The World's Most Corrupt Country! What Are The Political Establishments Doing To Turn That Around?

REPEAT: The DCCC Is Not Quite As Bad As The Republicans

Never assume an anti-red wave is an actual blue wave

At this point, it's almost quaint to ask whether Señor TACO’s chaos is a feature or a bug. One might be a distraction, but we all know the defining trait of his presidency isn’t just the nonstop circus— it’s the relentless drive toward authoritarianism, paired with a level of corruption that, while familiar in kleptocracies abroad, is without precedent in American political life. The two aren’t separate forces but mutually reinforcing ones: a strongman’s dream of impunity and control married to the personal grift of a man who never saw public office as anything more than a golden opportunity for self-enrichment.

Let’s cut to the chase: Trump didn’t enter politics out of some warped ideological vision. He entered because he saw a vacuum— of shame, of oversight, of consequence— and moved in like a parasite. Authoritarianism may be the endgame for the people around him, the Bannons, Voughts, Vances and Millers who fetishize cruelty and control… but for Trump, it’s always been about one thing: money. Power is useful only insofar as it protects the hustle. The immunity, the adoration, the chance to blur the lines between the state and his brand— that’s the real motivation. Everything else, including the fascist theatrics, is in service to the grift.

Last week, David Frum noted that he’s taking self-enrichment to a scale never seen before in America. He sees no reason why he can’t be as rich as Putin and Musk— and he’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen. “In his first term, he made improper millions. In his second term, he is reaching for billions... The record of Trump real-estate and business projects is one of almost unbroken failure; from 1991 to 2009, his companies filed for bankruptcy six times. Few if any legitimate investors entrusted their money to Trump’s businesses when he was out of office. But since his return to the White House, Trump has been inundated with cash from Middle Eastern governments. Obscure Chinese firms are suddenly buying millions of dollars’ worth of Trump meme coins. So are American companies hard-hit by the Trump tariffs and desperately seeking access and influence. After Trump invited major holders of his crypto funds to dinner, Wired quoted a crypto analyst about the coin’s value proposition: ‘Before, you were speculating on a $TRUMP coin with no utility. Now you’re speculating on future access to Trump. That has to be worth a bit more money.’ Nothing like this has been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency. Throw away the history books; discard feeble comparisons to scandals of the past. There is no analogy with any previous action by any past president. The brazenness of the self-enrichment resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a postcolonial African dictatorship.”

He concluded that “the United States is rich and powerful. Rather than wait for a foreign government to offer emoluments, a corrupt U.S. president can extract them. The emoluments clause depends on congressional enforcement, backed by the ultimate sanction of impeachment and removal. And if Congress does not enforce it? Then public opinion remains the only sanction. Cynics deny that public opinion matters, but Trump is not one of them. His belief in how much popular disgust for corruption matters is precisely why he and his supporters worked so hard to promote dark legends about rivals: the Bushes, the Clintons, the Bidens. Those stories were not based on nothing, but the closer anyone looked, the less there was to see. The Trump story, by contrast, is almost too big to see, too upsetting to confront. If we faced it, we’d have to do something— something proportional to the scandal of the most flagrant self-enrichment by a politician that this country, or any other, has seen in modern times.”

That has a great deal to do with why Blue America is working so hard to help flip Congress and why we look so closely at which Members of Congress are worthy of continued support. And why we’re always pointing out who’s really part of the resistance.

There’s story like this— Firings, pardons and policy changes have gutted DOJ anti-corruption efforts, experts say nearly daily. Trump is actively dismantling the institutions designed to enforce anti-corruption norms… worse than just flouting them. Firings, loyalty tests, weaponized pardons and deliberate sabotage of internal oversight mechanisms— each inexorable move chips away at the basic guardrails of accountability. But still the careerist-oriented political establishment, time and again, responded with handwringing, pearl-clutching and polite statements of “concern” rather than the structural reforms and decisive pushback the moment demanded.

At some point, the sheer volume of reporting, and even on scandal itself, becomes almost anesthetizing for most people. They tune out— not because they don’t care, but because the system— whether John Thune and Chuck Schumer— keeps signaling that nothing will be done. That’s not just a media fatigue issue— it’s a damning indictment of our democratic infrastructure and the elite consensus that refuses to treat this ongoing crisis with the urgency it warrants. If democratic governance feels dysfunctional, it’s because the mechanisms designed to protect it— oversight, enforcement, political courage— have either atrophied or been deliberately hollowed out. We’re watching the erosion of accountability in real time, and the institutions that should be sounding the alarm are too often still whispering.

In his piece, Ken Dilanian noted that “For decades, the FBI and the Justice Department have been the main enforcers of laws against political corruption and white-collar fraud in the United States. In four months, the Trump administration has dismantled key parts of that law enforcement infrastructure, creating what experts say is the ripest environment for corruption by public officials and business executives in a generation. Trump aides have forced out most of the lawyers in the Justice Department’s main anti-corruption unit, the Public Integrity Section, and disbanded an FBI squad tasked with investigating congressional misconduct. They have issued a series of directives requiring federal law enforcement agencies to prioritize immigration enforcement. And they have ended a 50-year policy of keeping the Justice Department independent of the White House in criminal investigations. All of that came after Trump fired most of the inspectors general— the independent agency watchdogs responsible for fighting corruption and waste— and the Justice Department dropped a corruption case against the mayor of New York in what a judge said was a ‘breathtaking’ political bargain. And it came after the Trump administration Justice Department pulled back on enforcement of foreign bribery and lobbying statutes, as well as cryptocurrency investigations. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has issued a steady stream of pardons to all but one Republican member of Congress convicted of felonies over the last 15 years.

You may even feel badly for the Brazilian drag queen on Long Island who didn’t get the pardon (yet)[[ or, for that matter, for Sam Bankman Fried, who will sooner or later fork over one of the billions he stole and get sprung by Trump… but it’s a much bigger deal that the vile Señor T is, according to Paul Rosenzweig, a George Washington University law professor who was a senior homeland security official in the Bush administration, “dismantling not just the means of prosecuting public corruption, but he’s also dismantling all the means of oversight of public corruption. The law is only for his enemies now.”

Democrats say the Trump policy changes— coupled with a mandate that FBI agents spend significant time on immigration enforcement— mean corporate fraud and public corruption enforcement is expected to plummet faster and further. 

“President Trump has ushered America into a golden age of public corruption,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told NBC News in a statement. “Trump quickly cleared out the watchdogs responsible for policing corruption cases at home and abroad by gutting the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section and the anti-kleptocracy teams.” 

Last month, the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Matthew Galeotti, announced in a memo and a speech that the Justice Department was “turning a new page on white-collar and corporate enforcement.” While he said that “white-collar crime also poses a significant threat to U.S. interests,” he said the Biden administration’s approach has “come at too high a cost for businesses and American enterprise.”

… [Corrupt political tool Pam] Bondi also paused enforcement of a law prohibiting U.S. corporate executives from bribing foreign officials, an area of U.S. law so well-developed that major law firms had entire sections devoted to advising clients about it.  

She also disbanded the FBI task force devoted to combating foreign influence and a Justice Department group that sought to confiscate the assets of Russian oligarchs. She also ordered a pullback on enforcing the law requiring foreign agents to register with the government and disclose their activities.

Several weeks later, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche ended an effort by the Justice Department to police crypto-related violations of banking secrecy and securities laws. 

Finally, one of the most impactful moves the Trump administration has made was to slash the size of the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, which has dropped from roughly 35 lawyers to four to five, according to two former members of the unit.

… [B]y shrinking the Public Integrity Section, dropping corruption charges against Adams and pardoning political allies convicted of federal crimes, Trump has sent an unmistakable message, current and former Justice Department officials say.

“Public corruption investigations are being politicized like we’ve never seen before,” said a former Justice Department official, who declined to be named for fear of retaliation. “What prosecutor or FBI agent is going to want to work on a case they think Donald Trump isn’t going to like? To witness the destruction of the institution is just infuriating and disheartening.”

Rosenzweig, the law professor, said the damage to America’s image as a country built on the rule of law is not easily fixable.

“Good governance is really a shared myth— it happens only because we all believe in it,” he said. “People are good because they share a mythos that expects them to be good. When that myth is destroyed, when you learn that it’s just a shared dream that isn’t mandatory ... it’s really, really hard to rebuild faith.”

Rosenzweig added, “In 150 days, Donald Trump has casually destroyed a belief in the necessity of incorruptibility built over 250 years.”

DCCC recruits another lifelong Republican

So how is the Democratic establishment responding? Lamely, as usual. The DCCC recruited conservative Republican Ryan Crosswell, one of the Public Integrity lawyers who quit when his nose got bent out of shape when the Trump and Bondi dropped the Eric Adams corruption case he was working on. Wonderful if he had a change of heart about his conservatism and about his old party, but the DCCC, of course wants him to take precedence over actual Democrats who didn’t vote for Trump twice. Crosswell registered as a Republican inNorth Carolina in 2011, registered as a Republican in 2014 when he moved to Louisiana and registered as a Republican in 2020 when he moved to DC. But in December, 2024, 6 months ago, he decided the next step in his career trajectory is to become a congressman— so he registered as a Democrat. The DCCC went wild; nothing thrills them, more than supporting conservative Republicans who pretend they’re Democrats!

The DCCC suggested he run for the open seat in PA-07, since he was born in Pennsylvania, but in Pottsville which isn’t in the district. The DCCC didn’t want him running in the district where he’s from because they view Dan Meuser, the Republican incumbent, as too strong in the R+19 district, where Kamala scored just 30.6%. He went to college in Tennessee and never looked back… until now, willing to move from his current home in California to pretend he’s not just a Democrat but also from PA-07.