Exposing corruption is not enough; voters need to understand how corruption affects their lives

This is a messaging challenge for those hoping to change the Trump regime in November 2026 and 2028.  Exposing corruption is not enough; voters need to understand how corruption affects their lives. The demise of Viktor Orban was brought about because voters understood that his corruption had made them the poorest country in the European Union.  So many in the US complain about the price of gas at the pump, and they see the connection with world-set oil prices and the impact on supply, and I understand this is about a war Trump started with Iran.  Some excuse Trump for getting rich while president because he is such a great businessman they so admire, but they are beginning to understand how his corrupt practices drive up grocery and agricultural prices and inflation.  To fund it, Trump proposes cuts to feed the hungry programs and making health care unaffordable for even more voters.  The Iran war is an easy connection to make to rising prices, but what does corruption have to do with it?  

 PBS and AP, in a lengthy analysis, show how the Trump family's cryptocurrency ventures are connected and how the prospect of war and foreign policy initiatives shape investment decisions. and the pockets of Trump and his family.  That's the problem: it is lengthy and requires a grasp of such new instruments of wealth like cryptocurrency and gifts from airplanes to the advantage of  managing sovereign Saudi funds

.The Trump family's current wealth has much to do with their self-interested conduct of foreign affairs, but the challenge is getting this into a form that lay people can understand and make the link to their own well-being.  Bribery is not always obvious when there is a quid pro quo.  The quid may be separated by months from the quo...or involve what seem to be unrelated business transactions that just happen to result in stuffing the pockets of schemers at both ends of a corrupt deal.   This is worth a serious read: 

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-the-trump-familys-business-deals-could-open-the-door-for-future-presidents-to-profit-from-office?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

 

Why is it some verbal slings and arrows do not bother Trump or MAGA?

  MAGA seems to dismiss certain verbal attacks on them by the libs as not just hot air, but they  ignore and sometimes even embrace what others call slurs and insults like the words fascists and dictators.  The most stunning recent development has been the millions participating in peaceful marches under the banner of "No Kings", a polite way of calling Trump a wannabe dictator who is destroying the democracy we have had for 250 years.  Trump just brushed that off before the entire world by not being offended by being called a dictator, but embracing it in Davos with "sometimes you need a dictator.. There is evidence that many in the MAGA movement agree, given CPAC and the implementing documents of  Project 2025 and actions unfolding before our very eyes on amateur and professional videos. They are either silent or in denial.

Is it time to call Trump a fascist kind of dictator? Dictators are not confined to specific ideologies. They can just as easily be communists as those on the farthest right. A recent case was made in the Atlantic that it was time to call Trump a fascist, despite the negative reaction it would inflame. My answer is to call specific actions the same as what fascists once did, instead of calling people or a group fascists. Fascist is still an insulting label, and hurling insults never was a good way to make friends and influence people. Yes, there are those within the MAGA movement who are there for reasons other than ideology or hero worship, are fearful, or have political and business ambitions. who would not like to be called fascists. Applebaum at the Atlantic, Maddow at MSNOW, and a bevy of historians and political scientists have doing a yeoman's job in educating what fascists in the last century did, but there needs to be more explicit linking the specific act to being similar to fascism,  similar to what the fascists once did.

The implicit message is, if you do not want to be called a fascist, then do not act like one. 

There is plenty of evidence that some in MAGA have already decided it would take a dictator to accomplish what they want to happen. What they want to happen sums it up in Make America Again, back to an era that resembles the 1950's, I suspect, though the "again" is never dated by  MAGA interviewees, but resembles their attitudes that look like before the civil rights legislation and DEI.  As evidence, CPAC(the conservative political action committee) began holding meetings in Hungary, whose dictator, Viktor Orbán, epitomized the kind of strong leadership that was their ideal. If that was not enough of a clue of what kind of America MAGA wanted to have govern us, they gave us another clue: Project 2025, which was a publicly printed blueprint of how to remove the checks and balances that kept a King, a tyrant, a despot, a dictator from becmiing "president", and used the placid term: unitary government. It would make the "president" be both the legislative and judicial branches, by subjugating those branches to his/her power. In his second term, the writers of that document were put in key positions to carry out the methods of achieving Project 2025 to replace all decision-making positions,  civil service protected, and appointee positions with appointees who were screened to ideological loyalty to the White Nationalist agenda. It was done under the banner of getting rid of the deep state. Laced throughout that document was the destruction of DEI in all matters. Trump appointed the Project 2025 architect as the person in charge of personnel and then proceeded to use the DOJ to threaten and to prosecute those who put up resistance or who did not resign.   Their weapon and tool was Donald Trump, who seems to have never enough absolute power to suit his appetite, even after his appointees on the Supreme Court gifted him immunity from criminal prosecution. Trump himself touted his lack of moral standards (he'll use his own version of what is moral, he told Davos) "transactional.. another polite term that means right is whatever favors him and his advantage and power, which he believes, and said so, in a recent interview that he has the power to do whatever he wants.

The other element in the MAGA equation, not openly expressed because there is still an element of political correctness, is, in my opinion, the belief that white people were superior to those of other colors and races, and they deserved to be the ones governing the country. The evidence is that they support a president whose racism ranges from calling brown migrants, legal or not, those who are "poisoning the blood of our country", sometimes referring to them bringing diseases", or who mostly were rapists and murderers as he descdended his golden escalator, and then to even call neo Nazis some fine people in the Charlottesville demonstrations. .  MAGA's silence when being called racists or supporters of the white race is as good as consent. They are supportive, or silent, of ICE targeting only those of color for their drag net, a racial profiling, mass deportation policy that not only got the murderers and rapists, but also deported far more who were only guilty of a misdemeanor by not having documents showing legal status. Even some who flashed proof of birth, passports, green cards, said they were citizens, were caught and sent to detention camps if they looked or had accents like migrants.

What has unnerved the MAGAs is that millions of white, middle-class people objected to the tactics of ICE by marching in every big city and red and blue hamlets in America.  They do not share the MAGA values. What word the citizens of Minneapolis coined was to call migrants of color their neighbors, in the spirit of the words spoken by Christ or some other moral standards.  They backed up their attitudes by helping those afraid to be snatched by ICE agents in danger because of their color, accent or language, even if they had proof of legal status. 

 The final straw that may put a dent in MAGA itself (maybe) or further inspired more protesters (for sure) was the suppression of white protesters whistling, shouting slurs, and videoing ICE take down atrocities and the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, white, middle-class protesters. Calling them immediately "domestic terrorists" has been a hard sell to most Americans as videos and backgrounds became more known and reported in more media. The "don't believe your very eyes" is the MAGA response that is wearing thin. Now, the arrest and prosecution of journalists like Don Lemon is a further attempt to suppress inconvenient revelations to the world of ICE's inhumane and unconstitutional tactics.  Trump has always called journalists the enemy of the people (meaning him?). The truths they reveal are not always convenient.

For those of us who have had personal experiences with both communist dictators and fascist dictators and/or who remember history lessons of the 1930s, or knew refugees from fascist Latin American dictators, the term describing how history is repeating itself, using the word fascism, is appropriate. What the Trumpists are doing is similar to what those we called fascists in the previous century also did. Calling a person or a group of people fascist is still too inflammatory, but accusing them of acting like one in specific ways has historical validity. 

 My response as a political opinion writer/journalist is to call whatever actions are the same employed by fascists and dictators in the recent past, as that. It is when the tactics and actions are the same used by these villains of the past, we should call out those acts as fascist. Such acts are what we once called evil.

MUFTIC FORUM BLOG: My nagging question: why does fascism keep raising its ugly 

Yes, It’s Fascism - The Atlantic

Comments attributed to Trump:

Sometimes we need a dictator: it is common sense  President Trump at the World Economic Forum: “Sometimes you need a dictator.” #news #trump

July 23, 2019: At a Turning Point USA summit,, "Then I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president." He made this claim while criticizing the Mueller investigation.

• August 2025: During a White House Cabinet meeting in his second term, when asked about potentially using the military domestically, he asserted, "I have the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the president of the United States".
• January 2026: In a New York Times interview, he refined this idea by stating that international law does not limit him, only his "own morality" and "own mind"   
• October 2023: In an interview with The National Pulse, Trump stated: "It's poisoning the blood of our country. It's so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have".
• December 2023: At a campaign rally in Durham, New Hampshire, he repeated the claim, telling supporters that migrants from Africa, Asia, and South America are "poisoning the blood of our country".
• December 2023: During a later rally in Waterloo, Iowa, he doubled down on the rhetoric, alleging without evidence that migrants bring "crime and potentially disease with them".
• Truth Social Posts: Trump also used all-caps posts on Truth Social to assert that "illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation". 
• Sources above Google AI 

Time to make corruption a resistance issue, as powerful as affordability and NO KINGS

Update:  A comprehensive view of Trump's corruption: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/opinion/trump-corruption.html?unlocked_article_code=1._U8.Pu8A.ks_n9mGjhyFs&smid=url-share

  While affordability looks like it will be the main driver of the 2026 midterms, there is another story out there that will have staying power. It is corruption. Since so much is right in the open,, what we have seen is contributions that are often laundered through third parties to separate the "contribution" from the payback or separated by time, happening months later after the donation was made in a seemingly unrelated manner. It is the pattern that will eventually reveal how corrupt the Trump regime is...Putting the pattern together is this piece from the NY Times.. The next challenge will be making the case in a way that the general public grasps the scope and understands how this affects their lives. The true puzzle to me is why MAGA and the GOP do not care? Is it that other issues impact their day-to-day lives more...affordability, racism and bigotry, class warfare of the working person against the big guys, or disgust with his immoral behavior? Perhaps all of the above will play a role, but corruption is bound to be an issue. It is still developing. It will take a few poster child worthy examples of Trump's obvious rewards to connect those who pay to play as an example of bribery to grab the interest of those still sitting on the fence and in the short term, the revealed actions of what is left of the free press, like the New York Times. In the longer term, if Democrats seize control of the House in November, expect them to connect the dots in a public way to make the MAGA brand so toxic that it can affect a regime change in the next presidential elections in 2028.

Continuing with the original post. Corruption is corruption whether committed in secret or in plain view. The difference is that a significant number of American voters do not care if it is in secret or in the open. For them, it is part of Trump's macho, big-businessman mystique and/or he serves some other purposes. We, the people, get the kind of rulers we deserve... and we do not deserve this. When affordability and NO Kings have become the issues motivating political activism, it is also time to add corruption to the list of reasons for a serious regime change in Washington, DC. These three issues, affordability, NO Kings, and corruption, are related, either as a harmful result or empowering the president to act as he does against the interest of the people over which he thinks he rules by executive order. So far, his respect for the rule of law is to abuse it as long as he can get away with it, until challenges reach "his" Supreme Court. Then what?

Populist revolts against corruption, like the Maidan revolution in Ukraine, which eventually led to the Russian invasion, are what tyrants and dictators fear the most. Fear of this motivates these autocrats to crack down even further on those who would expose them. Putin's actions against Navalny are a case in point. Navalny's revolt was fueled by his outrage over Putin and his oligarchs' corruption. (Navalny ended up dead in a gulag). When Viktor Orbán of Hungary faced criticism for his new luxury digs from whatever was left of a free press, he doubled down, destroying the pesky media. In all of these cases, the greed and corruption of these modern-day dictators were hidden from public view until some challenger exposed them.

That is not the case in the USA when Trump is being corrupt right out in the open. His demanding $230 million from the federal cookie jar to cover his legal costs is jaw-dropping. His crypto wealth is based solely on the value of his name and is bought or invested by those seeking favors and foreign policy advantages worldwide, or relief from tariffs in side deals, and pardons for his enablers. These are not decisions that serve the needs of US citizens or that motivate him to faithfully execute the laws of the land, as required by the Constitution. Instead, it contributes to decisions that harm ordinary people's ability to cope with daily pocketbook needs.

Affordability is not just "the groceries". It is also making health care unaffordable to pay for tax breaks for those who do not heed them, wielding power over who and what is subject to tariffs, or giving regulatory relief from consumer and environmental protections.. Tariffs are indeed raising consumer costs, are considered taxes by his allies on the Supreme Court, and he is now selectively backpedaling on a few, in effect admitting they cost consumers. Acting like a king, he grants regulatory favors (with the help of loyal appointees to agency heads and boards or Musk's chainsaw) to big business. This means axing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, ending consumer protections against practices that led to the 2008 financial crisis, or ending refunds for those who were wrongfully scammed by illegal financial institution practices. In nine months, he has also removed or controlled any in-house government watchdogs that find and report abuses and corruption to a GOP-controlled Congress and his Justice Department, which has been made moot since both are subservient to him. He threatens the media and press with delicensing or halting mergers if they report inconvenient truths, including those that expose corruption. Trump's increased wealth and political power are also based on favors and tax breaks he has granted and instigated on behalf of his "oligarch" billionaires, whom he sees as his peer group and Mar-a-Lago cronies. Top of his list: reducing their taxes and cutting services and support of the middle class to pay for it.

Once Trump is out of office, the crypto bubble he has ridden to feather his nest will collapse because its value is only access to Trump himself and the power and fear he wields as president. He has monetized his position as president, and when he is no longer president, the value of his family's crypto will decline, too. In the meantime, his crypto has enabled Middle Eastern regimes to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in his family's businesses.

Trump has been able to do this without fear of criminal prosecution because the US Supreme Court granted him immunity. The only other option for addressing corruption is impeachment. Impeachment is only an indictment, but the Senate finding him guilty and removing him is very unlikely because of the supermajority required. For that reason, he survived two other impeachments. Any retribution for his crimes will have to wait until he leaves the Oval Office. If he has his way, he will not leave. It is up to " we the people" to make sure his term is indeed over.

His moral corruption is a whole other issue. His cruelty, his infidelities, his rubbing elbows with sex traffickers and their customers, his p-grabbing boasts and assault (even found liable in court), are worthy of disgust, yet those who profess to be fine Christians look the other way because he serves whatever other purposes they have.

Update 11/19/2025 comments on the Epstein file release vote that cleared Congress 11/28/2025.

The value of the Epstein files vote is recognition that

1)sex trafficking of underage girls is vile, and

2) the issue is non-partisan, condemned by those on both sides of the aisle, and

3) the victims deserve our sympathy, and

4) enforcement of actions against sex trafficking deserves our support and the support of political leaders. The heroes, of course, were the incredibly brave women who, as underage girls deemed too young by law to consent, risked threats to their lives and exposing a painful past to public scrutiny, came forward before world media. Bravo.

5) Whether Trump did any more than rub elbows with Epstein and look away is yet to be determined, but he at least can be judged by the company he once kept.

The challenge for both those advocating for keeping the democracy we have and for exposing corruption is to help voters understand how it impacts them. Autocracies trample on the rights of citizens and their ability to influence public policy that benefits ordinary people. Corruption is the means by which wannabe dictators gain and maintain power. Once these autocrats are in control, they are more interested in protecting their self-interests, remaining in power, and secretly maintaining privileges they value than in protecting the safety and needs of those over whom they rule.

Tsk, tsking, and moral outrage are not enough to end sex trafficking if the ruling powers do not care or are participating in the practice. Class warfare, blaming the ultra-rich for paying for such depravity, is not enough, because human sex trafficking also involves victimizing the poor, less educated, underage, and undeserved. The johns are not always the ultra-rich, either. For sex trafficking to flourish depends upon the powers that be charged with enforcing laws to look the other way with a wink and a nod to boys will be boys.