There have been scandals in every era of American government. President Trump’s innovation is to make scandal itself his governing philosophy. While it is tempting to view the Trump administration’s corruption, its open profiteering and use of the state as a vehicle for revenge and self-enrichment, as a perversion of American democracy, the truth is much more disturbing. It’s a mirror. The difference between the Trump era and previous eras is not the existence of corruption, but its visibility and the fact that the public does not feel scandalized by corruption.
For decades, corruption in the United States has been moralized as a deviation from legitimate institutions. From the railroad magnates and corporate cities of the 19th century to the revolving doors of Wall Street and Washington in the 20th and 21st centuries, American capitalism has always relied on the conversion of public office to private profit. Mechanisms of corruption were disguised as professionalism, efficiency, and expertise when politicians became lobbyists and habitual inside traders, when corporations wrote legislation, when governments gave bailouts to bank executives and political donors, when hospital executives enriched themselves with public subsidies while employees and patients suffered. The neoliberal order has taught us to equate virtue with success and to see moral value in terms of market value.
By the time Trump arrived, corruption had become a normalized reality. President Trump has simply stripped away that polite fiction, not just in domestic politics but also in foreign policy, where the United States has long masked violence under the guise of democracy and human rights. For example, President Trump’s extrajudicial killing of unidentified persons in a unilateral military attack in Latin American waters is not a break with American precedent, but its most naked expression, an open implementation of a practice that past administrations have enacted under a cloak of denial and euphemism. Similarly, the brutality and brutality of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Trump administration is nothing new. Rather, it’s largely a dramatized, made-for-TV version of what Barack Obama pioneered over the years, when he earned the title of “chief foreign transportation official,” building the career of Tom Homan, now Trump’s so-called border czar. Like President Trump, President Obama greatly admires Homan, awarding him the Presidential Class Award in 2015 for his passion for rounding up immigrants, separating children from their parents, and locking people in concentration camps.
The brazenness of Trump’s corruption and brutality – nepotism, discord, self-dealing, open auctioning of government contracts and justice – does not shock us. Because it feels like an honest representation of what we already knew. This means that American governments and institutions serve the wealthy who own them, directly or indirectly, through donations and lobbyists, or through networks of influence, bribery, and extortion. The anger that would once have followed is replaced by a tired realization that things have always worked this way.
In this sense, Trump is not an anomaly but a revelation. If earlier administrations moralized capitalism as a meritocracy that strengthened the egos of billionaires and the politicians they put in office, Trump implements it as pure selfhood: unbridled appetite, unashamed greed. His corruption is not a disease of the system, but the embodiment of the system’s denied truths.
What has been destroyed is not legality, but the spiritual structures that once made illegality uncomfortable. What was once experienced as a violation is now enjoyed as a statement of truth. The superego no longer forbids, but commands us to enjoy the naked display of power and our own complicity in it.
In a society where all areas of life are subordinated to the logic of accumulation, where health care, education, and even care itself are dominated by profit, exposing corruption does not produce a collective moral renewal. This confirms what everyone has suspected: that there is no moral order left to uphold. The result is a kind of political paralysis. We can name corruption, but we cannot act against it. Doing so requires dismantling the very system we have been led to believe is inevitable, and this country as we know it is built on.
Liberal responses to corruption are stalled for the same reason. They appeal to morality—decency, fairness, honesty—without confronting the fact that these values have lost their institutional substance and stable cultural foundations. Meanwhile, the right has learned to weaponize this emptiness. Trump’s genius lies in his ability to turn corruption into a spectacle, to make his shamelessness feel real to many, his violence to feel like freedom. His followers rightly recognize that corruption is endemic in elite life. What they misunderstand is the root of it. They see decadence in bureaucrats, not billionaires. Immigration, not monopoly.
If corruption no longer provokes a meaningful response, let alone a popular uprising, it is because “resistance” has become commercialized under the Democratic brand. Resentment became a lifestyle and cynicism became a symbol of sophistication. Political criticism and condemnation have been thoroughly commodified and incorporated into the cultural industry. It is a machine that turns moral disgust into a commodity, turning proverbs about tyranny into New York Times bestsellers alongside the memoirs of corrupt politicians. When politics becomes entertainment and anger becomes corporate aesthetics, fascism no longer needs to pretend to be virtuous. All you need to do is put on a better show than your supposed opponents.
President Trump’s corruption is raging unchecked not because people don’t see it, but because people no longer believe that anything better is possible. After all, being exposed to scandal means that you still believe in a moral world that can be violated. What we are facing now is much darker. It is a society that no longer believes in the possibility of its own salvation.
Rebuilding the ethical imagination requires more than just exposing corruption. This will require building genuine public and civic institutions aimed at serving working-class people rather than the interests of the wealthy, and investing in collective and mutually beneficial forms of care that give concrete life and value to democratic ethics.
Corruption flourishes in the ruins of unity. To counter this meaningfully, we must build a society in which truth and honesty are not a matter of individual performance, but a common public purpose, one that confronts and truly moves away from the nation’s sordid past.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
