Trump’s Corruption Exposes Self-Dealing in High Office

Donald Trump’s corruption is described as the defining story of his presidency, with the article saying he has bent the office’s immense powers toward personal profit in extraordinarily blatant ways. The larger change, it says, is his effort to replace rule-based government with one in which major decisions depend on presidential favor.

Donald Trump and the natural state

The article frames that shift through the work of Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast in Violence and Social Orders. They divide societies into the “natural state” and the “open access state,” and write that “The essence of a natural state is personal relationships”.

In their account, the natural state works on behalf of self-serving elites and runs on rent-seeking and personal ties. The open access order, by contrast, rests on formal neutrality and legal rules that apply to everyone.

Violence and Social Orders

The article says Trump is trying to transform the operating logic of the American political system, and that the change is more sweeping than widely appreciated. It links that effort to a system in which the legal order loses force when individual rights depend on who a person is inside the dominant coalition.

North, Wallis, and Weingast write that “the legal system cannot enforce individual rights if every individual is different, if every relationship between two individuals depends uniquely on their identity within the dominant coalition.”

Trump’s self-dealing in office

The article says a list of news and revelations over roughly the past week showed Trump’s self-dealing and profiteering from high office. It presents that pattern as more than ordinary corruption because it reaches beyond personal enrichment and into how government decisions are made.

The practical consequence, as the article lays it out, is a system in which people and businesses would need presidential favor rather than equal rules to navigate power. That is the change the article says Trump is pressing toward at the center of his presidency.