It is tempting to think that just because Donald Trump is by far the most corrupt public official in the history of the United States, and his administration is unquestionably the most corrupt ever, that somehow the corruption problem in Washington begins and ends with them.

That would be a huge mistake.

I have lived in Washington for 33 years. My first job in D.C. was even before I moved here, when, for a couple of years during the Carter administration, I was the press secretary for a congressman.

I came to D.C. an idealist. My idealism was fostered by the wholesale swallowing of jingoistic propaganda from my school years and from my immigrant father. The idealism was then, in turn, wrapped in a protective coating of naivete and further buffered by a remarkable degree of ignorance.

So much for the East Coast cynicism of which I’ve always been so proud.

But here’s the deal: After decades in Washington, it is crystal clear to me that what distinguishes the city and defines its culture more than any other trait, and now does so to a greater and greater degree yearly, is its corruption.

Washington is, at its core, a machine in which power is recycled into money. Power is made into money, money is then translated into more power, which in turn becomes more money.

It is the formula that keeps the ecosystem of Washington alive, and ensures that it serves fewer and fewer of us at the expense of more and more of us.

But the corruption is about more than money. It is about placing the self-interests of the powerful ahead of judgment, ethics, morality, decency, and all the other qualities that we ought to expect in public servants.

It is about placing serving self-interests ahead of public service.

Much of the corruption is, however, invisible. Indeed, it has been institutionalized to such a degree that it is not just normalized, it’s mechanized, routinized, baked into the cake.

Appropriations processes, the way officials are recruited for jobs, and even how think tanks operate, rationalizing the unthinkable in exchange for donations, are all part of these corrupt processes.

In fact, baked in the cake is not a bad metaphor, as corruption in Washington is, as it turns out, perhaps a 700-layer cake ranging from straight-on grift of the free airplane type to hard-to-see chicanery of the crypto kind, to respectable forms of thievery like the budget process, to lobbying to think tanks, to the various forms of self-interested hobnobbery going on at Georgetown cocktail parties.

What’s more, the very fact that the corruption is endemic‚ embedded in the culture and the processes of Washington, means that it functions as a kind of defense system.

Everything is normalized by actually being normal.........

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