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There’s more to Trump’s corruption than stealing money

It’s transforming the US government at a cellular level.

Donald Trump’s self-dealing and profiteering from high office, a longtime subtheme of his presidency, has just become its defining story.

Consider the following list of news and revelations, all from roughly the past week:

Trump created a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” supervised solely by him, as part of a “settlement” for a bogus lawsuit against the IRS.

As part of the settlement, Trump has formally immunized himself, his family, and his business interests from IRS audits.

Trump made 3,700 stock trades in the first quarter this year, with trades often happening just before a major policy decision affecting the companies in his trades.

The Trump family has made a staggering $1.55 billion from its crypto vehicle World Liberty Financial since late 2024.

It is not hard to see the problem with this behavior. Most people intuitively know it’s bad for politicians to abuse their positions of power for profit.

Yet what Trump is doing is something far more than “ordinary” corruption. He is, very intentionally, attempting to transform the very operating logic of the American political system: to replace a political order structured by rule of law to one where major decisions ultimately come down to whether you have the personal favor of the president.

This is a fundamental transformation — one far more sweeping than widely appreciated. Once you understand it, you understand not just what Trump truly wants, but the deepest ways in which his presidency could affect us all.

Are far-right politics just the new normal?

New data suggests Trump’s assault on democracy may be stalling out

The breaking of American order

In their book Violence and Social Orders, the political scientists Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast sort advanced human societies into roughly two buckets: the “natural state” and the “open access state.”

The natural state, so-called because it was the dominant one for most of recorded history, operates on behalf of self-serving elites. These elite groups aim, first and foremost, at profiting via rent-seeking — which is to say, using their control over power and resources to extract money from others. Think European nobles owning land in perpetuity, taking tributary fees from peasants living under their rule, and ensuring these extractive rights were passed to........

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