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autoexec 3 hours ago [-]
Corruption in the US isn't new, but it's never been done as openly as it has been recently. I don't think it's a good thing. It shows that the government isn't concerned about what the public thinks, which suggests that they believe they no longer have to be. That's not a healthy sign for what's supposed to be a democracy.
yongjik 2 hours ago [-]
I think it's worse. It's not that the government doesn't care that the public hates it; it's more like the government is doing whatever it wants and half the public is going wild absolutely loving it.
Well, maybe a bit less than half these days.
Loughla 2 hours ago [-]
The half that supports this nonsense genuinely believes this level of corruption has always existed. They're just happy it's their team this time.
I simply do not understand American politics.
rootusrootus 30 minutes ago [-]
> I simply do not understand American politics.
You are in good company with most Americans in that regard.
It seems like the whole "we just blame the other side for everything we want to do, and then use that as justification when we actually do it" strategy must be well orchestrated, but the voters themselves legitimately seem to believe it is actually how things work. I am darkly impressed at the skillful manipulation.
tstrimple 6 minutes ago [-]
Imagine there had been no Nuremberg trials. The Nazis just got a slap on the wrist and almost immediately let back into politics as usual. That's how we got here. We're still fighting the remnants of the confederacy. Germany and Japan in particular purged most of those elements from their society. Here we built statues to the evil fucks.
esafak 1 hours ago [-]
It's a very banana republicy thing and not uniquely American.
subarctic 58 minutes ago [-]
Well, banana republics are run by American companies from what i understand
rapind 56 minutes ago [-]
If Trump tomorrow says communism is great, then every Fox news host, MAGA content creator, and MAGA bot would be extolling the virtues of communism. The republican house and senate would enable it, maybe with a small bribe here and there. There is no line. There is no integrity. It's just looting.
irishcoffee 1 hours ago [-]
Nobody does. The amount of teenage angst posted in this forum about the current admin is amusingly pathetic. None of it matters. Congress constantly gets a free pass while we focus on a figurehead largely enabled by a passive and embarrassing congressional electorate. “We found the scapegoat, blame that guy!”
It’s really embarrassing
magicalist 53 minutes ago [-]
> “We found the scapegoat, blame that guy!”
Yeah, that's not what an scapegoat is.
conception 1 hours ago [-]
This is greatly because most congressional elections are not competitive.
ThunderSizzle 29 minutes ago [-]
Corruption has been rampant under multiple administrations. I actually had hoped Trump might root out more corruption in his 2nd term, but two things happened: Congress wouldn't go afraid the corruption that was being found, and Charlie Kirk was assassinated in broad daylight...after 2-3 assassination attempts on Trump himself too.
It's easier to start looking the other way when bullets start flying.
Having said that, I'm not saying Trump was a saint, but it seems this board forgets we just had Obama and Biden running their corruption rings for 2 decades too...
That 35% will change their tune if it screws their stuff up. Trump et al is great in the large unless he's your business partner or boss screwing your money and life up, hitting on your wife or daughter, owes you money etc. Cheap symbolism is appealing in a fog only, not in your face.
kolanos 51 minutes ago [-]
> The national favorability rating for the Democratic Party sits around 39% to 41% favorable, with unfavorable ratings ranging from 48% to 54% across recent mid-2026 polls. [0]
And Congress as a whole...
> The approval rating for the U.S. Congress stands at 10%, while disapproval has climbed to 86%, according to data from Gallup. [1]
Diffuse organizations like "Congress" or "the party" aren't what you're voting for. Unfortunately Congress really does take it on the chin for the actions of the President in midterms, because that's very recognizable and personalized, and partisan votes (or just staying home) are the only lever people have to express displeasure.
BLKNSLVR 2 hours ago [-]
Part of the problem with the open brazenness of the corruption is that the populace of the country will follow the lead. The rot will spread far and wide if it is seen that there is no consequence.
m4rtink 47 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, just look at the eastern block countries - corruption was everywhere and considered totally normal. So much that it eventually brought the whole thing down.
But it still left a deep mark on people - people who grew up under the old regime still considered it normal to bring gifts (usually alcohol in some form) when visiting doctors - the idea being it would be rude not to!
This is having real consequences - I saw an interview with a doctor, where he showed the reports a big closet, full of alcohol from these gifts.
That was from just the last week. He also mentions colleagues with tendencies for alcoholism dying from this...
cucumber3732842 50 minutes ago [-]
What rots will fall down.
Now, if you had some grand master plan to use some part of the federal government to stomp some people in some state for doing it wrong this is probably bad for you. But on a 30-40yr timeline it'll probably just mean a cycle of the feds doing less and the states doing more and the diversity that comes with that.
Like we'll all screech about the EPA revoking this or the DOT ceasing to do that but whatever those policies are, if people want them they will be picked up by the states. In most cases it'll probably be 40-something states continuing to do whatever it was or 40-something states saying that was stupid all along and stopping immediately.
Basically the sky isn't falling.
autoexec 20 minutes ago [-]
The EPA is a good example of why this is so bad. Even if 90% of the states pass rules to protect the air and water it takes only a small number of states not following environmental regulations to cause a massive amount of harm to air and water quality and the effects of that can be felt in other states.
It also hurts businesses when they suddenly find themselves forced to follow an inconsistent/conflicting patchwork of state laws instead of a single federal law.
That said, it's still encouraging to see states picking up the slack and passing laws to protect their residents, even though I can't help but feel bad for people who become stuck in states where the government doesn't care about them. I hope that people will be begin to flee states where the government chooses to put corporate profits above the well-being of the public or wants to strip them of their rights, but realistically there will be many people who can't afford to move or who feel compelled to stay because of ties to their friends, family, and community.
cucumber3732842 9 minutes ago [-]
You're only looking at the glass half empty side of things.
The environment in the US is very diverse so why is it federally regulated to the degree it is?
Not having to put up with rules that make sense in the arid plains or western deserts is gonna be a huge boon to everyone east of the Mississippi.
The "consistency" argument is like 99% red herring. There's already a huge patchwork because the way federal agencies work is the states do most of the enforcing so you have 50 states worth of precedents and political whims to keep track of. If we're gonna suffer that patchwork it should at least work for the state as they want it rather than just be various flavors of spin on federal rules nobody fully agrees with.
You can run this sort of exercise with just about every federal agency. Stuff like the FRA, DOT and other things where the literal subject matter is flagrantly interstate are where this sort of thing is least true.
mc32 1 hours ago [-]
When Congress people enrich themselves while serving in office[1] and there's a revolving door from public service into private and we have billions in unaccounted spending, fraud everywhere you look (especially since Covid), it's no surprise people feel upset by corruption.
My hope is we will, one day, have an administration that roots it out using modern fraud detection, gets rid of waste, shuts down non-profits that funnel monies to their founders (anything where "overheard" is over 50%), stops insider trading amongst politicians and government workers, but I don't see them voting against their greed.
> It shows that the government isn't concerned about what the public thinks
Similar to the "Death of a Euphemism" [0], where some politicians decide they don't have to cloak their proposal in the trappings of reasonability any more.
I highly recommend the whole series, as it has renewed relevance today.
Sucks seeing the federal government weaponize the U.S. Postal Service to prevent legitimate ballots from being counted.
BLKNSLVR 2 hours ago [-]
Also gives an idea as to how desperate and paranoid they are.
vkou 48 minutes ago [-]
What would anyone expect to happen when people are stupid enough to elect someone who tried, with multiple parallel methods, including an attack on Congress, to steal one election already.
estearum 2 hours ago [-]
Well it’s almost certainly not just more open. But also more common and more intense. There is 100% absolutely no possible comparison to Trump’s personal acts of corruption in any prior White House ever.
shimman 2 hours ago [-]
Trump is bad, but please let's not excuse corporate neoliberal dems that are totally fine with insider trading, legalized bribes, and are quite proud that their consultant campaign workers get lucrative gigs at corporations/boards due to insider access. I mean we have people like Gillibrand that are openly in bed with the crypto industry while somehow decrying what Trump is doing. Feels like they're upset that Trump exposed how rotten this game has gotten.
At some point you realize there is a game that you were never playing and it becomes a bipartisan issue.
vannevar 1 hours ago [-]
No one is excusing them. But it's worth pointing out that in every aspect of government ethics reform, from campaign financing to insider trading by government officials, the legislation promoted by Democrats is stronger than that promoted by Republicans, who often not only don't promote reform but actively oppose it. For example, the recent lukewarm ban on insider trading was opposed by Democrats on the grounds that it was too weak, excluded the President and VP, and included unrelated voter regulation measures. And the Democrats have been trying to pass legislation to correct Citizens United for years. So while it's a bipartisan issue, one party is much more pro-reform than the other.
abletonlive 51 minutes ago [-]
> For example, the recent lukewarm ban on insider trading was opposed by Democrats on the grounds that it was too weak
Yeah you're brainwashed
rootusrootus 24 minutes ago [-]
After reading about Ground News, I am starting to gain a real appreciation for how effective "both sides are bad" is at benefiting the right. It may well be the closest I've seen to 4D chess in reality.
grvdrm 56 minutes ago [-]
Fair take, I think.
But we didn’t have to vote DJT into office as a counteracting force. Whether every decision is bad or not, not my point. It just seemed obvious that he wasn’t the right guy.
Some people can’t vote against their party. Some people believe write in is the move.
autoexec 10 minutes ago [-]
A write in, or even just scrawling "FUCK YOU" across the ballot is at least an active protest. It shows that you aren't apathetic to, or okay with, what is going on. It'd be interesting to see a write in campaign for someone with enough public support to be more than just a protest vote though. It'd be interesting to see someone campaign to the public with no interest in participating in the two party system at all, just asking the public to write them in when the time comes.
estearum 2 hours ago [-]
All of that is several orders of magnitude less bad than a normal Tuesday in the Trump administration.
For evidence, refer to TFA.
shimman 1 hours ago [-]
Okay and how do you think it helps the democratic candidate's ability to win elections when they are part of the same party that supports corporations over people? In the not so recent past the democratic party controlled Congress for 60+ years on the new deal coalition alone, now look what the party has morphed into...
I read the article too, in what sane world is it okay if 70% of citizens thought their governments + corporations are corrupt over a 20 year time span here. Society apparently has get quite bad for the last 20% to realize the state of things.
The only thing I got out of this article is that both parties + the F500 need to be destroyed.
vannevar 1 hours ago [-]
>The only thing I got out of this article is that both parties + the F500 need to be destroyed.
I don't know, if we'd had an overwhelmingly Democrat-dominated government, we'd have comprehensive bans on government insider trading and we'd correct the bad ruling in Citizens United. Corporatism is definitely a bipartisan issue, but at least Democrats recognize it as a problem, while to Republicans it's a feature. Not everything in politics is symmetrical, and misguided nihilism is actually how we got where we are. Turns out the road to hell is paved with "it's both sides."
estearum 1 hours ago [-]
Did I say it was okay?
If you think I (or virtually anyone else) am a fan of the two-party system, you probably aren't paying very close attention to... anything.
Things can be varying levels of imperfect. Things can be imperfect and acceptable, imperfect and bad, or imperfect and extremely extremely bad. It's not a sign of intelligence not to be able to discern between them.
dfxm12 1 hours ago [-]
This is putting mildly. The most damning bit might just be that Republican voters saw all the corruption of Trump I and decided they wanted more.
jeffbee 2 hours ago [-]
Implying that it's always been this way is part of the reason we are now here. For my entire life, bad faith commentators insinuated that the federal government was rife with corruption. When under Democratic control, of course. The time that Al Gore made one long-distance telephone call from his official desk, using his own personal calling card, birthed over 200 New York Times articles, 30 of them on the front page. We just had to get to the bottom of all that corruption!
iamnothere 10 minutes ago [-]
The problems that happened during the Clinton admin (with the exception of Whitewater) weren’t so much corruption as they were short-sighted neoliberal trade deals and hostility to organized labor, which accelerated the process of hollowing out the country. But this was also an unusual period in US history due to the end of the Cold War, so this administration could be an exception. Most of the scandals from this period appear quaint.
dispomatrix 41 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, because the disposition matrix is peak democracy.
netsharc 2 hours ago [-]
"Both sides are just as bad" is copium for when the guy from "your side" is revealed to be a corrupt piece of shit. You don't like it, so you justify to yourself that the other party is also full of creeps and assholes and thieves, so you can continue to support your guy guilt free...
Of course the supporters of one particular political party is much more better at gymnastics of the mental kind than the other side. Having no spine makes it quite easier...
2 hours ago [-]
rozal 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
chronc7403 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pseudosavant 2 hours ago [-]
Looking at their charts, Democrats and Independents clearly think corruption is up a lot since 2024. But Republicans think corruption is down from 2024. The polarization of the electorate in the U.S. is pretty incredible.
icegreentea2 41 minutes ago [-]
It's not just a question of belief, it's also a question of their information environment. The polarization in the electorate isn't just a question of what people believe, but what information their fed. Unfortunately, information environment -> belief -> environment is forms a strong sustaining feedback loop.
It is also worth pointing out that that 83% of republicans (vs 90% of independents) still believe that the government is widely corrupt. Like given the ~20% "crazy threshold" in basically any type of political polling, 80% of republicans is effectively "every single republican you could ever convince".
I would not lose sleep over polarization in this context.
BLKNSLVR 1 hours ago [-]
Their corruption is bad. (Ie. the other party)
I wonder if the split would still be roughly the same if a Democrat was in power at the time of the survey.
First diagram in the article shows uptick, but since 2010 it's been in the 70-80% range. So it seems pretty party-agnostic.
paisawalla 1 hours ago [-]
Per the second chart:
Since 2024, Democrats went from being the most trusting (57%) to the most skeptical (91%), bringing all groups to within 10 points of each other on the question.
This is not a "both sides" situation: Republicans dropped from 87% to 83% after their guy was elected, whereas Democrats nearly 1.5x'd their number of skeptics. There is no universal implication here IMO, this is just Democrats joining the 80-percenters, i.e. everyone
vannevar 49 minutes ago [-]
>...Republicans dropped from 87% to 83% after their guy was elected, whereas Democrats nearly 1.5x'd their number of skeptics.
This is not surprising; a big reason that Republican voters were able to justify voting for Trump and open corruption was that they were bombarded with claims that there was a "Biden crime family" in office for four years. No real evidence of that was ever uncovered, but it didn't stop Fox News and every Republican leader from constantly referring to the accusations as if they were true. One the other hand, Trump is openly accepting huge payments from foreign governments, and never even bothered to separate himself from his companies. Republicans were at 87% due to general distrust of government and the rumor of phantom corruption, while Democrats (who tend to be more trusting of government) rose to the same level only on clear evidence of real corruption. The authors don't break it out by parties, but the overall level during Trump's first term is about the same as Biden's. Since the article notes that Republican skepticism is higher in general and more consistent, this implies that Democrats' perception of corruption is much higher in Trump's second term than his first. Which makes sense, the Republican leadership was much more responsible in applying guardrails in the first term than the second. Trump is getting away with a LOT more in his second term.
xirdstl 1 hours ago [-]
Biden was in power for the survey in 2024.
socalgal2 1 hours ago [-]
U.S. Trust in Government Depends Upon Party Control
At least they think it's up since 2025. I wonder how this will inform their votes in November...
xnx 2 hours ago [-]
"Drain the swamp". Everything is projection. What they say about the Democrats is what they are or aspire to be.
etchalon 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder if it's less projection than permission.
They believe that all government is corrupt and thus they're not doing anything wrong by being openly corrupt.
Loughla 1 hours ago [-]
I don't know why you're being down voted. Your statement does seem to be the literal truth.
giantg2 1 hours ago [-]
Lots of people here are focused on one guy. But the the article says "widespread". In my experience, much of the corruption is at a local or state level. At the federal level it seems the corruption is mostly related to agencies (GAO reports) and lobbying.
vannevar 44 minutes ago [-]
It doesn't seem like they asked about specific levels or branches of government, so presumably the respondents were giving a general impression. And in that case, it's hard to believe that a corrupt President wouldn't strongly influence the response.
swed420 3 hours ago [-]
Related:
New High of 45% in U.S. Identify as Political Independents (January 12, 2026)
Identifying as independents means nothing. 67% of independents in 2018 viewed one party more favorable and were unfavorable to other. In other words, the independents have a partisan lean towards one party and are more likely to vote that way.
"indepdendent" does not mean "i see all parties as absolutely the same".
It means "I am not firmly affiliated". You still have the ability to make choices on who is a better likely outcome
spicymaki 2 hours ago [-]
This is correct. That is why I changed from independent to an actual political party. There is no point, it is highly improbable that I would ever vote for the party that is against my values. The two main US political parties are diametrically opposed.
swed420 1 hours ago [-]
No, they each manufacture consent for capital interests in a race to the bottom for everybody else, using time-tested good cop / bad cop, revolving door corruption, etc.
XorNot 2 hours ago [-]
That only matters of you actually do make different choices. But of course in turn even trying to control for that depends on their being meaningful changes in party platforms between elections.
So I'm pretty content calling it a meaningless measure.
swed420 2 hours ago [-]
Identifying as independent is the first step toward not voting at all (which itself is a type of vote, especially in a rigged system).
So definitely not meaningless. It demonstrates increasing amounts of people are tired of pretending our democracy isn't mostly illusory.
Democrats lost to a gameshow host. Twice. They just had to be better than that, and they couldn't manage. Pathetic. They also created the conditions for his rise. Twice. The bar is so amazingly low, and yet you can't comprehend how they keep fumbling this. Maybe, just maybe, it's a good cop / bad cop arrangement where only capital interests win, and it's a race to the bottom for everybody else. Or maybe that's just a childish, stupid opinion. Who knows!
trentor 3 hours ago [-]
Right on track to be the next Russia. Ironic but also incredibly funny.
FpUser 3 hours ago [-]
He who kills the dragon becomes one.
vkou 46 minutes ago [-]
Two thirds of those independents will vote MAGA down the ballot to give him a third and fourth term.
jeffbee 2 hours ago [-]
An "independent" in America is a person who greatly desires everything Trump is doing but realizes that makes them a bad person and therefore refuses to admit it.
the_gastropod 29 minutes ago [-]
I know you’re going to get downvoted to hell, but you’re pretty much spot on. There’s something strangely desirable about being seen as the edgy contrarian “not left, not right” person. But 9 times out of 10, that person has approximately the same incoherent worldview most Trumpists have.
throw0101a 2 hours ago [-]
Even before this new record high, in the previous ~15 years the average seemed to be around 75% (±), which seems… high? I would perhaps understand the US public thinking that (some levels of) government being "incompetent", but not corrupt.
By some measure the US does seem to have 'decent' scores for perception of corruption:
Meta: in some ways it seems that the public's perception of government is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the US there is a large vein of "government is bad/incompetent/corrupt" and that's apparently what the US often gets. While in (e.g.) Scandinavian countries there appears to be a higher level of trust in government, and the people there tend to elect more competent politicians (?).
wat10000 2 hours ago [-]
I'd guess it comes down to what counts as "the government."
Millions of people work for the federal government, and millions more for state and local governments. Is there widespread corruption among them? I don't think so. And I don't think my countrymen think so either.
But "the government" is often meant as just the very top. The President is corrupt. Big swathes of Congress are corrupt. We have a Supreme Court justice more or less openly accepting bribes. Among that small group, I would be comfortable saying that corruption is widespread.
mswphd 2 hours ago [-]
I (and I'm sure others) would obviously agree. just a smattering of the obvious cases
* for years people have noticed that many members of congress use privileged information to pick stocks.
* lobbying post-Citizen's United has a very decidedly "buying politicians" aspect to it
* a congressman (Menendez) was literally arrested while holding gold bars from a foreign government. he went to prison, but is the only person on this list who has iirc.
* the former mayor of new york (a long-time police offer) was embroiled in a Very Funny, very obviously true corruption scandal for turkish airline tickets. the prosecution against him was dropped for no good reason.
dfxm12 1 hours ago [-]
This is what a steady diet of conservative, increasingly monopolistic, media does to a populace.
jghn 2 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately if one asks "who is the cause of the corruption" you'd see two very strong modes in the data, and therein lies the issue regarding fixing things.
2 hours ago [-]
trashface 46 minutes ago [-]
The disparity between Trump and previous presidents on income earned while president is so vast, you need a log scale graph to make it meaningful. Your favorite LLM can generate it for you (except maybe grok, I presume)
mberning 1 hours ago [-]
The corruption is bad enough at the local level. I can’t even fathom how much theft is going on at the state and federal level. It’s one of the more frustrating things to see how much money you are paying into the system for such meager benefits. We can’t even get sidewalks installed in my area, but the township can certainly give a sweetheart tax break to one of their buddies to build a new gas station.
stinkbeetle 18 minutes ago [-]
I remember when this used to be a far right conspiracy theory.
> Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country, or not?
How is corruption defined for the purposes of this survey?
If there is none (I assume there is not), then it is only natural this number go up as the media highlights and propagandizes and highlights all actions taken by all government officials.
sublinear 2 hours ago [-]
I'm curious how these polls are conducted. These polls are at least already biased since people self-select. If they're online only, even moreso. If they're only advertised to echo chambers, even moreso.
Anyway, the result may be that the polls are only measuring younger people with nothing better to do. That's interesting but only a record high amongst that subpopulation. I'm fairly certain this is business as usual.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2 hours ago [-]
If this is the question they asked:
Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country, or not?
Then that's very open to interpretation. Even if I thought the federal government was not corrupt, but I did think the local or state government was corrupt (or many local governments were, not just my own), I'd answer yes to this question.
They should have broken it down a bit more.
tekla 2 hours ago [-]
Note the numbers between 2010 and 2025 were in the 72% to 79% range if you read the article. So numbers have not actually increased that much.
ProfessorLayton 2 hours ago [-]
2010 was right after the great recession, and after the people that caused it got bailed out by the government.
mswphd 2 hours ago [-]
2010 is also Citizen's United.
lynndotpy 1 hours ago [-]
Think about it as 25% who disagree to only 11. Less than half of the people who thought corruption is not widespread still think so. Further, the US is now the #1 ranked country in corruption.
I think it's more useful to think about the closed operations on the 0% to 100% range. A change of ~75% to 89% does not seem like much, but "only an 18% increase" is not a closed operation, so it's not so meaningful. You'll see this in machine learning, e.g. 70% accuracy to 75% accuracy is not as impressive as 98% to 99%, despite having a larger change.
chris_wot 2 hours ago [-]
I’m not an American. Those not American are frankly gobsmacked that U.S. citizens voted the current President in a second time. You all literally saw what he did in his first term!
imoverclocked 5 minutes ago [-]
> You all literally saw what he did in his first term!
False, unfortunately. Disparate news outlets covered events very differently and folks watching pro-Trump outlets (or only listening to friends who do) through the first term were under the impression that he did an excellent job. They may even still believe that the 2020 election was actually stolen. Heck, there are depositions this year while vetting appointees who refuse to admit (despite all available evidence) that the 2020 election was valid.
chronc7403 1 hours ago [-]
> You all literally saw what he did in his first term!
Yeah, he stopped US military from defending other countries for free.
Soft power doesn’t pay your rent/mortgage.
techblueberry 1 hours ago [-]
Soft power is _literally_ what pays your rent and mortgage.
Webstir 3 hours ago [-]
But, not the politicians I voted for.
It's always the other guys.
fhdkweig 2 hours ago [-]
That would have been a more interesting question to ask. It's a shame they didn't.
newAccount2025 2 hours ago [-]
Nah. At the end of the day it’s candidate A vs. B. Once they’re all corrupt you still have to decide between them and pick the lesser evil as you see it. They’re creatures of ambition and incentives, and the corruption is a feature of the system. It sucks but what can you do but vote for the corrupt dems or the corrupt republicans?
2 hours ago [-]
java-man 3 hours ago [-]
Who are these 11%?
slater 3 hours ago [-]
The ones smiling and holding "their" ladders
actionfromafar 2 hours ago [-]
And the ones who believes Mr Trump drained the swamp.
slater 2 hours ago [-]
[they-are-the-same-picture-dot-gif]
dmix 2 hours ago [-]
Government workers
jmyeet 36 minutes ago [-]
In many countries around the world, corruption is a huge problem. But pretty much everywhere it happens there's a surface-level denial or attempt to hide it. If you're Putin or Erdogan, for example, you'll have children who get beneficial contracts and there's layers of obfuscation.
So there are three things that are scary about Trump's corruption:
1. It's so brazen and on a scale rarely seen. Apparently he's made $2 billion since coming back into office and he does so openly. Pardons are for sale. Truth Social has a feature to pay to get early access to posts to trade on, basically. There are crypto rug pulls. The list goes on;
2. A third of the population simply doesn't care and will defend it no matter what; and
3. He'll never be held accountable by any future administration. This is the worst part. If this happened in China, he'd go to prison and his assets would be seized. This would extend to his family and their assets. Just look at Hui Ya Kan [1].
The US just does not punish the wealthy. Look at the Sacklers and Purdue. There's clear evidence they hid the fact that Oxycontin was addictive despite their public claims and they have a large amount of responsibility for the opioid crisis. In a just world, they would all die penniless in 6x8 foot grey prison cells. And who went to prison for the 2008 subprime crisis? Oh, that's right. Nobody.
This also extends to the powerful. George W. Bush had an illegal torture program. Who went to prison for it? Only 1 guy: the whistleblower John Kiriakou for talking about it.
The Supreme Court is utterly corrupt. Anthony Kennedy allegedly traded his retirement for a job for his son. John Roberts's wife makes tens of millions in headhunting fees for finding lawyers to argue before teh Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas is just one bribe after another.
The entire government is captured by people who want to get rich by betraying their country to the ultra-wealthy.
I thought electing an outsider with theretofore no experience nor interest in governing was supposed to break the system in a good way so as to erase the incumbent problems and rebuild with common sense and integrity.
autoexec 2 hours ago [-]
Giving someone without common sense and integrity unchecked power is probably not a good way to obtain common sense and integrity in your government.
netsharc 2 hours ago [-]
Well, that reads like the justification you want to give to yourself after the fact.. the interesting question is what's the real reason...
surfmike 2 hours ago [-]
The most blatant recent case is Trump selling early access to his Truth Social posts
I don’t know why this should be surprising since it’s all out in the open now.
They made Carter give up his family peanut farm to be President.
Trump and his family are selling stock every week, running crypto currency rug pulls, accepting gifts ostensibly for the country that they say will be donated to Trump at the end of his term(the Qatar plane).
It’s all out in the open under Trump term 2.
At this point if you think there isn’t corruption I assume you also think RFK has the right idea about health care and vaccinations.
insane_dreamer 1 hours ago [-]
yet Republicans think corruption is _down_ since 2024 :smacks-head:
Well, maybe a bit less than half these days.
I simply do not understand American politics.
You are in good company with most Americans in that regard.
It seems like the whole "we just blame the other side for everything we want to do, and then use that as justification when we actually do it" strategy must be well orchestrated, but the voters themselves legitimately seem to believe it is actually how things work. I am darkly impressed at the skillful manipulation.
It’s really embarrassing
Yeah, that's not what an scapegoat is.
It's easier to start looking the other way when bullets start flying.
Having said that, I'm not saying Trump was a saint, but it seems this board forgets we just had Obama and Biden running their corruption rings for 2 decades too...
> 35% approve, 61% disapprove, 5% not sure
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
And Congress as a whole...
> The approval rating for the U.S. Congress stands at 10%, while disapproval has climbed to 86%, according to data from Gallup. [1]
So not sure what this is really telling us?
[0]: https://fiftyplusone.news/polls/favorability/democratic-part... [1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/708722/disapproval-congress-tie...
Diffuse organizations like "Congress" or "the party" aren't what you're voting for. Unfortunately Congress really does take it on the chin for the actions of the President in midterms, because that's very recognizable and personalized, and partisan votes (or just staying home) are the only lever people have to express displeasure.
But it still left a deep mark on people - people who grew up under the old regime still considered it normal to bring gifts (usually alcohol in some form) when visiting doctors - the idea being it would be rude not to!
This is having real consequences - I saw an interview with a doctor, where he showed the reports a big closet, full of alcohol from these gifts.
That was from just the last week. He also mentions colleagues with tendencies for alcoholism dying from this...
Now, if you had some grand master plan to use some part of the federal government to stomp some people in some state for doing it wrong this is probably bad for you. But on a 30-40yr timeline it'll probably just mean a cycle of the feds doing less and the states doing more and the diversity that comes with that.
Like we'll all screech about the EPA revoking this or the DOT ceasing to do that but whatever those policies are, if people want them they will be picked up by the states. In most cases it'll probably be 40-something states continuing to do whatever it was or 40-something states saying that was stupid all along and stopping immediately.
Basically the sky isn't falling.
It also hurts businesses when they suddenly find themselves forced to follow an inconsistent/conflicting patchwork of state laws instead of a single federal law.
That said, it's still encouraging to see states picking up the slack and passing laws to protect their residents, even though I can't help but feel bad for people who become stuck in states where the government doesn't care about them. I hope that people will be begin to flee states where the government chooses to put corporate profits above the well-being of the public or wants to strip them of their rights, but realistically there will be many people who can't afford to move or who feel compelled to stay because of ties to their friends, family, and community.
The environment in the US is very diverse so why is it federally regulated to the degree it is?
Not having to put up with rules that make sense in the arid plains or western deserts is gonna be a huge boon to everyone east of the Mississippi.
The "consistency" argument is like 99% red herring. There's already a huge patchwork because the way federal agencies work is the states do most of the enforcing so you have 50 states worth of precedents and political whims to keep track of. If we're gonna suffer that patchwork it should at least work for the state as they want it rather than just be various flavors of spin on federal rules nobody fully agrees with.
You can run this sort of exercise with just about every federal agency. Stuff like the FRA, DOT and other things where the literal subject matter is flagrantly interstate are where this sort of thing is least true.
My hope is we will, one day, have an administration that roots it out using modern fraud detection, gets rid of waste, shuts down non-profits that funnel monies to their founders (anything where "overheard" is over 50%), stops insider trading amongst politicians and government workers, but I don't see them voting against their greed.
[1]https://ballotpedia.org/Changes_in_Net_Worth_of_U.S._Senator...
Similar to the "Death of a Euphemism" [0], where some politicians decide they don't have to cloak their proposal in the trappings of reasonability any more.
I highly recommend the whole series, as it has renewed relevance today.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dBJIkp7qIg
At some point you realize there is a game that you were never playing and it becomes a bipartisan issue.
Yeah you're brainwashed
But we didn’t have to vote DJT into office as a counteracting force. Whether every decision is bad or not, not my point. It just seemed obvious that he wasn’t the right guy.
Some people can’t vote against their party. Some people believe write in is the move.
For evidence, refer to TFA.
I read the article too, in what sane world is it okay if 70% of citizens thought their governments + corporations are corrupt over a 20 year time span here. Society apparently has get quite bad for the last 20% to realize the state of things.
The only thing I got out of this article is that both parties + the F500 need to be destroyed.
I don't know, if we'd had an overwhelmingly Democrat-dominated government, we'd have comprehensive bans on government insider trading and we'd correct the bad ruling in Citizens United. Corporatism is definitely a bipartisan issue, but at least Democrats recognize it as a problem, while to Republicans it's a feature. Not everything in politics is symmetrical, and misguided nihilism is actually how we got where we are. Turns out the road to hell is paved with "it's both sides."
If you think I (or virtually anyone else) am a fan of the two-party system, you probably aren't paying very close attention to... anything.
Things can be varying levels of imperfect. Things can be imperfect and acceptable, imperfect and bad, or imperfect and extremely extremely bad. It's not a sign of intelligence not to be able to discern between them.
Of course the supporters of one particular political party is much more better at gymnastics of the mental kind than the other side. Having no spine makes it quite easier...
It is also worth pointing out that that 83% of republicans (vs 90% of independents) still believe that the government is widely corrupt. Like given the ~20% "crazy threshold" in basically any type of political polling, 80% of republicans is effectively "every single republican you could ever convince".
I would not lose sleep over polarization in this context.
I wonder if the split would still be roughly the same if a Democrat was in power at the time of the survey.
Edited to add: Answer seems to be in the article, as pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49571258
First diagram in the article shows uptick, but since 2010 it's been in the 70-80% range. So it seems pretty party-agnostic.
Since 2024, Democrats went from being the most trusting (57%) to the most skeptical (91%), bringing all groups to within 10 points of each other on the question.
This is not a "both sides" situation: Republicans dropped from 87% to 83% after their guy was elected, whereas Democrats nearly 1.5x'd their number of skeptics. There is no universal implication here IMO, this is just Democrats joining the 80-percenters, i.e. everyone
This is not surprising; a big reason that Republican voters were able to justify voting for Trump and open corruption was that they were bombarded with claims that there was a "Biden crime family" in office for four years. No real evidence of that was ever uncovered, but it didn't stop Fox News and every Republican leader from constantly referring to the accusations as if they were true. One the other hand, Trump is openly accepting huge payments from foreign governments, and never even bothered to separate himself from his companies. Republicans were at 87% due to general distrust of government and the rumor of phantom corruption, while Democrats (who tend to be more trusting of government) rose to the same level only on clear evidence of real corruption. The authors don't break it out by parties, but the overall level during Trump's first term is about the same as Biden's. Since the article notes that Republican skepticism is higher in general and more consistent, this implies that Democrats' perception of corruption is much higher in Trump's second term than his first. Which makes sense, the Republican leadership was much more responsible in applying guardrails in the first term than the second. Trump is getting away with a LOT more in his second term.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/697421/trust-government-depends...
They believe that all government is corrupt and thus they're not doing anything wrong by being openly corrupt.
New High of 45% in U.S. Identify as Political Independents (January 12, 2026)
https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/03/14/political-in...
It means "I am not firmly affiliated". You still have the ability to make choices on who is a better likely outcome
So I'm pretty content calling it a meaningless measure.
So definitely not meaningless. It demonstrates increasing amounts of people are tired of pretending our democracy isn't mostly illusory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty
Democrats lost to a gameshow host. Twice. They just had to be better than that, and they couldn't manage. Pathetic. They also created the conditions for his rise. Twice. The bar is so amazingly low, and yet you can't comprehend how they keep fumbling this. Maybe, just maybe, it's a good cop / bad cop arrangement where only capital interests win, and it's a race to the bottom for everybody else. Or maybe that's just a childish, stupid opinion. Who knows!
By some measure the US does seem to have 'decent' scores for perception of corruption:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
* https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025
Meta: in some ways it seems that the public's perception of government is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the US there is a large vein of "government is bad/incompetent/corrupt" and that's apparently what the US often gets. While in (e.g.) Scandinavian countries there appears to be a higher level of trust in government, and the people there tend to elect more competent politicians (?).
Millions of people work for the federal government, and millions more for state and local governments. Is there widespread corruption among them? I don't think so. And I don't think my countrymen think so either.
But "the government" is often meant as just the very top. The President is corrupt. Big swathes of Congress are corrupt. We have a Supreme Court justice more or less openly accepting bribes. Among that small group, I would be comfortable saying that corruption is widespread.
* for years people have noticed that many members of congress use privileged information to pick stocks.
* lobbying post-Citizen's United has a very decidedly "buying politicians" aspect to it
* a congressman (Menendez) was literally arrested while holding gold bars from a foreign government. he went to prison, but is the only person on this list who has iirc.
* the former mayor of new york (a long-time police offer) was embroiled in a Very Funny, very obviously true corruption scandal for turkish airline tickets. the prosecution against him was dropped for no good reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
How is corruption defined for the purposes of this survey?
If there is none (I assume there is not), then it is only natural this number go up as the media highlights and propagandizes and highlights all actions taken by all government officials.
Anyway, the result may be that the polls are only measuring younger people with nothing better to do. That's interesting but only a record high amongst that subpopulation. I'm fairly certain this is business as usual.
Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country, or not?
Then that's very open to interpretation. Even if I thought the federal government was not corrupt, but I did think the local or state government was corrupt (or many local governments were, not just my own), I'd answer yes to this question.
They should have broken it down a bit more.
I think it's more useful to think about the closed operations on the 0% to 100% range. A change of ~75% to 89% does not seem like much, but "only an 18% increase" is not a closed operation, so it's not so meaningful. You'll see this in machine learning, e.g. 70% accuracy to 75% accuracy is not as impressive as 98% to 99%, despite having a larger change.
False, unfortunately. Disparate news outlets covered events very differently and folks watching pro-Trump outlets (or only listening to friends who do) through the first term were under the impression that he did an excellent job. They may even still believe that the 2020 election was actually stolen. Heck, there are depositions this year while vetting appointees who refuse to admit (despite all available evidence) that the 2020 election was valid.
Yeah, he stopped US military from defending other countries for free.
Soft power doesn’t pay your rent/mortgage.
So there are three things that are scary about Trump's corruption:
1. It's so brazen and on a scale rarely seen. Apparently he's made $2 billion since coming back into office and he does so openly. Pardons are for sale. Truth Social has a feature to pay to get early access to posts to trade on, basically. There are crypto rug pulls. The list goes on;
2. A third of the population simply doesn't care and will defend it no matter what; and
3. He'll never be held accountable by any future administration. This is the worst part. If this happened in China, he'd go to prison and his assets would be seized. This would extend to his family and their assets. Just look at Hui Ya Kan [1].
The US just does not punish the wealthy. Look at the Sacklers and Purdue. There's clear evidence they hid the fact that Oxycontin was addictive despite their public claims and they have a large amount of responsibility for the opioid crisis. In a just world, they would all die penniless in 6x8 foot grey prison cells. And who went to prison for the 2008 subprime crisis? Oh, that's right. Nobody.
This also extends to the powerful. George W. Bush had an illegal torture program. Who went to prison for it? Only 1 guy: the whistleblower John Kiriakou for talking about it.
The Supreme Court is utterly corrupt. Anthony Kennedy allegedly traded his retirement for a job for his son. John Roberts's wife makes tens of millions in headhunting fees for finding lawyers to argue before teh Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas is just one bribe after another.
The entire government is captured by people who want to get rich by betraying their country to the ultra-wealthy.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-evergrande-founder...
https://abcnews.com/Politics/profoundly-corrupt-trump-sued-f...
They made Carter give up his family peanut farm to be President.
Trump and his family are selling stock every week, running crypto currency rug pulls, accepting gifts ostensibly for the country that they say will be donated to Trump at the end of his term(the Qatar plane).
It’s all out in the open under Trump term 2.
At this point if you think there isn’t corruption I assume you also think RFK has the right idea about health care and vaccinations.