If the Democrats hope to maximize their chances of winning in this November’s elections, there’s a subject they need to scream far and wide about: Donald Trump’s immense and unprecedented corruption. The Democrats need to make clear to every American that Trump has shamelessly used his second term to increase his wealth by an astounding amount – by more than $2bn – all while millions of Americans are struggling to make ends meet, their struggles made worse by Trump policies that have pushed up inflation and gas prices.

Every day through election day, the Democrats should convey loud and clear that America’s billionaire president has focused far more on making himself richer than on improving the lives of average Americans. Trump’s corruption and conflicts of interest are so vast and outrageous that many Americans have little idea how vast and outrageous they are: ranging from Trump’s making more than $1.4bn from crypto last year to granting pardons to criminals whose families have donated to Trump’s campaign to his sons’ investing in start-up companies that receive generous help from the Trump administration.

Democrats should repeatedly hammer Trump for his greed, corruption and conflicts of interest the same way that Hungary’s opposition repeatedly attacked Viktor Orbán for his immense corruption – a strategy that caused Orbán’s popularity to plummet and caused Hungarian voters to oust their country’s authoritarian leader last April. Peter Magyar, Orbán’s challenger, defeated Orban by focusing on three issues the Democrats would be smart to focus on: the cost of living, the lack of economic opportunities, and the fact that their country’s leader and his family grew ever richer even as many people grew poorer.

Trump’s corruption and continuous push for self-enrichment are by far the worst of any president in US history. “It is completely unprecedented,” Megan Gorman, author of All the Presidents’ Money, a book on the history of presidential wealth since 1776, told the New York Times. Gorman said Trump’s focus on enriching himself is “a betrayal of the American social contract: that those who lead the country prioritize country over self”. Norm Eisen, the White House ethics czar under Barack Obama, told the Washington Post: “It’s corruption on a scale that, to be honest, has few rivals in world history.”

Before Trump won a second term, the Teapot Dome was considered the worst presidential financial scandal in US history. Every US high school student studies that ugly scandal, which occurred under Warren Harding (president from 1921 to 1923). But Teapot Dome is peanuts compared with Trump’s cornucopia of scandals. Harding wasn’t........

© The Guardian