Donald Trump, who was well on his way to becoming one of the most corrupt presidents in American history even before he said it would be “stupid” for the United States not to accept a plane worth hundreds of millions of dollars from Qatar to replace Air Force One, repeatedly attacks his adversaries in part to mask his own violations of the law and of the Constitution.
Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, argued in an email that Trump’s repeated description of Democrats and liberal programs as immoral is designed to win support for his own agenda:
Trump as a politician has used the populist framing of institutions as corrupt and illegitimate; an emphasis on D.E.I. is just one flavor of that presumed corruption.
Trump made his grievances his supporters’ grievances. His ally Russ Vought introduced the trope of weaponization of government by liberals, which made little sense until you saw it as a statement of intent. The D.O.J. was not weaponized under Biden — many of his allies regretted how cautious it was — but it clearly has been weaponized by Trump.
Identity politics, Moynihan wrote,
is amorphous enough to allow fairly significant double standards in how it is perceived. The idea that the military is corrupted by D.E.I. and wokeness is fairly risible, but it has provided a justification for censorship in military academies, and a purging of senior military officers.
For Trump, Moynihan argued,
shamelessness is a superpower. His scandals are out in the open, and he insists they are not scandals at all. Trump’s current administration is explicitly personalist: it is built around loyalty to him, even as he blurs his personal interests and public offices. His investments in social media and crypto were driven by the opportunities for easy money from political supporters and those seeking access to the presidency offered.
Trump does this, Moynihan wrote, “even while making ‘fraud’ a central trope of his administration in order to justify cutting government services.”
During his first and second terms in office, Trump radically altered the Republican Party’s moral guidelines to make self-enrichment a routine fact of political life.
Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, is outspoken in his criticism of Trump.
“Trump,” Dallek wrote by email,
is the most brazenly corrupt national politician in modern times, and his openness about it is sui generis. Trump 2.0 is emboldened on many fronts. He now feels liberated to wear his corruption on his sleeve.
There is a logic to Trump’s behavior. After all, he returned to office after having faced countless hurdles, including the Russia probe, two impeachments (Ukraine and Jan. 6), two assassination attempts, and dozens of criminal indictments and felony convictions.
Trump also considers himself anointed by God to save America, furthering his faith that he can do no wrong. Feeling more imbued with power and more liberated from constraints than at any time in the past decade, he no longer feels the need to hide from the fact that he uses his public position to enrich his family.
Trump’s self-dealing, Dallek argued, has become part and parcel of his overwhelming assault on American laws and traditions:
Whether the president is slapping large tariffs on allies, trying to suspend habeas corpus, or threatening to make Canada the 51st state, he is pushing past limits and celebrating his shock and awe approach to governing. In this light, using his office to sell meme coins and promote his crypto ventures is just another day in the Trump White House. It’s become normalized.
In fact, Dallek argues that Trump uses his profiteering as a tool to mobilize supporters:
His base seems to hail the president’s brazen defiance — his flouting of norms and rules — as signs that he alone is capable of destroying a system rigged against them. In the eyes of at least some of his supporters, his baldfaced corrupt schemes are an asset, a show of strength. Trump understands that his lack of shame is part of his brand. He knows that shamelessness sells with a portion of the American electorate.
Sarah Kreps, a political scientist at Cornell, emailed her responses to my queries about Trump and corruption:
Corruption is deeper than whether someone is making backroom deals. Instead, it’s a sense that the game itself is rigged in favor of a select few. Whether this perception is accurate or not is almost beside the point. It’s a powerful narrative, one that Trump has been particularly adept at harnessing, positioning himself as a champion of the forgotten and overlooked.
In this context, Kreps continued,
Democrats’ efforts to address historic inequalities through targeted policies, while often well-intentioned, can sometimes backfire, inadvertently reinforcing perceptions that the system picks favorites. For voters who already feel politically marginalized, these policies can seem less like social progress and more like political favoritism, creating fertile ground for populist narratives that cast the entire political establishment as stacked against the average citizen.
I asked Kreps and others whether Trump has been able to get away with self-dealing and profiting from his political position because he is so brazen — so transparent in his crypto deals and in the sale of Trump bibles and Trump sneakers, completely without guilt or shame.
Kreps replied:
The shamelessness, unapologetic approach, or lack of public contrition is a form of confidence, conviction and strength. Traditional politicians carefully curate their public image. Trump is unfiltered, implicitly a form of openness and relatability that I think further reinforces loyalty among his base.
Douglas Kriner, a political scientist at Cornell, elaborated on Kreps’s point:
Trump has never hidden his business interests and is not bothered by charges that he is breaking norms (or even the law), allegations of conflicts of interest and the like. Indeed, he seems to revel in them. His very iconoclasm is part and parcel of his political brand.
A good chunk of his base revels in President Trump’s norm breaking behavior and in the showman and salesman part of his persona. More generally, President Trump is unafraid to say things, do things, and even sign executive orders that delight his base, even if they make the median voter queasy. In this respect, his political calculus is different from most of his predecessors. And he has largely been proven correct; this has not really cost him politically.
In seeking to explain the Democrats’ vulnerability to Trump’s attacks, Kriner cited Trump’s 2024 transgender ads and their message that
Democrats are for special interests (in the ad, for “they/them”) and President Trump is for you. The political attack is clear — it alleges that Democrats are the ones doing the discriminating, prioritizing some groups over others, while accusing others of being discriminatory.
The transgender commercials, Kriner argued, focus on
a fundamental tension in many programs to address systematic inequality: They rely on illiberal means to achieve liberal ends. Thirty years of research has shown that this makes many Americans — including many self-identified liberals — uncomfortable, even if they embrace the need to address these inequalities.
This tension has long been a vulnerable spot for Democrats, and President Trump has exploited it more directly and ably than most of his predecessors.
Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024, despite his liabilities, raise a significant question. Bo Rothstein, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburg, wrote by email:
What exactly has America’s liberal, democratic and culturally engaged elite done to provoke such profound anger — indeed, outright hatred — from large sections of the predominantly white working class and lower-middle class, driving them toward a politician like Donald Trump?
After studying the link between corruption and social trust for three decades, Rothstein wrote, “It has become clear to me that what most people see as corruption is not limited to bribes and kickbacks. Instead, what they react against is when the principle of impartiality in the implementation of policies is transgressed.”
A 2024 article by Rothstein, “The Future for Social Democracy and the Challenge of Liberalism,” makes the case that
What distinguishes successful left-wing politics is that it is built on a union of the liberal principle of individual rights and the socialist idea of social justice. Successful social reforms and gender equality policies have been based on individual rights to pensions, health care, education, equal rights for men and women, etc., and not on group or family-based rights.
I asked a range of scholars for their assessment of Rothstein’s analysis, his broad definition of corruption and the effect of Trump’s transparent and guilt-free style. Their answers varied widely.
Moynihan argued that the view among conservative whites that Democratic policies are corrupt has been carefully cultured and nurtured by the MAGA movement:
What Rothstein gets right is that Trump’s supporters have been instructed to think about corruption more broadly than we traditionally consider.
It is not just about bribery of public officials or conflicts of interest. Trump has told his followers that public institutions are inherently corrupt and untrustworthy, apt to attack them, and any criticism of his actions reflects their corruption, rather than his own.
Rothstein, Dallek contended, “has a point. Democrats have allowed themselves to be painted as a party of special interests.” But, Dallek stressed, this portrayal of Democrats has been effective largely because it taps into the hatreds emerging under growing partisan animosity, with the result that for Republicans
one’s opponents are existential threats to the American experiment. Whatever ethical lapses a party leader commits pales in comparison to the dangers posed by that party’s enemies seizing reins of power.
Stanley Feldman, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, provided more detail in an email on Dallek’s point:
Since partisans now harbor such negative views of each other, they will likely endorse many negative descriptors of the other party. Republicans do see many Democratic positions as being “corruptions of American values.”
Trump, Feldman continued, “does not think that anything he does to enrich himself is improper or, at a minimum, that anything that he will be held legally responsible for.”
Trump’s belief in his ability to enrich himself without legal or political sanction has been reinforced by the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision, Feldman contended, and by the fact that “he was re-elected after being found guilty of falsifying business records, defamation in the E. Jean Carroll case, and financial statement fraud (as well as other indictments).”
Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, described the ongoing efforts of Trump and his allies in an email:
A standard move by his defenders when confronted with any evidence of malfeasance on Trump’s part is to attack Biden or other Democrats as worse: “What about Hunter’s laptop?” This feeds into the wider public skepticism about the honesty of elected officials, making a “they all do it” excuse.
Trump and his allies have been very effective in painting Democrats as evil and corrupt; consider the effort by congressional Republicans and right-wing media to portray Biden and his family as greedy and corrupt.
Trump, Jacobson noted,
seems utterly incapable of shame. I can’t think of an example where he has resisted some self-serving act on ethical grounds. It appears that he thinks anything he can get away with is fine and that whatever serves his purposes is ethical (or that ethics are for losers).
Jacobson notes in a forthcoming paper that
Trump has succeeded in persuading millions of disaffected Americans, especially less educated nonurban whites and white evangelical Christians, that they, like him, have been treated unfairly, that he is on their side, that his enemies are their enemies, and that attacks on him are attacks on them.
Reinforcing Jacobson’s argument, Jonathan Weiler, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, outlined in an email the sustained Republican effort to demonize political adversaries:
Congressional Republicans, not to mention a special prosecutor, spent years investigating Hunter Biden for alleged misconduct while Joe Biden was vice president. $1300 car payments became one among numerous “smoking guns” that Biden was abusing his office and engaging in impeachable conduct.
It would be impossible to overstate how ceaselessly right-wing media, including Fox News, pounded on this story hour after hour and day after day of “Biden family corruption.”
The focus on elite Democratic corruption, Weiler continued,
reinforces the larger attack on government, especially all of the allegedly rife abuse of our welfare system and the mistrust such narratives are meant to sow. And with the ground so seeded, it’s easier to rationalize Trump’s endless and brazen misconduct.
I asked Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T. and a recent Nobel laureate, what he thought of the high percentage of voters, Republicans and Democrats, who view the opposition party as corrupt. He replied by email:
Many supporters of both parties have come to see the other side as morally corrupt. In the eyes of liberals, the Republican Party’s capitulation to Trump, coziness to big donors, anti-immigrant policies, etc. are morally corrupt, while in the eyes of Republicans, Democrats’ globalism, elitism, and obsession with D.E.I., and critical race theory are signs of moral corruption.
At the same time, Acemoglu added,
Trump is normalizing high-level corruption, and this is going to have long-term effects even if U.S. institutions somehow survive the second Trump presidency. In the Manichaean world Trump conjures up, his MAGA followers are the genuine Americans, while his opponents are evil “Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
Some of those I contacted were explicitly critical of Rothstein’s arguments. Cindy Kam, a political scientist at Vanderbilt, wrote by email:
My own sense is that when people are talking about corruption, they really do mean the improper use of government funds for private gain.
People see the use of those programs as lining the pockets of administrators/decision makers or associates therein. But that’s not primarily the way that I’d see the Republicans framing their opposition to D.E.I., critical race theory, and affirmative action policies.
I would imagine other characterizations would be used by detractors (discriminatory, brainwashing, etc.). Fraud on the part of program participants seems different from corruption (self-benefit) on the part of decision makers; I’d see the opposition to means-tested programs and the safety net as coming from indignation over cheating/fraud by program participants.
One thing is clear: Trump’s sustained claims of Democratic and liberal corruption has not prevented the steady erosion of his status.
Since taking office, Trump’s approval rating has been on a consistent downward trajectory, falling to 45.8 percent on May 12 from 50.5 percent on Jan. 27, according to RealClearPolitics. Over the same period, his disapproval rating rose to 50.1 percent from 44.3 percent.
Any normal — or rational — politician looking at those numbers would seriously consider a major shift in direction. Trump, however, is neither normal nor rational.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.
The post Shamelessness Is Trump’s Superpower appeared first on New York Times.
