How Democrats Can Turn Trump’s Corruption Into a Political Revolution

From Teddy Roosevelt to Navalny and Zelenskyy, history shows that exposing corrupt elites can mobilize voters and topple entrenched power.

With all but 2 Republican senators voting to make Todd Blanche our Attorney General, Donald Trump just walked away from a $100 million fine for tax fraud that the IRS has been trying to collect from him for over a decade. This was the centerpiece of the “settlement” that Blanche wrote up that says that Trump, Uday and Qusay, Jared and Ivanka, Tiffany and Boulos, and even Barron will never again have to worry about paying taxes or ever being audited. It may well even extend to their business partners.

Meanwhile, last week Capital One bank submitted sworn testimony to a court that back in 2021 they shut down and closed 385 Trump-owned businesses because their fraud department — and its leader, a man with “extensive financial fraud law enforcement experience” — believed Trump’s businesses were engaging in illegal money laundering and the bank wanted nothing to do with it.

Even more astonishing, neither of these revelations from the past two weeks made more than the tiniest stir in our corporate media, which is increasingly afraid of crossing Trump or his neofascist billionaire buddies. There’s a meme that’s traveling around the internet right now that’s shockingly on-the-nose:

“It’s so weird how everybody simply accepts that Trump is a criminal and a Russian stooge and then goes on about their days.”

Setting aside the legal horror show this all represents for a moment, this mind-boggling level of corruption could be political gold, and today’s Democratic leadership is pissing it away.

Democrats are (continuously, it seems) debating what should be their campaign strategy, their main through-line message, for the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Every faction and special interest group in the country is pushing their own idea, but there’s one overarching concept — one word — that can encompass most all of them and do so with a proven political punch:

“Corruption.”

At every level, ever since the Reagan Revolution, the heart of Republican policies has been the naked corruption of our American political and economic systems by billionaires and giant corporations. Since the 1980s, Republicans have sold their corruption with slogans like, “Government is the problem, not the solution,” and “Let the market decide,” but their real message is, “Turn it all over to billionaires and their corporations.” The result has been:

— Tax cuts and loopholes for billionaires and big corporations that, in aggregate since 1981, add up to more than our total national debt of $39 trillion (in other words, Republicans borrowed $39 trillion in our names that our kids will repay and gave all of it to the morbidly rich).
— Reagan’s 1983 suspension of enforcement of the anti-trust laws that has caused every industry in America to become a form of monopoly dominated by five or fewer massive corporations, gutting small business competition and raising prices.
— Five on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court ruling that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as “free speech,” handing our elections over to the highest bidders.
— Virtually every legacy federal regulatory agency being run today by industry insiders working on a revolving-door basis.
— Members of Congress and the corrupt Trump regime engaging in insider trading with impunity; for $100,000 a month, Trump‘s Nazi-infested social media site will even sell you insider information.
— A GOP-aligned military-industrial complex that’s essentially taken over Pentagon procurement.
— An anti-labor Labor Department; an anti-education Education department; an anti-civil rights Civil Rights enforcement agency; an anti-environment Environmental Protection Agency; etc…
— Trump’s mysterious pardons that always seem to go to people who’ve given him millions of dollars (after Giuliani claimed he and Trump were selling pardons for two million each and splitting the money).
— Gutting of the Internal Revenue Service so that wealthy tax cheats and multinational corporations can more easily evade taxes with near-impunity.
— The systematic sabotage and even privatization of public institutions — from the US Postal Service to public schools to prisons — so Republican-donor corporations can profit off the essential services that used to be considered part of the commons.
— The rivers of dark money after Citizens United that’re letting billionaires and corporations secretly pour functionally unlimited amounts of cash into our elections with zero accountability.
— Using the Federal Communications Commission to loosen media ownership rules for Trump’s billionaire and nepo-baby buddies while, at the same time, threatening to shut down or force sales of those outlets that don’t sing Trump’s praises.
— Red-state and federal voter suppression laws that make it harder for poor, young, female, and minority voters to have a say in our democracy.
— The Republican Party’s multi-decade refusal to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices causing Americans to pay the highest prescription costs in the developed world.
— Paralyzing the Federal Election Commission so even the most bizarre and blatant violations of what’s left of our election laws by Republican politicians are never even investigated, much less prosecuted.
— The use of tax havens and trade policy to encourage offshoring American jobs while bigshot executives reap record profits and bonuses, hollowing out the American middle class.
— The Republican normalization of lobbyists literally writing legislation via groups like the Koch-funded ALEC, ensuring laws are crafted to benefit industries and billionaires rather than the public.
— Rewriting environmental and labor rules for the benefit of polluting industries, often done brazenly and in the open by Trump appointees with direct financial stakes in the companies or industries they’re supposed to regulate.
— The strategic packing of the federal courts with hardcore rightwing/neofascist judges that ensures decades of rulings that favor corporate and billionaire power, weakens labor and consumer protections, and shields Trump’s corruption from any kind of meaningful accountability.

Republicans understand the power of mobilizing the public’s outrage against the corruption that they themselves have participated in for over 40 years. Astonishingly, cynically, that’s the meta-message to Trump’s main campaign slogan each of the three times he’s run for president: “Drain the swamp.”

And it worked, even though it was an outrageous lie.

Democrats, who have actually been trying to do something about corruption for years, need to appropriate the anti-corruption theme as their main message for 2026 and 2028. Because, universally, it works.

— When working in Russia, I witnessed the way Alexi Navalny came so close to taking down Putin that the Russian dictator ordered him murdered; it was done via Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. It systematically and relentlessly exposed the ways Putin and his cronies were looting their nation’s government while passing out favors to oligarchs willing to align themselves with them.

— In the 1980s, I was working for a German international relief organization in The Philippines when Cory Aquino mobilized an anti-corruption message against the Marcos dynasty; the week Marcos and his wife fled the country I was bumped off Philippine Airlines flights five days in a row because so many of their cronies were appropriating all the seats (the airline was run by a crony).

— When Jair Bolsonaro first successfully ran for president of Brazil it was on a campaign against the corruption that “Operation Car Wash” had exposed in the Lula administration. When elected, Bolsonaro, instead of ending the corruption, slid right into the system and expanded it, leading to his own ultimate downfall and current imprisonment.

— In Delhi, activist Anna Hazare’s 2011 anti-corruption hunger strike ignited a nationwide movement that helped spur passage of India’s Lokpal anti-corruption law and led his former allies to found the Aam Aadmi Party, which rose from scratch to power in Delhi on a clean-government platform.

— And, of course, it was the anti-corruption message of the EuroMaidan “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014 that lifted then-comedian and TV star Volodymyr Zelenskyy into the presidency of Ukraine.

From Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Era of the early 20th century to the present, anti-corruption messages have repeatedly proven to be one of the most potent forces in American politics, too.

— In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt built a foundation of mass support by casting monopolies as a “corrupt alliance” between the morbidly rich and our government, while the exposure of William M “Boss” Tweed’s graft by Thomas Nast’s biting cartoons helped bring down New York’s Tammany Hall.

— The Watergate scandal turned corrupt abuse of power into a national reckoning that forced Richard Nixon from office and fueled sweeping electoral gains for reformers like Jimmy Carter, while more recent scandals like George Santos’ lies and loss reinforced “clean government” as a winning local message.

— At the national level, Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” campaign and the “rigged system” critiques by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren show that, across the ideological spectrum, framing political battles as struggle against entrenched, self-dealing elites remains one of the most consistently reliable ways to get energized voters to the polls and win power.

It makes perfect sense that this should be the Democrats’ main strategy: the core philosophy of the GOP that was first made explicit by the Reagan administration — “greed is good” — openly invites corruption.

As we’ve seen in virtually every congressional vote over the past four decades, Republican politicians are now entirely in the pockets of the fossil fuel, health insurance, tax preparation, and weapons industries, among others.

Whether it’s the corrupt collusion between the Kushner and Netanyahu families that helped lead us into an illegal war against Iran, the billions Trump’s family has made in crypto and other schemes, the insider trading on the war, putting industry insiders in charge of regulatory agencies, or the DeSantis and Paxton/Abbott corruption scandals, there are vivid examples of Republican corruption laying on the public ground all over the country in plain sight.

Every Democrat in America should scan their local horizon for examples of corruption they can use against Republicans because, for the GOP, corruption has become a way of life.

The words “Republican corruption” should be continuously on Democrats’ lips, whether campaigning, speaking to constituents, or making media appearances.

Hammer these corrupt SOBs with their own crimes against democracy and the middle class, and Democrats will see results like Magyar, Zelenskyy, Aquino, and so many others have achieved.

It’s simple, easy, and powerful: “It’s the corruption, stupid!”

Louise’s Daily Song: “When Did Trump’s Corruption Stop Being News?”

Comments on Monday’s Daily Take:

Could Trump, or Anyone, Win Elections by Simply Promising Medicare for All?

If the Democrats had total control of the legislative and executive as they did during Obama’s administration, I doubt that we could get Medicare for All, because the problem is inside the house. we have to oust the old guard, the consultants, analysts and reps that slop at the donor’s trough
~ William Farrar

Nobody wants promises anymore. The Democrats have demonstrated more than once that they are not interested in passing a single payer healthcare program, and certainly The Affordable Care Act is proof positive as that was effectively the opposite of single payer which privatized the healthcare system and had us funneling our tax dollars through the government to subsidize the profits of the health insurance conglomerates.
~ Barry J Kaufman DO

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.