Shamelessness Is Trump’s Superpower

Donald Trump, who was well on his way to becoming one of the most corrupt presidents in American history even before he said it would be “stupid” for the United States not to accept a plane worth hundreds of millions of dollars from Qatar to replace Air Force One, repeatedly attacks his adversaries in part to mask his own violations of the law and the Constitution.

Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, argued in an email that Trump’s repeated description of Democrats and liberal programs as immoral is designed to win support for his agenda:

Trump as a politician has used the populist framing of institutions as corrupt and illegitimate; an emphasis on D.E.I. is just one flavor of that presumed corruption.

Trump made his grievances his supporters’ grievances. His ally Russ Vought introduced the trope of weaponization of government by liberals, which made little sense until you saw it as a statement of intent. The D.O.J. was not weaponized under Biden — many of his allies regretted how cautious it was — but it clearly has been weaponized by Trump.

Identity politics, Moynihan wrote,

is amorphous enough to allow fairly significant double standards in how it is perceived. The idea that the military is corrupted by D.E.I. and wokeness is fairly risible, but it has provided a justification for censorship in military academies and a purging of senior military officers.

For Trump, Moynihan argued,

shamelessness is a superpower. His scandals are out in the open, and he insists they are not scandals at all. Trump’s current administration is explicitly personalist: It is built around loyalty to him, even as he blurs his personal interests and public offices. His investments in social media and crypto were driven by the opportunities for easy money from political supporters and those seeking access to the presidency offered.

Trump does this, Moynihan wrote, “even while making ‘fraud’ a central trope of his administration in order to justify cutting government services.”

During his first and second terms in office, Trump radically altered the Republican Party’s moral guidelines to make self-enrichment a routine fact of political life.

Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, is outspoken in his criticism of Trump.

“Trump,” Dallek wrote by email,

is the most brazenly corrupt national politician in modern times, and his openness about it is sui generis. Trump 2.0 is emboldened on many fronts. He now feels liberated to wear his corruption on his sleeve.

There is a logic to Trump’s behavior. After all, he returned to office after having faced countless hurdles, including the Russia probe, two impeachments (Ukraine and Jan. 6), two assassination attempts and dozens of criminal indictments and felony convictions.

Trump also considers himself anointed by God to save America, furthering his faith that he can do no wrong. Feeling more imbued with power and more liberated from constraints than at any time in the past decade, he no longer feels the need to hide from the fact that he uses his public position to enrich his family.

Trump’s self-dealing, Dallek argued, has become part and parcel of his overwhelming assault on American laws and traditions:

Whether the president is slapping large tariffs on allies, trying to suspend habeas corpus or threatening to make Canada the 51st state, he is pushing past limits and celebrating his shock and awe approach to governing. In this light, using his office to sell meme coins and promote his crypto ventures is just another day in the Trump White House. It’s become normalized.

In fact, Dallek argues that Trump uses his profiteering as a tool to mobilize supporters:

His base seems to hail the president’s brazen defiance — his flouting of norms and rules — as signs that he alone is capable of destroying a system rigged against them. In the eyes of at least some of his supporters, his baldfaced corrupt schemes are an asset, a show of strength. Trump understands that his lack of shame is part of his brand. He knows that shamelessness sells with a portion of the American electorate.

Sarah Kreps, a political scientist at Cornell, emailed her responses to my queries about Trump and corruption:

Corruption is deeper than whether someone is making backroom deals. Instead, it’s a sense that the game itself is rigged in favor of a select few. Whether this perception is accurate or not is almost beside the point. It’s a powerful narrative, one that Trump has been particularly adept at harnessing, positioning himself as a champion of the forgotten and overlooked.

In this context, Kreps continued,

Democrats’ efforts to address historic inequalities through targeted policies, while often well intentioned, can sometimes backfire, inadvertently reinforcing perceptions that the system picks favorites. For voters who already feel politically marginalized, these policies can seem less like social progress and more like political favoritism, creating fertile ground for populist narratives that cast the entire political establishment as stacked against the average citizen.

I asked Kreps and others whether Trump has been able to get away with self-dealing and profiting from his political position because he is so brazen — so transparent in his crypto deals and in the sale of Trump bibles and Trump sneakers, completely without guilt or shame.

Kreps replied:

The shamelessness, unapologetic approach or lack of public contrition is a form of confidence, conviction and strength. Traditional politicians carefully curate their public image. Trump is unfiltered, implicitly a form of openness and relatability that I think further reinforces loyalty among his base.

Douglas Kriner, a political scientist at Cornell, elaborated on Kreps’s point:

Trump has never hidden his business interests and is not bothered by charges that he is breaking norms (or even the law), allegations of conflicts of interest and the like. Indeed, he seems to revel in them. His very iconoclasm is part and parcel of his political brand.

A good chunk of his base revels in President Trump’s norm-breaking behavior and in the showman and salesman part of his persona. More generally, President Trump is unafraid to say things, do things and even sign executive orders that delight his base, even if they make the median voter queasy. In this respect, his political calculus is different from most of his predecessors. And he has largely been proven correct; this has not really cost him politically.

In seeking to explain the Democrats’ vulnerability to Trump’s attacks, Kriner cited Trump’s 2024 transgender ads and their message that

Democrats are for special interests (in the ad, for “they/them”) and President Trump is for you. The political attack is clear — it alleges that Democrats are the ones doing the discriminating, prioritizing some groups over others, while accusing others of being discriminatory.

The transgender commercials, Kriner argued, focused on

a fundamental tension in many programs to address systematic inequality: They rely on illiberal means to achieve liberal ends. Thirty years of research has shown that this makes many Americans — including many self-identified liberals — uncomfortable, even if they embrace the need to address these inequalities.

This tension has long been a vulnerable spot for Democrats, and President Trump has exploited it more directly and ably than most of his predecessors.

Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024, despite his liabilities, raise a significant question. Bo Rothstein, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburg, wrote by email:

What exactly has America’s liberal, democratic and culturally engaged elite done to provoke such profound anger — indeed, outright hatred — from large sections of the predominantly white working class and lower middle class, driving them toward a politician like Donald Trump?