For today’s column, let’s focus on whether Trump is personally corrupt.
Since 99percent of politicians are corrupt, the answer is yes. But I want to focus on the degree of corruption.
I’m motivated in part by a feature story from the New York Times. Authored by David Ovalle and Emily Cochrane, the report says Trump’s corruption has become politically toxic.
Like many Americans, Michael Nave has a hunch that politicians of both parties enrich themselves while the working class struggles to make ends meet. But on Wednesday, Mr. Nave, a Republican, decided the party in power has become too corrupt. He cast his vote early, in Clearwater, Fla., against every Republican on the ballot… “Trump said he would drain the swamp, and he’s become the swamp,” said Mr. Nave… Democratic efforts to bolster the issue this year may be resonating amid a drumbeat of stories about Mr. Trump’s staggering increase in wealth and the billionaire and corporate elites who have supported him. Some recent polls have shown corruption has risen to the top of issues that voters say they care about most.
When it comes to plausibly pay-for-play pardons, Trump in his second term makes Bill Clinton and every other president look like pikers. Paul Walczak, a nursing home executive who’d pled guilty to spending his employees’ federal tax withholdings on such baubles as a $2 million yacht, was in May 2025 on the verge of commencing an 18-month sentence and paying $4.4 million in fines when Trump issued his get-out-of-jail-free card. …Trump’s second-term pardons and sentence commutations have wiped away more than $2 billion in fines and restitutions. …here we are in Trump’s second term, so overwhelmed by dodgy-sounding deals that any attempt to measure or characterize the scope of corruption can seem preemptively futile. …Four days before Trump’s second inauguration, a company called Aryam Investments 1 signed a deal with the president-elect’s son Eric to buy a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial for a reported $500 million, half of it in cash up front. The Trump family received $187 million overnight… Did Aryam Investments have any pressing regulatory business in front of the U.S. government? Quite a bit, yes. …So a foreign government official’s secret $500 million deal that personally enriched the president and his family, plus a key Mideast diplomat and his family, preceded by six months a massive regulatory reversal that will further enrich said official and his country. …Donald Trump and his family are executing corruption at a scale never previously contemplated in the American experiment.
Through regulation, taxes, or outright government ownership, politicians limit the ability of individuals and businesses to do the stuff they want to do. To get free from these government-imposed restrictions, businesses and individuals typically have to pay tribute to the politicians. Throughout history and across the world, governments have functioned as shakedown artists. President Donald Trump is more blatant than any recent U.S. president in this regard, and closer to a third-world strongman than to the American norm. …In October, the White House announced it had approved construction of a road to a mining site in Alaska. The Biden administration, heeding the cries of environmentalists, banned the road. Trump last year approved it. …Trump approved it in exchange for a 10% federal stake in the mining company. Trump’s project of building up federal stakes in dozens of companies deserves plenty of scrutiny. I call it “venture socialism,” and it will have unforeseen (mostly bad) consequences down the line. But it’s worth considering why these companies end up playing ball with Trump: Because they feel they have to. …Trump never gives up leverage without getting something in return. …The “quid pro quo president” has so many quids to give because the federal government has so much power.
Dan Hannan of London’s Institute of Economic Affairs view Trump as being a “Third Worldist.”
…the U.S. is starting to behave like some of the tinpot autocracies… The attempt to browbeat the Nobel Peace Prize Committee; the obsession with building big arches; the tariffs; the annexation threats against Canada, Denmark, and Panama; the renaming of public institutions after a living leader. Such things are the hallmark of insecure dictatorships, not of confident democracies. …The ultimate defining feature of the Third World is corruption. …President Donald Trump has more than doubled his personal wealth since he took office, mainly through his family crypto ventures. It might not be illegal, but it would have been regarded by previous generations of Americans as disgusting. …Does Trump get a pass because he never pretends to be a saint? In a world where all politicians are assumed to be shysters, is he excused because he at least lacks hypocrisy? …Those who have downplayed, excused, or ignored Trump’s venality will struggle to find grounds on which to oppose equally sleazy behavior from a successor in either party. Standards have been permanently lowered.
Is there an empirical way of measuring the degree to which Trump is corrupt?
I’ll close with two bits of data.
Here’s a tweet from @leahfiles. I don’t know this person and have no idea if she’s credible or biased. But if she’s close to accurate, this is somewhat damning.
And here’s the chart she prepared.
Last but not least, here’s the Wikipedia chart on Trump’s estimated net worth.
If he uses his office for private gain, he did a terrible job his first term but he’s been very effective in his second term.
One final comment is that you should probably distinguish between the corruption of a politician and the corruption of the people appointed by that politician. There are rare politicians from all ideologies who seem very clean (Reagan, Carter, Milei, Obama, etc), but maybe had some appointees who behaved dishonorably.
If we focus just on the politician, Trump looks bad, especially in his second term. I don’t like any of the sleaze discussed above, but I’m especially concerned that Trump is being too cozy to dictators such as Putin for reasons of private financial gain for him and his family.
His protectionism enables sleaze and corruption.
