Corruption Is Still Corruption Even If It Happens Right In the Open

Why Trump's brazenness diffuses the media's ability to describe him accurately.

Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok

On Thursday evening, President Trump hosted a dinner for 220 winners of a very special auction, those who bought the largest quantities of the creative graft vehicle known as the Trump meme coin, both juicing the price of an asset Trump owns and funneling millions of dollars in fees to him. The largest purchaser was Justin Sun, a crypto mogul who has poured tens of millions of dollars into Trump family crypto enterprises in recent days. Sun had been under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, but after Trump took office, the investigation was halted.

One day earlier, the administration officially accepted the gift of a 747 jumbo jet from Qatar, which Trump wants to use as Air Force One; when he leaves office it will then be transferred to a future Trump museum foundation. In other words, a plane valued at $400 million, which the American taxpayer will pay to upgrade with something like a billion dollars in modifications, will be given to Trump for his personal use.

These two events (and many others) have presented a test to the news media, one they are largely failing. As they have so many times before, they are utilizing rules and practices that were built for reporting on ordinary politicians, but simply do not apply to Donald Trump.

At the heart of this failure is an expectation that no longer holds, that when a politician commits acts of corruption, they will seek to conceal their misdeeds. While it is entirely possible that Trump and his family of fraudsters have engaged in personal enrichment schemes that have been kept secret (in fact, I’d be surprised if they hadn’t), what he has done right out in public is more than enough to demand a change in how we talk about the corruption that defines this presidency. The fact that he is not hiding his corruption — indeed, he seems to revel in making it as public as possible — is still shocking to many in the news media. And they have yet to adapt.

Time to discard the language of ethics

Journalists know — or think they know — how to talk about the kinds of things Trump is doing. There’s a familiar language they’ve used many times before, and are using again. It’s the language of political ethics, built around a set of standards, practices, and procedures. They use terms like “ethical concerns,” “conflicts of interest,” and “established norms.” When ethical questions are raised, they say “questions are being raised” — questions they themselves will merely repeat in sanitized form, but not answer. They will consult ethics experts and explain how the political system deals with these sorts of issues. They will ask spokespeople to explain whether the politician in question is adhering to the law and the rules.

Those habits were built up over time as we dealt with politicians of varying degrees of integrity. Critically, even the corrupt ones attempted to convince the public that they were actually honest, that they weren’t on the take, that they wouldn’t countenance even the appearance of a conflict between the obligations of public office and their personal financial interest.

This was one of Trump’s innovations: By putting his corruption on display, he makes it seem less corrupt. That’s in part because we have come to expect that corruption is something that gets exposed, ferreted out by dogged reporters meeting sources in darkened parking garages talking about cash stuffed into brown paper bags:

From that expectation springs the belief that the most important “scoop” is the one that reveals what is being concealed. That is what excites enterprising reporters, and lies at the heart of how they understand their profession. But what if the scandal is right out in the open? Then there’s no revelation and no scoop — stories to write, certainly, but nothing that requires screaming headlines and all-hands-on-deck editorial mobilization that produces dozens of stories, as a news organization would mount if it found out that a Democrat, say, used the wrong email account.

There is, however, a model for how to talk about what Trump is doing: crime coverage. While reporters are careful to say someone is an “alleged” criminal before they have actually been convicted, when reporting on crime they don’t start from the presumption that nothing bad occurred, and they don’t look for experts who can tell them if it might be bad for crimes to be committed.

That’s how we ought to be talking about Trump: not about conflicts of interest and ethical concerns, but about payoffs, shakedowns, graft, and self-dealing.

It’s even worse than it looks

The fact that unlike an ordinary politician Trump doesn’t act as though he’s afraid of getting caught should make us more eager to speak plainly about how corrupt he is, not less. Just as he survived scandals over his lengthy history of sexual assault by offering denials that endorse the idea of sexual assault even as he dismisses a particular accuser (“Believe me, she would not be my first choice, that I can tell you”), Trump only halfheartedly, if at all, admits that there would be something wrong with him taking payoffs. Likewise, his spokespeople don’t bother answering questions about the details of the bribes he may be receiving; when asked they just repeat that his integrity is unimpeachable and his selflessness beyond measure. “I think it's frankly ridiculous that anyone in this room would even suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit,” says Karoline Leavitt. “That is not what President Trump does.” Even his own supporters must have laughed.

This is precisely why his naked corruption is so dangerous. One can argue that Watergate, for instance, was ultimately a story that enhanced the credibility of the system: A corrupt president was exposed, discredited, and hounded from office, and in his wake the laws and rules were reinforced to make sure something similar never happened again. But Trump’s impunity makes a mockery of the system, leaving behind the lesson that corruption is endemic and nobody should bother trying to stop it.

Perhaps unwittingly, reporters are reinforcing that idea. Because Trump is highly unlikely to be held accountable in any way, they don’t speak honestly about what he is doing. Since they pride themselves on being savvy realists, what would be the point? Democrats won’t impeach him, and the Supreme Court has given him immunity from prosecution for whatever crimes he elects to commit while in office, so describing what he is doing as blatant corruption would only make one seem naïve.

When asked about his fancy new Qatari jet, Trump Trump replied, “I could be a stupid person and say, 'No, we don't want a free, very expensive airplane.’” It was reminiscent of the time Hillary Clinton accused him of paying nothing in taxes, and he said, “That makes me smart.” Trump has long believed that to not be corrupt is to be stupid, a sucker, a loser.

Let’s try not to prove him right.

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