Donald Trump arrives at the White House. REUTERS/Annabelle Gordon
A former Donald Trump official argued that President Donald Trump has done something no president has done before by making corruption the top issue in an American election.
“Never in the history of modern polling has ‘corruption’ been the leading issue in an American election,” wrote former Homeland Security staffer Miles Taylor in his Defiance newsletter. “Donald Trump just made it one.”
Taylor pointed to a Fox News poll released this week that found 88 percent of registered voters are extremely or very concerned about corruption in government – even more than those who said the same about gas and grocery prices or health care. The same poll put Trump’s approval at 36 percent, the lowest Fox has ever recorded for him.
“It beat high gas and grocery prices. It beat healthcare. It beat everything!” Taylor wrote.
He also cited an AP-NORC survey that found most Americans believe Trump is profiting from the presidency illegally or unethically. A Gallup poll last month found 89 percent of Americans believe corruption is widespread in their government, the highest share Gallup has ever measured.
Taylor said the shift is historic, noting that even after Watergate, voters ranked the economy and inflation ahead of Richard Nixon’s crimes.
“Trump has made corruption literally impossible to ignore,” Taylor wrote. “He turned it from a background story that’s always playing out in Washington into basically the lead story of every news cycle for the past 18 months.”
As an example, he pointed to Trump’s White House ballroom. The Washington Post this week obtained a list of the project’s donors, which includes Apple, Nvidia and Lockheed Martin.
The Post found that many of the donors have since won regulatory decisions and government contracts, and Taylor pointed out that Trump himself “doesn’t appear to have given a dime,” while hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are going into the combined ballroom and bunker project.
On Taylor’s podcast, former Justice Department official Liz Oyer called the ballroom a “deposit box for bribes," and Taylor said Republicans can’t escape the fallout before Election Day.
“These latest polling numbers are a death sentence for MAGA as a governing movement,” he wrote. “There’s nothing Trump can do about it in the next three weeks. Nothing.”
He said Republicans with Trump’s name on their ballots “are running on the most radioactive issue in modern American political history because they have slavishly covered for his corruption or outright enabled it.”
“Trump spent more than a decade telling Americans the system was rigged,” Taylor concluded. “He finally convinced them. What he didn’t tell them is that he would be the one rigging it.
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