Is Trump the most corrupt President in U.S. history?

Is Trump the most corrupt President in U.S. history?

1 September 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

The Republican President Warren Harding is generally considered to have been the most corrupt in U.S. history. But on June 11 2024, I headlined “Biden is the most corrupt President in U.S. history.” And then, on 23 August 2025, I headlined “The Trump crime-family now outdoes even the Biden crime-family.” However, in a recent week, there were so many incidents reported of Trump’s corruptness, that I have now increased still further my rating of him for corruptness. Consider the following article from The Week magazine, issue-dated on 14 August 2026, summarizing those reports:

Profit­ing from the pres­id­ency

The Week (US)

7 August 2026

In the second Trump admin­is­tra­tion, “the palms couldn’t be greasier,” said Daniel W. Drezner in his Substack news­let­ter. A Wall Street Journal story last week revealed the epic scale of Pres­id­ent Trump’s cor­rup­tion, detail­ing how he has extrac­ted more than $800 mil­lion from com­pan­ies and donors since return­ing to office. Top Trump fun­draiser Meredith O’Rourke—whom he’s nick­named the “prin­cess of dark­ness” — will call com­pan­ies on the pres­id­ent’s orders and say, “The boss wants this money.” O’Rourke has got­ten res­ults: Soft­Bank handed over $50 mil­lion for Trump’s pres­id­en­tial lib­rary, Apple $25 mil­lion for his White House ball­room, and Meta $10 mil­lion for a Trump-aligned non­profit. Donors under­stand that such invest­ments might secure them more-favor­able treat­ment. Trump last month renewed a tar­iff exemp­tion for nat­ural dia­monds just weeks after a Bel­gian dia­mond group gif­ted him a watch-size 18-karat gold ring bear­ing two large dia­mond Ts. And all this graft is on top of the $2.2 bil­lion Trump made in 2025 alone “from a vari­ety of shake­downs and grifts,” includ­ing crypto­cur­rency schemes and real estate deals with Arab tyr­ants.

The Trump fam­ily is about to rake in even more, said the Wash­ing­ton Exam­iner in an edit­or­ial. Its media ven­ture last week launched Truth API, which for up to $100,000 a month will give sub­scribers’ mil­li­second-faster access to the pres­id­ent’s Truth Social posts. The abil­ity to trade early on mar­ket-mov­ing inform­a­tion can gen­er­ate big profits — a Trump post in April 2025 “announ­cing a tar­iff pause sent the S&P 500 soar­ing 9.5%” — and hedge funds and fin­an­cial insti­tu­tions will likely pay for the ser­vice, if only to stay com­pet­it­ive with other traders. “The whole concept is so cor­rupt you almost struggle to get your head around it,” said Jim Swift in The Bul­wark. Trump is char­ging for something, know­ledge of gov­ern­ment actions, that should belong freely to Amer­ic­ans. “This is pure rent-seek­ing.”

Crack­ing down on Trump’s cor­rup­tion should be a win­ning mes­sage for Demo­crats in the midterms, said James Downie in MS.now. A CNN/SSRS poll last week found that nearly two-thirds of Amer­ic­ans think Trump has “gone too far” in “pur­su­ing his per­sonal busi­ness interests.” But half of voters, includ­ing two-thirds of inde­pend­ents, think neither party is fight­ing the rot in Wash­ing­ton. After a dec­ade of Trump’s grift­ing, Demo­crats might find those num­bers “baff­ling.” But the pub­lic’s frus­tra­tion is under­stand­able: Con­gress has not passed a major eth­ics reform in dec­ades, and a con­gres­sional stock-trad­ing ban “remained in pur­gat­ory under Demo­cratic and GOP-con­trolled Con­gresses.” Demo­crats can make Trump’s graft an elec­tion-defin­ing issue — but then they must do something about it.

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The evidence is conclusive that both Parties are totally corrupt. However, Trump has risen to be the king of corruption, in ways that no previous U.S. politician had even imagined possible.

I asked Chat GPT to check whether anything alleged in that article was false; and it then accessed each of its sources and found all of them to be accurately represented there. It also said that if courts were to consider whether any of this amounts to “corruption,” “graft,” “shakedowns,” or “grifts” as defined by U.S. laws, some courts might say yes, and other courts might say no. But all of the Trump actions that were described in this article were accurately represented.

The fact that a President can get this far without being imprisoned for life is yet another indication that there is no justice in America, no actual democracy in America, and that the U.S. Government is profoundly rotten to its core — which “core” is not, and does NOT mean including, the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. actually stopped adhering to the U.S. Constitution when the worst President in U.S. history, Harry Truman, became President in 1945. Ever since then, America’s billionaires, and no longer America’s voters, have been the “power behind the throne” of (what Truman turned into) the U.S. empire.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.