Former President Donald Trump Jr. speaks to the press after attending wake for NYPD officer Jonathan Diller at Massapequa Funeral Home in Massapequa Park, NY on March 28, 2024, Image via Shutterstock.
President Donald Trump's blatant pursuit of personal profit while in office is not only upsetting activists; a number of polls have shown voters are outraged by the perceived corruption. Now one of Trump's former top advisers agreed that this has become a serious political problem for the president.
"Former Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told NewsNation that the recent 'stunning' Fox News poll on corruption as voters’ number-one concern is 'bad news for Republicans,'" reported Mediaite's Jennifer Bowers Bahney on Monday. "Batya Ungar-Sargon addressed the poll, saying, 'So, cost of living, the economy, jobs, is number-one in most polls. But this week, Fox News had a poll which found that actually another issue was top of mind for voters.'"
When Ungar-Sargon added that "corruption in government" is a bipartisan issue now, with almost nine out of ten voters prioritizing it, Mulvaney admitted he is alarmed by the situation.
“It’s a stunning number, just stunning, especially when you consider the source,” Mulvaney told Ungar-Sargon. “If a left-leaning organization had put this out, it would be easy for folks on the right to sort of dismiss. But this is about as right-wing organization, media organization, as you get, in Fox. And that number is striking to me.”
After remarking that Trump cannot ignore the poll because it is in the news, he added that "this is really, really bad news for the Republicans because, well, listen — a lot of folks think there’s corruption in government generally, and there is a little bit, I mean the government’s very, very big, and big organizations are going to have some corruption. But I never thought I’d see the day where it’s the leading issue on any poll, especially in a down economy."
He continued, "Parts of the economy are good, but generally speaking, inflation hits people really, really hard. But even then, against that background of high inflation, people are saying, apparently in this Fox News poll, that corruption means more to them. Stunning to me, and extraordinarily dangerous to the president."
He concluded "What people are telling him in that poll, if the poll is accurate — and again, polling has been a little bit suspect this year — but they’re saying is, 'Look, we’re tired of you getting rich and us getting poor.' And that’s the message there. 'Mr. President, we see the stories about your your family. We see the stories about you. We see the stories about your inner circle. They all seem to be getting really, really wealthy. I mean, billions of dollars wealthy. And we don’t feel like we’re going along for the ride.' That is a really, really dangerous position for any politician of any party to be in when you’re two weeks out from an election."
Economists tend to agree that when the government is corrupt, it ultimately makes most people in a country poorer.
"In these last weeks before the midterms, Democratic candidates have been gaining ground by talking about two things: the affordability crisis and political corruption," Robert Reich, who served as Labor Secretary under former President Bill Clinton, wrote for AlterNet earlier in October.
"If Democrats regain control of Congress and genuinely want to respond to affordability, they’ll need to do everything possible to root out the corruption," he added. "The two are inseparable. In large part, prices are rising faster than paychecks because so much of the economy has become subject to political bribery, Trump Republican pay-to-play schemes, and kickbacks to Trump and his cronies."
According to Dr. Justin Wolfers, a non-resident senior fellow at Brookings and the Peterson Institute and a University of Michigan professor of economics and public policy, government corruption makes it harder for people not in on the corruption to compete in the market.
"The problem with the Trump family corruption — and not all of it's the legal definition of corruption, by the way; some of it meets the standard English-language definition, if not a legal definition — is what you do is you change the nexus of competition," Wolfers told AlterNet in September.
