Impervious Corruption: President Trump and the Deformation of Democracy

A new set of political corruption concepts is introduced, impervious corruption foremost among them. Impervious corruption occurs when a corrupt political actor is unchecked by institutional guardians, giving the corrupt individual a sense of invulnerability. The resultant relationship between impervious corruption and deformation of democracy is then explained. The focus turns to President Donald Trump's political corruption and shows how the current United States political ecology has suborned his corrupt behavior. It is suggested that President Trump is an innovator in political corruption, engaging in acts heretofore not evident in the political history of the United States. The concluding section provides a set of prescriptions for addressing corruption and attendant deformation of democracy. These prescriptions do not require direct action from government institutions, reasoning that some official guardian institutions have been systematically diminished by the Trump administration and some political leaders have put partisan loyalty over their Constitutional duties.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  PAR. Public Administration Review

• Publication date

  2025-08-22

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/puar.70027
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• “You’re gonna need a bigger boat”: Understanding politicization in the populist era

  2025cited by this paper
• Partisan Hostility and American Democracy: Explaining Political Divisions and When They Matter

  2025cited by this paper
• Democracy, public administration, and democratic backsliding

  2025cited by this paper
• Decrypting Crypto

  2025cited by this paper
• From performance to morality: How politicians frame bureaucracy, its organizations, and public sector employees

  2024cited by this paper
• The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act At 50: A Mid‐Life Crisis

  2024cited by this paper
• Convicting Politicians for Corruption: The Politics of Criminal Accountability

  2024cited by this paper
• Partisan Hostility and American Democracy

  2024cited by this paper
• Political Corruption

  2024cited by this paper
• Megastudy testing 25 treatments to reduce antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity

  2024cited by this paper
• Understanding the Micro‐Foundations of Administrative Corruption in the Public Sector: Findings from a Systematic Literature Review

  2023cited by this paper
• Volatility and returns connectedness in cryptocurrency markets: Insights from graph-based methods

  2023cited by this paper
• Speaking truth to power … or to the Ivory tower? Public affairs researchers’ reports of practitioners’ use of their research

  2023cited by this paper
• Authoritarian Populism, Democracy and the Long Counter-Revolution of the Radical Right

  2023cited by this paper
• Explaining Putin’s impunity: public sector corruption and political trust in Russia

  2022cited by this paper
• Authoritarianism, Populism, and the Global Retreat of Democracy: A Curated Discussion

  2022cited by this paper
• The Spirit of Democracy: Corruption, Disintegration, Renewal

  2021cited by this paper
• United we stand, divided we rule: how political polarization erodes democracy

  2020cited by this paper
• Corruption as Resource Transfer: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis

  2019cited by this paper
• Angling for Sharks, Not Pilot Fish: Deep Corruption, Venal Corruption, and Public Values Failure

  2018influential reference
• AM I A PUBLIC SERVANT OR AM I A PATHOGEN? PUBLIC MANAGERS' SECTOR COMPARISON OF WORKER ABILITIES

  2014cited by this paper
• Public values and public interest: Counterbalancing economic individualism

  2009cited by this paper
• Political Corruption: Historical Conflict and the Rise of Standards

  2008cited by this paper
• Corruption in America

  2006cited by this paper
• Causes and Consequences of Corruption: What Do We Know from a Cross-Section of Countries?

  2006cited by this paper
• The dynamics of political corruption: Re-examining the influence of democracy

  2006cited by this paper
• Corruption: An Alternative Approach to its Definition and Measurement

  2005cited by this paper
• What Does Corruption Mean in a Democracy

  2004cited by this paper
• Accountability and Corruption: Political Institutions Matter

  2001cited by this paper
• Political Corruption and Democracy

  1999cited by this paper
• Corruption Around the World: Causes, Consequences, Scope, and Cures

  1998cited by this paper
• Does corruption affect income inequality and poverty?

  1998cited by this paper
• Corruption: The Facts

  1997cited by this paper
• Defining Political Corruption

  1997cited by this paper
• Undermining good governance: Corruption and democracy

  1997cited by this paper
• Don't Blame the Bureaucracy!

  1983cited by this paper
• FINIS FOR TWEED AND STEFFENS: REWRITING THE HISTORY OF URBAN RULE

  1982cited by this paper
• CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE

  year unknowncited by this paper

• No citing papers are available for this paper.