A few weeks ago, I wrote to you all about how I believed corruption should be an important part of the broader midterm message, particularly for candidates in a position to run against Trump, the Republican Party, or the Washington establishment.
Since then, there has been a lot of corruption to message about. We have taxpayers possibly spending a billion dollars on Trump's ballroom. The taxpayer money is on top of the hundreds of millions from major corporations trying to buy influence with Trump. There's the $1.7 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund for Trump's political allies that is the settlement in the case where Donald Trump the person sued Donald Trump the president, and then the two Donald Trumps settled the case in a way favorable to Donald Trump.
And then there is a stunning report from Bloomberg:
President Donald Trump's latest financial disclosures show that he or his investment advisers made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, a flurry totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration.
According to the article, Trump bought millions of dollars worth of NVIDIA stock about a week before NVIDIA announced a major deal with Meta, facilitated by the U.S. government. Unlike Trump's crypto schemes, insider trading is the kind of corruption easily understood by the public.
To put a finer point on it, the New Yorker estimates that the Trumps have increased their net worth by $4 billion in a little more than a year.
It's great work if you can get it.
With corruption increasingly in the news (and my advice that corruption should be part of the message), I wanted to send some thoughts on how to talk about it.
Voters Already Believe that Politics is Corrupt
No one is shocked by Trump's corruption. Okay, maybe the scale and brazenness cause them to take notice, but the public believes that the entire political system is corrupt. In fact, Americans have rarely, if ever, been more cynical about politics and the federal government. A Partnership for Public Service poll found that two-thirds of Americans describe the federal government as corrupt.
A poll from the Searchlight Institute, a moderate think tank, found that 71% believe a "typical politician" is at least somewhat likely to be corrupt. Notably, 68% think that a Republican is likely to be corrupt, and 61% say that of Democrats.
Trump and the Republicans have benefited from this baseline cynicism. If both parties are corrupt, or the whole system is corrupt, the stories about Trump's corruption are not necessarily new information that will cause swing voters to change their minds.
That doesn't mean Trump is getting off scot-free or that the public isn't taking notice. In the Yale Youth poll (which includes all voters with an oversample of young voters), 72% of voters list corruption as a top concern. For voters under 35, it's a bigger concern than health care or democracy.
In a February Economist/YouGov poll, nearly half of Americans describe Trump as corrupt. That number should, of course, be much, much higher, but it's certainly a good place to start, since Democrats have spent basically zero time aggressively pushing the corruption message for the last decade.
How to Talk About Corruption
I'm not sure what this says about the state of affairs in Democratic messaging over the last many years, but I always find it easier to start with what not to do.
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