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Political Corruption Is Often Not a Voting Issue in America
Aug 25, 2026
Almost every week, there seems to be another story about the pay-to-play ethos that is dominant in Donald Trump’s Washington, DC. On July 30, the Wall Street Journal added a new one to the list.
The Journal described the president’s fervent interest in fundraising and how he checks almost nightly with his top fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, to find out “which companies and donors have cut checks and which haven’t, and for how much.” The story highlighted the way she channels his interest into making her pitch.
“’This is very important to the president. He’s asked me to call you and ask you for this donation…. The boss wants this money.’”
Nothing subtle there.
Then there is the way the administration has used tariffs as a lever to extract money and other things from businesses seeking relief or exemption from the tariff. For example, on July 31, MS Now reported that the Antwerp World Diamond Center in Belgium had presented the president with a large ring, which he dubbed the Freedom 250 ring, and that they subsequently received favorable treatment in Trump’s tariff regime.
That was no ordinary ring. It is made of eighteen-karat gold and is the size of a wristwatch. It has a hand-carved presidential seal on top, encrusted with 321 diamonds, 56 sapphires, 18 emeralds, and 6 rubies. And it has an engraved inscription to Donald John Trump. A few weeks after the gift was made, the report continues, “Europe’s diamond industry was exempted from Trump’s latest round of tariffs.”
The New York Times is right to caution that “There is no evidence that the gift of the ring directly affected the president’s thinking on the tariff exclusion for the diamond industry. But the new list of exemptions has renewed questions about which industries should be exempt from tariffs, and why.”
If this were a one-off, it would not raise alarms. But it is not. It is part of a pattern in which the president appears to benefit personally from exercising the powers of his office.
As NPR observes, President Trump “has increased his net worth by making investments in companies with business before the government at a level never seen before, as much as $2 billion in the last year. And…he bought stock in Paramount and Warner Bros. while his Justice Department was considering whether or not to approve their merger.”
“He bought stock in Palantir, and then he praised the company publicly, including in a social media post that listed Palantir's stock ticker. He invested in Oracle while he was trying to get that company to buy TikTok, and it goes on and on.”
Ordinary Americans feel the consequences of this focus on personal enrichment and aggrandizement every day, though the connection between the two may not be obvious. For a long time, scholars have documented how government corruption hinders economic performance.
But none of that may be obvious to voters as they consider how to cast their ballots. That is why Democrats running for office this November and groups working to preserve American democracy will need to either work hard to make those connections clear or abandon the effort altogether.
Right now, things are moving in the opposite direction.
Playing the corruption card is fast becoming the orthodoxy among prominent Democrats. James Carville. Carville makes the case that the party is “not meeting the moment” because it is not focusing enough on what he called the MAGA movement’s “staggering corruption.”
Some Democratic candidates are following Carville’s lead. In Texas, James Talarico, who is running for the Senate, is hitting that theme hard.
He accuses his Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, of being “the most corrupt politician in our state, maybe in our country," but he doesn’t stop there. "We've seen corruption,” he says, “in the judicial branch, just as we've seen it in the legislative and executive branches."
Talarico is also trying to make the case that “politicians… who use their positions of power to enrich themselves and their wealthy friends, is why most Americans, especially the most vulnerable, can't ‘afford anything’ or can't ‘get ahead no matter how hard we work.’"
Senator John Ossoff, running for reelection in Georgia, is saying similar things. “When he’s (President Trump) not posting, he’s been trying to rob us…..All this while you pay more for gas, for groceries, for healthcare.”
But connecting the dots between those things is not easy. Here’s why.
That is because, as Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig argues, “responses to information are inseparable from their interests, desires, resources, cognitive capacities, and social contexts. Because of these and other factors, people may ignore information, misunderstand it, or misuse it. Whether and how,” he adds, “new information is used to further public objectives depends upon its incorporation into complex chains of comprehension, action, and response.”
It also does not help that the public is pretty well inured to accusations of corruption. At this point, NPR says, “People are incredibly cynical, almost numb. They see this as just the way things work in Washington - everybody does it.”
And “Trump has convinced a lot of his voters that he is such a good businessman, he just makes money no matter what he does.” That’s why publicity about how much money he has made in office or about gifts like the Freedom 250 ring may not penetrate with his most loyal supporters.
Beyond his base, voters “have mixed views on whether (allegations of corruption are) a big deal or not, indicating a level of cynicism about many in the political class. Among participants in two online focus groups in Pennsylvania, “Half the participants… were ‘troubled’ by Trump's windfall in office. The other half waved it off.”
One of the members of the latter group indicated that revelations about how much money Trump has made as president “isn't a shock to me or anybody else. He's admitted in the past that he's going to continue running his empire while he's in his president's seat. I was fully aware of that.’”
Moreover, as The New York Times explains. “No American politician, arguably, has understood and exploited this ambient cynicism more successfully than Trump, who has campaigned three times against ‘corrupt’ enemies and a ‘rigged’ system and twice led the most flagrantly self-enriching presidencies this country has seen.”
And, at the end of the day, Democrats need to remember that it is easier to make allegations of corruption during political campaigns than to make them stick and use them to motivate voters. Manoel Gehrke, Nic Cheesemanm, and Licia Cianetti from the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation in Great Britain attribute that difficulty to “complex media environments…loyalty to one’s ‘group’…(and)pessimism about the likelihood of change….”
In the run-up to November, Democrats should talk about corruption. But it may be easier to break through with voters by delivering a different message.
Whatever his motives, the president and his Republican allies in Congress care more about adding a ballroom at the White House, building a triumphal arch, and having a new, luxurious Air Force One than they do about gas prices, grocery prices, and the cost of health care. No need to connect the dots; just state the facts.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
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As Temperatures Rise and Federal Funding Falls, Drowning Risks Grow
Aug 25, 2026
July 25 marked World Drowning Day. More than 4000 people die from unintentional drowning in the United States each year. This translates into an average of 11 drowning deaths per day. Children ages one to four are at greatest risk, making drowning the leading cause of death for that group and the second leading cause of death for children ages five to 14.
Two emerging trends could make those numbers worse: federal funding cuts that have weakened drowning prevention efforts and hotter summers that are driving more people to water to cool off. Together, these trends threaten to deepen long-standing disparities that already place Black, Indigenous, autistic, and low-income communities at greater risk.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), drowning death rates are 2.6 times higher among Black children ages five to nine and 3.6 times higher among those ages 10 to 14 than among their White peers. The largest disparity is among American Indian and Alaska Native adults ages 25 to 29, whose drowning rate is 3.5 times higher than that of White adults. Autistic children are also especially vulnerable because many are drawn to water and may be less aware of danger. They are 160 times more likely to die from drowning than other children.
Those disparities could widen as federal support for drowning prevention continues to shrink. Last August, the Trump administration eliminated the CDC’s drowning prevention program as part of a broader effort to reduce the federal workforce. The small team of health experts tracked drowning data and helped answer critical public health questions, including who is drowning, where incidents occur, and which interventions are most effective.
Climate change may further compound those risks. Drowning deaths surged in both France and Germany during this summer’s heat waves in Europe, suggesting that extreme temperatures drive more people to seek relief in rivers, lakes and other unattended bodies of water. In the United States, public pools often become crowded during extreme heat days. In lower-income communities, overcrowding and lifeguard shortages can increase the risks of fatal drownings.
For Arkeisha Reese, drowning statistics are deeply personal.
It has been 20 years since Reese lost her five-year-old son Kareem in a drowning accident in central Florida. In mid-June 2006, she dropped him off at summer camp before heading to work. The last thing on her mind was her son’s safety. Kareem was enrolled in a reputable camp and under adult supervision. With hindsight, she wonders why the camp’s intake forms never asked about his swimming ability or sought permission to take him to a pool.
“The camp was organized by the school he was supposed to attend in the fall. They went on a field trip, and he was left unattended. I don’t think there was a lifeguard on duty, and to this day I am not exactly sure how it all happened,” explains Reese during a phone interview with the Fulcrum. “From the moment he drowned and died, no one was allowed to talk. He is my forever five.”
Ten years after her son’s death, Reese founded the Team Kareem Memorial Foundation to promote water safety through public education, including an annual 5K walk/run, CPR training, and swim lesson scholarships.
“I started researching, and I didn't like the answers I was getting, so I tried to make a change, share his story, and get partners who are willing to help and keep his memory alive.”
For Miriam Lynch, Executive Director of Diversity in Aquatics, a national network building a more inclusive, accessible, and representative aquatic community, drowning is also a systemic issue.
“We must be honest about the history of what has led us to disparities,” says Miriam Lynch in an interview with the Fulcrum. “There are 250 years of history that has led us to today’s disparities. They affect many different groups, including those with different abilities and people living in rural areas. We see it in politics, in geography, and in economics. And guess what? Water safety fits right in there. It’s not about fixing one problem only. We must change policy, funding, and accessibility.”
- YouTube youtu.be
The good news is that most drownings are preventable, according to water safety advocates, but many families underestimate the risks until tragedy strikes. “Drowning is 100% preventable, but only with all the layers of protection in place. Swim lessons are not the end-all deal,” says Kerri Morrison, founder and executive director of Live Like Jake Foundation, in an interview with the Fulcrum. Morrison and her husband established the nonprofit after their three-year-old son, Jake, drowned in 2013.
Experts recommend multiple layers of protection against drowning, including pool fences, door alarms, brightly colored suits, qualified supervision around water, and CPR training. Swim lessons can start as early as six months of age. Among the foundation’s programs are scholarships for Infant Swimming Resource skills or ISR, a one-on-one self-rescue swimming method that teaches children to become competent and confident in the water.
“It teaches young children to swim, float, and swim,” says Morrison, without surrendering to panic.
Because ISR instruction is individualized, it can be costly. The foundation partners with ISR instructors nationwide and has awarded 4,700 scholarships in 42 states, about 400 each year to families in need.
The consequences of drowning extend far beyond fatalities. “For every child that drowns,” says Morrison, “there’s at least five more that have survived but are left with brain damage. These children will not lead normal lives and will require regular therapies.”
Many health insurance plans do not cover those therapies, and Medicaid cuts could further limit access for low-income families. The Live Like Jake Foundation also provides small grants to about 25 families each year to help offset rehabilitation and other expenses often associated with a near-fatal drowning.
Some states with historically high drowning rates—Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and California— have expanded prevention efforts through initiatives like swimming lessons voucher programs, water safety education, and other initiatives.
Florida enacted a new drowning prevention law that came into effect July 1. Sponsored by Representative Anna V. Eskamani (D), the law requires hospitals, birth centers, and home birth providers to educate new parents about drowning prevention and expands eligibility for free swim lessons. Another legislative proposal that would have required licensed vacation rentals with pools or nearby water to install additional safety measures, including exit alarms and pool fences, failed to pass.
As federal support for drowning prevention shrinks, community organizations are increasingly filling the gap by educating families, pediatricians, and teachers, while expanding access to swim lessons and advocating for stronger policies.
For Lynch, the ripple effects extend well beyond public health. “If you survive a drowning but don’t have the resources to overcome your fear, you are not going to think about becoming a swim coach or a water polo coach or a sailing coach. It is also about the loss of opportunity in aquatics. Everyone stands to lose.”
Beatrice Spadacini is a freelance journalist for the Fulcrum. Spadacini writes about social justice and public health.
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As Washington stalls, young bipartisan lawmakers in Alaska, Mississippi, and beyond are proving that cross-partisan collaboration still wins.
Douglas Rissing/Getty Images
The Politicians Who Can Fix America's Polarization Problem Will Win
Aug 25, 2026
Political predictions are notoriously unreliable, but here is one I am willing to stand behind: the elected officials who figure out how to govern across difference will dominate the next decade of American politics. With dysfunction and paralysis having become the status quo in Washington, elected officials who work together to get things done will turn heads, offering desperate voters a much-needed alternative to a broken system.
Consider what happened in Alaska last year. The state’s lawmaking structure does not encourage political independence. Alaska has the nation's highest veto-override threshold: three-quarters. So when a popular education bill promising smaller class sizes, a cellphone ban, and vocational training funding cleared the legislature, only to be vetoed twice by the governor, it looked dead in the water.
But two lawmakers on opposite sides of the aisle made it their mission to revive it. State Senator Löki Gale Tobin, a Democrat from Anchorage, and State Representative Justin Ruffridge, a Republican from the Kenai Peninsula, held together the bipartisan coalition that supported the bill, defied the governor, and ensured it became law. Their cross-partisanship was rewarded: Rep. Ruffridge was elected minority whip by his own Republican colleagues.
Mississippi saw a similar feat of legislative courage and collaboration at the height of the COVID pandemic. Since 1894, the state flag had featured the Confederate battle cross. Conventional wisdom said it couldn’t be changed, but two lawmakers proved everyone wrong. Representative Jeramey Anderson, a Democrat, and his Republican colleague, former Representative Toby Barker, had built the relationship, over years, that made possible a bipartisan vote to redesign the flag.
With the mid-terms approaching and the highest stakes presidential election in modern memory on the horizon, the political establishment is desperate to identify winning issues. But as long as Americans are severely polarized, issues will no longer win elections; character will. More so than any single policy issue, what most of us want to solve is the underlying condition that makes everything else harder: the sense that Americans, especially our elected officials, no longer share enough common ground to solve problems together. Politicians who offer a credible case against division and back it up with constructive, collaborative governance will go places.
Many of the politicians who exemplify this get-it-done attitude share a trait that is worth singling out: they are among our youngest public officials. Younger politicians are often caricatured as inflexible and ideologically driven, but more often, it’s just the opposite. Research by Future Caucus, the nonpartisan organization that I lead, found that in 2022, 40 percent of all bipartisan bills signed into law at the state level were introduced by a Gen Z or millennial legislator, despite them making up only a quarter of all state lawmakers.
These lawmakers firmly belong in the American tradition of young political innovators. Our democratic project was born 250 years ago out of young lawmakers’ insistence on charting a new course. James Madison was 25 when he helped draft the Virginia Constitution, and Thomas Jefferson was 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Much of the constitutional architecture we still live with was built by people in their thirties, some of whom had never governed before.
At America's hinge moments, it has often been younger leaders who are willing to attempt the kind of coalition-building that entrenched interests have given up on. These young officials often have less to lose. When lawmakers join Future Caucus, which brings together Gen Z and millennial politicians from across the political spectrum to pursue collaborative fixes to stubborn problems, most cite frustration with a calcified status quo as their main reason for signing up.
What stands out about today’s young lawmakers is not that they are ideologically moderate – their views span the full breadth of the political spectrum – but that they have correctly diagnosed what voters actually want. Even with polarization at a fever pitch, Americans are hungry for productivity in politics. Eight in 10 U.S. adults agree that elected leaders should compromise to get things done. Americans are twice as likely to say they would rather see leaders in Washington compromise to pass legislation (47%) than have leaders stick to their political beliefs at the risk of accomplishing little (24%).
Right now, the young lawmakers who are delivering what voters want can be found in state capitals and city halls doing the procedural, unglamorous work of finding the final three votes to get a critical piece of legislation out of committee, actually returning calls from the other caucus (not to mention, from their constituents), and prioritizing bills that serve their communities over bills that virtue signal.
The commitment to problem-solving shared by these young lawmakers is already translating into political success: 100 percent of state Future Caucus co-chairs were reelected in 2024, many have been elected to committee and caucus leadership, and several — including Georgia Future Caucus co-chair Rep. Jasmine Clark — are running competitive races for higher office. In our deeply divided political moment, the power of cross-partisan respect and collaboration is becoming impossible to ignore. Voters have signaled that they are eager for a new era of cooperation. The politicians who make the most compelling case for connection – and walk the talk once in office – will write the next chapter of American history.
Layla Zaidane is president and CEO of Future Caucus, the nation's largest nonpartisan, nonprofit organization for Gen Z and millennial lawmakers. Future Caucus has supported more than 2,000 state and federal legislators since 2013.
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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a visit to the Fort Bragg U.S. Army base on February 13, 2026 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Nathan Howard/Getty Images
Reagan’s Strength vs. Trump’s Retreat: U.S. Alliances at Risk
Aug 25, 2026
How a country treats its allies and its adversaries says everything about what it believes strength means — a question that was already on my mind the night I sat in a movie theater watching "The Brink of War" when news broke.
The film reconstructs the 1986 Reykjavik summit, where President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev spent a tense weekend negotiating over the fate of the world's nuclear arsenals.
The movie is a portrait of an American president who believed peace was earned through strength and credibility because he understood that American reliability was the asset that guaranteed every other negotiation possible.
I checked my phone on the way out and read that President Trump had just ordered the Pentagon to "substantially reduce" the joint military exercises the United States runs each year with South Korea — hours before those drills were set to begin.
Trump’s stated reasons: the cost and Seoul's refusal to help with actions against Iran. He also took the opportunity to note his "very good relationship" with Kim Jong Un, the leader of a nuclear-armed regime still technically at war with the ally whose defense drills he'd just gutted.
The contrast was hard to shake.
Reagan's version of "peace through strength" is often reduced to a slogan. It wasn't. At Reykjavik, he was willing to walk away from a historic deal rather than trade away missile defense, because he believed a president's word — to allies and adversaries alike — had to mean the same thing on a good day as on a bad one.
In the two weeks before Trump gutted the drills meant to deter it, North Korea tested ballistic missiles at least twice — its ninth and tenth launches of the year, part of a pace that includes Kim Jong Un ordering a two-and-a-half-fold increase in missile production back in June.
Pyongyang has said openly that the tests are a protest against the joint exercises, which it calls an invasion rehearsal. The sequence isn't ambiguous: North Korea escalates, and the American response is to scale back the training designed to counter it.
That wasn't a response to reduced danger. It was a response to something else entirely — cost, grievance, a president's stated fondness for a dictator personally.
Kim Jong Un isn't managing a regional standoff on the Korean Peninsula anymore. He's a partner in two wars that are actively threatening American interests. That's who the administration just called "unthreatening and respectful."
Mark Montgomery, a retired Navy rear admiral now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has named the pattern directly: "President Trump does not seem to understand that North Korea is part of the 'bad guys' team – a member of the ‘Axis of Aggressors’ alongside Russia, Iran, and China.”
Montgomery went on to say, "Kim Jong Un has backed Putin's illegal war against Ukraine with ammunition, troops, and missiles." And the danger isn't confined to a European battlefield: "North Korea threatens key American allies and trade partners — South Korea and Japan — daily. Kim Jong Un is not America's friend; he cannot be reasoned with, and he won't give up his nuclear weapons."
Pyongyang has sent an estimated 11,000-plus troops to fight for Russia against Ukraine, supplies roughly half of Russia's artillery ammunition, and has shipped ballistic missiles Moscow now fires into Ukrainian cities.
It has spent decades as Iran's missile supplier — the technical lineage of Iran's Shahab and Khorramshahr missiles traces straight back to North Korean designs — and analysts expect that cooperation to deepen now that Iran needs to rebuild what the 2026 war destroyed.
Deterrence is thinning at the same time. The USS George Washington, the Navy's only forward-deployed carrier and until recently on station near the South China Sea, has pulled out of the Indo-Pacific to cover a Middle East gap, leaving the region without a home-based American carrier for the foreseeable future.
Montgomery has also flagged what that gap means in practice: a carrier permanently based in the Indo-Pacific cuts response time to a regional threat by more than two weeks compared to one that must sail in from elsewhere. That's exactly the kind of gap a rival power plans around.
When a president alienates a treaty ally over a war that the ally never signed onto, while publicly courting the goodwill of a regime that is simultaneously arming Russia and rebuilding Iran's missile program — the message isn't fiscal discipline. It's that American commitments are conditional, revocable, and personal to whoever happens to be in the Oval Office.
Reagan walked away from Gorbachev to protect American credibility. This administration is giving away its trustworthiness— to Kim Jong Un, for free.
Lynn Schmidt is a columnist and Editorial Board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She holds a master's of science in political science as well as a bachelor's of science in nursing.
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