There’s more to Trump’s corruption than stealing money

Donald Trump’s self-dealing and profiteering from high office, a longtime subtheme of his presidency, has just become its defining story.

Consider the following list of news and revelations, all from roughly the past week:

It is not hard to see the problem with this behavior. Most people intuitively know it’s bad for politicians to abuse their positions of power for profit.

Yet what Trump is doing is something far more than “ordinary” corruption. He is, very intentionally, attempting to transform the very operating logic of the American political system: to replace a political order structured by rule of law to one where major decisions ultimately come down to whether you have the personal favor of the president.

This is a fundamental transformation — one far more sweeping than widely appreciated. Once you understand it, you understand not just what Trump truly wants, but the deepest ways in which his presidency could affect us all.

In their book Violence and Social Orders, the political scientists Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast sort advanced human societies into roughly two buckets: the “natural state” and the “open access state.”

The natural state, so-called because it was the dominant one for most of recorded history, operates on behalf of self-serving elites. These elite groups aim, first and foremost, at profiting via rent-seeking — which is to say, using their control over power and resources to extract money from others. Think European nobles owning land in perpetuity, taking tributary fees from peasants living under their rule, and ensuring these extractive rights were passed to their children.

In the natural state, the entire social order is bent toward preserving this unequal relation. Justice is not a matter of impartial laws, but rather dispensations handed out to friends or favored groups.

“The essence of a natural state is personal relationships,” North et al. write. “The legal system cannot enforce individual rights if every individual is different, if every relationship between two individuals depends uniquely on their identity within the dominant coalition.”

The “open access order,” by contrast, is an arrangement defined by formal neutrality. Access to power and privilege are not determined primarily by personal relationships or inherited advantages, but from a set of legal rules that apply to everyone. While there are still wealthy, rent-seeking elites, membership in that class is not static; legal equality allows people to challenge entrenched interests and outcompete them in the marketplace. The politics of personal relationships is replaced by an impersonal politics where neutral rules apply to all, regardless of class or identity.

This is, at least on paper, the basic framework for a modern liberal democracy like the United States.

While one can point to any number of ways in which contemporary America falls short of the open access ideal, from declining social mobility to continued race-based inequality, the system is still qualitatively different from natural states like those of feudal Europe or the Jim Crow South — or even modern developing nations marked by weak rule of law and endemic corruption.

One way to look at the Trump administration is as a project of reversing the American transition from natural state to open access order. He is trying to erode the impersonal rules that govern the way the state is supposed to work, and replace them with a logic of favoritism based on personal access to the president.

Traditional corruption, in the sense of literally profiting from the presidency, is the most obvious example. He has bent his office’s immense powers toward personal profit in extraordinarily blatant ways — treating the country in much the same way that a medieval noble treated his fiefdom.

Trump’s personalist mission is equally obvious when you look at his approach to the Justice Department. His successful effort to strip its traditional independence and turn it into a tool for pursuing his interests — including prosecuting his political enemies on flimsy pretexts — represents the replacement of an open access justice system with one more closely resembling that of a natural state.

You can see natural state logic at work in his approach to taxation, where countries and companies get tariff exemptions if they manage to personally curry favor with Trump. You can see it in his approach to regulation, where Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr is encouraged to try and censor comedians who mock the president. You can see it is in his management of the US military, where he has deputized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to fire generals deemed politically unreliable (these generally happen to be women or racial minorities). You can see it in his foreign policy, a “neo-royalist” mixing of personal and public that puts the interests of ruling cliques ahead of public writ large. You can even see it in something as marginal as the Department of Transportation, where Secretary Sean Duffy used his office as an excuse to go on a bizarre family road trip funded by direct donations from Toyota and Boeing.

Many of these policies are authoritarian, in the sense that they attack basic rights and freedoms that allow for fair and healthy political competition. But all of them, even the ones that might seem like “ordinary” corruption, work to erode the essential impersonal logic of American governance — and, in its place, stand up a new system of government by personal access and rent-seeking.

Obviously, Trump himself doesn’t think about his objective in such abstract terms. But the North et al. framework is nonetheless useful — as it helps us see the furthest reaching implications of both his corruption and his broader personalization of the government.

What’s happening is probably more subtle than a full-scale overthrow of the old order; the Trump administration appears too incompetent, too haphazard to effect something so grandiose. Rather, his rule is blending the two systems — integrating natural state logic into institutions still nominally built around open-access principles.

The real-world implications of this shift are likely to be profound.

For the next few years, everyone in corporate America and the legal world knows that the best way to get what you want from the White House isn’t to make a persuasive case on substantive or even political grounds. Instead, it is to bribe and flatter the people in charge of making the decision, most of all the president. If you can make him richer, or even feel important, you will become exponentially more likely to get that payout or regulation you might otherwise have lobbied for through normal channels.

This breaks the incentive structure that underpins open access societies. In other countries that have gone on similar trajectories, such as Hungary, these specific kinds of corruption have led to economic disaster. Growth stagnates, as companies succeed based on connections rather than profits. Public services degrade, as they are administered not for public benefit but to make the administrators wealthy. Even the arts and culture suffer.

In one passage, North et al. describe the political differences between open access orders and natural states in some uncomfortably familiar terms:

In the open access orders, legislation provides details about how laws are administered; for example, that a person recently unemployed is to receive benefits of a certain amount for a certain duration. In these states, impartial, rule-of-law courts impose penalties on the executive for failing to implement the laws according to the provisions specified in the law. Not so in the typical natural state. Instead, corrupt courts do not constrain the executive; moreover, the legislature rarely — and rationally — undertakes the job of writing detailed provisions to constrain the executive, leaving the executive great freedom to allocate the funds as desired. Evidence from Latin America suggests that social programs serve immediate political goals, such as reelection, rather than their intended purposes.

One shouldn’t expect Trump to, say, ensure that only Republicans get Social Security payments: The open access logic of the US welfare state remains too strong for that.

But you can see versions of it already playing out where Trump has more discretion, like turning disaster relief into a political favor doled out to red states. And the passages about legislatures abandoning their jobs and courts deferring to Trump ring far too true.

We should expect more of this in the years to come, even if Trump experiences a major defeat in the 2026 midterms.

Trump wants to rule without constraint, to turn the presidency into an all-consuming office where he can decide on policy purely based on whim and personal interest. In doing so, he is breaking a fundamental part of the American social order — one that underpins nearly every element of how our society functions. It is impossible to predict all of the likely consequences, but there is little doubt that they will be profound.