Swamp Things

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, July 02, 2026

 

In January the president was asked why members of his family had begun doing business overseas during his second term when they had sworn off doing so during his first. If perceptions of influence-peddling were enough to put them off the practice once before, why would he and they engage in it orgiastically now?

 

“I found out that nobody cared,” he replied, matter-of-factly.

 

That’s classic Trump. On the one hand, it’s a pristine vista onto a criminal mind. Moral misgivings about monetizing one’s public office are nowhere in sight, nor is there any interest in setting a good example or anxiety about the civic consequences of letting an appearance of impropriety go uncorrected. To him, the question is simply whether the crime, once committed, is likely to go unpunished. If so, proceed.

 

On the other hand, he’s right. For all intents and purposes, nobody cares.

 

Don’t take my word for it. This morning Semafor reported on the trouble Senate Democrats are having gaining traction for a bill that would limit Trump’s ability to make money off of digital assets. “A lot of Dems really want to bankrupt Trump—and they can’t,” one source complained to the publication. “The entire model of a president’s ethics is electoral and the voters have clearly established they don’t care. … We’re just screwed.”

 

America at 250: We’re just screwed.

 

Any explanation of why we’re screwed begins with the promiscuous civic delinquency of the American right, but we’ve been over that many times and don’t need to belabor it here. Depending upon what sort of Republican you are, you’re either an enthusiastic member of a fascist personality cult, a brain-damaged hyperpartisan willing to excuse anything to keep the left out of power, or so embarrassed by where Trumpism has led that it’s easier psychologically to pretend its abuses aren’t happening than to confront them.

 

Not an interesting topic at this stage. What is interesting is the fact that few on the left seem to care very much about the president’s corruption either.

 

Manna from heaven.

 

Two House Democrats who played key roles in Trump’s first-term impeachments faced primary challengers in the past two weeks, Semafor (again) points out. Both lost.

 

“Israel is eclipsing the desire to hold the Republican president accountable as a motivating factor for many Democratic base voters,” reporters Nicholas Wu and Dave Weigel write. “With Trump returning to office and previous Democratic attempts to rein in his power through impeachment falling flat, the kind of Trump accountability messages pushed by the incumbents didn’t stick among constituents.”

 

Weird, no?

 

If ever there were a moment when you might expect anger at Trump’s financial corruption to break big among voters, this is it. In the middle of an affordability crisis, with huge numbers of Americans exasperated by the cost of living, evidence that the president is profiting lasciviously from his office is everywhere you look. He earned $2.2 billion last year, according to financial disclosures released this week, nearly four times his income in 2024. Of that amount, $1.4 billion came from businesses related to cryptocurrency, an industry his administration regulates (sort of?) and for which he’s a key policymaker.

 

Foreign interests with business before the U.S. government have used the president’s stake in crypto to great advantage. Small American investors, most of them presumably Trump supporters, didn’t fare as well. Although if it makes them feel better, they did help make him richer: “Every time $TRUMP [his cryptocurrency] was traded, the president and his partners collected transaction fees, which along with other revenues from the coin totaled hundreds of millions of dollars,” the New York Times reported.

 

Trump did suspiciously well in 2025 with conventional securities, too. At least three times last year, he purchased shares of Nvidia shortly before major announcements that boosted the company’s value. He also made hundreds of stock purchases the day before announcing that he was “pausing” his “Liberation Day” tariffs, which sent markets soaring. All told, according to the Financial Times, he engaged in more than 22,000 stock transactions during his first 11 months back in office. Over four years as president, Joe Biden engaged in 13.

 

The president would say, and has said, that his purchases and sales weren’t made by him personally but by brokerage firms that are barred from accepting trade requests from him and his family. You tell me: How likely is a guy whose sense of ethics boils down to “will I get caught or not?” to scrupulously observe that firewall?

 

And that’s just his conflicts of interest. If we broadened the Trump corruption inquiry to cases of petty graft like kickbacks and pardon-selling, we’d be here all day. “What strikes me as remarkable is how many pies Trump has his fingers in,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told NBC News. “There is no precedent to compare it with. No president in the 20th or 21st century has had something that’s vaguely comparable.”

 

For Democrats, this should be manna from political heaven—especially with populism now ascendant in both parties.

 

Populism is the idea that venal and incompetent elites have captured the state and perverted it to serve their own corrupt interests rather than the people’s. That narrative is now being handed to the left on a silver platter, replete with endless soundbites of Trump on the campaign trail in 2016 wheezing disingenuously, and ironically, about “draining the swamp.” No greater fraud was ever perpetrated on the oafishly gullible American people than the idea that a lowbrow mafioso wannabe from Queens would be a crusader for good government if they trusted him with the presidency. Democrats are all teed up to expose that fraud.

 

The attack ad writes itself: While your family is struggling to make ends meet, the swamp creature in the White House is making billions by turning the presidency into a criminal racket. It’s populism at 100 percent purity, reclaiming the mantle of that movement from Trump. And it’s 100 percent true.

 

But left-wing populists don’t seem that interested in talking about it. They’d rather talk about … Israel. Why?

 

Nobody cares.

 

There are prosaic answers to that question, I think, and less prosaic ones.

 

Prosaic: Democratic candidates probably will talk more about Trump’s corruption once the primaries end and the general election campaign begins. The party’s incumbents can be faulted only so much for failing to restrain the president at a moment when they’re in the congressional minority, locked out of oversight power. Zeroing in on their records on Israel as a litmus test of left-wing credibility and “outsider” backbone is a better play for progressive upstarts.

 

Besides, different populists prioritize different things in undertaking to “drain the swamp.” For some leftists still smarting from Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign disaster, purging Washington of its neoliberal gerontocracy may be more important—for now—than the Trump crime spree.

 

Also prosaic: Democratic voters outraged by the war in Gaza would say that restraining Israel from killing thousands more Palestinians is obviously more morally urgent than restraining an already-rich crook from getting richer. If your government is helping to bankroll a so-called “genocide,” that should matter to you more than whether your president is taking bribes.

 

If that’s why the left has been comparatively quiet about Trump’s corruption, then we shouldn’t expect them to go harder at the issue during the general election campaign. Why would they? Why distract voters from America’s complicity in Gaza by making a stink over a minor thing like the head of state being a racketeer operating in plain sight?

 

A few days ago I watched video of an openly gay left-wing lawmaker from San Francisco being hounded out of a rally for transgender rights by pro-Palestinian protesters, not because he supports Israel’s operations in Gaza but because he didn’t label them a “genocide” soon enough. Opposing “settler colonialism” is a cherished part of the progressive omnicause and fighting presidential graft is not: That might suffice to explain why Trump’s swampiness is of little interest to left-wing populists.

 

A less prosaic reason for why restraining him hasn’t mattered much in Democratic primaries is that the left has grown more interested in unseating its own party establishment than unseating Trump.

 

All Jacobin movements eventually reach that point, whether because they earnestly believe national reform requires first purging the milquetoasts who lead their own faction or because pretending that they believe it supplies a virtuous justification for their lust for power. Either way, the left has obviously reached it.

 

The right’s Tea Party Jacobins reached it quickly, ousting incumbent Republicans in Congress within a year of their movement gaining traction. By 2016, Trump was free to run against the Bush dynasty in a national Republican primary and took full advantage. By 2024, Marjorie Taylor Greene was warning conservatives—ironically, it would turn out—that “any Republican that isn’t willing to adapt … [to Trumpist] policies, we are completely eradicating from the party.”

 

Democratic socialists have taken longer to make their mark on the left, but they’re trying now to make up for lost time. “We have to root out the corruption and get money out of our politics,” progressive Melat Kiros told Politico after upsetting 30-year Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado on Tuesday. “It’s not about popular support, it’s about political will—and that means we have to vote out any of the incumbents that are standing in our way by taking that kind of corporate PAC money.”

 

Trump isn’t the prime target anymore. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are. And Israel is a far better wedge issue against those targets for leftists than the president’s self-dealing is.

 

There’s one more thing steering Democrats away from making an issue of his corruption: broken windows.

 

I’ve written before about the United States as the civic equivalent of a neighborhood that’s gone to hell, where the locals grow numb to antisocial behavior as they come to expect it. That’s straight out of the so-called “broken windows” theory of policing, the idea that “letting lesser offenses like window-breaking go unpunished signals … that laws won’t be enforced. Criminals respond by escalating to more serious offenses and law-abiding locals become fatalistic or apathetic.”

 

As America turns 250, Trumpism has left broken windows in every liberal institution as far as the eye can see. Even Democrats, primed by partisanship to resent it, seemingly can’t muster much shock at the sight anymore. I flagged the president’s financial corruption as an example of civic desensitization when I wrote about this previously, in fact: “If a business in a good neighborhood gets held up, everyone talks about it. But if a business in a bad neighborhood gets held up, it’s barely news. What can the locals realistically do except sigh and say, ‘Yeah, that happens now’?”

 

It happens now in America. It happens so often that the average joe struggles to care.

 

To make matters worse, Trump got elected in 2016 by essentially exclaiming loudly and often, “Look how many windows these elites broke in our neighborhood!” He convinced voters that their government had already gone to hell; then he turned it into Skid Row, and now many of the residents seem to believe that it’s always been this derelict. How mad can one be at the new mayor for behaving as corruptly as the old ones—supposedly—did? Haven’t you heard of Hunter Biden?

 

Populism might, in short, have become a prisoner of its own success. Having taught Americans to believe that they live in a swamp, complacency about swampiness is now part of the national character.

 

Wait ’til next year.

 

Someone should run a poll asking whether corruption was worse under the last two Democratic administrations or under the criminal syndicate that runs the government now. I’ll be surprised if opinion deviates wildly from the usual party lines. That’s the sort of ignorance and moronic tribalism that a Democratic strategist looking to galvanize voters this fall would be banging his or head against by flogging the issue of Trump’s unethical behavior.

 

But they might have better luck two years from now.

 

The most optimistic spin on Americans’ disinterest in the president’s corruption is that they simply haven’t heard of it yet. They’re distracted by the cost of living, they don’t (or can’t) keep up with the news closely enough to follow the trail of sleaze, and they’re not hearing a peep from our Republican-controlled Congress that anything might be amiss.

 

The fact that Trump has begun flying around in a giant plane-shaped bribe from the government of Qatar, with fake books lining its shelves as decor in an unintentional tribute to populist erudition, has simply escaped their notice.

 

That might change in January, as the minority party will feel obliged to do something about the state of the proverbial neighborhood if it returns to power in 2027. “If Democrats take back the House or Senate this November, they will have a field day probing the Trump family deals,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board warned on Wednesday. “Charges of GOP corruption will resound through 2028. This will feed the left’s class warfare and facile narrative that billionaire ‘oligarchs’ are getting rich off government.”

 

Trump as an unwitting accelerant of American socialism? I can sort of see that.

 

By the next cycle, the electoral incentives for the left might have changed as well. With J.D. Vance or some even less savory figure leading the ballot for the GOP, opposition to Israel might not be a major point of distinction between left and right. Progressives may also have deposed various Democratic leaders in Congress by then, satisfying their appetite (for the time being) for war on their own party. The left could pivot to redistribution, particularly if the affordability crisis grinds on.

 

The attack ad I imagined earlier would finally be ready to air.

 

But I can also imagine Democrats concluding in 2028 that corruption still doesn’t have the juice to meaningfully influence an election. The post-Trump era will be upon us, after all. Any uncomfortable stirring in the national conscience about having allowed a con man to turn the presidency into a financial asset will be quashed with self-soothing pabulum about not dwelling on the past.

 

And some left-wing strategists will ask themselves this: If attempting a coup wasn’t corrupt enough to stop Americans from reelecting Trump himself in 2024, why would the president’s insider trading and crypto scams dissuade them from reelecting some entirely different Republican in 2028? If voters were willing once before to lay aside all ethical considerations about national leadership in order to vote their wallets, why wouldn’t they do so again?

 

“We’re just screwed” is anathema to anyone who cares about politics, an endeavor based on the devout conviction that we’re not screwed as long as the faction one supports gets to be in charge. But it’s hard to draw any other conclusion as a civic matter after watching the American character degenerate over the last 10 years. In all likelihood, with respect to presidential corruption, we’re just screwed. Happy national birthday.