The Media’s Groundbreaking Discovery: Anti-Corruption Is Good Politics

Good news has been something of a precious commodity of late, what with the Trump administration still engaged in its slop-conflict with Iran and the president himself taking to depicting himself as a messianic figure online. But in last weekend’s elections in Hungary, Péter Magyar and his Tisza party resoundingly defeated international fascist darling Viktor Orbán and his far-right Fidesz minions. Tisza did so well in these elections, in fact, that they will have the numbers to enact crucial constitutional reforms and undo at least some of the damage of 16 years of authoritarian rule. As a side note, Orbán’s defeat is a black eye for his stateside backers, including Vice President JD Vance, who had personally stumped for the defeated strongman in the waning days of the campaign.

This was, in other words, a good outcome for freedom-loving people everywhere and a result that will hopefully yield further fruit. But there is one by-product that’s truly been a puzzlement. Across the media landscape, the chattering class has assayed the election and made what is—to it, anyway—a fresh discovery: What if political corruption is bad? And what if campaigning against corruption is a winning issue?

The Washington Post’s edit board said that “the main reason for Orbán’s fall was endemic corruption” and the fact that he had constructed “a mafia state.” The Wall Street Journal’s William Galston similarly enthused that Magyar’s focus on “a handful of issues—cronyism and corruption, economic stagnation and inflation, and decaying public services” was a “lesson for Democrats.” And The New York Times edit board, in a piece titled “Here’s How to Defeat Trumpism,” highlighted the fact that Magyar “made corruption a core campaign issue,” and then confidently intoned, “It is easy enough to imagine an American version of this strategy.”

It’s something of a marvel to have so many people so confident in their public declarations that they’ve finally cracked this code, several years after it might have been a useful insight. Trump, who will never be on a ballot again, is corrupt—and maybe that’s his Achilles’ heel! As someone who was trying to explain the depths of Trump’s corruption and the importance of safeguarding the constitutional bulwarks against a president using his position to enrich himself before Trump’s first inauguration, I can only say that these folks are a little late to the party.

It’s extremely cute that so many media elites have decided that this is a lesson Democrats need to learn when, in fact, many Democrats have actually already figured it out. Here, for example, is Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, speaking in September 2025 to Pod Save America: “Vast sums of corporate and billionaire money in our political system—with or without Trump—are why ordinary people are so ill served by elected officials and by Congress.… If we don’t solve this problem, even once we put Trump back in the box in the midterms and once he’s gone, the country will still be in deep trouble.”

Ossoff is one of 120 Democratic candidates who long ago signed onto End Citizens United’s “Unrig Washington” pledge, which asks candidates to support three agenda items: a total ban on congressional stock trading, a refusal of corporate PAC money, and a promise to undo the damage of the Citizens United ruling and to crack down on dark money in our politics. Maybe everyone at the big newspapers missed this. Notably, NOTUS—the upstart publication that’s lately been eating The Washington Post’s lunch—took stock of the scene two months ago and found that “Democratic candidates are leaning into anti-corruption messaging this cycle, seeing it as an opportunity to emphasize what they see as excessive corporate influence, unethical stock trading and shady behavior from their opponents.”

Democrats coming out against corruption in the Trump era isn’t even this recent a phenomenon. The Washington Post’s editors would do well to occasionally read their own newspaper’s reporting: As their own Mike DeBonis reported in the run-up to the 2018 midterms, anti-corruption was a major plank in the Democratic Party’s (successful) campaign.

So what, if anything, has been holding Democrats’ efforts back despite this being such a robust line of attack on Trumpism? Well, as the aforementioned NOTUS report noted, “Democrats were seen as more corrupt than Republicans by a five-percentage point margin in a 2025 battleground poll by End Citizens United.” There’s no doubt that some of this was a self-inflicted wound: There’s been significant intraparty resistance to a ban on stock trading, for instance. And the party has been slow to deal with its own corrupt members—like letting noted sleaze-pump Bob Menendez hang around the Senate until his crimes finally became too comical to tolerate.

Still, for the public to have the opinion, in 2025, that the Democrats were more corrupt than a party whose leader enmeshed himself in several Teapot Dome–level scandals in that same calendar year—including the creation of an unaccountable crypto slush fund to facilitate all manner of quid pro quo exchanges—suggests that the same media that’s recently tripped over the idea that corruption is a bad thing has impeded the public’s ability to see this for themselves.

It’s absolutely the case that we would know very little about Trump’s crimes were it not for the reporters who’ve ferreted out all these important stories. But where the mainstream media falls down on the job is its lack of civic impulse to properly paint Trump and his enablers as agents in a de facto criminal enterprise. And just as the media has indulged in sanewashing the president’s demented ravings, so too has it sanded off the edges of Trump’s corrupt practices. The way Trump’s story gets told, serial violations of the Constitution become mere “departures” from previous norms; his mafioso-like demands of the international community aren’t described as extortion—Trump is simply being “transactional.”

Just this week, days after the Associated Press joined their peers in the post-Orbán Great Corruption Awakening, they reported at length about how the Trump White House is basically a racket of double-dealing, favor-trading, and self-enrichment. Somehow, the word corrupt doesn’t appear in the article. There are no plain-English explanations of the historic criminality, either—merely allusions alongside laughable denials from various Trump spokespersons. In fact, the AP’s main concern, per their headline, is that the “Trump family deal spree could open [the] door for future presidents to profit from office.” This is the View From Nowhere at work: What if the criminal president we have now corrupts a future president?

Look, I think it’s great that so many media elites have woken up to the fact that political corruption is a great civic evil, and that Trump is politically corrupt. But by the transitive theory of equality, that means Trump is a great civic evildoer, and a media that can’t tell that truth—and which instead seeks to obscure it—is this corrupt president’s brilliant ally. I’m hoping this will change, but I rather think that the people who possess the means to shape the discourse back into something that reflects reality, and actually help restore our once flourishing democracy, all lack the guts to join this fight. Hopefully, as in Hungary, we will end up not needing them.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.