The bell is tolling for Donald Trump’s authoritarian movement. A shocking survey finds that Americans are more pissed off about government corruption than they’ve ever been — including both Democrats and Republicans.
Indeed, a recent Gallup poll revealed that a whopping 89 percent of Americans now say corruption is widespread in our government, notching the highest number ever recorded in two decades of asking the question. That’s up a staggering sixteen points since the year Trump got re-elected to the presidency.
For anyone trying to figure out how to bury the MAGA movement, this is your answer.
For the first time since Gallup began comparing countries, the United States ranks dead last among all 38 advanced economies on perceived government corruption. The average is under 60 percent. Again, we are at 89 percent, keeping statistical company with a basket of less-than-clean governments like those in Lebanon, Peru, and even Nigeria, where national fraud and embezzlement are so systemic that the country spawned the infamous “Nigerian prince” email scam (Remember that one? The con where a supposed royal offers you millions if you’ll just wire a small fee first? Those are our peers now).
America is the country that once lectured the world about clean government. Hell, I traveled the world delivering such lectures. Now, we’re statistically the most “corrupt-feeling” democracy in the developed world, according to our own citizens. If Donald Trump was worried about cementing his legacy, he doesn’t have to fear any longer. With this, he’s achieved something historic that no other president before him has achieved.
But MAGA leaders should register panic because it turns out that the concern is fully bipartisan. Ninety-one percent of Democrats say corruption is widespread. Ninety percent of independents. Eighty-three percent of Republicans. In an era when our political parties barely agree on how to read a map (actually), they agree on this. By a supermajority, Donald Trump’s own voters believe the government is rotten. He promised he’d drain the swamp, yet they can see the gold-leaf ballroom rising on their televisions, built with their money, while the First Family’s crypto ventures mint billions and while Trump himself is minting literal coins with his face on them.
You don’t have to convince MAGA voters that Washington is corrupt. They already believed it. What’s changed is that they’re starting to see who is really doing the corrupting. So let’s keep bringing them the receipts.
Consider this the opening paragraph of Donald Trump’s political eulogy. To win the day against a wannabe dictator, you don’t need nuanced sniping about healthcare budgets or business-as-usual debates over unfair policies. This ain’t a fight about ideology, which instantly splits a country in half. This is a fight about corruption, which now unites nine in ten of us. Do you see how significant this is?
It’s why I built DEFIANCE.org in the first place. History tells us that corruption-fighting brings people together, and I can see it starting to happen against my former boss Donald Trump. I’m not a registered Democrat. I’m a life-long conservative. Yet I run this organization with an avowed socialist. Why? Because neither of us can stand the corruption.
In less than a year, our members have raised seven-figure sums to fight back, and we’re doing it in targeted places where we can have outsize impact: exposing the Epstein cover-up and putting the files on wheels… backing the watchdogs and the whistleblowers… and treating anti-corruption as a tool of persuasion, like our support for the group Leaving MAGA, which helps disillusioned Trump voters find their way out with dignity instead of shame.
How we do it matters a great deal. On the off-ramp away from the pro-dictator movement, the sign doesn’t read: “You were wrong.” It says “You were robbed.” And believe me, that’s what brings people over to the pro-democracy side.
Next month, we’re going to take this messaging further. In October, DEFIANCE.org will release a micro-documentary on corruption in Trump’s America, built to give each voter, organizer, and dinner-table conversation the receipts in one place, or at least a lot of them. So stay tuned for that.
But back to the eighty-nine percent. I don’t want you to think of it as a survey result. I want you to start seeing it how I see it, as a coalition waiting to be led. Trump captured it for a while. He did. “Drain the swamp!” However, his opponents should be able to recapture it in far, far bigger numbers. A supermajority of Americans believe the government has been stolen from them, and they’re right. The man who stole it is plastering his name and face on the buildings.
Our job between now and November is mind-numbingly straightforward. Let’s give the 89 percent somewhere to put their anger. If we do, that will be the beginning of the end for Donald Trump.
Your friend, in defiance,
DEFIANCE DAILY
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