It’s the Corruption, Stupid

By Daniel Foster

Tuesday, October 20, 2026

 

JD Vance previewed a possible 2028 argument, one he will no doubt have to make a few hundred times, on the question of corruption and self-dealing inside the Trump administration.

 

In an interview with Mark Halperin, Vance said, “I just don’t understand the argument that politics has somehow made Donald Trump or his family much better off. I mean, their lives were nearly destroyed, their business was nearly destroyed, they tried to throw the president in jail for something like 900 years. So I don’t see the benefit there.” Later he adds, “It’s laughable to me the idea that Donald Trump has somehow been enriched by political office.”

 

Vance does say there is a separate concern “that sometimes gets muddled” with the first one, that D.C. is simply “too corrupt of a town” and people may be selling access. But, adds Vance, he hasn’t seen any evidence of that as far as Trump.

 

Credit to Vance, it’s as good an argument as is available to him. The bad news is it’s still not very good. The core rhetorical maneuver is to make the question a net–net proposition. That is, have Donald Trump and his family (and friends) materially gained more from his presidencies than they’ve lost. That gives Vance some leverage with voters who found the post–January 6 lawfare against Trump outrageous, as they’ll presumably weigh the costs heavily. The problem is it’s hard to weigh them at a couple of billion dollars. That’s the value of Trump family crypto ventures alone, just to pick one simple number. The potential gains extend far beyond that one slice, and there exist multiple other efforts to track them — of various methodologies, scopes, and levels of trustworthiness — that go as high as $4 billion. They also include business dealings that exist on a spectrum from the merely unseemly to the actively outrageous, so mileage will vary on what gets counted as kosher. Regardless, there’s already plenty of evidence, and two years of House Democratic control will undoubtedly furnish more still.

 

Vance leaves himself room to pivot on the campaign trail to a familiar good czar and bad boyars argument. That the real problem is that the opportunists around Trump took advantage of his good name for their own greedy ends. And that it will take another four to eight years to properly finish draining the swamp. Color me skeptical, but a lot can happen in two years.

 

In any case, it’s already a problem. A recent Fox poll showed the top concern among voters heading into the election is government corruption, with 88 percent extremely or very concerned. That includes 47 percent of Republicans who said they were extremely concerned. I’ve seen some commentary that the question may be capturing MAGA-leaners who think about corruption primarily in terms of Somali daycares, and there’s probably some of that. But the same poll shows a majority of respondents trust Democrats more than Republicans to address the issue. Less ambiguous is a Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll showing nearly two-thirds of Americans believed Trump was using the presidency to enrich himself. That included 34 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners, half again more than said they had the same concern last year.

 

Heading into the lame-duck half, this doesn’t strike me as friendly territory for Vance.