Your Weekly Guide to the Corruption and Chaos in Washington and Across the Country
Every Thursday, Democracy.News will cover topics relating to corruption, money in politics and voting rights.
“The mechanics of oligarchy are not hidden; they are flaunted with a level of pride that actively humiliates their spectators,” writes Naomi Klein in her 2023 book Doppelganger. Every day of Trump’s second term has illustrated her point to a degree that’s difficult to fully comprehend: Before Trump accepted a plane from the Qatari government, he appointed 13 billionaires to his cabinet and fired government watchdogs that would have served as checks on his power. His Justice Department dropped a lawsuit against his biggest donor (Elon Musk’s SpaceX). Trump has also loosened cryptocurrency regulation, and crypto dealings over the last six months have reportedly increased his family’s wealth by about $2.9 billion.
The flaunted grifts and unprecedented power grabs seem endless: In a damning recent report, End Citizens United describes the Trump administration’s most significant acts of corruption, self-dealing, and chaos during its first 100 days. The report drives home that the situation we’re facing is unambiguous, unabashed pay-to-play: Trump accepted millions in Big Pharma campaign donations and then restricted how Medicare can negotiate prescription drug prices; Trump took millions in Big Oil donations and then vowed to open more offshore areas and federal lands to drilling. And on and on, every day bringing another way the Trump administration is enriching the already rich and harming the rest of us.
The relentless barrage of all this news can be overwhelming, even paralyzing. And yet, we cannot accept this. We need to stay in the fight.
End Citizens United is launching Democracy.News, which is designed to guide you through all the corruption and chaos in Washington and across the country. Written by me, Meaghan Winter (more on me later), each week, Democracy.News will tackle an important corruption, money in politics or democracy-related story. Based on interviews with pro-democracy advocates and anti-corruption experts, Democracy.News will provide context and analysis that will help you sort through fact from fiction.
Already, just four months into Trump’s second term, it’s difficult not to feel our sense of what’s real, what’s normal, what’s possible is shifting, distorting our sense of our country and ourselves. Experts on authoritarian regimes often dispense similar advice: It’s essential that we “inhabit a shared reality,” as Russian American journalist M. Gessen puts it. And that means keeping a sober eye on what’s happening so that we can talk with each other, organize, and fight for our democracy.
This oligarchy didn’t emerge out of nowhere. As Tiffany Muller, president of End Citizens United, said just before Trump’s inauguration in January, that moment was “the beginning of an oligarchy that’s been 15 years in the making.” Muller was able to anticipate what we’ve seen in recent months, because for years she’s been tracking the influence of money on our politics.
We know that the 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United changed everything when it opened the floodgates of dark money and gave already powerful actors more power. The majority of Americans disapprove of the amount of political money spent, and the problem is only accelerating. According to a Brennan Center report published this month, an unprecedented $1.9 billion of dark money was spent on federal races in 2024—almost double the amount spent in 2020.
We also know that Republican strategists and deep-pocketed rightwing organizations have been undermining our democracy well before this year. After the Citizens United ruling, rightwing groups suddenly had access to large infusions of cash. According to a ProPublica report, between 2014 and 2020, groups associated with Federalist Society co-founder Leonard Leo— the rightwing strategist widely recognized for his role stacking the federal judiciary with rightwing judges— raised more than $600 million. Last year, the Supreme Court’s Federalist Society-vetted justices ruled that Trump has immunity from criminal prosecution for many of his actions while president. And here we are, witnessing him fire federal workers and run get-rich-quick schemes for his friends.
Citizens United has eroded democracy in quieter ways, too. After that decision, Republicans accelerated their spending on certain elections so that they could win control of statehouses, gerrymander maps, change voting laws, and entrench their power. The anti-democratic feedback loop remains in motion. Just one example: Last year, for The New Republic, I spoke with civic leaders in Florida who had decreased or suspended their voter registration drives, during a major election year, because a sprawling 2023 state law imposed criminal penalties for failure to meet complicated bureaucratic hurdles, and registering voters just wasn’t worth the risk, especially when the state had formed a special elections police force and investigations unit.
Those kinds of laws are familiar to me, as they may be to you. I cut my teeth reporting on abortion for national magazines in the years soon after the Citizens United ruling helped Republicans win control of statehouses across the country, which enabled the passage of hundreds of abortion restrictions, each one part of the death-by-a-thousand cuts strategy that would overturn Roe. Those years provided a real education. I then traveled around the country to report on progressive activists fighting in their statehouses for voting rights, clean energy, gun reform, abortion rights and more, to write a book on the importance of building power in the states.
Everything I learned underscored for me that the political issues I’d once considered distinct and separate — such as gerrymandering and abortion and clean energy — are in fact all connected. Since then, I’ve worked with climate advocates, racial justice activists, and progressive economists.
As I write Democracy.News, I’ll draw on that perspective to connect the dots between the actions of the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress and the longer-term corrosive effects of money in politics. But the problems aren’t just in Washington, so I’ll take you across the country to show you how corruption and self-dealing is leading to a worse government everywhere. I’ll also highlight the people who are making progress and have good ideas about how to fix this mess we’re currently in.
Next week, I’ll be back with an interview with End Citizens United’s president Tiffany Muller on how voters see corruption in Washington and what ECU is doing to make a difference.