Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann
In a nationwide poll conducted a few weeks ago and reported on by Axios, the majority of all registered voters surveyed said the number one word to describe Donald Trump is “corrupt.” This represents a massive opportunity for Democrats both now and for the next two years.
And the experience of candidates in today’s Democrats’ position around the world validates the argument that this is the best way to both campaign and win elections and political power.
Péter Magyar defeated Viktor Orbán in the Hungarian elections because he ran a Navalny-style playbook, calling Orbán’s and his billionaire buddies’ capture of the media and most other aspects of Hungarian life a “state capture system” grounded in good old-fashioned “corruption.”
From Orban’s son-in-law pulling a Jared and using his government position to become one of the richest men in the country, to his billionaire cronies buying up the media like the billionaire Ellisons are doing here now, corruption was Magyar’s singular through-line message. And it worked, producing an overwhelming turnout and undeniable victory.
It will work here, too!
Democrats are (continuously, it seems) debating what should be their campaign strategy, their main through-line message, for the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Every faction and special interest group in the country is pushing their own idea, but there’s one overarching concept — one word — that can encompass most all of them and do so with a proven political punch: “Corruption.”
At every level, ever since the Reagan Revolution, the heart of Republican policies has been the naked corruption of our American political and economic systems. Since the 1980s, Republicans have sold their corruption with slogans like, “Government is the problem, not the solution,” and “Let the market decide,” but their real message is, “Turn it all over to the billionaires and their corporations.” The result has been:
- Tax cuts and loopholes for billionaires and big corporations that, in aggregate since 1981, add up to more than our total national debt of $40 trillion (in other words, Republicans borrowed $40 trillion in our names that our kids will repay and gave all of it to the morbidly rich).
- Reagan’s 1983 suspension of enforcement of the anti-trust laws that has caused every industry in America to become a form of monopoly dominated by five or fewer massive corporations, gutting competition and raising prices.
- Five on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court ruling that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as “free speech,” handing our elections over to the highest bidders.
- Virtually every legacy federal regulatory agency being run by industry insiders working on a revolving-door basis.
- Members of Congress and the corrupt Trump regime engaging in insider trading with impunity.
- A GOP-aligned military-industrial complex that’s essentially taken over Pentagon procurement.
- An anti-labor Labor Department; an anti-education Education department; an anti-civil rights Civil Rights enforcement agency; an anti-environment Environmental Protection Agency; etc…
- Trump’s mysterious pardons that always seem to go to people who’ve given him millions of dollars (after Giuliani claimed he and Trump were selling pardons for two million each and splitting the money).
- The wholesale gutting of the Internal Revenue Service enforcement budget and staffing that’s largely ended audits of morbidly rich people and increased audits of working-class people instead.
- The systematic sabotage and privatization of public institutions — from the US Postal Service to public schools to prisons — with virtually every one of the for-profit replacements becoming big GOP donors.
- The explosion of dark money after Citizens United so we don’t even know who’s buying our elections.
- The weaponization of the Federal Communications Commission to loosen media ownership rules while threatening outlets that dare criticize Trump or the GOP.
- Red-state-level voter suppression laws including strict ID requirements, purges of voter rolls, and reduced polling access all to discourage voting by people in demographic groups associated with Democrats.
- The Republican refusal to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices for years and they’re still blocking most efforts.
- The systematic dismantling of campaign finance enforcement, turning the Federal Election Commission into a deadlocked, do-nothing body.
- The use of tax havens and trade policy to encourage offshoring American jobs.
- The Republican normalization of lobbyists literally writing legislation via groups like the Koch-funded ALEC.
- The rewriting of environmental and labor rules to favor polluting industries by GOP appointees who often came from those very industries.
- The strategic packing of the federal judiciary with hardcore rightwing/neofascist judges.
- And now Trump’s pathetic attempts to bribe voters with his $5000 offer backed up by $80 and $500 checks going out this week to people on Medicare and the Affordable Care Act.
Even Republicans understand the power of mobilizing the public’s outrage against the corruption that they themselves have participated in for over 40 years. Astonishingly, cynically, that’s the meta-message to Trump’s main campaign slogan each of the three times he’s run for president:
“Drain the swamp.”
It worked, even though it was an outrageous lie. Democrats, who have actually been trying to do something about corruption for years, need to appropriate the anti-corruption theme as their main message. Because, universally, it works.
- When working in Russia, I witnessed the way Alexi Navalny came so close to taking down Putin that the Russian dictator ordered him murdered; it was done via Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. It systematically and relentlessly exposed the ways Putin and his cronies were looting their nation’s government while passing out favors to oligarchs willing to align themselves with them.
- In the 1980s, I was working for a German international relief organization in The Philippines when Cory Aquino mobilized an anti-corruption message against the Marcos dynasty; the week Marcos and his wife fled the country I was bumped off Philippine Airlines flights five days in a row because so many of their cronies were appropriating all the seats (the airline was run by a crony).
- When Jair Bolsonaro first successfully ran for president of Brazil it was on a campaign against the corruption “Operation Car Wash” had exposed in the Lula administration. When elected, Bolsonaro, instead of ending the corruption, slid right into the system and expanded it, leading to his own ultimate downfall and current imprisonment.
- In Delhi, activist Anna Hazare’s 2011 anti-corruption hunger strike ignited a nationwide movement that helped spur passage of India’s Lokpal anti-corruption law and led his former allies to found the “clean government” Aam Aadmi Party.
- And, of course, it was the anti-corruption message of the EuroMaidan “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014 that lifted then-comedian and TV star Volodymyr Zelenskyy into the presidency of Ukraine.
From Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Era of the early 20th century to the present, anti-corruption messages have repeatedly proven to be one of the most potent forces in American politics, too.
- In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt built a foundation of mass support by casting monopolies as a “corrupt alliance” between the morbidly rich and our government, while the exposure of William M. “Boss” Tweed’s graft by Thomas Nast’s biting cartoons helped bring down New York’s Tammany Hall by converting complex examples of corruption into the simple story of “stolen public money.”
- The Watergate scandal turned corrupt abuse of power into a national reckoning that forced Richard Nixon from office and fueled sweeping electoral gains for reformers like Jimmy Carter, while more recent scandals like George Santos’ reinforced “clean government” as a winning local message.
- At the national level, Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” campaign and the “rigged system” critiques advanced by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren show that, across the ideological spectrum, framing political battles as struggle against entrenched, self-dealing elites remains one of the most consistently reliable ways to get energized voters to the polls and win power.
It makes perfect sense that this should be the Democrats’ main strategy: the core philosophy of the GOP that was first made explicit by the Reagan administration — “greed is good” — openly invites corruption. As we’ve seen in virtually every congressional vote over the past decade, Republican politicians are entirely in the pockets of the fossil fuel, health insurance, tax preparation, and weapons industries, among others.
Whether it’s the corrupt collusion between the Kushner and Netanyahu families that helped lead us into an illegal war against Iran, the billions Trump’s family has made in crypto and other schemes, the insider trading on the war, putting industry insiders in charge of regulatory agencies, the DeSantis and Paxton/Abbott corruption scandals, there are vivid examples of Republican corruption laying on the public ground all over the country in plain sight.
There’s a whole panoply of issues Democrats can and should seize on, from privatization to deregulation to climate change to affordability to healthcare and education, but the core — the foundation — of every one of them is corruption.
Every Democrat in America should scan their local horizon for examples of corruption they can use against Republicans. The words “Republican corruption” should be continuously on their lips, whether campaigning, speaking to constituents, or making media appearances.
Hammer these corrupt SOBs with their own crimes against democracy and the middle class, and Democrats will see results like Magyar, Zelenskyy, Aquino, and so many others have achieved.
It’s simple, easy, and powerful: “It’s the corruption, stupid!”
Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann, one of America’s leading public intellectuals and the country’s #1 progressive talk show host, writes fresh content six days a week. The Monday-Friday “Daily Take” articles are free to all, while paid subscribers receive a Saturday summary of the week’s news and, on Sunday, a chapter excerpt from one of his books.
