Refuge in Audacity

"This moment is exceptional. It's a one-of-one moment, and if it becomes normal, if people stop being outraged at what he is doing to enrich himself, then I fear there is no going back. The White House will just become a place to get rich." - U.S. Senator Chris Murphy

Late in the life of the Western Roman Empire, public office turned into a private profit center. Officials sold positions, extorted taxes past their legal limits, padded payrolls, and debased the coinage. The historian Ramsay MacMullen traced the empire's loss of control to the privatization of government power. High officials chased personal gain until central authority thinned out and local strongmen filled the vacuum.

There’s a name for corruption conducted in plain sight: refuge in audacity. Corruption performed openly, and often enough, stops registering as corruption at all. People go looking for wrongdoing behind locked doors. They're slower to see it when it's standing at the podium, because Trump-level brazenness seems like authority. Do it boldly enough, do it as policy, and the extraordinary becomes the new baseline. Any objection starts to sound partisan, or naïve, or both.

It’s plundering is outrageous, so why doesn’t somebody do something about it? A market economy and a functioning federal government both depend on someone willing to blow the whistle on self-dealing. In the United States, that job belongs mainly to three agencies: the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, and the FBI. Weaken all three at once, in the same administration, and corrupt transactions start to look like policy. It's the equivalent of cutting the alarm wires before committing the heist.

Start with the SEC. Paul Atkins, the current chairman, has recast the agency's mission as friendlier to the industries it used to police, especially crypto. Enforcement actions have fallen sharply since he took over. Several marquee cases were dismissed, paused, or quietly settled. Supporters call it the end of “regulation by enforcement” and a bid to make the United States the crypto capital of the world — a goal that happens to track the financial interests of the president and hisfamily. Critics call it defanging the one agency positioned to deal with that conflict of interest. Either way, the referee has been told to sit down.

As for the Justice Department, Todd Blanche, once Donald Trump's personal defense lawyer, now runs it. The ethics norms that ordinarily require distance from a former client collide head-on with the realities of the job. Under Blanche, a proposed settlement of Trump's lawsuit against the IRS floated a roughly $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund”, basically, a slush fund for allies, bundled with sweeping tax-audit immunity for the president, his family, and his businesses. 

Outrageous again. The fund drew bipartisan backlash, ran into court blocks, and was walked back under confirmation pressure, but the instinct behind it is alive and well. Add in investigative resources aimed at perceived adversaries, incomplete disclosure of the Epstein files, and the thinning of career ranks who'd worked prior Trump-related cases, and the picture is complete. Defenders call it correcting past politicization. It’s actually a Justice Department folded into a personal operation.

And the FBI. Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist with no background running an institution like it, took over the directorship. There followed loyalty tests, high turnover among career agents, impulsive public statements, a unit reportedly built around material on officials who'd investigated Trump and his allies, dismissals tied to earlier cases, and allegations of resources misused. Independence got reclassified as the obstacle. Operational discipline and political neutrality lost out to political warfare and personal branding.

In a nutshell: reduce the capacity and independence of the three agencies most likely to investigate a raid while the window of unified political control stays open. Meaning, the Republicans are dirty as hell?

Sure, except that Democrats don’t provide a clean contrast, they just have a less obvious, more deniable strain of the same disease. Spousal stock trades timed suspiciously close to major legislation, semiconductor bets around industrial policy, biotech trades around early pandemic information, this kind of stuff has been going on for years and years, administration after administration. 

The defenses are always the same: the member doesn't trade personally, had no advance knowledge, keeps assets in a blind trust. Formal charges rarely follow, and rarely stick even if they are brought. Insider trading in Congress is a bipartisan sport that Congress has repeatedly declined to ban. The club protects the club.

Still, it’s a lesser offense than putting your own former lawyer in charge ofsettlement decisions, floating public funds and personal tax immunity out of a lawsuit against your own tax agency, standing down securities enforcement in the sector where you hold a financial stake, and running the country's main investigative service as a loyalty operation. Quiet insider trades wrapped in spousal names, close friends, and trust language are ordinary Washington rot. 

An overleveraged government, eroded public trust, and a general sense that the postwar political order is fraying produce a specific psychology. It feels like the last chance to cash in before the game ends, the looter's calculation during a riot. The old restraints have loosened and the window may close, so the looters “smash and grab”what they can while the lights are still on. Both parties have contributed to that longer decay. This administration just does it more openly, at a larger institutional scale, and with zero embarrassment about being caught.

There's an obvious precedent for all this, documented in Catherine Belton's Putin's People and Karen Dawisha's Putin's Kleptocracy. After the Soviet collapse and the chaos of the 1990s, Trump’s on-and-off bestie Vladimir Putin offered Russia's oligarchs a blunt bargain: keep what you've taken, keep enriching yourselves under the new rules, but stay out of politics. Don't challenge the center. Don't use your money or your media against the Kremlin. 

The ones who took the deal mostly kept their fortunes. The ones who didn't, Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, et al., ended up exiled, imprisoned, or dead. Putin organized corruption under a single hierarchy and made loyalty the price of admission. Wealth was tolerated. .independent political power was not. 

The Trump version isn't identical...the institutions, the laws, and what's left of American norms still differ. But the underlying logic is the same one that Rome ran and Moscow refined. Extraction and enrichment are acceptable, even worth celebrating, as long as the loyalty test is passed and the referees have been brought to heel. Cross that arrangement, and the machinery that was softened for friends gets hardened again for enemies fast.

Trump’s party may lose one or both chambers in the 2026 midterms. A lost House restores subpoena power, and ranking members are already drafting the target list: family crypto holdings, foreign gifts, insider trading, the IRS fund and tax-immunity episode, the laughable Epstein-file handling, the personnel purges, the use of the Justice Department against political opponents.

If the White House understands that risk, and the speed of the institutional changes suggests it surely does, the next question suggests itself. Do you stop at accelerating extraction while the window stays open? Or does the same logic extend to a national-security pretext for an emergency postponement of the midterms, or to pre-emptive claims of fraud built to keep an unfavorable result tied up in litigation indefinitely?

Such gambits would be the simple extension of a strategy that treats institutional rules as obstacles rather than constraints. When reporters raise the self-dealing issue, the response is always the same: gaslight, stonewall, deflect, insult, project. Deny the premise. Question the reporter's motives. Accuse the other side of worse. Recast and twist every inquiry as proof of the very “weaponization” the administration claims to be dismantling. The senior circle runs it like a master spin class, no stationary bikes and loud music, just a workout designed to exhaust the audience before the next outrage surfaces. Refuge in audacity only works if the brazenness is conducted out in the open, under the lights.

This isn't an aberration bubbling up from an otherwise healthy system. It's routine, because the two-party system that produces it is itself corrupt in its foundations. Both parties protect the revolving door, the donor class, the lobbying industry, and the legal architecture that turns public office into a vehicle for private gain. The parties compete for power and share a deeper interest in preserving the rules that make power profitable. Partisan outrage is a show. Structural reform that would actually address the corrupt accumulation of money doesn’t happen because neither side wants to be the one to turn off the tap.

I made a version of this argument several years ago, when I asked whether America was a nation in decline and whether it could still be fixed. The classic late-cycle markers were already visible then: ballooning debt, widening inequality, internal conflict, and institutions captured by the very interests they were built to regulate.

Can the system be fixed? Here’s a starting point: get the money out of politics by reversing Citizens United and reining in the lobbying industry. That's basic hygiene for a republic that still claims to serve the public rather than the highest bidder. The trouble is that the system built on the status quo has no incentive to dismantle it voluntarily. Late-stage systems don’t reform by choice. They reform under intense pressure, once the cost of carrying on gets too high to bear. Or they don't reform at all.

The blatant corruption on display in the US right now, the extraction, the captured institutions, the refuge in audacity, isn't a glitch in the two-party system. It's what that system produces once the restraints have worn thin and everyone involved knows the window might be closing.