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Michael Waldman
Jun 03, 2026
Brennan Center for Justice
I’ve written that corruption is the sleeper issue of 2026. Well, it’s awake. And the issue may be bigger than I realized.
That’s the implication of a new national poll released Tuesday by the Brennan Center. The survey was conducted in late April and early May, just before the president’s attempt to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to funnel taxpayer money to his political allies.
The results are striking. More than 9 in 10 voters believe corruption is a big problem across politics and government. Large majorities view corruption as endemic and deeply embedded in government institutions, from the Supreme Court to Congress to the presidency. They are dejected about the fact that scandals continuously go without consequences and shocking revelations fail to produce reform.
Margins are overwhelming among Democrats, Republicans, and independents.
Vast majorities believe this corruption is part of why government doesn’t respond to major issues, including concerns like affordability and housing.
Most importantly, voters back bold reform. Eighty-three percent want a law that bars presidents from having conflicts of interest and holds them to stronger ethical standards. Eighty-one percent want a new federal ethics enforcer. Seventy-nine percent want a constitutional amendment that restores limits on money in elections, and other anti-corruption measures received similar levels of support.
It’s hard to find a set of proposals with a wider bipartisan appeal.
Yet there are notes here that should jar complacency. Listen carefully to voters. They define corruption broadly. Vast majorities see the spectacle of politicians catering to the interests of billionaires and big corporations as corrupt, not surprisingly. But to most Americans, wasting taxpayer dollars and even failing to respond to constituent needs are also forms of corruption.
Vast majorities believe this corruption is part of why government doesn’t respond to major issues, including concerns like affordability and housing. How do we connect these arcane government rules to people’s economic well-being? Voters are already doing so.
There are warning signs aplenty for politicians from both parties. Other polls have shown that voters think neither Democratic nor Republican politicians are better than the other on the issue.
Policymakers should understand that the public’s conception of what has gone wrong goes far deeper than super PACs or White House ballrooms or even slush funds. To them, it is a system that is fundamentally misfiring. A government that is not performing. And there is a willingness to name names and assign blame.
In some ways, these results are ominous. We often note that the 2024 election was the first time since the 1800s where the incumbent party lost the White House three times in a row (2016, 2020, 2024). This survey shows a deeply disquieted electorate, scornful of the political system and furious at its flaws. That environment created the conditions for President Donald Trump’s populist nationalism to emerge in 2016. It hasn’t gone away.
Yet this is also the kindling that can fuel new approaches, sharper critiques, and stronger solutions. If polls are to be believed, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) has turned his political fortunes through a relentless and often stirring stump-speech focus on corruption.
The breadth of public unhappiness suggests a deeper moral critique. Even now, amid wrenching technological change and evaporating standards, people seem focused on an underlying core of personal responsibility.
My old boss, President Bill Clinton, often talked this way, especially when he was running for president in 1992. “The American dream that we were all raised on is a simple but powerful one,” he would say. “If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be given a chance to go as far as your God-given ability will take you.”
More recently, that ethos was given voice in Hungary by its new president, Péter Magyar. Running against the authoritarian kleptocrat Viktor Orbán, Magyar vowed that Hungary would no longer be “a country without consequences.” He pledged to oversee not just new policies but a thorough effort to clean house and to hold accountable those who had stolen from the people.
The new Brennan Center research suggests that voters here, too, are ready for a country with consequences. That will help shape the next political era—if we are ready to make it happen.
© 2023 Brennan Center for Justice
Michael Waldman is President of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a nonpartisan law and policy institute that focuses on improving the systems of democracy and justice.
Full Bio >
I’ve written that corruption is the sleeper issue of 2026. Well, it’s awake. And the issue may be bigger than I realized.
That’s the implication of a new national poll released Tuesday by the Brennan Center. The survey was conducted in late April and early May, just before the president’s attempt to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to funnel taxpayer money to his political allies.
The results are striking. More than 9 in 10 voters believe corruption is a big problem across politics and government. Large majorities view corruption as endemic and deeply embedded in government institutions, from the Supreme Court to Congress to the presidency. They are dejected about the fact that scandals continuously go without consequences and shocking revelations fail to produce reform.
Margins are overwhelming among Democrats, Republicans, and independents.
Vast majorities believe this corruption is part of why government doesn’t respond to major issues, including concerns like affordability and housing.
Most importantly, voters back bold reform. Eighty-three percent want a law that bars presidents from having conflicts of interest and holds them to stronger ethical standards. Eighty-one percent want a new federal ethics enforcer. Seventy-nine percent want a constitutional amendment that restores limits on money in elections, and other anti-corruption measures received similar levels of support.
It’s hard to find a set of proposals with a wider bipartisan appeal.
Yet there are notes here that should jar complacency. Listen carefully to voters. They define corruption broadly. Vast majorities see the spectacle of politicians catering to the interests of billionaires and big corporations as corrupt, not surprisingly. But to most Americans, wasting taxpayer dollars and even failing to respond to constituent needs are also forms of corruption.
Vast majorities believe this corruption is part of why government doesn’t respond to major issues, including concerns like affordability and housing. How do we connect these arcane government rules to people’s economic well-being? Voters are already doing so.
There are warning signs aplenty for politicians from both parties. Other polls have shown that voters think neither Democratic nor Republican politicians are better than the other on the issue.
Policymakers should understand that the public’s conception of what has gone wrong goes far deeper than super PACs or White House ballrooms or even slush funds. To them, it is a system that is fundamentally misfiring. A government that is not performing. And there is a willingness to name names and assign blame.
In some ways, these results are ominous. We often note that the 2024 election was the first time since the 1800s where the incumbent party lost the White House three times in a row (2016, 2020, 2024). This survey shows a deeply disquieted electorate, scornful of the political system and furious at its flaws. That environment created the conditions for President Donald Trump’s populist nationalism to emerge in 2016. It hasn’t gone away.
Yet this is also the kindling that can fuel new approaches, sharper critiques, and stronger solutions. If polls are to be believed, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) has turned his political fortunes through a relentless and often stirring stump-speech focus on corruption.
The breadth of public unhappiness suggests a deeper moral critique. Even now, amid wrenching technological change and evaporating standards, people seem focused on an underlying core of personal responsibility.
My old boss, President Bill Clinton, often talked this way, especially when he was running for president in 1992. “The American dream that we were all raised on is a simple but powerful one,” he would say. “If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be given a chance to go as far as your God-given ability will take you.”
More recently, that ethos was given voice in Hungary by its new president, Péter Magyar. Running against the authoritarian kleptocrat Viktor Orbán, Magyar vowed that Hungary would no longer be “a country without consequences.” He pledged to oversee not just new policies but a thorough effort to clean house and to hold accountable those who had stolen from the people.
The new Brennan Center research suggests that voters here, too, are ready for a country with consequences. That will help shape the next political era—if we are ready to make it happen.
© 2023 Brennan Center for Justice
Michael Waldman is President of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a nonpartisan law and policy institute that focuses on improving the systems of democracy and justice.
Full Bio >
No President ‘More Brazenly Corrupt’ Than Trump, Says Ilhan Omar
Responding to Trump’s slur that Somali Americans are “all crooks,” Omar said the president “uses fraud as a political cudgel while protecting his donor base and enriching himself.”
US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) speaks with a delegate during Day 2 of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party Convention in the Mayo Civic Center in Rochester, Minnesota on May 30, 2026.
(Photo by Alex Kormann/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images)
Stephen Prager
Jun 02, 2026
COMMON DREAM
US Rep. Ilhan Omar issued a blistering response to President Donald Trump’s attacks on Minnesota and its Somali community on Tuesday with a Guardian opinion piece arguing that “there has never been a more brazenly corrupt president.”
The Democratic Minneapolis congresswoman has weathered ceaseless personal insults from the president since first ascending to office in 2019 that have grown increasingly racist in his second term—threatening to strip her of her US citizenship and “throw her the hell out” of the country and referring to Somalis collectively as “garbage”and “very low-IQ people,” who should all be deported despite mostly being legal US citizens.
“Any keen observer will recognize the pattern of inciting hostility against me and the Somali community whenever his own failures and corruption catches up to him,” Omar said. “He routinely reaches for the same tired playbook of lies, racism, and deflection.”
During a Cabinet meeting last week, Trump launched into yet another tirade: “The Somalians, what they’ve done to Minnesota, the Somalians, crooked as hell. Ilhan Omar, crooked as hell,” he said. “They’re all crooks, and we got them, we got them. Now we’re putting the clamps on.”
Trump was referring to a series of fraud cases in the state, in which organizations—many of which were run by Somali Americans—were found to have diverted hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds meant for food assistance, disability, and childcare, mostly in investigations that began during the Biden administration.
But as Omar wrote on Tuesday, Trump “uses fraud as a political cudgel while protecting his donor base and enriching himself.”
“The truth is, Trump doesn’t care about addressing fraud,” she said. “He has repeatedly pardoned and rewarded some of the most brazen financial criminals.”
As Omar detailed:
He pardoned Philip Esformes, convicted in what his own Department of Justice described as the “largest healthcare fraud scheme ever charged.”
He granted clemency to Lawrence Duran after a $205 million fraud conviction. He commuted Jason Galanis’ sentence and pardoned Devon Archer, who were both tied to tens of millions in fraud, and also pardoned Joseph Schwartz for a $38 million fraud scheme, and reality stars Todd and Julie Chrisley for multimillion-dollar bank fraud. He’s now defrauding the American people further by creating a $1.8 billion slush fund of taxpayer dollars to compensate people he pardoned for beating cops and ransacking the US Capitol on January 6 after they pleaded guilty or were convicted of such crimes.
After losing a court case and facing bipartisan backlash in Congress, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed on Tuesday that the administration was backing off the $1.8 billion fund.
Omar acknowledged the fraud cases in Minnesota, such as the Feeding Our Future nonprofit scandal, in which 65 people connected to the scheme have been convicted of stealing money intended to feed children during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We should all collectively care about the damage that these criminals have done to public faith in programs that save lives and feed children,” Omar said. “But instead of addressing the fraud equally and without exception, Trump and his cronies have turned combating fraud into a partisan spectacle defined by a level of racist vitriol that just years ago would have shocked most Republicans, not to mention the American people at large.”
“While Minnesota leaders were prosecuting thieves, Trump was letting them out of prison,” she added. “He enriches himself, his family profits from crypto deals, and world leaders understand that the presidency is now for sale. His underhanded operation racks up billions for his family and friends while working Americans struggle to afford basic necessities.”
The Trump administration has used fraud cases in Minnesota to inflict a sort of collective economic punishment on its poorest residents.
Using outlandish allegations that Somalis were looting tens of billions from Medicaid, the administration has frozen more than $350 million in federal Medicaid reimbursements owed to Minnesota and threatened to withhold more than $2 billion annually, which state officials have warned will destabilize benefits for the 1.2 million Minnesotans who rely on the program.
“The reality is that Trump and Republicans are not interested in combating fraud and corruption or having a real conversation to address it. They are interested in ransacking the public good for their own profit,” Omar said. “They are interested in clicks, outrage, and theatrics in order to deflect from their own corruption. The American people deserve better than a president who uses the pretense of accountability to punish his opponents and reward his allies.”
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