Trump’s corruption is personal, so why do Democrats keep talking about procedure?
Gold leaf and decor as U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, not pictured, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, U.S., Thursday, September 25, 2025. Erdogan visits the White House for the first time in six years, bringing a series of agreements aimed at […]
(Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images) A new consensus on the Beltway is emerging: after a decade of self-serving, executive-sanctioned brutality, pardon auctionand the appeasement of donors in the sanctuaries of MAGA power, the electorate is finally waking up. Whether it’s the White House lying campaign On every facet of the war in Iran, Donald Trump’s series of lawsuits against the IRS, his use of the Justice Department to enrich himself at the expense of taxpayers, or the daydreams of Versailles on ketamine in a billion-dollar ballroom where the East Wing of the White House once stood, voters are outraged at an authoritarian regime that no longer bothers to provide further phone-in justifications for its corruption.
As The rampartIt is Mona Charen arguespopular opinion has abandoned the cynical view that the venality of high office was largely integrated into the Trumpist model of power. “The voters of 2024 have struck a bargain,” she wrote. “Even though they knew Trump was corrupt, they were betting he would bring them the kind of economy they enjoyed in 2018.” Yet with the cost of living skyrocketing and the tariff-subsidized “gilded age” that Trump demonstrably derailed, that deal is now null and void:
Economic conditions are now worse than they were in 2024. Trump also cannot count on partisanship to come to his rescue, because it is not Democrats who are defending corruption, but Trump himself and his allies. It was Trump who used the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to defend his gaudy ballroom. It’s Senate Republicans who add insult to injury by demanding that taxpayers pay $1 billion for this monument to Trump’s ego. It is Trump, not his opposition, who is telling voters they should settle for fewer dolls at Christmas. It is Trump who accepts gold bars from the Swiss delegation and decorates the Oval Office in a style that could be described as neo-Saddam.
Unfortunately, several obstacles stand in the way of a simple takedown of Trump’s corruption during the upcoming midterm cycle. First, the MAGA right has trafficked in its own theology of maximum Democratic and Deep State corruption over the past decade—the claim that Trump is a suffering servant targeted by his political enemies is at the heart of the IRS and DoJ prosecutions, as well as the justification for allied abuses of law enforcement power, such as the ongoing effort to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey for unspecified vibration-motivated violations and the enlistment of the DoJ in a challenge to the $83 million civil action against Trump for assaulting E. Jean Carroll. (Acting Justice Department chief Todd Blanche is Trump’s former personal attorney, so this kind of prostration is probably second nature to him.) It’s a debased and self-serving political narrative, since no presidency in our history has been more corrupt than Trump’s, but it’s a narrative that has proven effective over multiple election cycles and countless frivolous but vindictively targeted lawsuits.
But the biggest challenge to an effective political trial against Trump’s reign of selfishness comes from Charen’s hasty declaration that this series of abuses of the presidency cannot be considered partisan hijacking since “it’s not Democrats who are defending corruption.” It contains a whole universe of failed policy initiatives, as does any patient student of the right’s inquisitions in Congress, from the Benghazi hearings to the long election regression. Hunter Biden glasses has the removal of Biden’s DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkascan confirm instantly. For every ideological witch hunt unleashed by the right-wing Jim Jordans and Trey Gowdys, there is a logging And self-destructive The Merrick Garland investigation into a substantive legal issue that went nowhere.
This is because Democrats subscribe to an institutionalist theory, rather than an obviously personal theory of political corruption. What is clear from their treatment of abuses of executive power is that they constitute above all a procedural affront – a defilement of the precious norms that constitute the founding principle of good governance and not a more revealing and visceral moral failing. For three dismal election cycles, the main Democratic anti-Trump message has been that the MAGA movement is a threat to our revered public institutions — not that Donald Trump is robbing you blind and using every weapon of the federal government in his corruption-seeking business model, just like a mobster would. (As I typed these words, I realized that “Mafia Don” was there as an ideal Democratic epithet for the occupant of the Oval Office, and yet the party continued to let him…sit right there.)
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Democrats’ distrust on this front is more than simple myopia; it’s a class blind spot. Party leaders see themselves as the accredited guardians of institutions now threatened with a total takeover of MAGA and the broader public discourse. In short, they are managers, both in training and temperament – and like any rule-enforcing manager, they are dismayed when their authority is flouted. This leads to a rhetorical style based primarily on rebuke (when the obvious directives of institutional sovereignty are crudely cast aside) and confusion (when, again and again, Democrats’ appeals to norms, managerial politeness, and “who we are” as a nation are derided, mocked, and squashed).
You can see this style on full display in this week’s magazine New Yorkers– our country’s most reliable outlet for elites to speak out about transgressed norms. A long profile of Trump’s immediate predecessorBarack Obama, expresses exasperation at the rapid pace of institutional disruption under Trump’s leadership, while the former president also worries that he cannot abandon his statesman role of “political leader” for that of simple “commentator.” The natural result of this managerial angst is a long recitation of scenes like this:
Over the past year, Obama has watched in disbelief as Trump used his power to enrich himself and his family, and committed some sort of travesty almost daily. Sometimes, often late at night, Obama will text or email a friend about “something stupid Trump did,” said Ben Rhodes, who served as Obama’s deputy national security adviser and is now his consultant. “What drives him crazy is the double standard: ‘What if I took a Qatari plane?’ It’s not even sour grapes. This is objectively crazy. If Barack Obama did any of these things, he would be destroyed on sight.”
As trial lawyers like to say: true, true and irrelevant. Complaints of double standards and hypocrisy are doomed to fail in ideological discourse, because they presuppose a disinterested adjudication of claims to power where none exists. This is especially the case when a ruling party plunders the government in pursuit of personal gain and political vendettas. The point is not that a norm is valid for other presidents and not for Trump – it is that Trump renders norms of all kinds meaningless by reinventing the presidency as an instrument of personal plunder. But this central message is heard muted at best in Democratic leadership circles — largely because, like Obama, party leaders remain frozen “in disbelief” at the specter of Trumpist corruption.
Among other things, this posture is a response that comes far too late in the cycle of MAGA rule by corruption to effectively relate to the public’s real disenchantment with Trump’s second term. After launching ineffective attempts to impeach Trump for egregious abuses of power during his first term — including a literal effort to install himself as dictator by fomenting a coup — Democrats have mostly fallen back on the defensive, intoning the mantra that they are focus on “table matters” instead of leading the political fight to hold Trump and his hand-picked cabinet of cronies accountable for their crimes.
Yet, especially during Trump’s second term, it is a distinction without a difference: The administration’s forays into corruption have also led to huge increases in everyday spending, from Trump’s imperious and unconstitutional tariff regime to the oil shocks caused by the illegal war with Iran. failure of the red state agricultural economy. Unbalanced authoritarian leaders despoil all of public life – and the economy is the first victim of this strategy, not a depoliticized sphere that renders behind-the-scenes verdicts on the regime’s performance and fitness for office.
Indeed, major areas of Trumpist economic influence, such as the crypto and AI sectors, are also major theaters of Trump family corruption. It therefore makes no sense to seek to dissociate the effects of corruption in power and its economic causes. Along the same lines, the Trump administration’s strangulation of the international order is inseparable from the economic interests of White House actors like Jared Kushner and Ben Witkoff, but Democratic leaders treat this malady of executive power as a consequence of Trump’s irritability and disregard for institutional protocols. Here again, the Democratic Party’s devotion to its managerial ethos has prevented it from tracing the crucial lines of economic causality that any fundamental understanding of politics requires.
Indeed, it is striking that the source of constitutional corruption that has been on full display throughout Trump’s two terms—his flagrant disregard of the Emoluments Clause prohibiting the president from making any personal gain from foreign powers while in office—has never received the serious attention of Democratic leaders. Cynics might protest that the type of corruption prohibited by the Emoluments Clause is increasingly the business model of both major parties: the crypto industry, q ui also serves as a money laundering front for foreign bribes, was, after all, one of the largest sources of campaign contributions to Republican and Democratic candidates during the last election cycle. But I would argue that Democrats are not messing around with the emoluments clause because it is too personal and a vulgar abuse of power: it essentially proscribes corruption, and corruption leaves no room for leaders to berate us about our tragically abandoned public standards. Voters can see it with their own eyes, just as they can see the madness in the White House ballroom, which is currently voting. behind a belief in ghosts and telepathy in CNN opinion polls. But you can at least be assured that in the middle of the night, Barack Obama sent out a few indignant text messages and emails on this subject.
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Chris Lehmann Chris Lehmann is the DC bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor to The deflector. He was previously editor-in-chief of THE Deflector And The New Republicand is the author, more recently, of The Cult of Money: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Destruction of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).
