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This past week, we discovered anew that presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner—who serves as a chief Trump administration diplomatic envoy—also profits mightily from business deals with countries with whom he negotiates. We learned, further, that Donald Trump’s negotiated settlements between himself and the IRS benefit … himself. As we already knew, Trump deploys his pardon power to benefit himself and his cronies. And that $63 million in “settlements” between Trump and big tech and media companies that were earmarked for Trump’s presidential library? That seems to be unaccounted for.

In short, we are so incredibly deep into the Trump-corruption tar pits, we barely notice that this is an administration that uses self-dealing as brick and mortar to build yet more corruption. As the recent example of Hungary’s ousting of authoritarian President Viktor Orbán demonstrates, though, there is the potential to come back from this. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick and former Obama administration ethics czar Norm Eisen discussed the ways in which Hungary’s Peter Magyar used anti-corruption as a shorthand to talk to voters about reinstituting democracy, and how that language can succeed in upcoming elections in the United States. Eisen served as the U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic from 2011 to 2014. He is the co-founder and executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund, which has been helping lead the successful national court fights against the Trump administration, and he’s the co-founder and publisher of the Contrarian. An excerpt of their conversation, edited and condensed for clarity, appears below.

Dahlia Lithwick: Do you have a pulldown menu of which instrumentalities of democracy you would fix first, if Republicans lose the next election? What is essential? 

Norm Eisen: People don’t want to hear about Locke and Burke and John Rawls. The way democracy hits them is they want to have a better life, and there’s nothing wrong with talking to people about the cost-of-living crisis. That’s not smaller than talking about ethereal democracy ideas. That’s what Magyar did, and he did it brilliantly. He connected the cost of living with the corruption. He made a deal with the right, left, and center in Hungary, and he was ruthless, and rigorous, and disciplined in making this commitment. Essentially he said: I’m gonna stop the stealing. They are stealing from you and making everything more expensive. I’m........

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