With Trump We Have More to Fear Than Fear Itself |
Newsweek
With Trump We Have More to Fear Than Fear Itself | Opinion
Thomas G. Moukawsher
Published
Dec 23, 2025 at 06:45 AM EST
President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously told Americans facing the Great Depression that, “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.” Thanks to the presidency of Donald Trump, that no longer seems to be the case.
An annual survey from Chapman University, revealed in 2025, for the tenth year in a row, that the top fear of Americans has been fear of corrupt government officials. While fear about the economy is climbing, it’s still only third on the list and fear of corrupt politicians beat out the No. 2 fear by 10 points: “fear of people I love becoming seriously ill.”
Republican politicians who have been doorstops to the portal of presidential profiteering should take note. If they think affordability is going to hurt them in the 2026 elections, they should also worry that Americans are feeling badly burned by the bribery and immorality at the core of the Trump presidency. They might note that 2015 was the first year that corruption took first place—coincidentally the same year Donald Trump descended on his golden escalator to announce his first campaign for office.
Republicans will have to answer for a hurricane of corruption in 2025. By the latest count Trump has enriched himself since the election by some $4 billion. Foreign actors and corporations from across the world have bought his crypto currency while he rolled back regulation of the industry.
Vietnam won a dramatic reduction of its tariff rate just weeks after the Trump organization broke ground on a $1.5 billion golf course in that country. He lowered Switzerland’s tariff rate right after Swiss businessmen handed Trump a gold bar and a Rolex watch. He is simultaneously developing a Trump tower in Saudi Arabia and approving an unprecedented and risky sale of F-35s to that kingdom. Trump got a $400 million plane for himself and a government-financed resort from Qatar and repaid them with a unilateral military guarantee of that country’s safety.
Principally using bogus lawsuits, Trump also extorted millions for his benefit from federally-regulated media companies, including X, ABC, CBS, Facebook, YouTube and Amazon. Now Trump is engaged in a $6-billion merger plan between his social media company and a fusion power company that’s partially funded with federal grant money. A list of Trump’s corruptions compiled by the respected non-partisan Campaign Legal Center goes on for 30 pages.
So, what can Republican politicians do if this corruption gives them reason to fear the voters more than they fear Trump? It’s simple. They can just start showing respect for the law and separate themselves from the kleptocracy that is literally tearing down White House norms to erect a billionaire’s ballroom in its place. They can start by recognizing conflicts of interest when they’re staring them in the face.
And then they can do something about them. Presidents should be required to transfer all business interests into a blind trust managed by an independent trustee. They should neither know about nor be able to influence their business finances or large private fortunes while in office. Congress should repeal the presidential exception to the federal conflicts of interest criminal laws. Presidents should not be allowed to take action on matters where their desire for money conflicts with America’s desire for good policy. Republicans should take the lead in requiring presidents and presidential candidates’ tax returns to be public. And they should adopt a law creating a way to enforce the constitutional ban on foreign gifts to American presidents.
Republicans can gain political cover by taking the lead in undoing the damage they have done by ignoring Trump’s predatory business behavior in the White House.
But they could do it for another reason too. It sounds quaint in this age of maximum cynicism, but they might do it because it’s in the national interest.
All governments function with some degree of corruption. But corruption on Trump’s scale is unsustainable. When everything appears for sale, inevitably everything will be bought rather than awarded by neutral officials based on merit. Russia shows us what kind of a country we might become if bribery becomes our norm. And perhaps our biggest fear should be that Trump thinks things in Russia are just great and that its leader is “so nice.”