Never in the history of modern polling has “corruption” been the leading issue in an American election. Donald Trump just made it one.
Before I get to the numbers, I have to marvel at how frequently the American people are confronted with the reality of the theft in Washington. It’s unending. Just look at what was reported this week.
On the east side of the White House, we’ve got crews frantically pouring concrete for a billion-dollar ballroom (with a bunker underneath) that Donald Trump swore he and his “friends” would pay for and which is named in his honor. On Wednesday, the Washington Post obtained the list of those friends, like Apple, Nvidia, and the Adelson family at $25 million apiece, and Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, and Palantir at $10 million. Many have since won regulatory decisions and government contracts, and in one case, a donor’s father secured a presidential pardon for a crime. Last night on our podcast, former DOJ official Liz Oyer called the ballroom a “deposit box for bribes.”
Of course, the one name missing from the list of people paying for Trump’s ballroom is Trump himself. So far, he doesn’t appear to have given a dime. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars are going into the combined ballroom-bunker project that he said we’d never have to pay for.
That’s just one day’s bad headline. This is happening every day. And the American people have noticed. I finally have overwhelming numbers to prove it.
A Fox News poll released this week asked registered voters what worries them most heading into the midterms. The winner was not affordability or the economy, which have dominated every election cycle in living memory. It was corruption in government. A whopping 88 percent of voters said they were extremely or very concerned about it. It beat high gas and grocery prices. It beat healthcare. It beat everything! In the same survey, Trump’s approval sank to 36 percent, the lowest Fox has ever recorded for him. In other polls, it’s dipped into the 20s.
It doesn’t stop there.
A day earlier, an AP-NORC survey found that most Americans believe Trump is profiting from the presidency either illegally or unethically, and that he’s more focused on building his own wealth than on helping them. Yikes. And last month — as you all know, because I’ve been referencing it almost every day — Gallup reported that 89 percent of Americans now believe corruption is widespread in their government, the largest Gallup has ever measured and which puts America at the very bottom of the developed world (out of 38 countries) when it comes to perceived corruption.
These are history-making developments, folks.
Pollsters have been asking Americans what worries them most since the 1930s, and through every scandal of the past century, grift and graft have never been ranked at the top. Not even after Watergate in 1974, when voters still ranked the economy and inflation ahead of Nixon’s crimes. To be sure, Americans have always been angry about government scandal and mismanagement of their tax dollars. But they’ve never put it ahead of grocery prices and the economy.
The reason for all of this is, without a doubt, is that Trump has made corruption literally impossible to ignore. He turned it from a background story that’s always playing out in Washington into basically the lead story of every news cycle for the past 18 months. What’s worse, the high prices people are experiencing at the grocery and at the pump are in no small part because of Trump’s corruption — tariffs he imposed illegally, wars he started without Congress, and meddling in the economy that has upended markets.
This will have generational repercussions.
More immediately, it’s why we announced that on Tuesday, October 27, one week before Election Day, we’re releasing a documentary called CORRUPTIONLAND to give the American people a full sense of the rot before they go to the polls. We spoke with leading legal scholars, watchdog groups, journalists, Members of Congress, and more to grasp the scope of the problem. You won’t believe what we uncovered. If you think you know how bad it is, you ain’t seen nothing yet. (Also, we’re making it free for everyone in the country to watch because of how important the issues is).
These latest polling numbers are a death sentence for MAGA as a governing movement. To a certain extent, affordability is an issue a president can blame on someone else, and this one certainly tries. He points at the Fed, at Biden, at foreigners, etc. But corruption is personal. It’s a profound statement on the character of the man in charge and of our leaders writ large. And this week, it became abundantly clear that voters have rendered their judgment.
There’s nothing Trump can do about it in the next three weeks. Nothing. When nine-in-ten Americans say the government is corrupt and only one-in-ten say the president is looking out for them, the little guy, there’s no earthly messaging strategy that can save the party in power. The Republicans running with Trump’s name on their ballots are running on the most radioactive issue in modern American political history because they have slavishly covered for his corruption or outright enabled it.
Trump spent more than a decade telling Americans the system was rigged. He finally convinced them. What he didn’t tell them is that he would be the one rigging it. Now they’ve noticed.
Your friend, in defiance,
P.S. DEFIANCE.org is a nonprofit “club for the courageous.” We literally exist to FIGHT the corruption you just read about. We announce a new effort every week to counter Trump’s abuses of power. That’s what your membership funds. If you haven’t yet, become a member today.
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