Authoritarianism IS Corruption

 I started teaching Nigeria in my Comp Gov course, and the sad history of that country - especially from 1965-1999 is a history of military regimes trying and failing to reintroduce democracy before a new set of generals overthrew everything. Nigeria does have democracy now, but it's not a great one and the reason is oil.

The presence of oil would seem to be a gift to one of the poorer countries in the world, but that oil money rarely makes it out of the government into the pockets of the people. Instead, controlling the government means controlling massive amounts of oil wealth, so democracy is rather fragile and corruption rules the day.

We tend to think of authoritarianism as one thing and corruption as another, because we can have corruption in democracy, too. This misses that the important point of most authoritarian regimes is the corruption. The reason we have elections is to self-correct. The reasons we bind our officials with rules and laws is to permit us to abate the corruption that comes with power.

You obviously see where I'm going with this. 

I feel reasonably confident that if Trump does half of what he says he wants to do, that Democrats will have a strong election in 2026. It will be chaotic, it will be dysfunctional, it will be inflationary, it will be corrupt. As long as American voters are able to freely express their will, they have shown that they don't approve of corruption. Even Trump voters who have voted for the whirlwind don't want to suffer. They don't want their kid hospitalized with measles. They want MS13 deported, not Maria, the nice lady who works the counter at the local bakery. 

Every election that Trump has not been in the ballot since 2016, Democrats have done well. He is going to be corrupt, he is going to be chaotic. His pretenses towards authoritarianism are partly temperamental, but partly about his lifelong project of evading legal accountability for his many crimes.