Trump’s corruption scandals are about more than stealing money

Donald Trump’s preoccupation with personal gain from high office, a long-running sub-theme of his presidency, has become its central story.

Consider the following list of news and revelations, all from about the past week:

It’s not hard to see the problem with this behavior. Most people know that it is wrong for politicians to abuse their positions of power for profit.

Yet what Trump is doing is more than “normal” corruption. He is, quite deliberately, trying to change the operating logic of the American political system: to replace a political order created by the rule of law with one where major decisions are ultimately based on whether you have the personal preferences of the president.

This is a fundamental evolution – one that stands out more than is widely appreciated. Once you understand it, you understand not only what Trump really wants, but the profound ways his presidency could affect us all.

Breaking the American order

In their book Violence and Social Orderspolitical scientists Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast grouped human societies into roughly two buckets: the “state of nature” and the “state of open access.”

Nature, known because it has dominated most of recorded history, works in favor of self-serving elites. These elite groups aim, first and foremost, to make a profit through rent-seeking – that is, to use their control over power and resources to get money from others. Imagine European nobles owning land in perpetuity, taking tribute from the peasants living under their rule, and ensuring these exploitative rights were passed on to their children.

In nature, the entire social order tends to preserve this unequal relationship. Rights are not a matter of impartial laws, but rather issues given to friends or favored groups.

“At the heart of nature are interpersonal relationships,” North et al. write. “The legal system cannot enforce the rights of the individual if each person is different, if each relationship between two people depends exclusively on their identity within a larger union.”

An “open access order,” by contrast, is an arrangement defined by neutrality. The acquisition of power and privilege is not determined primarily by personal relationships or inherited advantages, but from a set of legal rules that apply to everyone. While there are still wealthy, rent-seeking elites, membership in that class is not static; Legal equality allows people to challenge entrenched interests and defeat them in the marketplace. The politics of personal relationships is replaced by impersonal politics where neutral rules apply to all, regardless of caste or identity.

This is, at least on paper, the basic framework of a modern liberal democracy like the United States.

Although one can point to any number of ways in which contemporary America lacks open access to the ideal, from decreased social mobility to continue color balancesystem still for quality unlike indigenous nations like those of feudal Europe or the Jim Crow South – or even modern developing nations marked by weak rule of law and rampant corruption.

One way to look at the Trump administration is as a project to change the transition of the United States from a natural state to an open access regime. He is trying to blur the impersonal laws that govern how government should work, and replace it with a logic of privilege based on personal access to the president.

Traditional corruption, in the sense of literally profiting from the presidency, is the most obvious example. He has channeled the enormous power of his office towards personal gain in the most blatant ways – treating the country the same way a medieval noble treated his kingdom.

Trump’s message of selfishness is just as clear when you look at his approach to the Justice Department. His successful efforts to strip his cultural freedom and turn it into a tool for his own interests – including accusing his political enemies on flimsy pretexts – represents the replacement of an open access justice system with one that more closely resembles that of the natural state.

You can see the logic of nature in his approach to taxation, where countries and companies get tax breaks if they can curry favor with Trump. You can see it in his approach to regulation, where Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr is encouraged to try and regulate comedians who mock the president. You can see it in his management of the US military, where he has appointed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to fire generals who are considered politically unreliable (these are generally women or ethnic minorities). You can see in his foreign policy, “neo-royalist“A combination of private and public that puts the interests of ruling groups before the public document.” You can see it in something as small as the Department of Transportation, where Secretary Sean Duffy used his office as an excuse to go to a meeting. an amazing family trip funded by direct donations from Toyota and Boeing.

Many of these policies are authoritarian, in the sense that they attack basic rights and freedoms that allow fair and healthy political competition. But all of them, even those that can be seen as “ordinary” corruption, work to obscure important points impersonal the logic of the American administration – and, instead, to stand a new system of government to get private and seek taxes.

The peril of America’s natural state

Obviously, Trump himself does not think about his goal in abstract terms. But North et al. framework is important however – as it helps us see the far-reaching effects of its corruption and massive privatization of government.

What is happening is perhaps more subtle than a complete overthrow of the old order; the Trump administration is visible very incompetent, very speculative to do something very big. Instead, his rule is to combine the two systems – to integrate the logic of the natural state in institutions that are still being built on the principles of open access.

The real-world impact of these changes could be significant.

For the next few years, everyone in corporate America and the legal world knows that the best way to get what you want from the White House is not to make a convincing case on fundamental or even political grounds. Instead, it is bribing and flattering the people responsible for making decisions, above all the president. If you can make him richer, or even feel important, you’ll be more likely to get a payment or principle that you might have persuaded him through the usual channels.

This breaks the incentive structure that governs open access communities. In other countries that have gone through similar methods, like Hungarythese specific types of corruption have caused economic disaster. Growth slows, as companies succeed based on connections rather than profits. Public services are degraded, as they are managed not for the benefit of the public but to make the managers rich. Even art and culture suffer.

In one article, North et al. explain the political differences between the open access directive and the original state in terms that are not easily understood:

In open access directives, the rules provide details about how the rules are administered; for example, that a person who is recently unemployed is to receive a benefit of a certain amount for a certain period of time. In these states, impartial courts and rules of law impose penalties on the executive for failing to enforce the law in accordance with the provisions set forth in the law. Not so in the normal state of nature. Instead, corrupt courts do not coerce actors; moreover, the legislature rarely – and wisely – works to write detailed provisions to constrain the executive, leaving the executive a great deal of freedom to allocate funds as it wishes. Evidence from Latin America suggests that social programs serve immediate political goals, such as re-election, rather than intended goals.

One shouldn’t expect Trump, say, to ensure that only Republicans get Social Security payments: The open-access logic of the American welfare state remains too strong for that.

But you can see versions of it already playing out where Trump is wiser, like turning around disaster relief in political favors given to red states. And the articles about the legislatures quitting their jobs and the courts acquitting Trump ring very true.

We should expect more in the coming years, even if Trump loses in the 2026 midterms.

Trump wants to rule without coercion, turning the presidency into an omnibus office where he can decide on policy based on personal preferences and interests. In doing so, he is dismantling a fundamental part of the American social order – one that underlies almost every aspect of how our society functions. It is impossible to predict all possible outcomes, but there is little doubt that they will be significant.