Amid the flurry of changes to the face of American government—the president may or may not have the right to unilaterally eliminate agencies; engaging in insurrection has been decriminalized while prosecuting it has become grounds for termination; wars of conquest are now on the table—you could be forgiven for missing the news that bribery is basically legal now, as long as you support, or are, Donald Trump.
Consider the Trump administration’s actions yesterday alone: The president officially pardoned Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor who served eight years in prison for corruption, and his Department of Justice suspended its prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams for allegedly soliciting bribes from Turkey, despite extremely compelling evidence. (Adams has denied the allegations.) Trump fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics, the chief official making sure government employees comply with ethics requirements, including those concerning conflicts of interest. And he directed the Justice Department to cease enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prevents American businesses from bribing foreign officials.
Not bad for a day’s work—but Trump wasn’t done. Today, the administration told The New York Times that Elon Musk’s financial disclosures would not be made public, allowing the shadow president to direct vast swaths of government policy with enormous stakes for his personal fortune without the public knowing the precise areas of overlap.
A running joke in the first Trump term was “Infrastructure Week,” a recurring attempt by the administration to focus media attention on a subject (passing an infrastructure bill) that had no real policy meat to it. This time around, Trump has quietly put together a policy theme—call it “Corruption Week”—for which he has actually delivered the goods. Whether Trump did this intentionally or just had numerous pro-corruption initiatives coincidentally stacked up on his desk is hard to say. What seems clear, however, is that Trump genuinely believes in corruption as a normal and acceptable way to do business.
When he first ran for president, in 2016, Trump cast himself as a master of the system who had strategically donated to public officials in exchange for favors that would advance his business career. This was not mere bluster. Trump’s breakthrough experience in business came by working the corrupt nexis between real estate and politics in New York City. The late journalist Wayne Barrett, writing in The Village Voice, exhaustively detailed Trump’s wheeling and dealing to obtain a subsidized permit to develop a prized spot of land: the Commodore Hotel deal, which put Trump on the map and seeded his reputation as a symbol of capitalism.
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Trump recognized that design and construction had little to do with success in this project. The whole trick was to gain influence among the political brokers who controlled land permitting and could dole out lucrative tax abatements.
Trump’s winning bid for the coveted land “had nothing going for it but connections,” Barrett wrote. On top of being born rich, Trump displayed a genuine talent for finding and exploiting the soft spots in the system. He not only donated to the necessary public officials; he put the governor’s top fundraiser on his own payroll. Trump sought to influence Barrett’s reporting with a mix of threats, promises of some ongoing future relationship between them, and what sounded like a bribe. After discovering that Barrett lived in Brownsville, Trump proposed, “I could get you an apartment, you know. That must be an awfully tough neighborhood.”
As a politician, Trump positioned himself as standing above the corruption of the system. That pose was also a way of defining corruption as so endemic that it could not be identified as a discrete form of behavior. Trump calls everything he opposes “corrupt”: political opposition, news reports, judicial rulings, election results, and so on.
That tactic has worked. In part because the word has grown so ubiquitous during the period when Trump has dominated news coverage, it barely registers anymore. Trump was able to continue owning a private business during his first term while refusing to disclose his tax returns, at the time a stunning violation of anti-corruption norms. Early in his second term, he not only continued those practices but opened up a lucrative new business selling a crypto memecoin that serves both to exploit his own fans and to allow anyone anywhere in the world to enrich him directly.
The chance that any corrupt behavior on behalf of Trump, Musk, or any other member of his administration will be exposed is significantly dampened by Trump’s decision to fire inspectors general en masse. If, by chance, some corruption scandal still comes to light, Trump has stacked the Justice Department with loyalists who will almost certainly look the other way.
You can call this hypocritical, but a more realistic description is that it follows Trump’s understanding of how power works: The people running the system operate it for their own benefit. Smart people figure out how to get in on the corruption and get rich themselves. The people who get left out are suckers.
Trump’s cynical model of the world is not purely a matter of self-interest. His suspension of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is an actual policy agenda to enable American businesses to bribe officials overseas without violating American law. Trump himself has no need to grease anybody’s palms. He therefore appears to support this reform, as it were, because he genuinely believes in it. And unlike most of his flailing efforts to advance policy objectives, his pro-corruption agenda is comprehensive and well designed. How the rest of Trump’s presidency plays out is anyone’s guess. The consequences of legalizing corruption, however, will be utterly predictable.
