"Trump's shameless corruption is not a deviation from American history but its fulfilment. Every era of American government has had its scandal. Trump's innovation is to make scandal itself a governing philosophy. Although it is tempting to see the Trump regime's corruption its open profiteering, its use of the state as an instrument of vengeance and self-enrichment as a perversion of American democracy, the truth is more unsettling: it's a mirror."
"When politicians became lobbyists and habitual inside traders, when corporations wrote legislation, when government bailouts were given to bank executives and political donors, when hospital executives grew rich on public subsidies while their workers and patients sank into precarity, the mechanisms of corruption were disguised as professionalism, efficiency, or expertise. The neoliberal order taught us to equate virtue with success and to see moral worth in market value."
American political and economic life has repeatedly converted public office into private profit, from 19th-century rail barons to modern revolving-door relations between Wall Street and Washington. Corruption was frequently reframed as professionalism, efficiency, or expertise, while neoliberal culture equated market success with moral virtue. The distinctive feature of the Trump era is not the emergence of corruption but its naked visibility and deliberate use as policy: open profiteering, state-driven vengeance, and unapologetic foreign interventions. Some contemporary actions, including unilateral extrajudicial strikes, present unabashed performances of longstanding state behaviors once concealed behind rhetoric of democracy and human rights.
Read at www.aljazeera.com
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