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Gangster Capitalism and Corruption in Trump’s America

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Tradition is not the worship of ashes. It is the preservation of fire. –Gustav Mahler

Tradition is not the worship of ashes. It is the preservation of fire.

Corruption as Authoritarian Spectacle

Corruption has never been far from the center of American politics. Some of the most notorious scandals stretch from the cronyism of Warren G. Harding to the abuses of power exposed during the Watergate scandal under Richard Nixon. Yet many historians argue that what distinguishes What distinguishes Donald Trump from earlier corrupt presidencies is that corruption no longer operates behind closed doors, shielded by the liberal rituals of institutional legitimacy and the euphemisms of political decorum. Under Trump, corruption is performed openly as spectacle, celebrated as a sign of strength, wealth, vengeance, and personal loyalty.

Trump’s ever-expanding regime of corruption is no longer simply hidden financial misconduct but a public display of sociopathic avarice designed to normalize greed, lawlessness, unconstrained power, and the collapse of civic accountability. It reflects a politics of moral nihilism in which fascism no longer appears as a distant threat, but as the future already taking shape.

As a badge of honor, Trump embraces corruption not simply as a mode of governance, but as a spectacle designed to legitimate greed, cruelty, and unchecked power. It functions as what Dominic Wetzel has called the “pornification of the American dream,” a culture in which excess, lawlessness, and predation are celebrated as signs of success and strength. In Trump’s America, corruption metastasizes into a theater of cruelty and violence, saturating political life with the values of fear, spectacle, and disposability. It feeds a broader architecture of domination rooted in toxic hierarchies of race, class, misogyny, and white Christian nationalism, while turning lawlessness and untethered aggression into forms of political entertainment.

Corruption, in this sense, is more than a symptom of institutional decay, moral depravity, or political vulgarity. It becomes one of the central pedagogical and political mechanisms through which fascist politics takes hold, eroding democratic values while legitimating a culture organized around brutality, humiliation, and civic abandonment. In this formulation, corruption functions as a kind of fascist staging ground, creating the conditions that nourish what Jonathan Crary calls in Scorched Earth an “implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory, and social disintegration.”

The Criminalization of Governance

What defines the Trump regime, then, is not merely corruption in the conventional sense of bribery or financial misconduct. Rather, it is the systemic fusion of authoritarian power, organized greed, spectacle, state-sponsored cruelty, and impunity, a fusion that transforms corruption into a governing principle and a cultural ideal. The display  of greed and the ensuing scandals are staggering in scope: the use of Trump hotels and resorts as political cash machines for lobbyists, foreign governments, and Republican operatives seeking influence; the funneling of taxpayer money into Trump-owned properties through Secret Service and government expenditures; the diversion of inauguration funds into private enrichment schemes; the use of cryptocurrency ventures and opaque political action committees as modern slush funds; the acceptance of lavish gifts, luxury travel, and aircraft linked to billionaire benefactors and foreign interests; and the open monetization of political access itself.

Added to this are Jared Kushner’s multibillion-dollar Saudi investment connections following his White House role, Ivanka Trump’s trademark deals and business expansions during the administration, and the nepotistic appointment of family members to positions of immense political influence. What emerges is a scale of self-dealing and lawlessness unprecedented in modern American politics. But these scandals are not isolated abuses of office. They point to a deeper transformation in which corruption becomes institutionalized as a governing logic, a mode of public pedagogy, and a defining feature of authoritarian power.

Trump’s corruption reaches beyond the traditional language of political scandal and increasingly resembles the operational logic of a criminal enterprise. The proposed $1.786 billion slush fund, tied to settlements for insurrectionists, corrupt opportunists, and other Trump allies, signals more than financial gangsterism; it reveals a governing structure in which enormous pools of money function as instruments of loyalty, reward, intimidation, and political protection. Walter Olson quoting Nick Catoggio is right in stating that “It’s simple theft packaged in the argle-bargle of “weaponization” and “compensation.” … The president behaves with impunity because he believes most of his party will unthinkingly defend anything he does, and he’s correct.”

 Taken together, these actions reveal a regime that increasingly resembles a criminal enterprise. Such practices build upon Trump’s decision to pardon more than 1,600 individuals convicted in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol, including participants involved in violent assaults on police officers defending the democratic process. The pardons transformed political violence into a badge of allegiance, signaling that acts committed in defense of the leader would not only be excused but sanctified as patriotic service.

At the same time, Trump has repeatedly used the pardon power to shield political allies, wealthy donors, and figures associated with spectacular forms of criminality. Among the most notorious was the pardon of Ross Ulbricht, associated with one of the largest online drug trafficking operations in American history. Added to this were pardons and commutations granted to numerous allies and supporters convicted of fraud, corruption, and financial crimes. For example the pardon of  Philip Esformes, who was convicted in one of the largest Medicare fraud schemes in U.S. history involving roughly $1.3 billion in fraudulent claims. Esformes became emblematic of a politics in which white-collar criminality is treated not as a threat to the public good but as negotiable currency within a system of transactional loyalty.

As journalist David D. Kirkpatrick reported in The New Yorker the Trump family has pocketed roughly $4 billion through a vast network of business dealings, political branding........

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