426 - Corruption Consumes the Globe, and Overwhelms Washington
Pay for Play
Transparency International has just released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index for 2025. As expected, and in line with most years since 1995, the CPI ranks the Nordics, Singapore, and selected continental European nations as the world’s least corrupt. At the very bottom of the 181 country-long list are the Chads, Somalias, South Sudans, Venezuelas, Yemens, and Zimbabwes of the least developed and heavily troubled corners of our war-torn planet.
This year, as most recent years, Denmark, with a score of 89, remained the globe’s least corrupt place. Finland, the happy country, was second, Singapore third, New Zealand fourth, Norway fifth, and Sweden sixth. Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Germany followed, with Iceland number ten, scoring 77. Canada was sixteenth, with 75 points. Britain came in at number 20.
We wrote about Costa Rica last Monday. It now ranks 46th, down four places, on the latest list. Uruguay and Chile are deemed even less corrupt -- the exemplars of Latin America -- with rankings of seventeen and thirty-one. Barbados, a well-governed parliamentary democracy since the seventeenth century, is listed as number twenty-four, well ahead of its Caribbean neighbors. Last week it had an election that supported a third term for Prime Minister Mia Mottley, a leading figure across the entire Caribbean and the rest of the English-speaking world.
Not altogether surprising, but shocking nevertheless, was the distinct slippage of the U.S. to 29th this year, tied with the Bahamas and just behind France and Lithuania! Its point total was a mere 64, down twelve points over the past decade. Given how Trump has used the first year of his second presidency to abuse the office and profit himself and his family, this diminished outcome was to be expected. But what is far less anticipated is the failure of Republicans in Congress to criticize his and his family’s blatant excesses.
Trump’s immorality is not new. Nor is his disdain for the rule of law. Likewise, his fundamental impropriety and indecency are now commonplace. But what is new is the odious and open breaking of laws and norms and the failure of Congress and the courts to call a halt. These abysmal results are well reflected in the latest low CPI score.
“The use of enforcement discretion to politically determine winners and losers, and the selective loosening of market rules to favor politically connected actors, undermine core principles of the rule of law, fair competition, and anti-corruption,” said Transparency International U.S. Executive Director Gary Kalman. “Anti-corruption laws should be there to serve the public interest, not be distorted to advance narrow political or economic interests.”
That is the fundamental expectation of an American president. But, as Kalman goes on to say, “Perhaps most alarming, is that these actions encourage leaders in other countries to further target and restrict independent voices, including advocates and journalists.” This is especially telling since the Trump administration also ended enforcement action under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977; it previously penalized American corporations for bribing foreign governments and helped for decades to reduce kleptocracy around the world. It was until this year the gold standard for anticorruption internationally, with Canada and several European countries copying the U.S. legislation -- to good effect.
Kalman doesn’t exactly say, as well, that by coarsening and sleazing what is left after Trump of the presidential ideal reduces respect for the office and the nation, and not only abroad. Even among partisans, it cheapens and eviscerates respect for good intentions and good governance. It also encourages Americans to cheat, connive, steal, purloin, and break the law. Without norms and morality, little is left.
What Kelman and other commentators alluded to, Nicolas Kristof, in the New York Times, specified as best he could. During the first year of his second presidency, Trump and his family have made at least $1.4 billion so far by exploiting the power and privileges of the hitherto carefully curated presidency.
A secret $500 billion deal was concluded with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) just before Trump’s second inauguration. It involved the purchase of a large stake in the Trump family cryptocurrency company and led to Trump allowing the UAE to obtain special long-desired advanced computer chips (which might also end up in China). Trump got cash and the UAE the chips that it had sought. But the deal also made it hard for Trump’s negotiators to demand that the UAE cease supporting the murderous Rapid Support Forces in the civil-war wracked Sudan. About 400,000 deaths there can reliably be ascribed to UAE backing and supplying of the RSF, and thus to Trump’s avaricious financial greed.
As Kristof concludes, “The sums were invested in secret, and to me at least they look less like an arms-length business transaction than a money transfer. The transaction also raises two fundamental questions:
First, did the Emirati decision to enrich the Trump family lead the administration to approve chip sales that put at risk American competitiveness and national security?
Second, did the Emirati investments buy Trump’s silence about the Emirates’ role in backing a militia that the United States accuses of committing genocide in Sudan? Hundreds of thousands of people have died there, and vast numbers have been raped, yet Trump has averted his eyes — and in the face of that silence, the killing, rape and torture continue.”
There have been peculating presidents before -- think President Harding of the Teapot Dome scandal -- but no incumbent has ever cashed in so openly and maliciously from the Oval Office. No one has so monetized the presidency, grabbed gifts such as large aircraft from Qatar, parlayed efforts to end wars with the simultaneous erections of hotels and golf courses (the Gaza Riviera), and tried to demand payment for security and humanitarian aid to allies and unfortunates. (And no president has ever destroyed the physical White House as this one is doing.)
Trump’s tariffs cut two ways as well, some to enrich his families if he holds off or reduces imports. And then there are the pardons of crypto and corruption mavens -- all for cold cash payments. The U.S. has been reduced by Trump to a giant illicit vending machine.
Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York called Trump a “con man,” and so he remains, cutting corners, enriching himself and his family, doing deals for the cash rather than the principle. It is no wonder that the U.S. ranks lower and lower each year on the CPI.
Happy Presidents’ Day. This, accordingly, is a fitting column to honor the day, not the corrupt incumbent.
A sorry state of affairs, which it would seem can only get worse before it gets better.
First, I am surprised that the US has not slipped lower on the list of non corrupt countries- it seems somewhat insulting, that exclamation mark of yours, Robert, when observing that the US was now lower on the list than France. Frankly, and I say so from the perspective of someone who has lived in France for the last 5 years and observed the antics of elections being bought by vested interests in the US since lobbying began there at the beginning of US politics, I am pretty appalled at that exclamation mark.
Second, I presume that Trump’s requirement that countries wishing to join his execrable “world peace” organisation must pay one billion IN CASH to him, its president for life, will now shoot the US faster down the list of non-corrupt countries than a speeding bullet.
Thirdly, I would be interested to know where my country Australia sits on that list. I know for a fact that there is corruption everywhere n local politics. But I also know for a fact that your average Australian voter will not tolerate the kind of votes-for-cash mentality that has been endemic in US politics since the beginning of time and despise any attempts by interest groups to lobby politicians to act in their financial interests. It is also a staunchly fair and extremes-rejecting electorate in a country which has had the good sense to make voting compulsory since 1924.