Conservative slams Dems for not riding Trump's corruption harder

A conservative writer scolded Democrats on Thursday for not focusing on President Donald Trump’s unprecedented corruption in the months leading up to the November mid-terms.

“For all intents and purposes, nobody cares,” The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio wrote. He described Trump’s blatant profiteering from being in office, which is without any analogous example in modern American history. Agreeing with a source in the Senate who said that the indifference to Trump’s corruption means “we’re just screwed,” he argued that “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.”

He denounced Republicans who give Trump a pass on his grift by saying that “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.”

Yet in addition to Trump’s own party, Catoggio criticized Democrats — especially those on the left — since “few on the left seem to care very much about the president’s corruption either.” Instead they seem more interested in opposing Israel and trying to purge the party of its centrist leaders.

He adds that this is a great missed political opportunity.

“If ever there were a moment when you might expect anger at Trump’s financial corruption to break big among voters, this is it,” Catoggio said. “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.” His financial disclosure forms reveal that he earned $2.2 billion in 2025, almost quadrupling his income from 2024, of which roughly $1.4 billion “came from businesses related to cryptocurrency, an industry his administration regulates (sort of?) and for which he’s a key policymaker.”

He added, “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.”

Refraining from discussing Trump’s conflicts of interest, “petty graft like kickbacks” and selling pardons, “we’d be here all day.” The bottom line is that, as presidential historian Douglas Brinkely told NBC News, “What strikes me as remarkable is how many pies Trump has his fingers in. There is no precedent to compare it with. No president in the 20th or 21st century has had something that’s vaguely comparable.”

Instead of exploiting this opportunity to win elections on a populist theme, Catoggio suggested that left-wing populists are relatively indifferent to those issues compared with others that rile up their base. By doing this, though, they are normalizing Trump’s unprecedented corruption and making it easier for both him and future perpetrators to get away with it.

Indeed, Catoggio said Democrats’ failure to adequately bring up and emphasize Trump’s corruption has made it easier for Republicans to obscure that what Trump is doing far and away exceeds the actions of any of his predecessors.

“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,” Catoggio said. “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.”

If this attitude continues into the 2028 election, it could be disastrous — and Catoggio suspects that is exactly what will happen.

“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?” Catoggio wrote. “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?”

He concluded, “‘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.”

Catoggio is joining a growing chorus of commentators who are shocked that Trump is being so brazenly corrupt, and hurting his own voters in the process, without widespread outrage. Angelo Carusone, president of the nonprofit watchdog Media Matters for America, told MS NOW anchor Nicolle Wallace earlier this week that Trump's open corruption is making Americans "chumps.”

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