Americans’ ‘government corruption’ problem is in a new league

Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

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It is not news, or surprising, that Americans are worried about government corruption.

They twice elected Donald Trump, who twice promised to drain the “swamp” of Washington, DC.

“We are transferring power from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the American People,” he said in his first inaugural address.

In his second inaugural address, Trump promised to liberate the country from “a radical and corrupt establishment” that “extracted power and wealth from our citizens.”

On that promise, there’s striking new evidence that Americans believe he has failed to deliver.

It should be of some concern to the White House — and to every American, really — that 89% of Americans said “yes” in a Gallup poll when asked, “Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country, or not?”

Gallup isn’t alone on this. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst is also out with a poll Tuesday in which 97% of Americans — nearly everybody — says there is some corruption in government. A smaller portion, 75%, said there is “a great deal” of corruption in the UMass poll.

Decades of polling has found widespread frustration with and mistrust of government, but the new data from Gallup is notable for two main reasons.

Gallup is still collecting data from all 38 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for 2026, but the preliminary indication is that the US is now in a class of its own in terms of how its people view government corruption.

The US already outpaced other OECD countries in Gallup’s polling, but while the average corruption perception has been below 60% since 2022, it has now shot up for the US, which has been above 70% since 2010. In 2025, the US was tied with Colombia at 79%.

Usually, as Gallup notes , when power changes hands, those who favor the winning party are less likely to see corruption. That expected drop has not happened. Instead, the 83% of Republicans who see widespread corruption in the most recent poll is broadly in line with the 87% who said corruption was widespread in 2024, the final year of President Joe Biden’s administration.

At the time, Republicans worked very hard to portray Biden’s family, particularly his son Hunter, as corrupt, which the Bidens vehemently denied.

Craig Hudson/Reuters

In the meantime, while Republicans have not abandoned their perceptions of corruption, 91% of Democrats and 90% of political independents see widespread corruption.

Very few issues see such cross-party agreement. And lawmakers are not doing much to counter the trend.

In the UMass poll, respondents were asked to rank four governmental institutions from most to least corrupt. Most people — 53% — listed the president first, compared with 18% who listed Congress first. Forty-one percent listed Congress as the second most corrupt branch of government. Fewer pointed to courts and the federal bureaucracy first or second.

After accusing Biden of trying to enrich his family through the presidency, Trump’s family has adopted a YOLO attitude toward wealth acquisition during Trump 2.0. The dollar figures the Trumps appear to be bringing in could dwarf what Hunter Biden was paid to sit on corporate boards.

In the UMass poll, 77% said the president should not or definitely should not be profiting from business ventures that could be affected by the policies and decisions of his administration.

One Trump-aligned company, Trump Media, is selling early access to his social media posts , giving Wall Street firms who can afford up to $100,000 a month possible early looks at some of his policy decisions.

Trump’s sons both have interests in defense contractors at a time when President Trump is pushing for a gobsmacking $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget , which would be an increase of nearly $500 billion in one year.

Overseeing their father’s assets, sons Eric and Don Jr. founded a firm, World Liberty Financial , along with the son of his Mideast and Ukraine negotiator Steve Witkoff, to capitalize on the craze around cryptocurrency. All of this is happening at a time when President Trump is taking a hands-off approach to regulation.

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images/File

Trump made more than a billion dollars from cryptocurrency ventures in first year back in office

They are pursuing overseas deals at a time when their father is seeking trade deals.

“I found out that nobody cared,” he told the New York Times back in January, suggesting he feels entitled to mix business and politics. He said he tried to separate the two during his first term and “got no credit.”

Don Jr. and Eric Trump say they do not discuss business with their father. The sons of other top Trump administration officials, including Witkoff and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick , are also working business angles that touch their wealthy fathers’ public jobs.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Lutnick, pressed on CNBC about the perception of a conflict in a mining deal that benefits his family and Trump’s, dismissed “silly questions” and a “waste of time.”

The president also apparently does not have direct control over his stock portfolio, so it is at least possible he does not know about the 1,000-plus recent stock trades made on his behalf by third-party financial institutions, including in energy companies affected by his war on Iran. The trades were disclosed in government-mandated disclosures to the Office of Government Ethics.

Trump isn’t the only politician playing the market. Tracking the trades of members of Congress, including wealthy Democrats such as Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Ro Khanna of California, has become an investment strategy for people who want to buy the same stocks as lawmakers from either or both parties. It has also led to growing bipartisan calls, but no concrete action , for a ban on members of Congress and their direct family members trading stocks. A large, bipartisan majority of Americans support passing such a ban .

Heather Diehl/Getty Images

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who prefers to be called secretary of war, was critical, before his nomination to join the Trump administration, of generals working for defense contractors. But he notably declined, when pressed by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, to pledge not to work for a defense contractor for 10 years after he leaves office.

“I’m not a general, senator,” Hegseth told Warren at his confirmation hearing. More recently, he and Warren tangled at a congressional hearing over whether the Pentagon should be doing anything to investigate well-timed oil market bets before Trump launched the war in Iran.

Warren’s own one-percenter wealth — divulged when she released tax returns during a 2020 presidential run — could be construed as antithetical to her progressive bona fides, although her wealth was built through her and her husbands’ healthy salaries as professors and her book deals rather through than stock trades.

Many of the people who are elected to office are wealthy. (And simply having money in index funds would have inflated anyone’s bottom line in recent years.) That is clearly different from using knowledge or access to gain an upper hand.

A larger issue than the money made by lawmakers in their private pursuits may be how the government spends money at a time when the national debt has eclipsed $40 trillion .

Trump’s administration has sounded the alarm about government spending, but then cut revenues with massive tax cuts that will only generate more revenue far down the road, if ever .

Elon Musk, the world’s richest individual, was brought in as a special government employee early in the Trump administration with directions to cut government spending and whittle down the bureaucracy.

But it’s not clear what, if anything, he actually accomplished other than making wild, frequently unfounded accusations about fraud and corruption in social safety net programs. Musk ultimately left government to return to his companies, which benefit from government contracts, and briefly became the world’s first trillionaire. He’s still doing OK. The nearly $300 million we know about that he spent helping get Trump elected in 2024 can be viewed as a solid investment.

Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg/Getty Images

How much of Musk’s wealth comes from government help? Virtually all of it

At the same time, the increasing murkiness of US election spending means we don’t know exactly who is spending what to get candidates elected.

Trump has also made wild and unverified claims about fraud throughout government and repeatedly alleged corruption in US elections. All of these claims could appeal to his political base, which identifies with his claim that the system is rigged against them. And Democrats have alleged that his moves are a threat to democracy and the right to vote is under threat.

Take a step back, and the vast majority of Americans just see corruption.

朱莉娅·德马雷·尼金森/美联社

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美国民众担忧政府腐败问题，这并不令人意外，也并非新闻。

他们两次选举唐纳德·特朗普，而特朗普也两次承诺要清除华盛顿特区的“沼泽”。

“我们正在将权力从华盛顿特区转移出去，并把它还给你们，美国人民，”他在首次就职演说中说道。

在第二次就职演说中，特朗普承诺将国家从“激进腐败的建制派”手中解放出来，这个建制派“从我们的公民身上榨取了权力和财富”。

关于他做出的承诺，有令人震惊的新证据表明，美国人认为他未能兑现。

盖洛普民意调查显示，当被问及“这个国家的政府中是否存在普遍的腐败现象”时，89% 的美国人回答“是”，这应该引起白宫乃至每个美国人的关注。

盖洛普并非孤例。马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校周二也公布了一项民调，结果显示97%的美国人——几乎所有人都——认为政府存在某种程度的腐败。其中，75%的人认为政府存在“非常严重的”腐败。

数十年的民意调查发现，民众对政府普遍感到失望和不信任，但盖洛普的新数据因两个主要原因而引人注目。

盖洛普仍在收集经济合作与发展组织 (OECD) 所有 38 个国家 2026 年的数据，但初步迹象表明，就美国民众对政府腐败的看法而言，美国现在已经独树一帜。

在盖洛普的民意调查中，美国已经超过了其他经合组织国家，但尽管自 2022 年以来，平均腐败感知度一直低于 60%，但美国的腐败感知度现在已经飙升，自 2010 年以来一直高于 70%。到 2025 年，美国的腐败感知度将与哥伦比亚并列，为 79%。

正如盖洛普指出的那样，通常情况下，当权力更迭时，支持获胜政党的民众往往不太会注意到腐败问题。然而，这种预期的下降趋势并未出现。相反，在最近的民调中，83%的共和党人认为腐败现象普遍存在，这一比例与2024年（拜登总统任期最后一年）认为腐败普遍存在的87%的共和党人基本一致。

当时，共和党人极力将拜登一家，特别是他的儿子亨特，描绘成腐败分子，而拜登一家对此予以强烈否认。

克雷格·哈德森/路透社

与此同时，虽然共和党人并未放弃对腐败的看法，但91%的民主党人和90%的政治独立人士认为腐败现象普遍存在。

很少有议题能获得如此广泛的跨党派共识。而立法者们似乎并没有采取太多措施来扭转这一趋势。

在马萨诸塞大学的民意调查中，受访者被要求对四个政府机构的腐败程度进行排序，从最腐败到最清廉。大多数人（53%）将总统列为首位，而将国会列为首位的受访者仅占18%。41%的受访者认为国会是第二腐败的政府部门。将法院和联邦官僚机构列为首位或第二位的受访者较少。

在指责拜登试图利用总统职位为家族谋取私利之后，特朗普家族在“特朗普2.0”时期采取了“及时行乐”式的财富积累态度。特朗普家族似乎正在赚取的巨额财富，可能远远超过亨特·拜登担任公司董事所获得的报酬。

在马萨诸塞大学的民意调查中，77% 的人表示，总统不应该或绝对不应该从可能受到其政府政策和决定影响的商业活动中获利。

一家与特朗普关系密切的公司——特朗普媒体公司——正在出售提前访问其社交媒体帖子的权限，让每月能负担得起高达 10 万美元的华尔街公司有机会提前了解他的一些政策决定。

特朗普的两个儿子都持有国防承包商的股份，而此时特朗普总统正在推动一项令人瞠目结舌的 1.5 万亿美元五角大楼预算，这意味着一年内将增加近 5000 亿美元。

埃里克和唐纳德·特朗普二世接管了父亲的资产，并与父亲的中东和乌克兰谈判代表史蒂夫·威特科夫的儿子共同创立了世界自由金融公司，旨在利用加密货币热潮牟利。所有这一切都发生在特朗普总统对监管采取放任态度之际。

凯文迪奇/盖蒂图片社/文件

特朗普重返总统任期第一年就从加密货币项目中​​赚取了超过10亿美元。

他们的父亲也在寻求贸易往来，而他们自己却在追求海外交易。

“我发现根本没人关心，”他今年一月接受《纽约时报》采访时说道，这表明他认为自己有权将商业和政治混为一谈。他说，他在第一任期内曾试图将两者分开，但“没有得到任何认可”。

小唐纳德·特朗普和埃里克·特朗普表示，他们不与父亲讨论商业事宜。其他特朗普政府高官的儿子，包括威特科夫和商务部长霍华德·卢特尼克的儿子，也在从事与他们富有的父亲的公职工作相关的商业活动。

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

卢特尼克在接受 CNBC 采访时，被问及一项采矿交易中是否存在利益冲突，该交易使他的家族和特朗普家族都受益，对此他不屑一顾，称这是“愚蠢的问题”和“浪费时间”。

总统显然也无法直接控制自己的股票投资组合，因此他很可能并不知情第三方金融机构近期代表他进行的1000多笔股票交易，其中包括受其对伊朗战争影响的能源公司。这些交易已按照政府规定向政府道德办公室披露。

特朗普并非唯一涉足股市的政治人物。追踪国会议员的交易，包括像南希·佩洛西和加州众议员罗·卡纳这样富有的民主党人，已成为一些投资者的策略，他们希望购买与两党议员持有相同股票的股票。这也导致了两党人士日益高涨的呼吁，要求禁止国会议员及其直系亲属进行股票交易，但至今仍未采取任何具体行动。绝大多数美国民众，无论党派，都支持通过这项禁令。

Heather Diehl/Getty Images

国防部长皮特·赫格塞斯（他更喜欢被称为战争部长）在被提名加入特朗普政府之前，曾对为国防承包商工作的将军们持批评态度。但值得注意的是，当民主党参议员伊丽莎白·沃伦敦促他承诺卸任后十年内不为国防承包商工作时，他却拒绝了。

“我不是将军，参议员，”赫格塞斯在确认听证会上对沃伦说道。最近，他和沃伦在国会听证会上就五角大楼是否应该对特朗普发动伊朗战争前精心策划的石油市场投机活动展开了激烈辩论。

沃伦在 2020 年竞选总统期间公布纳税申报表时，其自身 1% 的财富被披露出来，这可能被认为与她的进步主义立场相悖，尽管她的财富是通过她和她丈夫作为教授的高薪以及她的图书出版合同积累起来的，而不是通过股票交易积累起来的。

许多当选公职的人都很富有。（近年来，仅仅投资指数基金就能大幅提升任何人的净资产。）这显然与利用知识或人脉关系来获取优势截然不同。

比议员们通过私人活动赚取的金钱更大的问题可能是，在国家债务超过 40 万亿美元的情况下，政府如何使用资金。

特朗普政府对政府支出发出警告，但随后却通过大规模减税削减收入，而这些减税措施即使能够带来更多收入，也只能在很久以后才能实现。

世界首富埃隆·马斯克在特朗普政府初期被聘为特别政府雇员，负责削减政府开支和精简官僚机构。

但除了对社会保障体系中的欺诈和腐败提出种种毫无根据的指控之外，他究竟取得了什么成就，目前尚不清楚。马斯克最终离开政府，重返他那些受益于政府合同的公司，并短暂地成为世界首位万亿富翁。他现在依然过得不错。据我们所知，他花费了近3亿美元帮助特朗普在2024年当选，这笔钱可以被视为一笔稳健的投资。

Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg/Getty Images

马斯克的财富有多少来自政府资助？几乎全部。

与此同时，美国选举支出的不透明性日益加剧，这意味着我们并不确切知道是谁在花多少钱来帮助候选人当选。

特朗普还发表了大量未经证实的、关于政府各部门舞弊的言论，并多次指控美国大选存在腐败。所有这些言论都可能迎合他的政治基本盘，因为他们认同他关于体制对他们不利的说法。而民主党人则指责他的这些举动威胁民主，并威胁到投票权。

退一步想，绝大多数美国人看到的只是腐败。