The Stench of Corruption

The Trump family’s exploitation of every opportunity to enrich themselves demoralizes me, as I’m sure it does many readers. Don Jr. and Eric Trump are the Uday and Qusay Hussein of our unhappy times, harvesting great sums from investors who seem interested in influencing the White House. (Kevin Williamson made this observation back in 2016.) Earlier this year, it was revealed that powerful figures in Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates invested $500 million in World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture. This is by no means the only infusion of large sums into Uday and Qusay’s enterprises. I find myself wondering if America’s Middle East foreign policy is for sale.

More than two centuries ago, the wry political thinker Joseph de Maistre quipped, “Every country gets the government that it deserves.” This dictum should inform our assessments of Donald Trump’s now decade-long dominance of American public life. We must consider his regular recourse to fabricated facts and his family’s misuse of public office along with actions we’ve supported in these pages, such as his judicial appointments, measures to encourage re-industrialization, and anti-DEI executive orders. The good and bad in this administration are difficult to untangle.

Perhaps all administrations are corrupt to some degree. But the present situation is unique in its blatant character. No doubt the Trump people recognize that American voters are deeply cynical about the norms championed by the Great and the Good. The public suspects that these norms are applied selectively. As a result, the excuse that “everybody does it” has gained wide currency.

Such cynicism is well earned. In a recent review of Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, Christian Parenti discusses the “culture of fraud,” not just at Stanford but throughout higher education (“The Rise of the Fraud Economy,” Compact). Parenti relates Baker’s account of fraternity parties at Stanford. For most of Baker’s time on campus (he graduated last May), to gain the required administrative approval for a party, its organizers had to pledge to lead partygoers in the recitation of a legalistic consent policy, as well as a land acknowledgement. (The latter was quietly dropped in October 2025.) It’s a small thing—a brief loyalty oath before getting on with the fun—but the ritual is corruptive. It’s part of a larger system, one that encourages young people to mouth pieties that they know to be ridiculous. A Stanford student learns that, one way or another, you gotta pay to play. The lesson was recently reinforced, Parenti reminds us, this time with real money: “As the Varsity Blues admissions scandal revealed in 2019, one family paid third parties $6.5 million to get their child into Stanford.”

As an undergraduate journalist, Baker made a name for himself by exposing academic fraud in scientific papers published by then-Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. (It remains an open question whether the fraud was perpetrated by Tessier-Lavigne or by research teams under his oversight.) Parenti observes that some of the “questionable research” appears to have been tailored to advance the corporate interests of a biotech firm for which Tessier-Lavigne served as chief scientific officer. The scandal led to his resignation from the university presidency. But note well: Tessier-Lavigne remains a tenured professor of biology, and “his new biotech company, Xaira Therapeutics, raised a billion dollars in its first round of funding.”

Mammon is not the only driving force behind “the fraud economy.” The entire country witnessed the spectacle of Claudine Gay, an underqualified professor who was raised to the presidency of Harvard almost certainly because she was a black woman, only to resign after she made a disastrous appearance before Congress and evidence of plagiarism surfaced. She became the posterchild for all the lies, deceptions, manipulations, and double-speak that surround affirmative action in higher education and elsewhere. The embarrassment Gay brought to Harvard was only too predictable. As many of us know, institutions are under great pressure to promote “diversity.” The mostly white leaders of those institutions recognize that appointments furthering that goal must be made, one way or another: You gotta pay to play. Meanwhile, the existence of this dynamic, which is widely recognized, is universally denied by our elites.

Parenti does not mention Claudine Gay. But her fate reinforces his larger point: “Through experience, students learn that successful people are manipulative, self-aggrandizing, hypocritical, and dishonest.” And not just students. During the pandemic, public health officials, journalists, and politicians shamelessly manipulated public opinion by lying about the universal danger the virus posed, only to lie about the efficacy of the vaccines a year later. It’s very difficult not to become cynical.

“Everyone is doing it” is never a legitimate excuse for prevarication and misuse of office. And furthermore, everyone is not trading on his power and position to enrich himself. My point is that the rot runs deep. Repair will require leaders who value honor over wealth.