Greed vs. integrity in Trump’s Gilded Age

This Fourth of July felt more like a day of mourning than a celebration of American democracy. I found myself that weekend watching “Washington Journal,” C-SPAN’s venerable daily call-in show, which posed a question to viewers: What is the most important issue facing America?

During the three-hour-long show, I heard a nation in crisis and pain, disunited and polarized. The callers were angry at “the elites,” “the system,” Donald Trump, the two-party system, the news media, their neighbors and fellow Americans and an American society that seems fundamentally broken and beyond repair — where “regular people” and “average Americans” are too often marginalized and ignored.

Predictably, the Trumpists were enthralled by their Dear Leader and his mass deportation campaign and other policies. Trump, they said, is the new “sheriff” in town, who is fighting back against foreign countries like China that have been “raping” the American people. He is also defending white men and other “real Americans” from “cancel culture.” The MAGAverse sees an America overrun with brown terrorists and “illegal immigrants.” One caller feigned empathy for the “illegal aliens,” who may be swallowed up by Trump’s Alligator Alcatraz and larger nationwide gulag system, but nonetheless said they should not be in this country and do not deserve due process.

There were other callers, too. One offered a plea for civility in public life and decried “the hatred coming from the top of our government.” A caller from Oregon, who sounded like an older woman, suggested the host “hang up” on hostile callers who “say really terrible things about the other party, or especially the Democrats . . . because it only adds to the terrible viciousness that is going on in our country.”

The final caller, a woman from North Carolina, was especially devastating in her sincerity. “I think the biggest problem is greed over integrity,” she said, channeling the terror that vulnerable Americans who need help from the social safety net are feeling in the wake of Trump and the GOP’s big ugly bill, which includes cruel cuts to essential services such as housing, health care and food support that help them to maintain some threadbare amount of human dignity.

When that vote went through, it was clear that people don’t care about their fellow people. All these people who are going to lose their health care, which is going to cause a real effect overall to their subsistence – and that is all it is, subsistence, if they are on Medicaid — they are struggling to get by. These [cuts] are the bottom of the barrel. It is only . . . greed and the lack of integrity [that] is fueling this discord. Trump is leading the band. But it is the individual person. How were they raised, all those Republicans?

For decades, it has been clear that the Republican party values greed over integrity. The GOP’s support for the “Big Beautiful Bill,” discredited “trickle-down economics” and Trump’s corrupt use of the presidency to further enrich himself and his family is prima facie proof of that claim. Taken together, the president’s policies are producing an economy that uses state power to give even more money and resources to the rich, while punishing the poor and vulnerable as undeserving and immoral — and demonizing them as “welfare queens” and “a parasite class” — instead of expanding social democracy and opportunity for everyone. 

But what about the Democrats? Instead of crafting a real populist agenda that speaks to the economic needs and perils of the average American — and how the Trump administration and MAGA movement are directly responsible for that pain — the Democrats are still disoriented after losing the White House and Senate in November. 

The Democratic National Committee is conducting a political autopsy about the party’s 2024 election losses. But according to multiple reports, party officials are not examining the impact of former President Joe Biden’s decision to seek reelection or decisions made by Kamala Harris’ campaign, which she inherited from Biden after he exited the race. Instead, they are convening endless meetings about their messaging and brand, as well as the role of consultants and outside allied groups. 

Officials are generally engaging in hand-wringing and in-fighting about if they are too liberal and left, and whether they should pivot back to the center to capture the white “working class” vote from Trump and MAGA, while trying to figure out why they lost ground among key base voters such as Latinos and young Black men. The hope is they will try to learn what it means to be an effective opposition party when the country’s democracy is collapsing into authoritarianism.

Both parties, to varying degrees, serve the same masters in the financier class and corporatocracy. They have each advanced a neoliberal gangster capitalist regime that has seen the financialization of almost every aspect of American life; a decline in intergenerational mobility and real wages; and a regime of globalization. This has included outsourcing and “flexible accumulation” that has replaced industrial and other well-paying skilled and semi-skilled jobs with a service economy, “gig jobs” and “side hustles.”

For at least the last decade, Americans have perceived that the country’s political elite in both parties prioritize greed over integrity. A 2023 report from the Pew Research Center found a majority of respondents saying “the political process is dominated by special interests, flooded with campaign cash and mired in partisan warfare.” Politicians were largely seen as “self-serving and ineffective.”

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One finding was particularly damning: Majorities found “all or most politicians” to be “motivated by selfish reasons.” Sixty-three percent said that “all or most [politicians] ran for office to make a lot of money.”

These numbers back up a famous study published nine years earlier, in which political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page showed that Republicans and Democrats in Congress are largely unresponsive to the policy demands of the average American. Instead, these elected officials are hyper-responsive to the policy demands and concerns of the richest Americans, corporations and interest groups. When considered alongside the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision, which removed limits on campaign contributions and so-called dark money, it’s no wonder Gilens and Page found that America’s “democracy” is actually an oligarchy.

In addition, neither party supports strong financial transparency laws or other rules — such as divestment of stocks or blind trusts — that would, for example, impede the moral hazard of members of Congress, and their immediate family members, being able to personally profit from legislation passed by Congress.

In total, the American people, and their ability to live full and meaningful lives, are being gobbled up by what political theorist Nancy Fraser describes as “cannibal capitalism.”

Some people who called into “Washington Journal” were political partisans, and they likely included right-wing operatives who are paid to phone the program and circulate their talking points. There were also rage-filled hate-eaters who revel in the pain and suffering of other Americans they deem to be “traitors” and not “real Americans” like them. But the deeper current among the callers was of an America that is lost and in dire need of help — a battered, wounded democracy.

There are many technical terms for this. Negative partisanship, echo chambers, the dark triad, propaganda, pathocracy and political sadism are just a few.

This language is important. But you don’t need to know the academic jargon to hear the truth. Real people are being impacted by power and public policy.

The media has a role to play here, too. Communicating this cause-and-effect requires empathetic reporting and journalism that centers the human dimension instead of foregrounding abstract policies and numbers. This approach builds trust by authentically and carefully listening to people and their communities. To be clear, numbers and data do matter, but the lives being impacted by them matter much more.

The Fourth Estate has an obligation to speak truth to power and give the public the information and context they can use to make good decisions, particularly during a time in which Trump and MAGA Republicans are attacking and suing media institutions, and gutting public media.

The caller from North Carolina was right. Greed vs. integrity is the conflict of our age — and right now, greed is winning.