Today I saw a reposting of the June, 2024 cover of Rolling Stone that had a picture of Donald Trump adjusting his tie with the headline: “The Most Corrupt President Ever. Ever.” It went on to say, “From self-dealing to abuse of power, no president in history has put personal greed ahead of the country like Donald Trump.” And of course, that was BEFORE he started his second term and his recently exposed $2.2 billion extortion juggernaut began during his current administration.
Corruption isn’t a modern pathology, it’s essentially been around since the beginnings of organized government itself. In the ancient world, Egyptian pharaohs, Mesopotamian officials, and Roman magistrates all dealt with it. Rome is the best documented example of early corruption (hence the common tendency to equate our times to those of the falling of the Roman Empire). The late Roman Republic was riddled with bribery, vote-buying, and provincial governors systematically looting their territories. Verres, prosecuted by Cicero in 70 BC for plundering Sicily, is the canonical case. The word “corruption” itself is Latin (corruptio), meaning decay or rot.
In Medieval Europe, simony (the practice of buying church offices) was so endemic it became its own named sin. Feudal administration was structurally corrupt by design with officials almost expected to extract personal income from their positions. The line between taxation, fees, and theft was essentially nonexistent.
In the early modern period, the sale of offices became formalized in France, England, and Spain when literally purchasing government positions as investments paid returns through graft. Patronage networks (clientelism) dominated politics everywhere. Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister (1720s–40s), openly maintained power through systematic bribery of Parliament. Then, in late 19th century America, the Gilded Age that Trump so admires, produced the most spectacular corruption in US history to that point. Tammany Hall, the Credit Mobilier railroad scandal, the Whiskey Ring under Grant, and robber barons openly purchasing senators was all the rage. The phrase “an honest politician is one who stays bought” dates to this era.
With the 20th century, corruption industrialized itself alongside government and as the scale of public spending created proportionally larger opportunities, so corruption expanded. Kleptocracies emerged in postcolonial Africa, Asia and Latin America (Mobutu, Marcos, the Duvaliers) where rulers simply treated national treasuries as personal accounts. This was further funded with all the post-WWII attempts to provide foreign aid and development dollars in the zeal of liberal democracy. The Cold War made it all worse as both superpowers actively subsidized corrupt regimes as strategic assets.
The pattern across all of these eras is that corruption tends to flourish where oversight is weak, officials are underpaid relative to what their position can extract, and the probability of punishment is low. Transparency, independent judiciary, free press, and civil service professionalization are the historically consistent suppressants, none of which eliminate it, but all of which reduce it substantially. Is it any wonder that Trump specializes in obfuscation, exerting undue influence on the “independent” judiciary through intimidation and ridicule, tries to quash the free press (both written and broadcast through regulation and personal defamation litigation) and eliminate professional civil service by calling it the “Deep State”? The uncomfortable through-line is that “corruption” is partly definitional. What one era treats as normal administrative practice (gifts to officials, patronage appointments, payment for access), a later era reframes as criminal. The corruption thing itself never disappears, only the threshold for what gets labeled and adjudicated. And right now, Trump has normalized corruption to the point of turning anyone who doesn’t fill their pockets with both hands as a chump.
This trend spreads well beyond government as well. I recall a New Yorker cartoon I saw during the last big round of Latin American debt abrogation…it showed a banker telling his client, “No, just because Brazil won’t pay its debts does not mean you can do the same!” The places I see this spreading to are already coming up in my expert witness work. Since that work is predicated on civil disputes, what can be less civil that divorce litigation? I am regularly asked to look at situations where complex financial engineering is put to work in the arena of “this is mine and that is yours” of divorce settlement. The blend and overlay of tax-related structuring and then opacity-related finagling, when people are trying to shield assets and keep more or take more from the marital pot (only after keeping the government from getting its hands on it) is the basis of much of the need for experts to opine on what is right and wrong or at least what is appropriate versus abnormal practice. In most of Western history, divorce didn’t exist as a civil matter… marriage was a sacrament controlled by the Church, and dissolution required either annulment (marriage declared void from the start) or a private Act of Parliament/legislature for the very wealthy. Both systems were inherently corrupt with annulments required finding canonical grounds that often didn’t exist, so evidence was manufactured, witnesses were paid, and church officials were bribed. Henry VIII’s serial annulments are the most famous example of raw power distorting the process, but it happened at every level where money was available. When England passed the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 creating civil divorce courts, adultery became the primary ground. This immediately generated a corruption industry. Couples who mutually wanted to divorce but lacked legal grounds simply fabricated adultery. A husband would hire a woman (often a prostitute) to be “discovered” with him in a hotel room by a private detective, also hired for the purpose. Everyone involved was paid, the evidence was staged, and the courts knew it and largely looked the other way because the alternative was trapping people in dead marriages. This was so widespread it was practically semi-official and London had agencies that arranged the entire transaction. The US had similar problems, compounded by wildly varying state laws. Nevada famously became a divorce mill in the early 20th century, establishing six-week residency requirements specifically to attract unhappy couples from stricter states. Reno and Las Vegas built cottage industries around it: boarding houses, lawyers, and judges all profited from the flow. New York’s adultery-only divorce law until 1966 meant Manhattan divorce lawyers routinely arranged the same hotel-room fabrication scheme as England, essentially openly.
Once no-fault divorce spread through the US in the 1970s (California first in 1969), the adultery-fabrication racket died, but corruption migrated to custody and financial proceedings. Hidden assets became the dominant form, with offshore accounts, undervalued businesses, real estate transferred to relatives, cash businesses with manipulated books. The forensic accounting profession essentially grew up in response to systematic financial fraud in divorce. Divorce proceedings concentrate enormous financial stakes, high emotions, and asymmetric information (spouses know things about each other’s assets that courts can’t easily verify) in a system that historically had weak oversight and variable judicial quality. That combination reliably generates corruption in almost any legal system, not because divorce lawyers or judges are uniquely venal, but because the structural incentives are unusually favorable to it.
The increase in political corruption, ala Trump, is starting to show up big-time in litigation proceedings from what I can see. The new cartoon that will probably appear in the New Yorker this time around is a man sitting on the witness stand before a judge and the judge saying, “No, Mr. Smith, just because Donald Trump lies, cheats and steals does NOT mean its OK for you to do it in this divorce!”