Donald Trump loves nothing more than superlatives, so here’s another he can use: the most corrupt government in decades, according to Americans. A new poll from Gallup finds that “Americans’ perceptions of government corruption in the U.S. are at their highest level in 20 years, with 89% of U.S. adults saying it is widespread.” An estimated 91% of Democrats, 90% of independents and even 83% of Republicans agreed with that assessment.
How could anyone think otherwise? The past two years have been full of self-dealing and exploitation of the Oval Office for Trump’s personal gain.
Three days before he took office, Trump created a meme coin for people to invest in. As of July, he made $636 million in fees; buyers lost $3.81 billion.
For instance, four days before Trump was inaugurated, the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser, known as the “Spy Sheik,” secretly made a $500 million investment in World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company. The administration later lifted controls on the export of artificial intelligence chips to the UAE, a key objective of its government.
When the Emirati royal family took a $2 billion stake in Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange, Binance arranged for the investment to be made with World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin. That, in effect, provided World Liberty a $2 billion bank deposit. (The Trump family, World Liberty and Binance all deny wrongdoing.) Not long after, Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who had pled guilty in a sweeping money-laundering investigation.
Speaking of crypto, Trump signed legislation in July 2025 boosting stablecoins, just one of many actions he has taken in support of the crypto industry from which he stands to make billions. And just before he took office, Trump created a meme coin for people to invest in. As of July this year, he made $636 million in fees; buyers lost $3.81 billion.
Trump’s sons have invested in a series of companies that benefit from government contracts. In at least one case, the White House intervened to secure a government loan for one of Don Jr.’s investments, although the Pentagon and Trump Jr. said he was not involved in the decision.
In another case, the president personally lobbied the president of Kazakhstan to grant a lucrative tungsten mining concession to a company his sons were negotiating a stake in. (The White House “rejected any suggestion that the Trump administration was improperly mixing government actions with family business,” The New York Times reported.)
Other examples include:
- Qatar gifted Trump a $400 million airplane to serve as Air Force One. Upgrading the plane cost taxpayers around $1 billion. The plane will become property of the Trump library after he leaves office, which essentially means Trump can use it for as long as he likes.
- Trump Media & Technology Group, the company that owns Truth Social, created a program in which people can pay $100,000 for early access to the president’s social media posts, which often move markets. Two media outlets have filed a lawsuit challenging the access. (The White House has not commented. A TMTG spokesperson said that “monetizing social media platform data is commonplace among tech companies.”)
- Trump has used his pardon power to reward a slew of politicians convicted on corruption charges, donors convicted of fraud and other allies and supporters.
- In February 2025, Trump paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars American companies from paying bribes overseas. The president said the law was being enforced in “excessive, unpredictable” ways. Though the pause ended in June 2025, enforcement of the FCPA is down significantly.
- Under Trump, the Department of Justice office charged with combatting public corruption was reduced from 36 lawyers down to just two.
- Trump has taken hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate donations to his inauguration and various pet projects, from his ballroom to his library to the sod on the White House lawn.
At another time, any one of these would have been a scandal so huge it would have consumed a presidency.
And Trump isn’t shy about admitting what he’s up to. When asked in an interview earlier this year why he has been so much more open about pursuing his own business interests in his second term than he was in his first, he replied, “Because I found out that nobody cared. I’m allowed to.” He does not bother to say that the public has a right to expect integrity in its leaders. The only question is whether he can get away with using his office personal gain. If he can, he will.
In 2024, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled in Snyder v. United States that a mayor who took a $13,000 payment for steering a government contract to a company could not be convicted of bribery because he had only received a “gratuity” afterward. In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by the court’s two other liberal justices, wrote that officials using their positions for their own gain “makes governments — at every level — less responsive, less efficient, and less trustworthy from the perspective of the communities they serve.” For Trump and his party, that’s exactly the point. They want people to distrust their government and expect nothing from it. Once you’ve grown that cynical, why bother voting for the party that believes in government’s ability to solve problems?
On the campaign trail this year, some Democrats — including Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff and James Talarico in Texas — have been trying to tie all this corruption together and weave it into a larger story about what ails America. Corruption, they say, is not just why Trump has expanded his wealth so dramatically in office. It’s also why Jeffrey Epstein got away with what he did for so long, why the rich keep getting tax cuts, and why healthcare is unaffordable. According to the polls, almost all the voters believe corruption is a problem. The question is how much longer they’re willing to tolerate it.
The post A new poll finds nearly all Americans say government corruption is ‘widespread.’ Blame Trump. appeared first on MS NOW.
Author: Source Author
From MS Now.
Leave a Reply