It was only a decade ago that a governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, was embroiled in a corruption scandal resulting from his acceptance of $177,000 in gifts and loans from a businessman in exchange for promoting the company’s diet supplement. The quid pro quo struck many people at the time as more tacky than corrupt; and indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court eventually overturned his conviction on the grounds that using the governor’s mansion as a promotion venue wasn’t a sufficiently “official” act.
These days, the kerfuffle raised by the exposure of McDonnell’s little side hustle feels almost quaint. It also feels like foreshadowing, anticipating President Donald Trump’s use of the White House lawn as a Tesla showroom to thank Elon Musk for his hard work in destroying American government.
In the present-day version, though, it does not appear the carmaker’s $290 million in election spending played a role beyond instilling a warm fuzzy feeling in the bosom of the president. So while ordinary people may be appalled, and Democratic leaders like Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia are demanding an investigation, it’s hard to see the Supreme Court batting an eye. Is it so different from Justice Clarence Thomas accepting a luxury RV from a wealthy businessman?
Trading favors among the rich and powerful seems to be how it works in Trump’s America. Anyone who isn’t using his public position for his own gain is a chump. And while the laws prohibiting corruption are still on the books, Trump has ensured there are no federal prosecutors left with the independence to go after his allies.
Besides which, in the unlikely event your cupidity actually gets you convicted of a crime, the president has a history going back to his first term of handing out pardons to MAGA loyalists regardless of their crimes. Sufficiently demonstrating fealty to the president may be enough to secure your place in his No Grifter Left Behind program. Frankly, the judge who sentences you has more to fear from the president than you do.
By design, Trump’s attacks on American government, civil society and the world order have been so various and extreme as to leave opponents breathless. The resistance looks like a team of firefighters trying to deal with a large and very determined pack of juvenile arsonists.
Yet, of all the fires now burning, Trump’s attacks on the rule of law might pose the single greatest threat to the country’s stability and prosperity. Trump’s firing of government watchdogs, blacklisting a law firm that represented his enemies, and defying judges who rule against him are unprecedented in modern U.S. history. Our economy as well as our democracy was built on a system of checks and balances that made corruption the newsworthy exception rather than the dismal norm.
This was brought home to me in a conversation I had recently with a rancher in, of all places, Patagonia, at the far tip of South America. (When the going gets tough, the not-very-tough go hiking.) The owner of an 8,000-acre estancia turned out to have been involved in Chilean politics for 30 years, representing his region in the Chilean Congress. He didn’t know much about what was going on in the U.S., he admitted, but he felt encouraged by the news that Trump was cutting waste and fraud.
Okay, yes, I guffawed, but I was also struck that, with all the turmoil and crises going on in Washington, the only thing that survived a distance of 6,000 miles was Trump’s spin on his actions. Still, you hardly need to go to Chile to find people who accept Trump’s through-the-looking-glass framing of his dismantling of government institutions.
A pro-Trump family member, as big-hearted a guy as you will ever meet, told me he was sad that people in developing countries would go without food and medicine as a result of Trump shutting down foreign aid, but it had to be done “because of all the fraud.” Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin is also an ardent supporter of Trump’s ever-expanding trims, last week defending the slashing of thousands of federal workers’ jobs as “dislocation” necessary to “gain efficiencies and reduce costs in the federal government.”
That’s the power of language. What Trump calls fraud and corruption turns out to be grants for things he doesn’t like, but his choice of words makes it seem he is fighting for the kind of honest government he is actually working to undermine.
It’s not wrong for people to worry about corruption, though, whether it is the imaginary kind Trump invokes or the real kind we will face when no watchdogs are left to hold his appointees accountable. Whether conservative or socialist, corruption in government leads to a siphoning off of public dollars, the erosion of social cohesion and trust, economic distortion and lower levels of investment in education and health care. Sure, some businesses are going to prosper when they can evade laws with just a well-placed application of palm grease, but economists find that overall, official corruption is a drag on a country’s economic performance. Not to mention, most of us see it as fundamentally unAmerican.
But has Trump actually launched the U.S. on a slippery slide down the corruption index? I talked over my concerns with a fellow Mercury contributor, Michael O’Grady. O’Grady is a research economist and Ph.D. candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies public policy and administration, and he thinks the situation is even worse than I suggest.
Like many scholars, he feels the face-off between Trump and the courts has brought the U.S. to what he calls “the biggest inflection point since at least U.S. v. Nixon, and maybe since Marbury v. Madison in 1803.” And, he points out, if Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was really uncovering fraud in government contracts, we should have seen cases being referred to the Department of Justice for prosecution.
Meanwhile, he says, the firing of government watchdogs and the politicization of the federal government will have real consequences on people’s lives, affecting everything from housing costs to the stock market. When government oversight lapses, corporations tend to engage in market manipulation and tax evasion. To take one example, last summer the DOJ sued a company called RealPage for allowing competing landlords to collude in setting apartment rents. We aren’t likely to see that kind of action from the Trump administration.
O’Grady doesn’t see how this can end well, and neither do I. I’d like to think that in the U.S., our fifty state governments could provide some kind of pushback against malfeasance at the federal level. But I’m aware that’s delusional. For one thing, my own experience is that federal bureaucrats are saints compared to state and local officials, who have much more motivation to swap favors with people and businesses in their communities. And for another, Republican fealty to Trump is so strong that it’s hard to imagine a state attorney general from his own party taking action even if state laws were implicated. Recall that it wasn’t a state prosecutor who indicted Bob McDonnell; it was the U.S. Department of Justice.
I’d have much less concern over Democrats rallying around a party leader if roles were reversed. Loyalty is a conservative value, not a liberal one. Recall how Democratic governor Ralph Northam was called on to resign by members of his own party over a blackface incident. Democrats eat their own.
For now, at least, one bulwark against Trumpism remains: an independent, non-partisan press committed to reporting the facts and holding government officials accountable. There has never been as great a need for unbiased journalism as there is today, or more need for ordinary Americans to support it.
O’Grady reminded me of the (probably apocryphal) story of Benjamin Franklin describing the young United States as “a republic, if you can keep it.” Whether we keep it now depends on us.
This article was published in the Virginia Mercury on March 25, 2025.