Why voters keep shrugging off Trump’s corruption |
Tom Homan, the White House border czar, allegedly accepted $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives during a sting operation last year, according to MSNBC. The payment was made after Homan implied that he could help the agents secure government contracts in a second Trump administration.
In layperson’s terms, this is what bribery looks like: officials promising favors in exchange for money. In this case, Homan was not a government official at the time of the sting, though he had said during the 2024 election that he would likely have a role in a second Trump term. The investigation related to Homan — which was launched during the Biden administration and was first reported by MSNBC this past weekend — was only recently shut down. FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed that prosecutors “found no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.”
Now, we don’t know the full details of the case, and, in the absence of a full investigation or a trial, we can’t know that Homan is guilty of hatching a bribery scheme. But to say this should raise eyebrows is an understatement.
The Homan story raises a question that has come up over and over again since President Donald Trump catapulted himself to the White House: Do American voters actually care about corruption? After all, Trump has so far gotten away with maintaining unprecedented conflicts of interest, accepting gifts from foreign governments, and turning the presidency into a giant cash grab. And despite his history of fraud and corruption, he still won a second term last November.
Yet