the idea that after getting law degrees at Yale and Harvard they moved back to their home states to run for office in order to get rich