Corruption

 Yglesias looks at the kind of bizarre way that Americans look at public corruption. The whole thing is bizarre, as it usually is when you ask Americans about policies and specifics. For instance, 86% of respondents say that public officials who take cash in return for votes is corrupt. That means 14% are either unsure or think that's not corrupt.

Anyway.

Some of the things that people think are corrupt really aren't. If you get speaking fees for a group that has any political agenda (which is most groups), 62% think that's corruption. If a politician votes with "social elites" over constituents, 78% think that's corruption. In other words, if a politician votes for climate legislation that his constituents disagree with, then - rather than being just a policy disagreement - respondents see that as corruption.

All of this is to say, that this is why Donald Trump's unprecedented corruption seems to sail under the radar. Sure, there are things like his demolition of the East Wing that have landed in public opinion, but overall, people seem inured to Trump's really unprecedented corruption. Yglesias says it's the most corrupt in decades, but I think it has to be considered the most corrupt of all time. Certainly no president has engaged in such naked corruption. Grant and Harding had men around them who were corrupt, but they engaged in very little themselves. Trump is engaging in the outright sale of his office.

Because Americans think "all politicians are corrupt" - and they think that because they define corruption so loosely - then Trump is able to get away with unprecedented corruption because "they all do it."

We see this in the fact that Trump basically won in 2024 by carrying low-information voters. This tends to show up in the fact that they just weren't aware of things like "tariffs lead to higher prices" or "deportations won't increase jobs." It also shows up in things like being surprised that Trump would pursue vendettas against his enemies - something he admitted to on the campaign trail. Low information voters tend to blame the president for higher prices, even if - like Biden - it's not particularly his fault. They are less upset with inflation than with nominal prices. Because prices aren't coming down (which would actually be bad), they think it's corruption. In this case, it's incompetence and malevolence. 

Morris gives us this graph:

Trump won in 2024 in large part because ~one-quarter of the electorate wasn’t paying enough attention to his promises to know much about what he’d do as president. Now that they are seeing the results — especially on prices — they are just as anti-Trump as voters who spend all day consuming political news.

The corruption thing is part and parcel of the striking ignorance of the American voter.  Evidence seems unimportant, because evidence cannot contradict certain dearly held positions, and we are cooked because of it.