Unfortunately, decades of media conditioning and extreme polarization has led to a situation in which the normal checks and balances have been severely degraded or are non functional.
A significant fraction of the population is happy to overlook excesses from 'their' side. Combine that with extreme gerrymandering and you have the recipe for a situation where a majority of elected lawmakers have no real fear of an election loss.
We have a situation where the same people who were apoplectic about Hunter Biden's laptop are whistling past things like the pardon of George Santos and the Binance founder(with Trump admitting he didn't who CZ was).
There is no easy path back from this situation. Democracies that have reached this stage of late have struggled to come back.
autoexec
Corruption in the US isn't new, but it's never been done as openly as it has been recently. I don't think it's a good thing. It shows that the government isn't concerned about what the public thinks, which suggests that they believe they no longer have to be. That's not a healthy sign for what's supposed to be a democracy.
show comments
pseudosavant
Looking at their charts, Democrats and Independents clearly think corruption is up a lot since 2024. But Republicans think corruption is down from 2024. The polarization of the electorate in the U.S. is pretty incredible.
show comments
chr15m
Most democracy measurement projects and indices have shown a decline in democratic performance for the US over the past decade.
EIU reclassified the country from "full democracy" to "flawed democracy" in 2016.
V-Dem went from "liberal democracy" to "electoral democracy" in 2025.
When you have a wide variety of entities measuring the same trend, it is probably broadly correct.
Even before this new record high, in the previous ~15 years the average seemed to be around 75% (±), which seems… high? I would perhaps understand the US public thinking that (some levels of) government being "incompetent", but not corrupt.
By some measure the US does seem to have 'decent' scores for perception of corruption:
Meta: in some ways it seems that the public's perception of government is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the US there is a large vein of "government is bad/incompetent/corrupt" and that's apparently what the US often gets. While in (e.g.) Scandinavian countries there appears to be a higher level of trust in government, and the people there tend to elect more competent politicians (?).
show comments
swed420
Related:
New High of 45% in U.S. Identify as Political Independents (January 12, 2026)
"Drain the swamp". Everything is projection. What they say about the Democrats is what they are or aspire to be.
show comments
MBCook
I would be really interested in a much, much longer timescale version of the graph. Like 50 to 100 years.
giantg2
Lots of people here are focused on one guy. But the the article says "widespread". In my experience, much of the corruption is at a local or state level. At the federal level it seems the corruption is mostly related to agencies (GAO reports) and lobbying.
show comments
jghn
Unfortunately if one asks "who is the cause of the corruption" you'd see two very strong modes in the data, and therein lies the issue regarding fixing things.
amazingamazing
> Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country, or not?
How is corruption defined for the purposes of this survey?
If there is none (I assume there is not), then it is only natural this number go up as the media highlights and propagandizes and highlights all actions taken by all government officials.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS
If this is the question they asked:
Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country, or not?
Then that's very open to interpretation. Even if I thought the federal government was not corrupt, but I did think the local or state government was corrupt (or many local governments were, not just my own), I'd answer yes to this question.
They should have broken it down a bit more.
tekla
Note the numbers between 2010 and 2025 were in the 72% to 79% range if you read the article. So numbers have not actually increased that much.
show comments
trashface
The disparity between Trump and previous presidents on income earned while president is so vast, you need a log scale graph to make it meaningful. Your favorite LLM can generate it for you (except maybe grok, I presume)
rush86999
It's like everyone knows the dirty truth, but no one wants to do anything about it.
Why? Self-interest has made everyone blind to open corruption.
The worst part is reality hits 3-4 years later, and the big guy is already out and about. Already with his billions, partying in the Caymans.
Welcome to democratic oligarchy!!
52-hertz_whale
4 year smash and grab. Foxes are in the henhouse.
mberning
The corruption is bad enough at the local level. I can’t even fathom how much theft is going on at the state and federal level. It’s one of the more frustrating things to see how much money you are paying into the system for such meager benefits. We can’t even get sidewalks installed in my area, but the township can certainly give a sweetheart tax break to one of their buddies to build a new gas station.
sublinear
I'm curious how these polls are conducted. These polls are at least already biased since people self-select. If they're online only, even moreso. If they're only advertised to echo chambers, even moreso.
Anyway, the result may be that the polls are only measuring younger people with nothing better to do. That's interesting but only a record high amongst that subpopulation. I'm fairly certain this is business as usual.
surfmike
The most blatant recent case is Trump selling early access to his Truth Social posts
I thought electing an outsider with theretofore no experience nor interest in governing was supposed to break the system in a good way so as to erase the incumbent problems and rebuild with common sense and integrity.
show comments
java-man
Who are these 11%?
show comments
CyberDildonics
Interesting that so far I don't see any comments about the epstein files and half of them not being released even under congressional order, let alone congress now being recessed for two weeks to avoid another vote for a second eptein transparency act.
chris_wot
I’m not an American. Those not American are frankly gobsmacked that U.S. citizens voted the current President in a second time. You all literally saw what he did in his first term!
show comments
lovich
I don’t know why this should be surprising since it’s all out in the open now.
They made Carter give up his family peanut farm to be President.
Trump and his family are selling stock every week, running crypto currency rug pulls, accepting gifts ostensibly for the country that they say will be donated to Trump at the end of his term(the Qatar plane).
It’s all out in the open under Trump term 2.
At this point if you think there isn’t corruption I assume you also think RFK has the right idea about health care and vaccinations.
show comments
jmyeet
In many countries around the world, corruption is a huge problem. But pretty much everywhere it happens there's a surface-level denial or attempt to hide it. If you're Putin or Erdogan, for example, you'll have children who get beneficial contracts and there's layers of obfuscation.
So there are three things that are scary about Trump's corruption:
1. It's so brazen and on a scale rarely seen. Apparently he's made $2 billion since coming back into office and he does so openly. Pardons are for sale. Truth Social has a feature to pay to get early access to posts to trade on, basically. There are crypto rug pulls. The list goes on;
2. A third of the population simply doesn't care and will defend it no matter what; and
3. He'll never be held accountable by any future administration. This is the worst part. If this happened in China, he'd go to prison and his assets would be seized. This would extend to his family and their assets. Just look at Hui Ya Kan [1].
The US just does not punish the wealthy. Look at the Sacklers and Purdue. There's clear evidence they hid the fact that Oxycontin was addictive despite their public claims and they have a large amount of responsibility for the opioid crisis. In a just world, they would all die penniless in 6x8 foot grey prison cells. And who went to prison for the 2008 subprime crisis? Oh, that's right. Nobody.
This also extends to the powerful. George W. Bush had an illegal torture program. Who went to prison for it? Only 1 guy: the whistleblower John Kiriakou for talking about it.
The Supreme Court is utterly corrupt. Anthony Kennedy allegedly traded his retirement for a job for his son. John Roberts's wife makes tens of millions in headhunting fees for finding lawyers to argue before teh Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas is just one bribe after another.
The entire government is captured by people who want to get rich by betraying their country to the ultra-wealthy.
Unfortunately, decades of media conditioning and extreme polarization has led to a situation in which the normal checks and balances have been severely degraded or are non functional.
A significant fraction of the population is happy to overlook excesses from 'their' side. Combine that with extreme gerrymandering and you have the recipe for a situation where a majority of elected lawmakers have no real fear of an election loss.
We have a situation where the same people who were apoplectic about Hunter Biden's laptop are whistling past things like the pardon of George Santos and the Binance founder(with Trump admitting he didn't who CZ was).
There is no easy path back from this situation. Democracies that have reached this stage of late have struggled to come back.
Corruption in the US isn't new, but it's never been done as openly as it has been recently. I don't think it's a good thing. It shows that the government isn't concerned about what the public thinks, which suggests that they believe they no longer have to be. That's not a healthy sign for what's supposed to be a democracy.
Looking at their charts, Democrats and Independents clearly think corruption is up a lot since 2024. But Republicans think corruption is down from 2024. The polarization of the electorate in the U.S. is pretty incredible.
Most democracy measurement projects and indices have shown a decline in democratic performance for the US over the past decade.
EIU reclassified the country from "full democracy" to "flawed democracy" in 2016.
V-Dem went from "liberal democracy" to "electoral democracy" in 2025.
When you have a wide variety of entities measuring the same trend, it is probably broadly correct.
The hope the good citizenry find a fix.
[To be fair the trend is global unfortunately: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/countries-democracies-aut...]
Even before this new record high, in the previous ~15 years the average seemed to be around 75% (±), which seems… high? I would perhaps understand the US public thinking that (some levels of) government being "incompetent", but not corrupt.
By some measure the US does seem to have 'decent' scores for perception of corruption:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
* https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025
Meta: in some ways it seems that the public's perception of government is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the US there is a large vein of "government is bad/incompetent/corrupt" and that's apparently what the US often gets. While in (e.g.) Scandinavian countries there appears to be a higher level of trust in government, and the people there tend to elect more competent politicians (?).
Related:
New High of 45% in U.S. Identify as Political Independents (January 12, 2026)
https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...
"Drain the swamp". Everything is projection. What they say about the Democrats is what they are or aspire to be.
I would be really interested in a much, much longer timescale version of the graph. Like 50 to 100 years.
Lots of people here are focused on one guy. But the the article says "widespread". In my experience, much of the corruption is at a local or state level. At the federal level it seems the corruption is mostly related to agencies (GAO reports) and lobbying.
Unfortunately if one asks "who is the cause of the corruption" you'd see two very strong modes in the data, and therein lies the issue regarding fixing things.
> Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country, or not?
How is corruption defined for the purposes of this survey?
If there is none (I assume there is not), then it is only natural this number go up as the media highlights and propagandizes and highlights all actions taken by all government officials.
If this is the question they asked:
Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country, or not?
Then that's very open to interpretation. Even if I thought the federal government was not corrupt, but I did think the local or state government was corrupt (or many local governments were, not just my own), I'd answer yes to this question.
They should have broken it down a bit more.
Note the numbers between 2010 and 2025 were in the 72% to 79% range if you read the article. So numbers have not actually increased that much.
The disparity between Trump and previous presidents on income earned while president is so vast, you need a log scale graph to make it meaningful. Your favorite LLM can generate it for you (except maybe grok, I presume)
It's like everyone knows the dirty truth, but no one wants to do anything about it.
Why? Self-interest has made everyone blind to open corruption.
The worst part is reality hits 3-4 years later, and the big guy is already out and about. Already with his billions, partying in the Caymans.
Welcome to democratic oligarchy!!
4 year smash and grab. Foxes are in the henhouse.
The corruption is bad enough at the local level. I can’t even fathom how much theft is going on at the state and federal level. It’s one of the more frustrating things to see how much money you are paying into the system for such meager benefits. We can’t even get sidewalks installed in my area, but the township can certainly give a sweetheart tax break to one of their buddies to build a new gas station.
I'm curious how these polls are conducted. These polls are at least already biased since people self-select. If they're online only, even moreso. If they're only advertised to echo chambers, even moreso.
Anyway, the result may be that the polls are only measuring younger people with nothing better to do. That's interesting but only a record high amongst that subpopulation. I'm fairly certain this is business as usual.
The most blatant recent case is Trump selling early access to his Truth Social posts
https://abcnews.com/Politics/profoundly-corrupt-trump-sued-f...
So that is 11% who do not read the news, do not know what corruption is or are benefiting
Citizens United. Nothing else to say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
I thought electing an outsider with theretofore no experience nor interest in governing was supposed to break the system in a good way so as to erase the incumbent problems and rebuild with common sense and integrity.
Who are these 11%?
Interesting that so far I don't see any comments about the epstein files and half of them not being released even under congressional order, let alone congress now being recessed for two weeks to avoid another vote for a second eptein transparency act.
I’m not an American. Those not American are frankly gobsmacked that U.S. citizens voted the current President in a second time. You all literally saw what he did in his first term!
I don’t know why this should be surprising since it’s all out in the open now.
They made Carter give up his family peanut farm to be President.
Trump and his family are selling stock every week, running crypto currency rug pulls, accepting gifts ostensibly for the country that they say will be donated to Trump at the end of his term(the Qatar plane).
It’s all out in the open under Trump term 2.
At this point if you think there isn’t corruption I assume you also think RFK has the right idea about health care and vaccinations.
In many countries around the world, corruption is a huge problem. But pretty much everywhere it happens there's a surface-level denial or attempt to hide it. If you're Putin or Erdogan, for example, you'll have children who get beneficial contracts and there's layers of obfuscation.
So there are three things that are scary about Trump's corruption:
1. It's so brazen and on a scale rarely seen. Apparently he's made $2 billion since coming back into office and he does so openly. Pardons are for sale. Truth Social has a feature to pay to get early access to posts to trade on, basically. There are crypto rug pulls. The list goes on;
2. A third of the population simply doesn't care and will defend it no matter what; and
3. He'll never be held accountable by any future administration. This is the worst part. If this happened in China, he'd go to prison and his assets would be seized. This would extend to his family and their assets. Just look at Hui Ya Kan [1].
The US just does not punish the wealthy. Look at the Sacklers and Purdue. There's clear evidence they hid the fact that Oxycontin was addictive despite their public claims and they have a large amount of responsibility for the opioid crisis. In a just world, they would all die penniless in 6x8 foot grey prison cells. And who went to prison for the 2008 subprime crisis? Oh, that's right. Nobody.
This also extends to the powerful. George W. Bush had an illegal torture program. Who went to prison for it? Only 1 guy: the whistleblower John Kiriakou for talking about it.
The Supreme Court is utterly corrupt. Anthony Kennedy allegedly traded his retirement for a job for his son. John Roberts's wife makes tens of millions in headhunting fees for finding lawyers to argue before teh Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas is just one bribe after another.
The entire government is captured by people who want to get rich by betraying their country to the ultra-wealthy.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-evergrande-founder...
I remember when this used to be a far right conspiracy theory.
But, not the politicians I voted for. It's always the other guys.