The ghost of Richard Nixon should be pleased.
He is now officially no longer the most corrupt US president in all history.
That award now goes to Orange Man.
People keep saying Trump term II is the most corrupt administration ever, so I built a model to find out if it was true.
I took the UN's definition of corruption [a definition of corruption that 190 countries have signed], turned it into eight criteria and 100 points ... Then I put every president since Eisenhower on the same scale, both parties, with every exoneration counted right alongside the convictions.
Nixon scored 41 and no other American President scored over a 25.
Trump's second term scored a 91...
It's even worse than that. When she put every president since Eisenhower on the same scale as the world-famous kleptocrats -- men who looted their countries -- Marcos, Suharto, Mobutu, Abacha, Obiang, Putin -- Trump II still comes out comfortably ahead of the kleptocrats' average of 83.
So he is not only the most corrupt president in American history. At this pace he finishes his term level with the most corrupt rulers of the last hundred years.
And this doesn't even cover this week's revelation that a corrupt Russian mobster linked to Putin paid for the spawn's wedding in the Bahamas.
Anybody here still deluded about the Corrupter-in-Chief like to defend any of this?
BUT FIRST, CAN WE REALLY measure corruption? What sort of standard might we use?
The most defensible starting point is the definition that 190 countries are party to, so that is where we will start.
The United Nations Convention against Corruption, ratified by the United States in 2006 lists the offenses that constitute corruption: bribery, embezzlement of public property, laundering the proceeds, obstruction of justice, trading in influence, abuse of function, and illicit enrichment, which the convention defines as a significant increase in an official’s assets that cannot reasonably be explained by lawful income. That last offense would apply to nearly every kleptocrat in history, and nearly none of them were ever convicted of it, because the countries they ran had no such law on the books. ...
Corruption is the conversion of public power into private benefit through whatever channel is available, together with the disabling of the mechanisms that would detect it. It does not require that a law be broken, because every kleptocracy in the calibration set made its theft lawful first. It does not require a traceable transaction, because dependence, access and regulatory forbearance are documented forms of benefit. And it treats the dismantling of inspectors, prosecutors and election regulators as corruption in itself rather than as an aggravating factor, because in every case studied the detectors were switched off before the extraction began.
Here are just a few examples during Trump II:
There is a unit inside the Justice Department whose only job is to prosecute corrupt public officials. It is called the Public Integrity Section. In January 2025 it had about thirty-six lawyers, and today it has two. ... What the game looks like without [these] referees is now a matter of public record. ...
On June 30 the president signed a sworn financial disclosure showing more than $2 billion in personal income for 2025, most of it from crypto companies with his name on them. A foreign government’s investment fund settled a $2 billion deal in his family’s stablecoin. About 1,600 pardons have gone out, ten of them through the pardon office, and $1.7 billion in court-ordered restitution went away with them. The Justice Department settled the family’s own lawsuit against the IRS for $1.776 billion and a promise to stop auditing them, until a federal judge threw the deal out as collusive. The acting attorney general who defended that deal to Congress was Trump’s personal attorney and is now the Attorney General.
There's more, much more, in the original post.
Head to the post to read full results and methodology: THE MOST CORRUPT PRESIDENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY: A CORRUPTION MODEL
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