Donald Trump just accepted a $400 million luxury jet from a foreign government. When asked by a reporter about this, he angrily said that only “stupid” people would not accept such a blatantly corrupt exchange.
Most people understand why this is wrong: the president should work on behalf of Americans’ interests, not his own.
Most of those same people, however, think that “all of them” act this way. This is how conversations with them tend to go:
“Trump accepted $400 million luxury jet from a foreign government.”
“Well he shouldn’t have done that, but they all do that.”
“They do? Who else has done anything like this.”
“Oh, ya know, all of them! Didn’t Hillary taking bribes at the Clinton foundation? Didn’t Biden’s kid get a job in a foreign country once?”
“Those were nothing on the scale of the President of the United States accepting $400 million in gifts *while* he’s president. Hunter Biden was not an elected official, Hillary Clinton was never proven to have engaged in any wrongdoing at the Clinton Foundation”
“Well why did everyone make so much noise about Hunter and Hillary? There must have been something.”
And now, suddenly, you are talking about Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden: two people who were not the president of the United States when they committed their supposed transgressions. And you are not talking about Trump accepting a $400 million dollar gift from a foreign government.
It doesn’t matter what Hillary, Hunter, or any other politically-connected person actually did, or whether it was corrupt. Trump/MAGA simply needs people to feel confused, disoriented, and numb about who did what and how it compares to Trump’s transgressions. And that is exactly how the American public feels right now.
Worse, Trump actually *benefits* because he does it in broad daylight. His base respects him more for the lack of secrecy about it; it codes as “alpha” to just do it, defend it, and shut down anyone who asks about it.
It would be nice if in the lead up to the 2026 and 2028 elections, Democrats could focus exclusively on how they are going to help the American people. But they did this in 2024, and it failed. Our political culture is simply not interested in the details of legislation, of what the government might for us (like, say, deliver us from a crippling, deadly pandemic by getting 220 million vaccinated and back to normal).
Cynicism and ethical disorientation is a generational problem that we will not escape in the next 2-3 years. In fact, it will worsen, as people feel even more numb and powerless from normalized, bold-faced corruption.
The brightest contrast Democrats could draw with MAGA right now is the same one that worked in the 2006 midterms: fighting corruption. But unlike 2006, we need this to be a generational argument, not just one that lasts one election cycle.
Yes, talk about the cost of living, prices, health care, and issues that hit people in their daily lives. But Americans have been numbed by Trump’s lack of any sort of ethics. The hypothetical conversation I sketched above was not a *happy* one. The casual Trump voter is not “excited” that Trump does “what everyone else does.” They are confused as to why you think Democrats are any better.
Trump right now is *using* his bold-faced corruption as an asset: the brazenness of it numbs his casual supporters from think there’s anything wrong with it, and it emboldens his base for gleefully triggering the libs.
Democrats are now out of power and so the American public will not blame them for what happens over the next two years or more. While they live in a state “outside” of politics, to the 60-70% of the non-MAGA voting public, they need to re-introduce the idea that corruption is bad, it is not normal, and there is something that *can be done* about it.
Easier said than done, but as we formulate who we are as a party over these next 2-3 years: better said than unsaid.
What do you think?