Corruption may be just a way of life for US President Donald Trump, but it has been a key theme of his presidency. From handing out pardons and policies in exchange for cash donations or favors, to encouraging foreign governments and non-state actors to invest in his family's cryptocurrency, Trump's corrupt practices have reached a scale unprecedented in American history.
The significance of this corruption cannot be understood without recognizing the role it plays in Trump’s quest to dismantle “the system.” That mission is being carried out using methods that recall not only Russian President Vladimir Putin’s kleptocratic Kremlin but also Soviet-era communist power structures. Trump rules through arbitrary, personalized power and an indifference to the law. As I wrote during the first Trump administration, the president and his allies see no problem using state power to advance private business interests. Blatant nepotism, petty corruption, and pay-to-play lobbying schemes are all on the table.
Trump's second administration makes what we saw during his first term seem mild. The president and his appointees are restructuring government to make corruption easy, lucrative, and unpunished, and to destroy impartial, accountable government. Self-enrichment and anti-system goals go hand in hand.
Trump’s meme coin is a prime example, as it allows anyone in the world to pay him “under the table” in exchange for personal favors. The Trump family has already generated up to $1 billion from their crypto ventures, demonstrating the kind of greed we saw in the oligarch-kleptocrats who “grabbed” (embezzled) Russian state resources after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This is no coincidence. Trump embodies the merging - and sometimes strong marriage - of two previously separate worlds: the West and the former Soviet bloc. The systemic corruption that brought us this president has been spreading globally for decades through the intertwining of these two worlds. The deregulation and outsourcing agenda that swept the West in the 1980s, starting with US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, found new, huge stages in the states of the former USSR and the Eastern Bloc during the 1990s.
American-style privatization in Russia got out of hand, as the sell-off of state assets was carried out without the necessary legal and regulatory infrastructure (thanks, in part, to Western aid and advisors). Public assets that once belonged to everyone ended up in the hands of a few. This new class of oligarchs then created a new class of Westerners: high-octane, highly paid professional “enablers,” whose job it was to move, launder, and hide the unprecedented amount of dirty money—which was flooding the global financial system from post-communist countries—and to polish the oligarchs’ image.
These ill-gotten gains – stashed in offshore destinations such as the UK, Switzerland, Austria, Malta, Cyprus and the US – have formed and continue to form the basis for operations aimed at Kremlin influence in the West. Kremlin operatives (some of whom have now been exposed and returned to Moscow) have long helped to weaken the Republican Party from within. Right-wing media outlets have also been targets of infiltration. The West was once a source of ideas and values that could take root elsewhere, but now you only have to listen to American influencers to see that the tide has turned.
Take, for example, how the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), which Trump established as part of his effort to dismantle the system, mimicked communist practices. In the Soviet system, it was common for party organizations, which held informal power, to override official government agencies and their functions. Although he was neither confirmed nor vetted by Congress, Elon Musk was given the go-ahead to carry out an unprecedented purge of the federal government. The illegality of his actions was almost irrelevant; as in communism, the party leader is the sole source of control.
Of course, this model of informal power outside the law - through direct reporting to the leader - has a minor American precedent in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s. That was when the Reagan White House bypassed the federal government and Congress by authorizing several confidential operatives to sell weapons to Iran to fund counterinsurgents in Nicaragua - funding that Congress had expressly forbidden.
But there is a fundamental difference between the Iran-Contra scheme and DOGE. When the former was discovered, Congress and both political parties condemned it, and at least some of those responsible were held accountable. Today, neither the Republican-led Congress nor the Supreme Court has attempted to stop DOGE. In such a model, conflict-of-interest rules seem almost old-fashioned. As a longtime Washington insider once told me, “There is no conflict of interest, because we define interest.”
Using his position as a “cash cow,” Trump has made no secret of his interests. And he succeeds in this thanks to a tried-and-true Soviet practice: appointing incompetent and inexperienced subordinates who owe everything to their master. The almost farcical amateurism of his cabinet makes its members political plasticine. With a cadre of dutiful cadres fully complicit in his corrupt and illegal behavior (which was not always the case during his first term), Trump systematically dismantles the government agencies that would otherwise monitor corruption and foreign influence operations and enforce rules to limit them.
That's why Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the Kleptocratic Asset Recovery Initiative (Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative) and the KleptoCapture Working Group (Task Force KleptoCapture), created in 2022 to enforce Western sanctions against Russia and oligarchs allied with Putin; redirected prosecutions under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (Foreign Corruption Practices Act) and the Law on the Prevention of Foreign Extortion (Foreign Extortion Prevention Act); dissolved the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force (Foreign Influence Task Force); limited the implementation of the Foreign Agents Registration Law (Foreign Agent Registration Act); and dismantled the cryptocurrency enforcement unit.
The Trump family’s focus on cryptocurrencies speaks volumes; it’s a striking example of the convergence of the mission of personal wealth and system destruction. The practical application of this technology seems to lie almost entirely in circumventing anti-money laundering and corruption rules. Transactions are anonymous, and even regulators often don’t know who is behind many crypto exchanges, where they are located, and who their users are. It’s hard to say who is driving the massive jumps in the value of $TRUMP coin.
Trump’s corruption could contribute to the collapse of the system, especially given the growing risks that cryptocurrencies pose to financial stability. And that’s the point. During his first term, Trump helped destabilize the US and the international system; today he is actively seeking to destroy democratic institutions and the rules-based world order. Soviet leaders would have been amazed by his methods.
The author is a social anthropologist and a professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025. (translation: NR)
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