America was born out of rebellion against oligarchy.
- Priya Satia, Stanford University
When a majority of citizens disagree with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose.
- Benjamin Page, Martin Gilens, 2014
Last year, voters strongly rejected Viktor Orban’s authoritarian Hungarian government, rife with corruption. Economic stagnation played a role, but corruption was the decisive factor.
America could be next. The decades of pay-to-play corruption at the center of America’s political system have delegitimized its democracy. Except in individual instances, however, corruption has rarely proven sufficiently potent at the ballot box to be determinant. That dynamic will be sorely tested in 2026 thanks to President Trump.
The Irony of America’s Oligarchic Governance
The Founding Fathers would be gravely disheartened at the state of their grand democratic experiment after 250 years.
American politics in recent decades has largely been the domain of oligarchs. It has devolved ironically to resemble the elitist political and economic system that inspired the Revolutionary War - a replica of the despised England the colonists first raised arms against at Lexington and Concord in 1775.
True, colonials believed their just cause was the rejection of an oppressive monarchy. In reality, the offending practices and policies blamed on the figurehead King George III - the tariff on Indian tea, for instance - were dictated by a Parliament dominated by oligarchs - nabobs like Sir Robert Clive and Cecil Rhodes. The 1688-89 Glorious Revolution, which deposed James II, also stripped the English monarchy of absolute power. Political, social, and economic power had abruptly migrated from the monarchy to the wealthy oligarchs who dominated Parliament– a transition that “dramatically curbed kingly authority.”
Like the England of 1775, America’s policies today are largely dictated by wealthy oligarchs like Elon Musk, many of whom share President Trump’s hostility toward taxes to fund social program spending. Charles Koch, for instance, has lobbied for cuts similar to Trump’s 2025 tax law, removing 4 million from food assistance and eliminating Medicaid health insurance for an estimated 17 million of America’s poorest, forcing rural hospitals to close.
Reduced food and health care for the least advantaged is just one facet of the consequences of America’s pay-to-play political system. Republicans, beginning with Goldwater and later Reagan, fully embraced pay-to-play, genuflecting to the wealthy who still dominate their Party. Partisan loyalists appointed to the Supreme Court have legitimized the practice, ruling, rather mystically, out of whole cloth, that money is constitutionally protected political speech. We are all entitled to a corner soapbox. But it seems you are also entitled to drown out my voice a million-fold, wallet permitting. They have even ruled that the legal fiction of corporations enjoys those same speech rights, ruling in Citizens United that ethereal political donors can be incorporeal wallets.
Political scientists term America’s faux democracy a functional oligarchy like Egypt or Turkey, or 18th-century England. But most American men and women view it simply as corruption - enabling the wealthy to profit by stacking the economy “against people like me.”
A Brennan Center survey in May 2026, for instance, found that 90% of independent voters believe “corruption is responsible for policies that benefit billionaires and big corporations at the expense of the American people.” This belief has become increasingly evident since 2017. Some 57% of respondents to a March NBC poll, for instance, believed that the rich and powerful are above the law – corruption that has grown worse in “the past five or ten years,” fostering a second Gilded Age.
This erosion of America’s democratic integrity has been recognized abroad: U.S. democracy fell on Transparency International’s government Corruption Index to a record low 29th globally in 2025 from 16th in 2015, below authentic democracies that limit the role of money in politics.
The Corruption Awakening
One important reason for growing sensitivity to corruption is rising American income inequality - the record surge in wealth at the top coming at the expense of workers. Real hourly compensation - wages and benefits - has virtually stagnated for the lowest earning 80% (111 million) of nonfarm salaried workers since the Reagan administration. (You may want to read that again.) Pay-to-play politics permits employers to offshore jobs while weakening unions, labor rights, and antitrust enforcement. That enabled employers to raise profits by capping workers’ pay, thereby doubling the national income share of the top 1% since 1979.
A second factor has been blatant global grifting by Trump – a Boeing 747 from Qatar and tungsten mines in Kazakhstan – corruption in flagrant violation of the Constitution’s Articles I and II emoluments clauses.
A Political Corruption Edge?
Only rarely has corruption provided a partisan electoral advantage to either political party. But this may be one of those moments, with surveys finding that corruption offers Democrats an electoral opportunity in 2026 and 2028.
An extensive 2025 analysis drawn from a panel of nearly 2000 voters, for instance, found that independent voters view Republican Party office holders as more corrupt than Democrats. These swing voters believe Republican politicians are nearly 30% more likely to be “very corrupt” than Democrats (29% of independents believe Democratic politicians are “very corrupt” while 37% believe Republicans are). Moreover, 38% of these independent panelists believed that the wealthy have the “most influence” on the Republican Party, while only 20% believe they have the most influence on Democrats. And a study of campaign spending by billionaires in 2024 found they favored Republicans by at least 2.5:1 - and that excludes their hidden dark money spending. The margin in seven pivotal 2024 Senate races was at least 7:1.
Restoring Democratic Legitimacy
Pivotal independent voters have come to believe that political corruption is widespread, multi-faceted, deeply embedded, and adversely affecting household economics. The 2026 and especially the 2028 elections offer them opportunities to rebuild the legitimacy of American democracy.
Should reformers prevail at the ballot box, a top priority is upgrading the Supreme Court that has championed pay-to-play for decades. Congress and the President can reform the Supreme Court by term-limiting justices or by imposing judicial jurisdiction limits as permitted by Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution. But opposition will be fierce, led by billionaires determined to preserve the central role of money in American politics and their dominance.
Voters can rekindle the Founders’ high hopes for democracy in the coming elections. The question is whether the corruption issue has sufficiently ripened and economic conditions have become sufficiently dire that democratic reformers can attain a trifecta at the polls in 2028.
George Tyler is a former deputy assistant treasury secretary and World Bank official. He is the author of books including Billionaire Democracy and What Went Wrong.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
____
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.