A few days ago, my colleague Noah Shachtman, former editor of Rolling Stone, published a reported column in The New York Times focusing on the widespread brazen corruption of New York City Mayor Eric Adams and his administration. He framed it as a marker, proxy and accelerant for a broader culture of public corruption and impunity advancing at every level of our government. Just a couple of days later, it was reported that President Donald Trump’s immigration attack dog Tom Homan — who’s led much of the administration’s heavy-handed federal crackdown — last year allegedly took $50,000 in cash in a literal bag from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen, on camera, after agreeing to steer lucrative future government contracts to them.
It’s rare that something that walks like a bribery scheme, talks like a bribery scheme and quacks like a bribery scheme plays out this cartoonishly, with a soon-to-be public official receiving a stack of cash while all but saying “great, and this is for the crimes, to be clear.” As Shachtman noted in his piece, the Supreme Court has spent much of the past several years chipping away at the ability of prosecutors to successfully bring a corruption case against any public official, but if any case could still be a slam dunk, this, based on the limited information we have, could be it. Instead, the investigation was closed, reportedly by new Trumpist FBI Director Kash Patel, clearing the way for Homan to keep his prominent role in Trump’s orbit.
Not that Trump and his allies are disinterested in using the resources of the Justice Department to go after public officials. Just the day before the Homan news broke, the president posted to his pet social media app, Truth Social, imploring Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate and charge administration critics including former FBI Director James Comey, California Sen. Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James, arguing that inaction on this front was “killing our reputation and credibility.” Some people speculated, given the structure of the post, that this was meant to be a direct message, which would be even worse as that would mean Trump is giving orders to his subordinates via the DM function of a third rate social platform that is, obviously, not properly preserving these as official documents.
In any case, the Homan case seems like the culmination of the move to centralize corruption in U.S. political life, and it struck me that most people aren’t yet grasping the severity and magnitude of this shift, which goes far beyond any individual investigation. Corruption is, in my view, highly corrosive to the fabric of a society in ways that are difficult to patch up, and can eat away at not just our institutions but our desire to preserve them in the first place.
I have lived most of my life in the United States, but I have also lived in countries where the idea that politically well-connected players would face anything resembling official investigation or sanction for corporate or public corruption was, at least for some periods of time, laughable, absurd. This is terrible for all of the obvious reasons — a society that tolerates the theft of public resources often also has worse services, nonresponsive government and corporate abuses that can rise to the level of threatening our collective health and safety. But there are also social and cultural ones. It strikes at the sense that we are all to some extent living in a polity together, where there is some level of shared accountability. It breeds a sense that nothing really matters; there is only power and those wield it.
Now, I can already hear some readers exclaiming that this is and has been the reality in the U.S. too. The Sackler family paid billions to settle lawsuits but are likely to keep billions and never faced meaningful criminal consequences for intentionally misleading doctors and patients about the dangers of opioid use, helping set off an epidemic that’s ravaged parts of the country. The architects of the 2008 financial crisis mostly escaped completely unscathed; many continue to run aspects of the nation’s commercial financial architecture – and to lobby for deregulation. Government officials who signed off on or sanctioned everything from torture at Abu Ghraib to mass surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency have never really had to answer for it.
I can see how it can feel like we’ve already been there for a while. But I can’t emphasize enough that many of our systems of public and official accountability, while imperfect, still existed as of the start of this year and could operate with some independence and sense of mission. High-level and connected figures still got indicted (often after some prompting by journalists, such as in the case of Jeffrey Epstein), congressional investigations probed executive officials, regulators went after corporate malefactors and so on.
I think it’s a good thing that a good chunk of regular people seem surprised to learn that one of Trump’s top lieutenants skated after being filmed accepting what sure looks like a $50,000 bribe, straight up, no way to spin it. Don’t get me wrong, it would be a scandal anywhere, but it actually seems shocking and unusual here that there would have been no further action in the face of such blatant evidence, whereas in many countries this type of conduct would just be expected. We really don’t want to live in that kind of society – or anyplace where this sort of raw impunity is just par for the course.
This matters in terms of how we live our daily lives. If roads and transit systems are not working, for example, we demand better from our political leaders with the expectation that they will adjust course and do better. In a society steeped in public corruption, everyone would just assume that overinflated contracts had gone to cronies of the leaders, and that there would not really be any point in pushing back or trying to untangle those connections. It would be as if the connections were out in the open – because there would be nothing that you or anyone could do about it. At its very core, the malignant growth of corruption is about the death of possibility and the humiliation of hope; it is the assertion that things cannot really get better because there is no mechanism for them to.
There’s a lot of talk these days about what it would mean to return to something like normalcy or what a post-Trump era would look like. These are complex conversations, even if there are some straightforward planks we can rally behind, like the reestablishment of full political free speech rights. My contribution here, my warning, is that it will not be enough to nominally preserve democratic norms and call it a day. Corruption has taken root in our public and corporate life. Unless it’s excised meaningfully and intentionally, nothing else is really going to matter. Those who wield enormous power should fear the consequences of misusing it.
