Why voters keep shrugging off Trump’s corruption

Tom Homan, the White House border czar, allegedly accepted $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives during a sting operation last year, according to MSNBC. The payment was made after Homan implied that he could help the agents secure government contracts in a second Trump administration.

In layperson’s terms, this is what bribery looks like: officials promising favors in exchange for money. In this case, Homan was not a government official at the time of the sting, though he had said during the 2024 election that he would likely have a role in a second Trump term. The investigation related to Homan — which was launched during the Biden administration and was first reported by MSNBC this past weekend — was only recently shut down. FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed that prosecutors “found no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.”

Now, we don’t know the full details of the case, and, in the absence of a full investigation or a trial, we can’t know that Homan is guilty of hatching a bribery scheme. But to say this should raise eyebrows is an understatement.

The Homan story raises a question that has come up over and over again since President Donald Trump catapulted himself to the White House: Do American voters actually care about corruption? After all, Trump has so far gotten away with maintaining unprecedented conflicts of interest, accepting gifts from foreign governments, and turning the presidency into a giant cash grab. And despite his history of fraud and corruption, he still won a second term last November.

Yet polls consistently indicate that a majority of Americans think that corruption is a serious problem that plagues Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. And there’s evidence that corruption scandals can drag down politicians. One recent example is Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, who was indicted last year on corruption charges. An overwhelming majority of New Yorkers believe that Adams should resign, and his reelection bid seems all but doomed: Most recent polls show Adams’s support is in single-digits.

So why is it that no level of corruption in the Trump administration — no matter how brazen or how high up it goes, from Homan to other members of Trump’s Cabinet to the first family and the president himself — seems to ever stick?

Since Trump’s first term, a lot has been said about his attacks on institutions and his utter disregard for the rules and norms that preserve American democracy. But one of the biggest guardrails that Trump quickly shattered isn’t any kind of institution or law; it’s the effectiveness of public shaming.

Public shaming can be a powerful weapon for citizens protesting their government. It creates an environment that makes the shamed person lose legitimacy, and it puts pressure on institutions or other people in power to take action. And the prospect of public shaming likely deters some politicians from taking shortcuts or engaging in petty corruption, not out of principle or ethics but out of fear of getting caught. After all, public shaming was a tool that ultimately helped push many politicians to resign in disgrace, from President Richard Nixon to former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Trump has discovered that not caving to shame eventually leads people to let go and move on. His seeming inability to feel shame has allowed him to plow through scandals — like the Access Hollywood tape — that would have easily ended other politicians’ careers. It’s also allowed him to maintain a sprawling web of conflicts of interest without feeling the need to answer to anyone. Throughout his time in politics, Trump has shown little remorse for his misdeeds, and his strategy to simply power through scandals, often with no apologies, has proven remarkably effective.

And other politicians have taken notice. For example, Cuomo, who resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct in 2021, has tried to stage a comeback by running for mayor of New York City. But that doesn’t mean that shaming no longer works at all. Cuomo couldn’t outrun his past as his opponents reminded voters of why he resigned in the first place, and he eventually went on to lose the Democratic primary earlier this year. And, if the polls are accurate, he is on track to lose the general election in November as well. But when it comes to Trump, Americans have yet to find the scandal that can shame his way to political irrelevance.

There are two main reasons why Trump and his administration are so often able to avoid any accountability for potential corruption, even though there is evidence that voters do care about corrupt governance, as Eric Adams’s downfall shows. First, Trump’s core supporters are willing to look the other way because their priority is supporting Trump’s broader political project. In some cases, some of the president’s supporters might not believe any of the allegations of corruption or might point to how the president’s opponents are corrupt as well. In fact, many American voters believe the Democratic Party is more corrupt than the GOP.

Second, and more importantly, while the president’s opponents might care about the corruption in his administration, Trump’s ability to wiggle out of any consequences and ignore public shaming tactics has made people feel powerless. He won a second term, for example, despite being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation and getting convicted of crimes, including falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments. So while incidents of potential corruption might draw a lot of voters’ ire, they’re unlikely to break through and become full-fledged scandals because many Democratic voters seem resigned to the fact that Trump will likely get away with the story of the day, just as he has over and over again since his first campaign for president in 2016.

Part of what might be driving that general sense of apathy in the opposition is that Trump is term-limited, and unlike his first term, he can’t run for reelection. That leaves many people in the mindset of waiting out Trump’s second term instead of actively resisting it as they did during his first presidency. So while they know they’re stuck with him for now, they also know they’re not going to be stuck with him forever.

That’s not to say that corruption and abuse of power won’t ever galvanize resistance to Trump, especially as the midterms get underway next year. Democrats hoping to win back the House will likely highlight how a Democratic majority in at least one chamber of Congress would be a check on the president’s corruption. In fact, some Democratic operatives are pushing Democrats to embrace that message and focus on Trump’s “culture of corruption” as their midterm strategy, according to a memo obtained by the Bulwark earlier this month.

Whether Democrats go with that advice will depend on whether they believe Americans care enough about Trump’s corruption. And so far this year, it seems the answer to that question is no. But that might not always be the case, especially if an anti-corruption coalition finds the right messenger.