Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
So here's the thing about Donald Trump's blatant, sometimes open corruption. If it's happening out in front of us, if it's largely been accepted by the public and seemingly the courts, is it even fair to call it corruption at all?
That was my first question to Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy at a recent forum about corporate monopolies and corruption held by the American Economic Liberties Project in Washington, D.C. That's this week on Today Explained Saturday. Let's dig in.
Chapter 2: Is it fair to call Trump's actions corruption if they are publicly accepted?
Thank you to the American Economic Liberties Project. Obviously, thank you to Senator Murphy for being here. And thank you to you all, too, for being interested in this topic.
When I think about corruption, particularly this bending the knee kind of framework, one thing that immediately jumps to mind for me is that when we think about the Trump administration, this isn't happening in backroom deals. This isn't happening in some secret basement. A lot of these things are happening right in front of us.
So I guess my first question was, is corruption the right word to even use when It's been broadly sanctioned by legal and governmental entities.
Well, that's a good question to start with. I guess I haven't really thought about it. I think corruption is still a word that resonates. I think people understand that corruption is a bad thing, that it is something that we have broadly tried to expunge from our politics. And I do think that people generally understand corruption, though, to be something that happens quietly behind closed doors.
Corruption is something you try to hide. And so I do think the most important piece of this moment in some ways is trying to understand what to do with the brazen public way that Trump is engaging in corruption, because simply by the very fact that he does it every day, that he does it openly, publicly, and proudly, It is causing some people to question, wait, wait, is this corruption?
Because this isn't what I learned corruption is. There's no shame in this, and generally there's supposed to be shame in corruption. But I don't necessarily know it means you change the word. I guess as I'm literally just thinking out loud, if you change the word, you're kind of – ceding to his terms, right? He's trying to change the very notion of corruption by doing it publicly.
And so if you call it something different, then I think you're probably playing his game.
You know, your corporate pardons report documents over 160 companies that have had federal enforcement actions dropped. But as we know, corporate influence has been true in Washington for a long time. You know, how do you think this is a qualitatively different moment than the usual pay to play or the usual lobbying influence that we've seen?
Yeah, it's just so nakedly transactional right now. And it's just a really easy story to explain, you know, whether it's the donations that Boeing made that got them out of their trouble, whether it's the Toyota donations, whether it's the money that Zell pumped into the administration. You know, it now doesn't happen through slowly...
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Chapter 3: How does the open nature of Trump's corruption challenge traditional definitions?
What do you think is the impact of that kind of flagrant? degradation of the process, or just doing it out in the open. I mean, we've established kind of how different this moment feels in its in-your-face nature of it. Does that have a democracy-corroding impact? Like, what do you think is the consequence of its being in our face in this way?
Yes. I listen. Trump takes over at a moment when a lot of Americans were seriously contemplating giving up on democracy. Right. And while that conversation may not be sort of on the surface of kitchen table talk, talks in our country, it's right below the surface. People just don't think that their voice matters any longer.
They, for a long time, have believed that the elites get whatever they want out of the system. And the way in which Trump has chosen to do this so transparently I think, is an effort to permanently shatter people's faith in the entire enterprise, so as to transition the country to a kleptocratic oligarchy.
And so, yes, I think this is a particularly vulnerable moment for the country in which a lot of Americans are unfortunately ready to just say, Fuck it. Like, this thing doesn't work any longer. It now clearly doesn't work because we have an elected president who is just stealing from us. I'm just going to walk away from the whole enterprise.
And when people give up, right, when people just retreat from public action, that's the moment that the oligarchs seize power and never give it up. So, yes, the reason that I have been sort of raising –
The unacceptability of the corruption, right, raising for people the fact that it is abnormal, that we should not normalize it, is because I think Trump's core case here is in and if he is successful in normalizing it, it may be the death blow to people's faith in the entire Democratic enterprise. More from Senator Chris Murphy in a minute.
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We're back. It's Today Explained Saturday, and we're talking with Senator Chris Murphy. As you mentioned of kind of explicit examples, Donald Trump Jr. is a strategic advisor at MarketKaushi. He's joined the board of another prediction market. Your Bets Off Act targets prediction markets, banning bets on government actions, war, assassination.
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Chapter 4: What distinguishes Trump's corruption from previous political corruption?
Not just people out in the public, but members of Congress, right, start signing up for the project the bolder it is. So, yes, those are hard things to unwind, but they become less hard if you state very clearly at the outset about what your intentions are.
Mm-hmm. To this point, you signed a memo with Senators Schiff, Warren, and Smith that argues the Democrats can't run on affordability without naming the corporations and the billionaires driving the crisis. I guess I wanted to ask about that with the context of what the Democratic Party's history has been in mind.
Chapter 5: How are corporate pardons influencing political dynamics?
You know, there's close relationships between the Democratic Party and some of these, let's say, Silicon Valley money or tech money. There's close relationships between Democrats and folks in big law. Are those relationships an impediment for Democrats doing that clear naming and shaming that you're talking about? Absolutely.
I mean, like, absolutely. So what did we do last year? We passed a bill essentially greenlighting the massive expansion of the crypto industry and corruption inside the crypto industry with Democratic votes. The Stablecoin Act, the Genius Act, which has like a modicum of consumer protections, literally has in it a carve-out from ethics rules for the President of the United States
to be able to issue his own cryptocurrency. Like, that's incredible that the Democratic Party signed off on a crypto regulatory bill that greenlights Donald Trump's corruption scheme There's no explanation for why we did that other than the integration of parts of our party and very powerful people in the crypto industry, or maybe more charitably, our fear
that the crypto industry is gonna spend a ton of money against Democrats in the next election if we don't do what they want. But that's just a slightly more acceptable form of corruption, right? Just the, I'm gonna do what you want because I fear that there's gonna be political consequences in the next election.
So yeah, the memo that Adam and Elizabeth and Tina and I sent says very simply, you're not gonna win over the public unless you tell a story about corporate and billionaire corruption. Because people are smarter than a lot of us think they are.
People understand that the corruption of the economy, right, their stagnation in their economic lives is derivative, is downstream of the corruption of our politics. Like, they get that. And if you don't tell that full story, the influence that the corporations and the billionaires have in our politics, and how that has limited your economic opportunities, your message is just not believable.
If you just start with, let's trim the sales of the way that the pharmaceutical companies price drugs, it's like you're not telling me the whole story. The real story is that we got into this mess with prescription drug prices that are so high because our politics is corrupt. And the prescription drug companies have way too much control over Washington.
So don't just tell me your plan for lowering prescription drug costs. Tell me your plan for knocking out the prescription drug industry's power in Washington. Like, I need to know both things.
I mean, that really rings true from, you know, even my some experience on the road. I mean, oftentimes leading up to 2024, things like corporate capture or corporate consolidation were things I heard even more Trump supporters or RFK supporters sometimes talking about and not necessarily coming from Democrats.
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