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The Managerial Anguish of Democratic Leaders

Trump’s corruption is personal, so why do Democrats keep making it about procedure?

Gold leafing and decor as US President Donald Trump meets with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, not pictured, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Sept. 25, 2025. Erdogan is visiting the White House for the first time in six years, bringing a slate of deals aimed at […]

There’s a new Beltway consensus in the making: After a decade of self-dealing, executive-sanctioned thuggery, pardon-auctioning, and donor-appeasement in the sanctums of MAGA power, the electorate is at long last wising up. Whether it’s the White House’s campaign of lying about every facet of the Iran War, Donald Trump’s series of lawsuits against the IRS, his use of the Department of Justice to enrich himself at taxpayer expense, or the Versailles-on-ketamine reveries of a billion-dollar ballroom where the East Wing of the White House used to be, voters are becoming outraged over an authoritarian regime that no longer bothers to offer any more than phoned-in rationales for its corruption. 

As The Bulwark’s Mona Charen argues, popular opinion has shifted from the cynical view that the venality of high-office holding was pretty much priced into the Trumpist model of power. “Voters in 2024 made a bargain,” she writes. “Though they knew Trump was corrupt, they bet that he would bring them the kind of economy they’d enjoyed in 2018.” Yet with the cost of living skyrocketing and the tariffs-subsidized “golden age” that Trump hawked a demonstrable bust, that bargain is now null and void:

Economic conditions are now worse than they were in 2024. Nor can Trump rely on partisanship to come to his rescue because it isn’t the Democrats who are making the case about corruption, it’s Trump himself and his allies. It is Trump who used the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to make the case for his garish ballroom. It is Senate Republicans who are adding the insult of demanding taxpayers pay $1 billion for this monument to Trump’s ego. It is Trump, not his opposition, who instructs voters that they should be happy with fewer dolls at Christmas. It is Trump who accepts gold bars from the Swiss delegation and adorns the Oval Office in a style that could be called neo-Saddam.

Economic conditions are now worse than they were in 2024. Nor can Trump rely on partisanship to come to his rescue because it isn’t the Democrats who are making the case about corruption, it’s Trump himself and his allies. It is Trump who used the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to make the case for his garish ballroom. It is Senate Republicans who are adding the insult of demanding taxpayers pay $1 billion for this monument to Trump’s ego. It is Trump, not his opposition, who instructs voters that they should be happy with fewer dolls at Christmas. It is Trump who accepts gold bars from the Swiss delegation and adorns the Oval Office in a style that could be called neo-Saddam.

Unfortunately, though, there are several obstacles in the path of a straightforward kick-the-bums-out case against Trump’s corruptionism in the upcoming midterms cycle. First, the MAGA right has been trafficking in its own theology of maximal Democratic and deep-state corruption over the past decade—the claim that Trump is a suffering servant targeted by his political foes is at the heart of the IRS and DoJ suits, as well as the rationale for allied abuses of law-enforcement power such as the ongoing effort to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey for unspecified vibes-driven offenses and DoJ’s enlistment in a challenge to the $83 million civil action against Trump for assaulting E. Jean Carroll. (The acting........

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