This is what Republican corruption looks like

Here’s a memo to Democrats as they begin campaigning in earnest for control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections.

TO: Democratic candidates in the 2026 midterm elections

RE: Connect Trump’s lousy economy to his corrupt regime.

The purpose of this memo is to help you shape your midterm message around the crisis of affordability and Trump Republican corruption. I urge you to present these two issues as aspects of the same underlying problem: The economy is lousy for most Americans because Trump Republicans are enabling super-rich oligarchs to siphon off most of its gains while exerting increasing control over it. Their — and Trump’s — self-dealing is undermining trust and confidence in the U.S. economic system.

1. Republicans in the House and Senate have put oligarchs in charge of America.

House and Senate Republicans have allowed Trump’s war and his tariffs to drive up prices and Trump’s corruption to undermine faith in the economy. They’ve allowed Trump to gild his White House in gold leaf, plan a giant Arc de Trump, throw lavish parties, and build a Billionaire’s Ballroom — at a time when most Americans can’t afford gas or groceries.

They raided Medicaid to pay for Trump’s giant tax cut, whose benefits are going mostly to the rich. Legislative efforts advanced by House Republicans and signed into law have targeted up to $2 trillion in federal health care cuts, forcing millions of Americans off Medicaid rolls to pay for these tax reductions.

They refused to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies. This is causing average premiums to more than double and has already pushed 1.2 million people off coverage because they can’t afford it. Coverage losses are mounting as many who initially selected a plan or who were automatically reenrolled have to drop coverage.

Big Tech oligarchs — centi-billionaires Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Ellison, and other robber barons — paid for Trump’s 2024 election, his inauguration, and his ballroom and are major donors to Senate and House Republicans. They’ve shown up at Trump’s inauguration, White House dinners, and official visits to China.

In return, these oligarchs have been allowed to monopolize and drive up the prices we pay and silence Trump critics. Bezos’s Amazon, for example, won’t allow any seller on the site to post lower prices on any other site, and Bezos won’t allow his Washington Post editorial page to criticize Trump. Larry and David Ellison have bought CBS and sanitized “60 Minutes” of Trump criticism and effectively canceled Stephen Colbert. After buying X (formerly Twitter), Musk turned it into a pro-Trump voice box.

The AI oligarchs have bribed Trump and congressional Republicans to allow unfettered and unregulated growth of AI and its data centers, threatening millions of jobs and posing potential dangers to human life itself.

The crypto oligarchs have bribed Trump and congressional Republicans to allow them to create the world’s largest Ponzi scheme — which is enriching Trump and his family while providing a means for criminals to hide insider trades, child trafficking, and drug deals.

The Big Oil and aerospace oligarchs have bribed congressional Republicans to allow Trump to go to war in Iran, resulting in massive profits for Big Oil — while the rest of us pay $1.50 more per gallon of gas — and giant profits for giant military contractors.

This war spending has also contributed to higher inflation, which the rest of us pay for in higher mortgage rates and higher rates on car loans and education loans. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate has surged to over 6.6 percent, reaching its highest level in nearly nine months, driven by rising Treasury yields, higher oil prices, and broader economic inflation concerns stemming from the war in Iran. The major beneficiaries of these higher rates — who pocket the higher payments we have to make — are the biggest banks and super-rich who make the loans.

Oligarchs have also bribed Trump and congressional Republicans to (1) get no-bid contracts, (2) deregulate Wall Street, (3) roll back environmental safeguards and worker safety, and (4) get massive subsidies for their corporations — all of which have made them even richer while making life for the rest of us more dangerous and more costly.

2. Republicans have created crony capitalism on steroids.

The system is an extreme form of crony capitalism. Congressional Republicans have rubber-stamped Trump’s corruption or pretended not to notice it, while average Americans get shafted and billionaires do better than ever. Corporate profits have never been higher. But wages aren’t keeping up with prices, which means most people are getting poorer, and the confidence of average consumers has never been lower.

Trump and his family’s corruption are leading the pack, setting an example for the rest of the American oligarchy.

Congressional Republicans have been silent in the face of bribes paid to Trump and his family. They didn’t raise a word about Jeff Bezos’s outright bribe to Melania Trump of $40 million for her film rights and $35 million to promote it, for a total of $75 million, when the best-case scenario is that Bezos’s Amazon earns $10 million on it.

But that’s just one example of the bribes coming Trump’s way. Qatar gifted Trump a Boeing 747 luxury jet valued at $400 million. Days before Trump’s second inauguration, the United Arab Emirates’ “Spy Sheikh” secretly bought 49 percent of the Trump family’s crypto firm. Months later, the administration handed over America’s most sensitive AI chip technology to the United Arab Emirates despite national security concerns. The Trump cryptocurrency business has rolled out a stablecoin called (USD1) pegged to the U.S. dollar. The stablecoin was utilized in a subsequent $2 billion investment into the cryptocurrency exchange Binance by MGX, an Abu Dhabi government fund. And so on.

Congressional Republicans have been silent as Trump has executed thousands of stock trades, many in individual stocks affected by his regime’s policies. And congressional Republicans won’t pass legislation to stop the regime from profiting off its policies. They’ve been silent as Trump praises and boosts corporations (as he did Apple on March 11) on the same day he invests in them and won’t hold Trump or the regime to any ethical standards.

Congressional Republicans have been silent in the face of the Trump family’s looting of America. In his first year of his second term of office, Trump increased his net worth by almost $4 billion to $7.8 billion by the end of 2025, according to TIME. Forbes estimated that in 2025, Eric Trump became 10 times richer, ending up worth some $400 million, and Donald Trump Jr. became six times richer, ending up worth some $300 million. Even Barron Trump, while still in college, reportedly ended up worth some $150 million in 2025.

Congressional Republicans have also been silent about Trump’s “agreement” with the Justice Department to create a $1.8 billion slush fund and immunity to all future IRS audits of Trump and his family. The agreement was based on Trump’s withdrawal of his absurd $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for damages (after a contractor leaked Trump’s tax information during his first term), when the federal judge to which the case was assigned indicated she’d throw it out because Trump can’t be in charge of both sides of the lawsuit.

So Trump’s own Justice Department then offered him — not as an official legal “settlement” but as a kind of consolation prize — a $1.8 billion slush fund, enabling him to compensate anyone he feels has been unfairly convicted. Likely beneficiaries would include fat-cat contributors to the Republican Party, as well as those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The Justice Department has also offered Trump and his family immunity from any IRS audit ever again — allowing him and his family to permanently bury any and all illegal bribes they’ve received.

This is outright robbery from the citizens of the United States. Billions of dollars that Trump and his family have pocketed — from foreign governments, billionaires, and corporate supplicants — are now untraceable, unaccounted for, and hidden for good.

Republican members of Congress are reportedly unhappy with this agreement, presumably because their constituents are furious about it. But they won’t take any action or even say anything about it for fear of angering Trump; their silence about it is deafening.

3. The larger Republican scam is to replace our economy with bribes.

The Republicans’ increasingly corrupt political system — rife with crony capitalism, corporate welfare, and payoffs to the powerful — inevitably produces a corrupt economy. That’s because politics determines the rules by which an economy functions — and if those rules are products of corruption, the economy is corrupted.

In such an economy, investors can no longer rely on a system of stable rules and reliable laws. Everything depends on bribes and personal deals made by the biggest Republican loyalists and grifters, oligarchs and plutocrats, billionaire and multi-billionaires, and monopolists.

This inevitably leads to economic sclerosis and decline, as political and economic deal-making become personal transactions. Greed and payoffs replace trust. It’s happened before, after America’s first Gilded Age (see the Great Crash of 1929, leading to the Great Depression).

4. A lesson: Péter Magyar’s victory over Viktor Orbán relied on connecting the economic problems of ordinary Hungarians with Orban’s corruption.

Finally, recall that the key to Péter Magyar’s remarkable defeat of Viktor Orbán’s entrenched regime was Magyar’s ability to connect the economic problems faced by ordinary Hungarians to Orbán’s corruption.

Magyar showed how Hungary’s soaring cost of living and crumbling public services were linked to the illicit enrichment of Hungary’s ruling elite. He exposed how state resources were siphoned into a “mafia state” and showed that Hungary’s crumbling healthcare system, dilapidated schools, and failing infrastructure were a consequence. The inner circle of Orbán-aligned oligarchs had amassed immense fortunes while ordinary Hungarians suffered from high inflation, stagnant growth, and an erosion of their purchasing power.

Magyar’s anti-corruption message resonated because he presented elite graft not merely as a moral or governance issue, but as the root cause of Hungary’s cost-of-living crisis and declining standards of living.

Democrats should do the same. The parallels between what happened under Orbán and what’s happened under Trump and the Republicans are almost exact.

5. The Republican Party is responsible for the corruption. Democrats must respond with a plan to revive the economy and end the corruption.

The Democrats’ record on corruption is not perfect, to be sure, but Republicans are now in charge of the entire government — and we have never before witnessed corruption on this scale. The twin issues of an economy that’s unaffordable for most Americans and a system overwhelmed with corruption are closely linked, and Trump and his Republican Congress are largely responsible.

Most Americans are beginning to catch on, but Democrats need to hammer this home — and propose ways to lower prices while fighting the corruption.

Democrats should propose: (1) more vigorous anti-monopoly enforcement, including busting up giant corporations, (2) prohibiting insider trading by all elected officials and their families, (3) getting big money out of politics (see here), (4) raising taxes on the super-wealthy, including a wealth tax, and (5) using the proceeds to improve the lives of average working Americans through Medicare for all, universal childcare, paid leave, and free public higher education.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.