Donald Trump walks on the south lawn of the White House on October 18, 2026.
(Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images)
Donald Trump’s near-total ability to get away with unprecedented corruption has always been one of the most frustrating aspects of his time atop US politics. Trump has been far and away the most crooked president in American history, a genuine gangster who makes earlier criminal presidents such as Warren Harding and Richard Nixon look like small-time hoodlums. His corruption extended from his brazen disdain for the Emoluments Clause in his first term (which allowed him to pocket millions of dollars from political supplicants trying to influence him by paying to stay at his hotels) to his family’s grand-scale self-enrichment in his second term (mostly through business deals in crypto and real estate, which have ballooned the Trump clan’s net worth by billions).
Yet Trump has paid virtually no price for this record-breaking larceny. Neither of his impeachments stemmed from his love of graft; the first involved political misconduct and the second from his incitement of the January 6 insurrection. And Congressional Democrats, with a few notable exceptions such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, have been reluctant to challenge Trump on his personal corruption.
The political logic behind this reluctance to make corruption a political issue went something like this: Trump has a cult-like hold over the Republican electorate, so there is no convincing his voters that he is enriching himself. Further, voters care more about their own economic well-being than about what the Trump family is up to, while Republican elites are attuned to foreign policy issues and threats to the constitutional order. Based on this reasoning, Democrats pursued a dual strategy of talking about economic issues to the electorate while trying to win over congressional Republicans on impeachments focused on Russiagate or Trump’s attempted coup.
My Nation colleague Chris Lehmann has repeatedly hammered the Democratic Party’s political elite for its aversion to making corruption a political issue. On The Time of Monsters podcast last June, Lehmann rightly lamented the mental blinkers of thinking that kitchen table economics and Trump’s corruption are separate issues. During the Watergate scandal, popular anger at Nixon’s slush fund intensified because of the concurrent rise in inflation. Under Trump, one could easily harness rage at the affordability crisis by contrasting the struggles of everyday voters with the orgy of self-enrichment in the White House, indulged in by both the president and his plutocratic cronies. David Sirota of The Lever has often made similar arguments about the necessity of foregrounding an anti-corruption message.
The good news is that Trump’s invulnerability on corruption seems to be ending. Two crucial groups are starting to wake up to the danger of a mobster president: a rising minority of Republican voters and many Democratic Party political consultants.
On Sunday, The Washington Post reported:
Nearly 2 in 3 Americans say President Donald Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself — and most of the increase over the past year has come from people who lean Republican, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.
Among Republicans and independents who lean Republican, 34 percent believe Trump is enriching himself, up from 22 percent in September 2025. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents were already nearly unanimous, at 88 percent a year ago and 92 percent now, while independents who don’t lean toward either party were unchanged.
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Another striking fact is that in this poll, the percentage of independents who believe Trump is corrupt remained steady at a very high level: 72 per cent.
Further, a Fox News poll released last Wednesday made clear that corruption was a top concern for a super-majority of voters. Asked what issues they were concerned with, corruption came out on top, with 88 per cent concerned, including 60 per cent saying they were extremely concerned. Intriguingly, the other issues that voters are worried about are economic. As Fox reports, “The top five voter concerns are government corruption (60% extremely concerned), inflation (58%), gas prices (50%), government leadership (49%), and healthcare (48%). And double digits more trust the Democrats than the Republicans to handle each of those.”
These polls (and other earlier ones) vindicate the argument long made by writers such as Lehmann and Sirota: Democrats need to hammer the Trump administration on corruption and link that with broader frustration about the economy.
On October 10, Politico reported that Democrats are “leaning hard into anti-corruption messaging in the final weeks of the campaign as new research suggests that linking corruption to Americans’ economic struggles can boost Democrats into the home stretch.” Josh Turek, the Democratic Senate candidate in Iowa, summed up the new argument succinctly: “We have a corruption crisis in this country, and it is leading to an affordability crisis.”
Similar arguments are being sounded by other Senate candidates, notably Jon Ossoff in Georgia, James Talarico in Texas, and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. According to Talarico, “We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.” Speaking at a rally on Saturday, Ossoff thundered, “The Mar-a-Lago mafia really has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights. This corruption is why nothing works for ordinary people.”
The new focus on corruption as an economic issue is welcome, but it is also just a start. While Trump’s grandiose personal corruption offers a massive target, it is merely a symptom of the larger problem of the plutocracy that has swallowed up so much of American politics. Beyond the midterms, anti-corruption politics can only win if Democrats deliver on the promise of reining in the oligarchs and giving ordinary people a bigger share of the economic pie. A failure to deliver on economic populism will only prepare the groundwork for another Trump-style demagogue.
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