Watch new documentary CORRUPTIONLAND on Trump's administraion
Our documentary, CORRUPTIONLAND, reveals for the first time how deep the D.C. swamp got under Donald Trump. And now voters can do something about it.
Nobody in Washington ever bothered to add it all up, so we did. The volume of alleged corruption in Donald Trump’s Washington is now roughly $377 billion.
In fact, we put it on a map. That’s what the CORRUPTIONLAND ledger came to when we analyzed 100 documented episodes of alleged corruption and abuses of power since Donald Trump was re-elected. Each of those episodes was built from court filings, government records, congressional documents, or reporting by established news organizations. And we released them today alongside a documentary film about all of it: CORRUPTIONLAND.
Before you go look, I want to tell you about that figure and why it surprised me.
First, $377 billion is a measure of scale. It shows you how breathtaking the corruption has become and how the swamp Trump promised to “drain” has gotten deeper than ever. This includes public money, private benefit, and the transaction volumes tied to those 100 episodes. Some of it landed with the president’s family. But the bulk of the ledger is money that belongs to you that has been misappropriated, mismanaged, or used as a tool of political coercion. (Our friends at States United and Grant Witness Project have already documented the up-to $170 billion in taxpayer dollars wiped out by Trump.)
Second, as staggering as that figure is, it’s not even the full picture. We only picked 100 alleged instances of corruption to measure. And fifty-nine of those entries have no dollar figure at all, because you can’t put a price tag on a fired inspector general or a presidential critic thrown in jail or the many thousands of federal employees fired or pushed out of their jobs. What’s more, the figure excludes hard-to-measure acts of corruption, which nonetheless have seismic economic implications. For example, Trump’s retaliatory tariffs surely add up to untold billions in costs for Americans and the global economy, yet they’re excluded from this tracker because of that immeasurable magnitude.
We’re living in one of the gravest periods of corruption in American history.
And here’s what surprised me most in filming CORRUPTIONLAND and researching these cases. The individual scandals aren’t really the story. Yes, they’re shocking — from the ballroom and the jet to the Trump-branded monument arch and the fishy pardons — and any one of them would have consumed a normal presidency for months. But when you put it all on a map you see that it’s become systematized.
When I first started working in Washington, I learned that there are five basic layers, or “corruption filters” as I call them, designed to catch wrongdoing before it happens or gets too far. That includes ethics lawyers in the White House… prosecutors and agents at Justice and the FBI… “inside watchdogs,” like inspectors general and whistleblowers in the agencies themselves… “outside watchdogs,” like a free press and the groups that sue a law-breaking government in court… and finally Congress. The film walks through these layers and shows how the filtration system has been deliberately sabotaged. The result is a seemingly endless stream of filth — wrongdoing, self-enrichment, weaponized power — into our republic.
But something else changed while we were making this film. Americans caught up.
We were the first to observe that all of this “corruption” has set a record in the eyes of the people. Never before has the issue been the number-one voting issue headed into an American election, at least not since polling began in the 1930s. Yet today it is. Survey after survey finds that supermajorities of Democrats and Republicans are furious about corruption in the United States, even more so than economic conditions, and it’s led to a hyper-populist, anti-incumbent mood across the nation. The president’s own approval has sunk to 30 percent in Pew’s latest survey, which only happens when millions of his own voters walk away in disgust.
I hope you’ll use this documentary and the data for what they are: alarm bells for our democracy. Last night, we premiered CORRUPTIONLAND for thousands of DEFIANCE.org Members, and we heard from Rep. Jason Crow and other people from the film. This morning, all Americans get a chance to see it, and hopefully they will be stirred to action.
So here’s my ask, one week out from the election:
Watch it. It’s 35 minutes and it’s free at corruptionland.org as of right now.
Send it to one person who needs to see it. The point is to wake more Americans up to the fact that our republic is in danger from grift, graft, and the people perpetuating it.
Then vote. Early voting is open almost everywhere. Four of the five corruption filters have been nearly destroyed. The fifth one is on your ballot, and you can actually do something about it.
They kicked us out of the Washington Monument for filming this (true story). But they cannot stop you from watching it.
P.S. DEFIANCE.org is a nonprofit “club for the courageous.” We literally exist to FIGHT the corruption you just read about. We announce a new effort every week to counter Trump’s abuses of power. That’s what your membership funds. If you haven’t yet, become a member today.
CORRUPTIONLAND
CORRUPTIONLAND is now available nationwide at CORRUPTIONLAND.org, along with an interactive corruption map. Watch it, then send it to everyone. This is your most important GET OUT THE VOTE tool!