Elizabeth Warren on Monday unveiled a significant expansion of her plan to improve the behavior of public servants and root out Washington corruption.
It was the latest detailed set of policy prescriptions from the Massachusetts senator, who has seen her standing in the top tier of Democratic presidential hopefuls solidify in recent weeks — a signal that the frail state of government ethics is guaranteed to have a place among the issues being addressed in the 2020 campaign.
"Make no mistake about it: The Trump administration is the most corrupt administration of our lifetimes," Warren wrote in a post on Medium that's now part of her campaign website. "But these problems did not start with Donald Trump. They are much bigger than him — and solving them will require big, structural change to fundamentally transform our government."
While anti-corruption proposals are not new to Warren's expansive policy-rich campaign platform, her new, broad plan for reform addressing all three branches of the federal government builds on a relatively narrow array of things she'd previously promised to tackle if elected.
The senator has previously promised to press for legislation setting a lifetime ban on lobbying by former members of Congress, requiring presidents and presidential candidates to release their tax returns and implementing a code of ethics for the Supreme Court.
Monday's announcement details more than 30 additional proposals related to increasing transparency and accountability, restricting lobbying, airing out financial conflicts of interest and strengthening government ethics. Warren asserted it would be "the most sweeping set of anti-corruption reforms since Watergate."
Among the proposals:
- Curtail insider trading in Congress by tightening regulations on political intelligence firms.
- Ban government officials from trading individual stocks while in office.
- Install limits on when lobbyists may take on government roles.
- Require more detailed public disclosure of financial activities and potential conflicts of interest by federal judges.
- Impose a tax on entities that spend more than $500,000 a year on lobbying.
- Establish a new government office to investigate ethics violations.
Several of the proposals are already included in HR 1, the sweeping campaign finance regulation, election administration and ethics overhaul bill passed by the House this spring but sidelined indefinitely in the GOP Senate — even though it's cosponsored by every Democratic senator. That means that, on paper at least, five of Warren's rivals already support much of what she's proposed: Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Michel Bennet.
Throughout her plan, Warren cites Trump and his administration as some of the worst offenders — terming the president "a walking conflict of interest" — while also making clear her view that the problem predates him and is bigger than him.
Corruption is "at the root of the major problems we face as a democracy," Warren wrote, and most be addressed early in the next administration because otherwise all the other top-of-mind public policy challenges — climate change, health care, gun control and education among them — will remain impossible to tackle.
"I believe that we can root out corruption in Washington. I believe we must make big, structural changes that will once again restore our trust in government by showing that it can work for all of us," Warren said.
The expanded platform was to be the topic of a speech Monday night in New York, near the site of the former Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where a fire 108 years killed nearly 150 workers and led to a many of the workplace safety reforms of the 20th century.
Trump posted a series of tweets on Monday that, while not rebutting the Warren plan by name, took issue with his political opponents for suggesting he's conflicted by his business interests.
"Democrats are trying to build a case that I enrich myself by being President," he tweeted. "Good idea, except I will, and have always expected to, lose BILLIONS of DOLLARS for the privilege of being your President - and doing the best job that has been done in many decades."
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.