It is tempting to think that just because Donald Trump is by far the most corrupt public official in the history of the United States, and his administration is unquestionably the most corrupt ever, that somehow the corruption problem in Washington begins and ends with them.
That would be a huge mistake.
I have lived in Washington for 33 years. My first job in D.C. was even before I moved here, when, for a couple of years during the Carter administration, I was the press secretary for a congressman.
I came to D.C. an idealist. My idealism was fostered by the wholesale swallowing of jingoistic propaganda from my school years and from my immigrant father. The idealism was then, in turn, wrapped in a protective coating of naivete and further buffered by a remarkable degree of ignorance.
So much for the East Coast cynicism of which I’ve always been so proud.
But here’s the deal: After decades in Washington, it is crystal clear to me that what distinguishes the city and defines its culture more than any other trait, and now does so to a greater and greater degree yearly, is its corruption.
Washington is, at its core, a machine in which power is recycled into money. Power is made into money, money is then translated into more power, which in turn becomes more money.
It is the formula that keeps the ecosystem of Washington alive, and ensures that it serves fewer and fewer of us at the expense of more and more of us.
But the corruption is about more than money. It is about placing the self-interests of the powerful ahead of judgment, ethics, morality, decency, and all the other qualities that we ought to expect in public servants.
It is about placing serving self-interests ahead of public service.
Much of the corruption is, however, invisible. Indeed, it has been institutionalized to such a degree that it is not just normalized, it’s mechanized, routinized, baked into the cake.
Appropriations processes, the way officials are recruited for jobs, and even how think tanks operate, rationalizing the unthinkable in exchange for donations, are all part of these corrupt processes.
In fact, baked in the cake is not a bad metaphor, as corruption in Washington is, as it turns out, perhaps a 700-layer cake ranging from straight-on grift of the free airplane type to hard-to-see chicanery of the crypto kind, to respectable forms of thievery like the budget process, to lobbying to think tanks, to the various forms of self-interested hobnobbery going on at Georgetown cocktail parties.
What’s more, the very fact that the corruption is endemic‚ embedded in the culture and the processes of Washington, means that it functions as a kind of defense system.
Everything is normalized by actually being normal. People are numb to it because it is part of the air they breathe and their daily rituals: corruption in who you know and chat with in the car pool line at your kids’ private school, corruption playing golf, corruption as S.O.P. in every moneymaking business in town, corruption as the way our campaign finance system works, corruption as the rationale behind who secrets are shared with, and who are left out in the cold because they can’t be trusted.
You may think I am exaggerating. If anything, I’m understating the scope, depth, pervasiveness, and perniciousness of the problem.
It just takes a quick scan of the headlines to reveal that virtually every story about Washington today contains a corrupt subtext. That may be obvious when our felon president—convicted of fraud, a pathological liar—gets on the horn with the head of one of the world’s most corrupt organizations, FIFA, to fiddle the rules around a red card in the World Cup.
It’s pretty transparent in that case; more so if you remember FIFA head Gianni Infantino gave Trump the ridiculous FIFA Peace Prize. Or if you know the history of corruption inquiries into FIFA, or you remember that FIFA is a tenant, for no apparent reason, at Trump Tower in New York.
It’s also obvious when Trump touts, publicly—as he did on Monday—all that he has done for the crypto business, even as revelations swirl about the billions he has made off of crypto, and the billions investors in his crypto ventures have lost, and all the crypto-friendly regulations he has passed.
Trump is really the godfather of the crypto boom in the U.S. and I use the term primarily in the Mario Puzo sense. It’s a huge con and our president is rigging the rules, firing crypto investigators, doing all he can to cash in on the highly suspect form of finance.
And we probably don’t know the half of it. What international and domestic side deals has the president struck in crypto? We’ll probably never know.
You see corruption when Trump flies around on Grift Force One. When entities his family owns benefit from a UFC fight night on the South Lawn or off the 250th birthday celebration of America or from Pentagon or foreign contracts (like the recent Kazakh tungsten mine revelations). Trump family members getting a sweet deal on land for a resort in Albania? So corrupt that people turn out in the streets to protest.
The fact that other members of his administration are also cashing in is a further illustration of the problem. But so too are what we learn about who is giving gifts to Supreme Court members or about the pervasiveness of insider trading from Congress to Trump (trading millions in the hours before he changes trade policy, for example).
But, again, there are more layers to the corrupt culture of D.C. Trump barely works and spends many millions golfing on the public’s dime. He allocates funds for his pet D.C. projects outside of legal channels.
But what about how the GOP is protecting members of Congress who make up its slim margin of control when they are clearly guilty of ethics violations or even crimes? Or when they, like New Jersey Rep. Tom Kean, just don’t show up for work for half a year? Or when you have a prominent Republican like Mitch McConnell whose staff feels no compulsion to let his constituents know whether, say, he is even still alive.
Democrats can be guilty, too. They’ve got plenty of insider trading stories on their records. But they also have contributed to the culture of corruption by trying to cover up or downplay obvious, egregious ethical problems with candidates like Graham Platner, the Maine Senate wannabe whose candidacy is now circling the drain. Good people lent him their reputations and then, when it became clear he was abusing their trust, were slow to call him out because of how it might have reflected on them.
And I’ll tell you, for me, another level of the corruption was found in this fairly innocuous social media post by the staid and respected Center for Strategic and International Studies. They published a report and a long social media thread assessing U.S. defense spending. The social media post began by saying: “At about 4.6% of GDP, the budget request of $1.5 trillion for FY 2027 marks a notable increase in defense spending. But a state of wartime footing also demands an ecosystem of competitive, innovative firms that can quickly field & sustain military systems in large quantities.”
Pretty bland stuff. It then goes through a variety of points about what is needed to put the United States industrial base on a “wartime footing.” It talks about what might ensure we can produce the weapons we “need.” It then concludes by saying: “Defense spending is rising, munitions production agreements are being signed at historic scale, and novel public-private investment structures are taking shape, but the U.S. industrial base has a long way to go to achieve resilience.”
Measured tones. Formal analytical language. But nowhere does it point out that we have no reason to have an industrial base on a “wartime footing,” that no other country in the world takes this approach, and that even in the long history of obscene U.S. defense budgets, this $1.5 trillion budget request is egregiously over-the-top insanely wasteful and unjustifiable—many multiples of every other country, multiples of all major powers added together. It does not note that such spending is crazy as deficits skyrocket or cuts are being made in social spending to provide more benefits to billionaires. It does not mention that what this budget is proposing is obscene, reckless and a threat to every American.
No. It normalizes it. It whitewashes the administration’s bats–t crazy defense request and validates it. It even suggests, ludicrously, that the administration’s plans may not go far enough.
That is corruption, too. It will cost Americans more than the stealing of even master criminals like the Trump Crime Family. It looks like a fact-based academic assessment, but it is paid for by corporate and personal donations from entities that benefit from its recommendations. (As often happens with think tank reports.) That includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and General Atomics. The people who write the report are part of an information and career ecosystem in which they benefit from doing what has been done since Dwight Eisenhower first warned of the military industrial complex in 1961.
Some of these forms of corruption are visible. Others come to light periodically, when there are scandals or people see laws are being rewritten to serve billionaires and corporations at the expense of the majority of Americans. We are inured to others and barely notice. Some are intentionally invisible but just as damaging to our national interests.
Periodically, the corruption in D.C. grows so extreme that change is called for. Think of Teddy Roosevelt and the trustbusters at the end of the period of the robber barons. Or more recently, think of post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, when people were so eager for a big change they elected a president few had heard of before 1976. That was a Georgia farmer, Sunday school teacher, former naval officer, and governor who seemed like the perfect anti-Washingtonian, anti-Nixon. A man of faith and ethics. Jimmy Carter.
My sense is that given the extremes of visible corruption today, we are reaching another such inflection point and that as a consequence, we will be seeking a next president who is seen as not part of the D.C.’s corrupted culture; someone who is rather distinguished by his or her character, ethics, and values in much the same way that Trump is known for his absence of all those things.
We need someone to clean house. Not a charlatan fake “common man” who, upon examination, has all the sleazoid traits we despise about D.C. like Platner. But someone who appears capable of recognizing and calling out the problem, holding offenders accountable, and overseeing meaningful reforms.
Whomever she or he is, the odds are that, like in 1976, we don’t know their name right now. But one thing is certain: it is ever more likely that they are another of the usual suspects, another creature inside the Beltway swamp that the slime monster who is our president has only made many quantum levels worse.
