Any way you slice or dice the productive output of the Trump White House and its Republican Party enablers, what you find is a heaving portion of deceit, double-dealing, and self-enrichment. And the public has noticed: Ahead of the midterm elections, voters say “corruption” is their number one concern. In fact, a Gallup poll found 89 percent of Americans believe government corruption is widespread—that is the highest figure ever recorded on the subject and a view shared across party lines (83 percent of Republicans, 91 percent of Democrats).
So people might be primed for a new documentary that puts MAGA malfeasance under a microscope. On Tuesday, Defiance.org released Corruptionland, an investigation into the staggering scale of corruption in Trump’s Washington.
“For two years, Trump’s scandals have hit one at a time, and each one gets buried under the next,” said Miles Taylor, executive producer of the film and the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration. “So we added them up. When you put 100 episodes in one place, the scale is staggering: $377 billion in a tangled web of alleged corruption that is without any precedent in American history. Even that number undersells it, because you can’t put a price on the president’s revenge agenda and his weaponization of federal power.
Every American deserves to see the full picture before they vote, and now they can.”
In the film, Taylor is joined by Donald Sherman, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW; together, they walk the National Mall and provide a geographic map of the Trump administration’s misdeeds. Along the way, a host of former officials and advocates give an intimate view of how long-erected safeguards against corruption were dismantled from the inside, including former DOJ Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer, former ABC News journalist Terry Moran, former FBI official Chris O’Leary, Democracy Forward president Skye Perryman, Representative Jason Crow, and others.
Viewers are going to get the kind of civic education that the political media is often incapable of providing. As the producers describe, “The documentary traces how the five ‘filters’ that historically checked presidential corruption—from White House ethics lawyers to inspectors general to Congress—have been purged, captured, or sidelined.”
As I’ve written in the past, the mainstream media has been slow on the uptake where corruption is concerned. When Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán was defeated back in April, news outlets seemed to have been caught flat-flooted that a broad anti-corruption message could succeed so vividly in a country that seemed to be so deeply mired in authoritarianism.
Democrats, on the other hand, have been ahead of the curve. As The Washington Sun (then doing business as NOTUS) recently reported, “Democratic candidates are leaning into anti-corruption messaging this cycle, seeing it as an opportunity to emphasize what they see as excessive corporate influence, unethical stock trading and shady behavior from their opponents.”
“I’ve been on the receiving end of the president’s corruption,” Taylor said. “He accused me of treason and issued an executive order directing his agencies to investigate me for First Amendment protected speech. I was not afraid to call out his corruption then, and I’m not afraid now. Neither are millions of Americans who are speaking up.
“This isn’t about Republicans and Democrats anymore,” Taylor added. “It’s about a constitutional order that faces a mortal threat—and an internal rot that will destroy our republic if we don’t address it.” With Democrats on the hunt and the public hungry to set things right, Corruptionland’s timely dose of Trump transgressions will add considerable fuel to a raging fire.