The Media’s Groundbreaking Discovery: Anti-Corruption Is Good Politics
Good news has been somewhat precious lately, as the Trump administration remains engaged in its conflict with Iran and the president himself has taken to portraying himself online as a messianic figure. But in last weekend’s elections in Hungary, Péter Magyar and his Tisza party resoundingly defeated international fascist darling Viktor Orbán and his far-right Fidesz acolytes. In fact, Tisza did so well in these elections that they will have the numbers needed to pass crucial constitutional reforms and repair at least some of the damage caused by 16 years of authoritarian rule. By the way, Orbán’s defeat is a black eye for his supporters in the United States, including Vice President JD Vance, who had personally leaned on the defeated strongman in the final days of the campaign.
In other words, it is a good result for freedom-loving people around the world and one that will hopefully still bear fruit. But there is a byproduct that has really been a real perplexity. In the media landscape, the chattering class has analyzed the elections and made what is – for them, at least – a new discovery: what if political corruption was bad? What if campaigning against corruption was a winning issue?
The Washington PostThe editorial board of OrbanThe fall of the state was due to endemic corruption” and the fact that he had built “a mafia state”. The Wall Street Journalby William Galston just as enthusiastic that the Magyars’ focus on “a handful of problems – cronyism and corruption, economic stagnation and inflation, and the decline of public services” was a “lesson for Democrats.” And The New York Times edition table, in an article entitled “Here’s How to Defeat Trumpism“, highlighted the fact that the Magyars “made corruption a central theme of the campaign”, then confidently intoned: “It is quite easy to imagine an American version of this strategy. »
It’s an amazing thing to have so many people so confident in their public statements that they finally cracked this code, many years after it might have been a useful insight. Trump, who will never contest elections again, is corrupt – and that may be his Achilles heel! As someone who was trying to explain the extent of Trump’s corruption and the importance of safeguarding constitutional defenses against a president using his position to enrich himself before Trump’s first inauguration, I can only say that these people are a little late to the party.
It’s extremely cute that so many media elites have decided that this is a lesson Democrats need to learn when, in fact, many Democrats have already figured it out. Here, for example, is Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, speaking in September 2025 before Save America Pod: “The vast amounts of corporate and billionaire money in our political system – with or without Trump – is why ordinary people are so poorly served by elected officials and by Congress.… If we don’t solve this problem, even once we put Trump back in the box midterms and once he is gone, the country will still be in deep trouble. »
Ossoff is one of 120 Democratic candidates who long ago signed End Citizens United’s “Unrig Washington” pledge, which asks candidates to support three agenda items: a total ban on stock trading in Congress, a refusal of corporate PAC money and a promise to undo the damage Congress has done. Citizens united to power and to suppress black money in our politics. Maybe everyone at the major newspapers missed this. Notably, NOTUS, the new publication which has recently devoured The Washington Post‘s Lunch took stock two months ago and found that “Democratic candidates are turning to anti-corruption messaging this cycle, seeing it as an opportunity to highlight what they see as excessive corporate influence, unethical stock trading and shady behavior by their opponents.”
The fact that Democrats have spoken out against corruption in the Trump era isn’t even that recent a phenomenon. The Washington Post‘Editors would do well to occasionally read their own newspaper’s articles: As their own Mike DeBonis reported in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, fighting corruption was a major plank of the Democratic Party’s (successful) campaign.
So what, if anything, has held back Democrats’ efforts despite it being such a robust line of attack against Trumpism? Well, as the aforementioned NOTUS report notes, “Democrats were considered more corrupt than Republicans by a margin of five percentage points in a 2025 poll conducted by End Citizens United.” There is no doubt that this is partly a self-inflicted wound: there has been significant resistance within the party to the ban on stock trading, for example. And the party was slow to deal with its own corrupt members – for example letting the notoriously sleazy Bob Menendez hang around in the Senate until his crimes finally became too comical to tolerate.
However, for the public to have their opinion, in 2025, that the Democrats were more more corrupt than a party whose leader embroiled himself in several scandals at the Teapot Dome in the same calendar year – including the creation of an unaccountable crypto slush fund to facilitate all manner of quid pro quo trading – suggests that the same media that recently stumbled upon the idea that corruption is a bad thing have prevented the public from seeing this for themselves.
It is absolutely true that we would know very little about Trump’s crimes without the journalists who unearthed all these important stories. But where the mainstream media fails in its job is its lack of civic impetus to properly portray Trump and his accomplices as agents of a de facto criminal enterprise. And just as the media has engaged in whitewashing the president’s demented ramblings, it has also erased the boundaries of Trump’s corrupt practices. The way the Trump story is told, serial violations of the Constitution become mere “deviations” from previous norms; his mafia demands on the international community are not described as extortion – Trump is simply being “transactional”.
Just this week, days after the Associated Press joined its peers in the great post-Orbán corruption awakening, they reported at length that the Trump White House is fundamentally a double-dealing, favor-trading, and self-enrichment racket. One way or another the word corrupt does not appear in the article. Nor are there any plain English explanations of historical criminality – mere allusions accompanied by laughable denials from various Trump spokespeople. In fact, the AP’s main concern, according to its headline, is that “the flurry of Trump family deals could open [the] door for future presidents to take advantage of the function. This is View From Nowhere at work: What if the criminal president we currently have corrupts a future president?
Look, I think it’s great that so many media elites have woken up to the fact that political corruption is a great civic evil and that Trump is politically corrupt. But according to the transitive theory of equality, this means that Trump is a great civic evildoer, and that the media that cannot tell this truth – and which instead seeks to obscure it – are the brilliant ally of this corrupt president. I hope this will change, but I rather think that not all of the people who have the means to shape the discourse to reflect reality and actually help restore our once-thriving democracy have the courage to join this fight. Hopefully, like in Hungary, we will no longer need it.
This article was first published in Crazy powera weekly TNR newsletter written by Associate Editor Jason Linkins. Register here.
