President Donald Trump and his party can’t seem to escape the stench of corruption, and a former whistleblower in Trump’s first administration says it’s obvious why.
“There’s a Watergate scandal a day, and JD Vance even joked about that a few weeks ago at the Nixon library, of all places,” former Homeland Security analyst Miles Taylor told CNN anchor Kasie Hunt on Tuesday. “… Trump said he was going to drain the swamp, but he has refilled the swamp.”
Taylor, who has a new documentary screening at corruption.org, says he and other researchers looked at the anticorruption filters that are supposed to exist in Washington, from White House ethics officials and lawyers to the prosecutors and agents at the FBI and DOJ, to the inspector general, all the way to Congress. The documentary “Corruptionland” examines which filters are working and which are not, but Taylor said what surprised him while making the documentary was the sheer amount of corruption at work.
“We tried to do an assessment of the top 100 instances of alleged corruption in the second Trump administration. The number is $377 billion implicated in those top 100 episodes we reviewed. And … that number blew me away. I was very surprised at how high it was,” said Taylor.
CNN reports that corruption and grift is spreading as one of the issues draining voters’ wallets, with mentions of corruption on left leaning podcasts going up 21 percent in September. And Hunt reported that closing polls are showing that it is becoming increasingly important to voters in a recent Fox News poll, with voters saying they are more concerned about corruption in government than even inflation and gas prices.
“What’s more, voters seem to think that if elected to Congress, Republicans would produce more corruption than Democrats by about a 2 to 1 margin,” said Hunt.
The New York Times Editorial Board condemned the Congressional Republican majority Tuesday, accusing lawmakers of absolute surrender of checks and balances, which enabled economic instability, an unauthorized foreign war, and systemic government corruption.
But Hunt also said the U.S. suffers from a pall of indifference when it comes to Trump’s corruption. Taylor dismissed that argument.
“I think the poll numbers disprove it,” said Taylor. “In fact, I was the first one to point out about a week and a half ago that not since polling began in the 1930s has corruption topped the list of voters’ concerns in an election year. Not even in 1974 after Watergate. Not only do they care, Americans are saying that this is the issue they care the most about. The president cannot stop measuring the drapes in his ballroom and building monuments to himself. And they’re out there suffering.”
“We went and we talked to Trump voters who were in Washington, D.C., visiting. We ran into one three-time Trump voter from Texas, standing in front of the White House, looking at the cranes over the ballroom. And he said, ‘I just can’t do it anymore. I just cannot do it anymore. What I’m seeing is sickening.’”
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