Every era of American government has had its scandal. Trump’s innovation is to make scandal itself a governing philosophy. Although it is tempting to see the Trump regime’s corruption – its open profiteering, its use of the state as an instrument of vengeance and self-enrichment – as a perversion of American democracy, the truth is more unsettling: it’s a mirror. The difference between Trump’s era and those before it is not the presence of corruption, but its visibility and the nation’s collective incapacity to feel scandalised by it.

For decades, corruption in the United States was moralised as a deviation from an otherwise legitimate system. From the rail barons and company towns of the 19th century to the revolving door of Wall Street and Washington in the 20th and 21st, American capitalism has always depended on the conversion of public office into private profit. When politicians became lobbyists and habitual inside traders, when corporations wrote legislation, when government bailouts were given to bank executives and political donors, when hospital executives grew rich on public subsidies while their workers and patients sank into precarity, the mechanisms of corruption were disguised as professionalism, efficiency, or expertise. The neoliberal order taught us to equate virtue with success and to see moral worth in market value.

By the time Trump arrived, corruption had been normalised as realism. Trump merely stripped it of its polite fictions – not only in domestic politics but in foreign policy, where the US has long cloaked its violence in the language of democracy and human rights. Trump’s extrajudicial killings of unidentified individuals via........

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