President Donald Trump’s second administration has been tied to roughly $377 billion in alleged corruption, according to a tally released Tuesday by former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor, a prominent Trump critic.
Taylor said no one in Washington had tried to add up the total, so his team did. They reviewed 100 cases of alleged wrongdoing since Trump’s reelection, drawing on court filings, federal records, congressional material and news coverage. Taylor released the sum alongside “Corruptionland,” a 35-minute documentary from his group, Defiance.org.
Taylor called the figure “a measure of scale.” Rather than a tally of stolen cash, it combines public money, private benefits and the dollar value of transactions linked to the 100 cases. Some of that went to Trump’s family, Taylor said, but the bulk is taxpayer money that was misused, mismanaged or turned into a weapon against the administration’s perceived enemies.
He argued the figure still understates the problem. More than half the cases, 59 in all, couldn’t be assigned a dollar value, Taylor noted, explaining that “you can’t put a price tag on a fired inspector general or a presidential critic thrown in jail.” The total also excludes the economic fallout from Trump’s tariffs, which Taylor said is impossible to measure.
“We’re living in one of the gravest periods of corruption in American history,” Taylor wrote.
Taylor argued the bigger danger is how routine the misconduct has become. He described five checks on government wrongdoing: White House ethics lawyers, the Justice Department and FBI, inspectors general and whistleblowers, the press and outside watchdog groups, and Congress. He said all but the last had been deliberately undermined.
“Four of the five corruption filters have been nearly destroyed,” Taylor wrote, urging Americans to vote in next week’s midterms. “The fifth one is on your ballot, and you can actually do something about it.”