What Trump's Massive Corruption is Doing to Our Country

It's worse than you think. A lot worse.

You know this already: The Trump administration is far and away the most corrupt in US history, and it’s not close.

What I want to talk about here are the consequences for our country flowing from this fact. I will use the word “Trump” to include his sons and the family ventures, because that is what the entire Republican Party and all of MAGA media did to Joe Biden. And, by any measure, Hunter Biden’s shady dealings are chickenfeed compared to what the Trumps are doing.

The First Consequence

The first and most obvious consequence of Trump’s massive corruption is that it deforms public policy.

Take the cleanest example.

In late 2024, the Trump family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, was failing. It sold $22 million in tokens its first month against a $300 million target. The future looked bleak.

Then a Canadian businessman named Changpeng Zhao came to their rescue. “CZ,” as he’s known, had founded cryptocurrency companies like Binance and Blockchain.com. But Zhao had also pleaded guilty to letting Binance be used to launder money for terrorists, drug traffickers, and child sex abusers, and he served four months in a federal prison for his crimes.

Zhao’s company helped World Liberty launch a stablecoin, which is a cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar, the kind used to move large sums across borders without going through a bank. OK—good for the Trumps, they launched a stablecoin, with CZ’s help. So what? It’s no good unless people want to use it.

Enter the fabulously wealthy nation, the United Arab Emirates. In May 2025, the UAE’s state investment fund put $2 billion into Binance, and they settled their deal in that brand new Trump stablecoin. This one move is projected to earn the Trumps roughly $80 million a year in interest.

Two weeks later, the White House signed an agreement giving the UAE hundreds of thousands of advanced American AI chips that had been blocked on national security grounds.

Then in October, Trump pardoned Zhao.

This is the new architecture of American policy. The pardon power, the chip-export regime, the SEC’s enforcement docket—these are just negotiable instruments now. A foreign government or ex-con wires money to the family business; the policy changes. It happens frequently, and there is no need to be subtle about it, because there is no longer a cost to it. The Trumps do it out in the open—and MAGA cheers, hails it as genius.

The Second Consequence

The second consequence is that all this is now precedent. Whatever Congress declines to investigate, regulate, publicize or punish—it ratifies.

Congress is an empty shell. Impeachment was tried, twice, and failed, and the lesson the political class has drawn is not that presidents must restrain themselves, but that impeachment is only theater.

So the constitutional architecture the Founders built to prevent the monetization of the presidential office is simply being abandoned. What one president can do without consequence, every subsequent president can do.

The next Democrat in the White House will face the same temptation, and what will stop him or her? The press corps? They have already learned to shrug, because the American people are demonstrating that corruption is no big deal, really. And the GOP? They won’t want to change the game now—their turn will come again. Ordinary Americans might yell at each other on social media over this or that one-week corruption scandal. Maybe there’ll be a protest or two.

And this is how kleptocracies get made—not in some foundational act of corruption, which is always notorious, shocking, and gets real media coverage. But in the second one. That’s the one that confirms that the first was not punished. And by now, we are well past the second.

The Third Consequence

The third consequence is the worst, and it is the one that really breaks my heart. I have seen it in action in many countries I have reported from over the years.

In societies where the default assumption underlying every transaction is that the other party will cheat you if he can, or get a favor from the government that you didn’t see coming—there is a deep demoralization that sets in. In those societies the law is mere decoration; what really governs is the brute calculation of what one can get away with. Russia is like that. Egypt, too. There are many.

In nations where ordinary people’s experience and expectation of public life and of commerce is that it’s all just a racket, trust collapses inward to the family, the clan, the bribed official. Civic life withers.

That has not been us. American culture has always had its hucksters and embezzlers, its Ponzi men and tax cheats. But running underneath the noise was a foundational aspiration to decency in business—a sense, however often violated, that there were things one did not do because they were not done.

Tocqueville called this unwritten part of our self-government “habits of the heart.” John Adams said our Constitution was made only for a moral people and was wholly inadequate to the government of any other. He was not making a theological claim; it’s practical. A republic of citizens who will steal whatever they can get away with cannot be governed by a piece of paper.

Now, in our time, the president of the United States is teaching our country, every day, in the most public way available to a human being, that there is only one rule, in business, in government, in marriage, in any relationship, and the rule is this: Whatever you can get, you should take. That means probity is for losers, restraint is for suckers, and the people still trying to play by the old rules are marks.

And so the good life, the good American life, is now all about the Benjamins and the stablecoins, no matter how you get your hands on them.

Fast bucks. Free lunches. Laughing at the chumps.

That lesson, once learned, is hard to unlearn. A country that gets corruption like this in its bloodstream has a terribly difficult time getting it out.

The dollars can be recovered. The policies can be reversed. But those habits of the heart, once corrupted, take generations to mend—if they mend at all.

That is what Trump is doing to our country. That is the price of him.

The way out, if there is one, must begin with true congressional oversight, and a Congress that will make it a priority.

—Terry