Eighty-eight per cent of voters told Fox News earlier this month that government corruption was their top worry ahead of next week's midterm elections. Trump said, "You ought to look at the real corruption." Many Americans now link the high cost of living with the president’s own personal profiteering.
Draining the swamp used to be one of President Donald Trump's themes. We do not hear much about that vow nowadays. When asked recently about his own profiteering, Trump said: "You ought to look at the real corruption. It's Democrat corruption and that includes Jeffrey Epstein." Freud could have fun with Trump's unprompted Epstein reference. But it is Marie Antoinette who springs to mind. The optics of Trump shaking donors down for a Versailles-style ballroom while Americans are treading water is bad politics. Dismissing corruption as fake news is worse. "Let them eat hot dogs," he might as well say.
Unlike the French peasantry, Americans have the vote. Corruption tops the bill of voter complaints ahead of next week's midterm elections. In one of the most striking polls of recent years, 88 per cent of voters told the pro-Trump Fox News earlier this month that "government corruption" was their top worry. Sixty per cent were "extremely concerned", including nearly half of Republicans. It is possible some Republicans were reacting abstractly to the role of money in politics. It is also unlikely. That gold-drenched Trump ballroom is worth a thousand recondite crypto deals. Its gaudiness is hard to unsee.
The moral of the looming Republican defeat will nevertheless be overstated. Should Trump lose control of Congress next week, US voters will not be rejecting populism any more than they were embracing it when they elected him in 2024. Americans are reacting badly to the high cost of living, which all politicians seem unable to fix. The difference between today and 2024 is that corruption has entered the conversation. America's affordability crisis and corruption are now treated as two sides of the same coin. When their circumstances are straitened, people tend to view the economy as a zero-sum game. More for him means less for me. When the "him" in question is not only their president but he is conspicuously raking it in, that sharpens people's anger.
Every unhappy nation is unique. But the mood overlap between countries such as Hungary and Serbia, both of which have recently thrown out rightwing populists in corruption-dominated elections, and today's America is striking. In each case, Hungary's Viktor Orbán in April and Serbia's Aleksandar Vučić last Sunday, the strongmen conceded defeat. This was not out of the goodness of their hearts. Their margins of defeat, particularly in Hungary, were too gaping to dispute. We can only anticipate Trump's reaction to next Tuesday's results. But past performance suggests he would treat any defeat as rigged. Yet the bigger the loss the harder it will be for Trump to overturn it.
The trillion-dollar question is whether voters will connect the dots between nationalist wannabe autocrats and the proliferation of grift. Centrist parties, including the Democrats, Britain's Labour and the French middle, remain largely clueless about how to fix their societies' malaise. Affordability is a heuristic for a deeper sense of being locked out. That feeling can be linked to any number of culprits, including immigration. In this US cycle, it happens to be corruption. Yet corruption thrives on a certain strain of politics. No Democrat, nor any previous Republican for that matter, gets anywhere close to matching Trump's money machine.
His saving grace is that he makes little effort to hide what he is doing. Trump thus offers a clear experiment in how long waving the stars and stripes can distract people from what is going on under their noses. He has not just been making troves of money in office -- estimates go up to $4bn if his family is included. But a large share has come from foreigners. You do not need a US passport to arrange a pardon from someone in Trump's circle. You can even be convicted of facilitating the laundering of Iran's money, as was the case with Changpeng Zhao, founder of Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, or of narcotics trafficking, as was true of Juan Orlando Hernández, Honduras' jailed former president. In the latter's case, no money seems to have changed hands. Trump was undoing what he saw as a "Biden set up". Either way, fighting Iran and drug trafficking are supposed to be Trump priorities.
The world's most lurid example of flag-waving corruption is Russia's Vladimir Putin. His net worth is estimated to be in the tens of billions. But Putin also typifies one of our age's central features. The jump from breaking laws (or invading neighbours) in order to stay in power and breaking laws to enrich yourself is a small one. The first usually leads to the second. One of the few selling points mainstream parties have nowadays is that they are not built around corruption. This may seem like a small mercy given the scale of the west's problems. But it does resonate.