Trumpocalyptic Corruption
GREED!
Last Thursday, ProPublica published a document titled “Documents Reveal a Web of Financial Ties Between Trump Officials and the Industries They Help Regulate”1.
This is a short summary:
ProPublica’s new disclosure archive does not merely reveal a few technical ethics problems. It exposes something far more dangerous: a government increasingly arranged so that wealth, industry, and state power can flow through the same small circle of insiders with fewer and fewer restraints.
Former lobbyists, corporate executives, private-equity figures, crypto investors, and industry lawyers are not hovering around the edges of this administration; they are embedded within it, often in positions where they can shape the very policies, contracts, and enforcement decisions that affect their former worlds.
When you combine these entanglements with the removal of ethics guardrails, the firing of inspectors general, and the hollowing out of oversight, the pattern is no longer incidental. It is systemic.
This is not government as public service. It is government as an instrument increasingly available for private advantage, legal camouflage, and the normalization of conflicts that would once have triggered outrage.
I asked one of my AI resources to rank the current U.S. administration on a scale of 0 — 10 (0 to Total Corruption) for its historical level of greed. The response: 8.5 out of 10.
Why that high:
This is not just classic patronage or a few crooked deals. What ProPublica describes is broad-spectrum conflict risk across defense, crypto, environmental regulation, transportation, and trade, happening alongside the weakening of oversight institutions that are supposed to police exactly those dangers. That combination—dense entanglement plus weakened enforcement—is what pushes it into the very high range.
Why not a 10:
Historically, “total corruption” would mean something even farther gone: open routine bribery as the organizing principle of government, no meaningful independent courts, no functioning press scrutiny, no elections with real uncertainty, and no surviving capacity for public exposure. The U.S. is not there. ProPublica was able to obtain and publish thousands of records, watchdogs are still speaking, courts still exist as partial checks, and these entanglements are still contested in public rather than simply accepted as the unquestioned operating system.
Over 250 years of American governance-and-greed, I would place this near the top tier, alongside rather than identical to the great corruption eras: the spoils-system age, the Gilded Age, and the Harding-era scandals such as Teapot Dome. Britannica describes the Gilded Age as a period of “blatant political corruption,” and Teapot Dome remains one of the canonical federal corruption scandals.
What makes the current moment arguably more dangerous than some earlier scandals is scale and system: modern finance, private equity, crypto, national-security contracting, and regulatory opacity can move far more money through more channels, faster, and with more legal camouflage than the old-style bag-of-cash corruption.
Read it and weep. Then join your fellow citizens in doing all within your power to remove this Trumpocalyptic Plague from our Nation. Start today to replace all Republicans and neoliberal Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. 37 Senate seats will also be filled. Fill them with allied Democrats. Do all you can to assure that the 120th Congress, convening in January 2027, is not our last.
We, the People, remain the Rightful Sovereigns.
*— the full text of the ProPublica article is here: https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-administration-financial-disclosures-steve-feinberg