Corruption

For years various thinktankeries have published country "corruption indices." I'm not going to get into the details of any of them because I am a lazy blogger, but I was always struck how if you exclude the kinds of corruption that are standard in the US but not elsewhere then the US comes out looking pretty good. Putting it roughly, our system of legalized bribery is usually enough of a Rube Goldberg machine that one can pretend it does not exist, while in other countries the suitcases of cash just get dropped on the table in plain sight. That we have our own corruption - infecting elites across government, journalism, and business - is not new, though here, too, Trump is in a way saying the quiet part out loud, or more accurately the Rube Goldberg machine was too complicated for him to operate so he just junked it.