This was, in other words, a good outcome for freedom-loving people everywhere and a result that will hopefully yield further fruit. But there is one by-product that’s truly been a puzzlement. Across the media landscape, the chattering class has assayed the election and made what is—to it, anyway—a fresh discovery: What if political corruption is bad? And what if campaigning against corruption is a winning issue?
It’s something of a marvel to have so many people so confident in their public declarations that they’ve finally cracked this code, several years after it might have been a useful insight. Trump, who will never be on a ballot again, is corrupt—and maybe that’s his Achilles’ heel! As someone who was trying to explain the depths of Trump’s corruption and the importance of safeguarding the constitutional bulwarks against a president using his position to enrich himself before Trump’s first inauguration, I can only say that these folks are a little late to the party.
Ossoff is one of 120 Democratic candidates who long ago signed onto End Citizens United’s “Unrig Washington” pledge, which asks candidates to support three agenda items: a total ban on congressional stock trading, a refusal of corporate PAC money, and a promise to undo the damage of the Citizens United ruling and to crack down on dark money in our politics. Maybe everyone at the big newspapers missed this. Notably, NOTUS—the upstart publication that’s lately been eating The Washington Post’s lunch—took stock of the scene two months ago and found that “Democratic candidates are leaning into anti-corruption messaging this cycle, seeing it as an opportunity to emphasize what they see as excessive corporate influence, unethical stock trading and shady behavior from their opponents.”
So what, if anything, has been holding Democrats’ efforts back despite this being such a robust line of attack on Trumpism? Well, as the aforementioned NOTUS report noted, “Democrats were seen as more corrupt than Republicans by a five-percentage point margin in a 2025 battleground poll by End Citizens United.” There’s no doubt that some of this was a self-inflicted wound: There’s been significant intraparty resistance to a ban on stock trading, for instance. And the party has been slow to deal with its own corrupt members—like letting noted sleaze-pump Bob Menendez hang around the Senate until his crimes finally became too comical to tolerate.
It’s absolutely the case that we would know very little about Trump’s crimes were it not for the reporters who’ve ferreted out all these important stories. But where the mainstream media falls down on the job is its lack of civic impulse to properly paint Trump and his enablers as agents in a de facto criminal enterprise. And just as the media has indulged in sanewashing the president’s demented ravings, so too has it sanded off the edges of Trump’s corrupt practices. The way Trump’s story gets told, serial violations of the Constitution become mere “departures” from previous norms; his mafioso-like demands of the international community aren’t described as extortion—Trump is simply being “transactional.”
Look, I think it’s great that so many media elites have woken up to the fact that political corruption is a great civic evil, and that Trump is politically corrupt. But by the transitive theory of equality, that means Trump is a great civic evildoer, and a media that can’t tell that truth—and which instead seeks to obscure it—is this corrupt president’s brilliant ally. I’m hoping this will change, but I rather think that the people who possess the means to shape the discourse back into something that reflects reality, and actually help restore our once flourishing democracy, all lack the guts to join this fight. Hopefully, as in Hungary, we will end up not needing them.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
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