"President Trump has more than doubled his personal wealth since starting his 2024 election campaign. Billions of foreign dollars have flowed into his family’s real estate and crypto ventures. A plane that doubles as a “palace in the sky” has been given for Mr. Trump’s use by the government of Qatar.
It is easy to dismiss this as just a bigger and more brazen version of the self-dealing we saw during the first Trump term. But it poses a more fundamental danger. Our political system is being transformed into something that no longer serves the people. Indeed, the United States is seemingly becoming just another country with a corrupt strongman personalizing and profiting from power.
Vladimir Putin pursued this playbook in Russia. The news media was forced into the hands of his political allies. Natural resources and lucrative contracts were turned over to his associates. Mr. Putin reportedly became one of the world’s richest men while creating a system in which the nation’s interests became indistinguishable from its leader’s.
This fusion of political and personal interests was on display in Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. As Mr. Putin’s approval ratings soared, so did the wealth of his associates. To take just one example, his former judo partner — Arkady Rotenberg — received a contract valued at over $3 billion to build a bridge linking Russia and Crimea. Corruption allowed Mr. Putin to consolidate power, and power facilitated ever more corruption.
Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, a MAGA favorite, has pursued this playbook on a smaller scale, leveraging the power of the state to marginalize opponents while his associates became ostentatiously wealthy. As with Mr. Trump and the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, this includes Mr. Orban’s son-in-law. Family members and associates double as gatekeepers and deal makers operating outside formal government roles, which come with rules and oversight.
Sandor Lederer has run a Hungarian anti-corruption organization for more than 15 years, throughout Mr. Orban’s second stint as prime minister. The story he tells echoes America’s. A justice system being captured by the leader’s loyalists. Checks and balances weakened or ignored until they barely exist. Moral and ethical frameworks eroded. Oligarchs becoming richer and more powerful than institutions.
Mr. Orban responds to scrutiny over corruption by lashing out at opponents. Over time, apathy can take hold. “You follow politics like you would a soap opera,” Mr. Lederer told me, “without feeling that you can do anything about it.”
Mr. Lederer likened the pressure corruption puts on a political system to a river bearing down on a dam. Once the dam breaks, you’re washed downriver by currents you can’t control. If you try to rebuild the dam, it’s too late; opposition parties in Hungary, as in the United States, failed to understand that the system collapsed — the dam broke — because the rules and expectations it relied on had disintegrated beyond salvaging.
When that happens, it seems only to confirm what leaders like Mr. Orban and Mr. Trump have been saying all along: The system was rotten, and the opposition parties were clueless to reality or too feckless to change it. The corruption becomes a flood, a new normal, carrying the entire country along with it...."
It is easy to dismiss this as just a bigger and more brazen version of the self-dealing we saw during the first Trump term. But it poses a more fundamental danger. Our political system is being transformed into something that no longer serves the people. Indeed, the United States is seemingly becoming just another country with a corrupt strongman personalizing and profiting from power.
Vladimir Putin pursued this playbook in Russia. The news media was forced into the hands of his political allies. Natural resources and lucrative contracts were turned over to his associates. Mr. Putin reportedly became one of the world’s richest men while creating a system in which the nation’s interests became indistinguishable from its leader’s.
This fusion of political and personal interests was on display in Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. As Mr. Putin’s approval ratings soared, so did the wealth of his associates. To take just one example, his former judo partner — Arkady Rotenberg — received a contract valued at over $3 billion to build a bridge linking Russia and Crimea. Corruption allowed Mr. Putin to consolidate power, and power facilitated ever more corruption.
Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, a MAGA favorite, has pursued this playbook on a smaller scale, leveraging the power of the state to marginalize opponents while his associates became ostentatiously wealthy. As with Mr. Trump and the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, this includes Mr. Orban’s son-in-law. Family members and associates double as gatekeepers and deal makers operating outside formal government roles, which come with rules and oversight.
Sandor Lederer has run a Hungarian anti-corruption organization for more than 15 years, throughout Mr. Orban’s second stint as prime minister. The story he tells echoes America’s. A justice system being captured by the leader’s loyalists. Checks and balances weakened or ignored until they barely exist. Moral and ethical frameworks eroded. Oligarchs becoming richer and more powerful than institutions.
Mr. Orban responds to scrutiny over corruption by lashing out at opponents. Over time, apathy can take hold. “You follow politics like you would a soap opera,” Mr. Lederer told me, “without feeling that you can do anything about it.”
Mr. Lederer likened the pressure corruption puts on a political system to a river bearing down on a dam. Once the dam breaks, you’re washed downriver by currents you can’t control. If you try to rebuild the dam, it’s too late; opposition parties in Hungary, as in the United States, failed to understand that the system collapsed — the dam broke — because the rules and expectations it relied on had disintegrated beyond salvaging.
When that happens, it seems only to confirm what leaders like Mr. Orban and Mr. Trump have been saying all along: The system was rotten, and the opposition parties were clueless to reality or too feckless to change it. The corruption becomes a flood, a new normal, carrying the entire country along with it...."
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