For the most part, it isn’t something Americans have to worry about in their daily lives. Transparency International ranks the United States as the 22nd least-corrupt country, which is quite good (though not as good as the Scandinavian countries, which are all at the top of the list). You usually don’t have to bribe a clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles to get your driver’s license renewed, and when instances of corruption — such as the college admissions scandal — are revealed, we’re genuinely surprised.

Nevertheless, we often talk about the political system being corrupt, which in many ways it is. That kind of corruption, however, tends to be done both within the confines of the law and in largely public (even if not widely noticed) ways. Yes, old-fashioned corruption of the “Here’s a suitcase full of cash for that government contract” type is much rarer than it used to be. Instead, we have lobbyists who provide expertise and advice to members of Congress — in addition to timely campaign donations — and a revolving door between industry and federal agencies, which winds up aligning their worldviews and priorities. It’s all very civilized.

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Or at least it was, until Donald Trump came to Washington claiming he would “drain the swamp.” While anyone with eyes and ears could see he’d do nothing of the sort, I don’t think we were quite prepared for how clear he would make it to everyone that, if you want something from this administration, you have to literally pay the president of the United States.

Here are some recent stories:

What we have here is a system and a set of expectations that have developed. The whole world knows that if you want something from the Trump administration, paying off the president might not be required, but sure it couldn’t hurt.

It would be nice to think that once Trump is no longer president, the expectations around corruption will reset to where they were before he took office, and people in both parties will once again believe the very thought of the president using the presidency to personally enrich himself to be abhorrent. But the alacrity with which Republicans decided that Trump’s brand of corruption is perfectly fine suggests otherwise.

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There is another, more hopeful possibility: It’s that the moral squalor of the Trump era will produce a reaction in the other direction, a desire to clean up the system, not just so we don’t get another president as corrupt as Trump, but so we can have something better than what we had before he arrived, when the rich and powerful already were well able to twist policy for their benefit.

One can hope.