President Donald Trump speaks to the press aboard Air Force One en route to the following his official visit with President Xi Jinping in China, May 15, 2026; REUTERS/Evan Vucci
President Donald Trump's myriad corruption scandals are now having tangible political consequences — that is, according to one politics expert, they are costing him loads of votes.
"Corruption is moving the needle whenever voters are focused on the explosion of greed and self-enrichment by Trump and his family—easily the worst in presidential history," Larry Sabato, a political scientist and political analyst, posted on X on Sunday.
Speaking with AlterNet in September about the 2026 midterm elections, polling expert Kyle Kondik from Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball explained why Trump and his Republican Party are at a structural disadvantage.
"It's primarily the president's weak approval rating combined with the usual difficulty that the presidential party has in a midterm," Kondik explained. "I also think there may be even more for voters to react to in 2026 compared to even 2018, because Trump has acted as more of an imperial president and there is more dissatisfaction both with the economy as well as the president's foreign policy choices."
Even longtime trump supporters like right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan have turned against Trump, at least when it comes to issues like his corruption. Rogan in particular criticized Trump for earning more than $2 billion since beginning his second term, much of it in cryptocurrency.
"I think part of what's going on here, Nicole, is, number one, the scale and obvious nature of this corruption is much simpler of a story to tell than some of the more bank-shot corruption of the first term," Ben Rhodes, a former Obama administration national security adviser, told MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace on Sunday. "You know, Saudis paying a lot of money to stay in Trump hotel rooms or something like that. The scale [this time] is billions of dollars, and it's pretty clear when you juice, like, a meme coin, and then it collapses in value, and you walk away with a lot of money and all the people that you convinced to invest in it walk away losing a lot of money. Well, that's an easy story to tell. So that's the first thing: the scale of it and how clear it is."
Speaking to AlterNet in September, 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 — explained how Trump's corruption hurts ordinary Americans economically.
"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. "If the best way for me to get ahead is to go to the White House bearing gifts, and then they pass a rule and they ban you from competing against me, then that means the basic dynamics of competition and markets delivering good outcomes for regular folks just gets broken."
He added, "That in turn means that if I'm the CEO of a company, I spend less time trying to create products at lower prices, trying to outcompete, or less time creating new or better products. And I spend more time and energy at Mar-a-Lago trying to win over the favor of the president. That means bad products will win. That means expensive products will win. And the way I tell the story, compare Tim Cook's job at Apple to Steve Jobs' job at Apple."
