For generations, Americans worried that presidents might misuse power for political ends. Now we are witnessing the wholesale misuse of public office to amass private riches—and the collapse of the safeguards meant to stop it in the future.

Americans are exhausted.

The news cycle seems to be spinning out of control. Every day brings another shock—another unprecedented claim of presidential power, another honorable norm smashed, another desperate fight over the authority of courts, or free speech, or fair elections.

The sheer velocity of disruption has produced a strange blindness in many of us. Citizens simply do not have the bandwidth to notice something equally consequential that is happening every day, in plain sight: The systematic conversion of presidential power into private wealth.

This is not about some dubious deals, or some embarrassing relatives trading on a famous name. We’ve seen that before. This is about something much larger. What the Trump family and their cronies here and abroad are doing is transforming the American presidency itself into a public office that can be used used not merely to exercise power, but to monetize it.

You hear about this story. But not enough, in my judgment. Because this is not a political scandal. To me, it feels like the corruption becoming embedded in so many ways in our government, in our markets, in our media—it’s turning us into a foreign country. Soon, we will not recognize our beloved republic.

Recently, some observers have begun to say plainly what many mainstream political reporters still hesitate to admit. In the magazine Foreign Affairs, Professors Alexander Cooley of Barnard College and Daniel Nexon of Georgetown University argue that the reason the media keeps misunderstanding Trump’s foreign policy is primarily because of a failure of imagination. Reporters simply cannot grasp what is happening in front of their eyes because they assume that all presidents (even Trump) act, however imperfectly, in pursuit of some vision of the national interest. A New Deal. A Great Society. A movement to Make America Great Again. It’s politics, right? And politics is about using power to achieve some goal for the nation.

“It is tempting to view Trump’s corrupt dealings as less important that his administration’s embrace of far-right ideology,” Cooley and Nexon write. “But under Trump, kleptocracy and ideology are inextricably intertwined. And that makes it more likely that kleptocratic governance—in both domestic and foreign policy—will endure even after he leaves office.”

Unknown Number Calling? It’s Not Random

The BBC caught scam call center workers on hidden cameras as they laughed at the people they were tricking. One worker bragged about making $250K from victims. The disturbing truth? Scammers don’t pick phone numbers at random. They buy your contact info from data brokers.

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Foreign governments seeking American favor understand the new system under Donald Trump perfectly. Massive investments and servile flattery flow toward businesses connected to the president. Public policy follows.

Meanwhile, the guardrails that once constrained such behavior are being dismantled. Career officials get pushed aside. Inspectors general across the government are dismissed. The Republican Congress is largely supine. And the “Justice Department”? Don’t make me laugh.

Confidence in the integrity of our old American governing institutions is eroding. The assumption now is that there is no such thing as a disinterested policy or a decent public official. Citizens come to believe it’s all just a racket.

So the real danger is not merely Trump’s personal conduct. It is the precedent.

Once politics becomes openly profitable, future politicians learn the lesson. The expectation of enrichment spreads downward through the system. Elected officials and bureaucrats coming up at the national, state, and local levels see their careers differently. Not all will; but many. Norms that took generations to build—civil service protections, financial disclosures, anti-bribery laws—dissolve through new practices and tendentious reinterpretations of old standards. Corruption institutionalizes itself.

And here is the most unsettling question: will voters care?

Scandal once depended on revelation. Today, everything is revealed constantly. Outrage burns hot and evaporates quickly. At first, we see only the sins of the other side. If it’s your guy—he’s a crook. If it’s my guy—it’s a witch hunt. (We heard some of that from Democrats in the Hunter Biden scandal.) Pretty soon, the general public absorbs extensive corruption among all political parties and movements as just another feature of American politics.

For more than a century, Americans built safeguards in our laws and practices and norms of public life, in order to ensure that public offices could not be openly converted into private fortunes. Those safeguards are now being dismantled in full view of the country.

—Terry