A quarter century ago, Vladimir Putin gathered 21 of Russia’s top oligarchs in the Kremlin to let them know that he, not they, held power in Russia. The young Russian president (not yet for life) informed them that they could keep the wealth they’d amassed if they complied with his political goals. Partnership with Putin held out the prospect of safety, and even greater riches. “We received confirmation,” an attendee named Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky said, “that the development of Russian business is one of the state’s top priorities.”

Most of the oligarchs submitted, but those who didn’t went to prison or into exile, lest they fall prey to the country’s epidemic of window-plunging deaths. (Khodorkovsky was imprisoned, putatively for fraud and tax evasion, but really for supporting independent media and opposition parties.) Since then, affinity for Putin has been a sine qua non of high-level economic success in Russia.

An eerily reminiscent scene played out late last year at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Winter Palace, where Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s loyalty enforcers, met with Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The weather was more pleasant, and presumably neither party contemplated defenestration as a settlement alternative, but many other details seemed to echo. “Mr. Miller told Mr. Zuckerberg that he had an opportunity to help reform America, but it would be on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s terms,” The New York Times reported. Because Trump had recently warned, “We are watching [Zuckerberg] closely, and if he does anything illegal” during Trump’s second term, “he will spend the rest of his life in prison,” this opportunity must have sounded enticing. Zuckerberg indicated that he would not in any way obstruct Trump’s agenda, according to the Times, and foisted blame for any prior offenses onto subordinates.

By the time Trump assumed power, Zuckerberg was lavishing him with praise. “We now have a U.S. administration that is proud of our leading companies,” he gushed of the man who had once threatened him with prison, “that prioritizes American technology winning. And that will defend our values and interests abroad.” His rehabilitation complete, Zuckerberg assumed a place of pride at Trump’s inauguration, alongside Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and other titans of industry. His eyes were now on the future, and the promised Trumpian Golden Age.

The president’s public communion with the business titans who have submitted to him has been analyzed as a signal of his authoritarianism and his alliance with the rich. But it also reveals another emerging aspect of Trumpism: his rejection of the capitalist principles that ultimately generate prosperity.

Trump has never believed in the invisible hand—in leaving people alone to pursue self-interest in a free market; in letting market forces allocate capital and arbitrate any given company’s success or failure. Nor does he even believe in traditional mercantilist protection. He believes, like Putin, in political control of the economy’s commanding heights—success for those executives and companies who please him, failure for those who don’t. And he seems to be seeking that control more actively than he did in 2016.

Already, Trump’s words and actions have brought about a psychological transformation within the executive class. Presidents and business leaders have sometimes tangled, or formed partnerships, but the combination of fear and solicitousness that Trump now commands is wholly new.

After the election, The Wall Street Journal reported, businesses began looking at steps such as “buying the Trump family’s cryptocurrency token” and scrubbing their websites of Democratic-friendly language. Stanley Black & Decker took down an old post-insurrection statement saying it would “use our voice to advocate for our democracy and a peaceful transition of power,” and donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. A steel executive hoping to win Trump’s approval to purchase U.S. Steel held a press conference in Butler, Pennsylvania—a holy site in the MAGA universe since the assassination attempt at a rally there in July—where he declared, “America First!”

Bezos has not renewed his financial support for the Science Based Targets initiative, which works with businesses looking to cut emissions. After Trump gave Musk, the largest donor to his campaign, a limitless portfolio to reshape federal policy, businesses began to see Musk’s commercial empire as a route to political favor too, as the Financial Times noted in February. Visa struck a payment-processing deal with Musk’s controversial social-media site, X, while Amazon boosted its planned marketing there. Musk’s former rivals hastily reconsidered their rivalries: JPMorganChase dropped a lawsuit against Tesla (the company said the timing was coincidental), and Jamie Dimon announced on CNBC that he had “hugged it out” with Musk after a long feud.

The Journal, as America’s most prominent business paper, has documented this cultural transformation in remarkably clear terms. Sentences like this began appearing regularly after the election: “Executives across the corporate sphere are working to get in the good graces of the new administration” (November). “Titans of the business world are rushing to make inroads with the president-elect, gambling that personal relationships with the next occupant of the Oval Office will help their bottom lines and spare them from Trump’s wrath” (December). “Companies seeking Trump’s favor have plenty to gain” (January). The newspaper that American capitalists consult to find out how to run their businesses is informing them that they must gain Trump’s favor if they want to get ahead.

It would be naive to depict this behavior as totally novel. For decades, big companies have spent great sums on lobbying, and their executives have long made pilgrimages to Washington to advance their interests. And they’ve often gotten results.

But Trump appears to be ushering in a change not only in the degree of government favoritism, but also in kind. And the velocity of the transformation, coming as it does alongside a cascade of tumbling norms, can obscure how differently he is operating.

The change can be seen most blatantly in the media industry, which has drawn Trump’s gaze more than any other. Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, and Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns the Los Angeles Times, spiked endorsements of Kamala Harris, claiming they would give off the appearance of bias, but then after the election made personal statements praising Trump or his Cabinet picks, as if that somehow wouldn’t. Since then, several major companies have settled lawsuits that Trump had brought against them, and that likely would have been defeated if not laughed out of court. ABC, owned by Disney, donated $15 million to Trump’s presidential library to settle his complaint that George Stephanopoulos had described Trump as having been found liable for rape (he was found liable for sexual abuse). After incoming Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr warned Paramount executives that their merger bid could be at risk because of Trump’s anger at CBS, which Paramount owns, the network reportedly began talks to settle a frivolous $10 billion lawsuit complaining that 60 Minutes had edited out unflattering portions of its interview with Harris. Even after the presiding judge expressed extreme skepticism at the merits of Trump’s lawsuit against Meta for suspending him from Facebook after the January 6 insurrection—a right it clearly possessed as a private entity—Zuckerberg offered up $25 million in penance.

[Read: Trump says the corrupt part out loud]

Putting the screws to media owners in particular, especially early on, seems to follow the same playbook that Putin and other strongmen have used to consolidate their power. So does finding opportunities for personal enrichment along the way. (Putin, a lifelong public servant, has become one of the world’s wealthiest men.) Filing weak or groundless lawsuits and expecting his targets to settle for fear of government retribution appears to be a perfectly legal way for Trump to collect baksheesh.

Although Trump has so far devoted the most attention to media businesses, he has not ignored the broader economy. Every economic-policy decision he makes is a potential weapon to punish dissent or reward his friends, beginning with tariffs.

[David Frum: The price America will pay for Trump’s tariffs]

Trump has never described himself as a free-market purist, and his enthusiasm for levying imports is his best-known deviation from his party’s traditional economic philosophy. This impulse is often described as a protectionist instinct, aimed at helping shield key industries or American businesses generally. But in fact, Trump’s tariff strategy, if you want to call it that, hardly advances any coherent economic goal. He has threatened tariffs on countries for non-economic reasons, and levied tariffs on industrial inputs, such as aluminum and copper, that make American industries less, not more, competitive by raising their costs. Trump apparently believes that tariffs are borne by foreigners, and are therefore an untapped source of free money from overseas. He enjoys the idea of using them as levers to extract diplomatic concessions as well.

But Trump has also used tariffs to gain personal and political leverage over American businesses. During his first term, Trump levied broad tariffs and then entertained a parade of executives pleading for exemptions, which his administration doled out at its whim. The Office of the United States Trade Representative fielded more than 50,000 requests from domestic businesses for exceptions to the tariffs on Chinese goods alone, while the Commerce Department sifted through almost half a million waiver requests. Trump’s decisions were often arbitrary—Bibles got a tariff exception, on the apparent basis that their costs needed to stay low, but textbooks did not.

One study of the exceptions, published by the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, found that firms that had donated to Trump or hired staff from his administration were more likely to receive tariff exceptions. The tariffs, and the ability to hand out exceptions without any oversight or method, were “a very effective spoils system allowing the administration of the day to reward its political friends and punish its enemies,” the authors concluded.

A 2019 investigation by the Commerce Department’s inspector general reported “the appearance of improper influence in decision-making” in the waiver process. In his second term, Trump has managed to solve this problem—if you define problem as the exposure of corruption rather than its existence—by firing, to date, the inspectors general at 18 federal agencies, including Commerce.

Trump’s greatest advantage in this regard is that he has never professed adherence to any standard of fairness. When he discusses his plans to regulate businesses, or reward them with tax breaks, he does so in nakedly transactional terms. The business community understands that every decision the federal government makes, whether it involves antitrust enforcement or taxation or criminal justice, will be meted out on the basis of Trump’s political and personal whims. Trump does not even pretend otherwise, because the pretense would undermine his power.

Presidents may not be angels. But they used to follow a general presumption of leaving the task of picking winners and losers to the private sector. They likewise observed a wall between public and private interest that we can barely recognize today.

Seventy-two years ago, President Dwight Eisenhower selected Charlie Wilson, the head of General Motors, as his defense secretary. Skeptical members of Congress quizzed Wilson as to how he would put aside residual loyalty to his former company. Wilson confessed, “For years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” The confession scandalized the country. Although Wilson was trying to say that General Motors benefited from national prosperity, the very possibility that he might conflate the interests of his former employer with those of the country was beyond the pale.

[From the April 2018 issue: Is Big Business really that bad?]

At the moment, large swaths of government policy are being dictated by the current CEO of a car company. And yet it is unfathomable that the Trump administration would deem Elon Musk’s dual role unethical, let alone demand that he step down from Tesla and his other companies as a condition of public service. Musk, like Trump, respects no distinction between his personal financial interests, those of his political party, and those of the country. The seamless connection between political power and personal wealth tells everybody who belongs to the upper class or aspires to it that their safest path is to join the ruling claque.

This is alarming for any number of reasons. But, not least among them, it violates the key precept of any free-enterprise system: that market competition dictates which businesses succeed or fail. Through innovation and creative destruction, this kind of competition yields national prosperity.

The nature of Trump’s economic vision—populist? nationalist? traditional conservative?—has been the subject of endless debate. The reality is that he brings together the least attractive elements of capitalism and socialism, fusing heavy-handed state control with high inequality, and entrenching a set of oligarchs who serve simultaneously as the ruling party’s victims and co-conspirators. The more that political favor displaces market competition as the basis of corporate success, the worse things will get.

It may seem to Americans influenced by Trump’s well-crafted persona as a business genius or lulled by the record of his first term (when he inherited a growing economy) that he will bring some pro-business magic to his second term. Yet favoring incumbent businesses (as long as they stay on his good side) is not the same as favoring healthy free markets. Putin is in some ways a great ally of Russian business, and the country’s economic elite supports him, but Russia’s economy should be seen by intelligent advocates of capitalism as a vision of hell.

The end point of Trump’s vision for the economy would be unrecognizable to generations of innovators. It would sacrifice the openness and opportunity that make America the most enticing destination for entrepreneurs across the world, while locking into place and even celebrating excesses of wealth. If Americans think that by empowering Trump, they have traded away some of their equality, civic decency, and political freedom for prosperity, we may find one day that we have sacrificed them all.

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Fear Economy.”

What exactly is Donald Trump doing?

Since taking office, he has reduced his administration’s effectiveness by appointing to essential agencies people who lack the skills and temperaments to do their jobs. His mass firings have emptied the civil service of many of its most capable employees. He has defied laws that he could just as easily have followed (for instance, refusing to notify Congress 30 days before firing inspectors general). He has disregarded the plain language of statutes, court rulings, and the Constitution, setting up confrontations with the courts that he is likely to lose. Few of his orders have gone through a policy-development process that helps ensure they won’t fail or backfire—thus ensuring that many will.

In foreign affairs, he has antagonized Denmark, Canada, and Panama; renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”; and unveiled a Gaz-a-Lago plan. For good measure, he named himself chair of the Kennedy Center, as if he didn’t have enough to do.

Even those who expected the worst from his reelection (I among them) expected more rationality. Today, it is clear that what has happened since January 20 is not just a change of administration but a change of regime—a change, that is, in our system of government. But a change to what?

[Graeme Wood: Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing]

There is an answer, and it is not classic authoritarianism—nor is it autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism. Understanding patrimonialism is essential to defeating it. In particular, it has a fatal weakness that Democrats and Trump’s other opponents should make their primary and relentless line of attack.

Last year, two professors published a book that deserves wide attention. In The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future, Stephen E. Hanson, a government professor at the College of William & Mary, and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, a political scientist at UC Irvine, resurface a mostly forgotten term whose lineage dates back to Max Weber, the German sociologist best known for his seminal book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Weber wondered how the leaders of states derive legitimacy, the claim to rule rightfully. He thought it boiled down to two choices. One is rational legal bureaucracy (or “bureaucratic proceduralism”), a system in which legitimacy is bestowed by institutions following certain rules and norms. That is the American system we all took for granted until January 20. Presidents, federal officials, and military inductees swear an oath to the Constitution, not to a person.

The other source of legitimacy is more ancient, more common, and more intuitive—“the default form of rule in the premodern world,” Hanson and Kopstein write. “The state was little more than the extended ‘household’ of the ruler; it did not exist as a separate entity.” Weber called this system “patrimonialism” because rulers claimed to be the symbolic father of the people—the state’s personification and protector. Exactly that idea was implied in Trump’s own chilling declaration: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

In his day, Weber thought that patrimonialism was on its way to history’s scrap heap. Its personalized style of rule was too inexpert and capricious to manage the complex economies and military machines that, after Bismarck, became the hallmarks of modern statehood. Unfortunately, he was wrong.

Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.

In its governmental guise, patrimonialism is distinguished by running the state as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business. It can be found in many countries, but its main contemporary exponent—at least until January 20, 2025—has been Vladimir Putin. In the first portion of his rule, he ran the Russian state as a personal racket. State bureaucracies and private companies continued to operate, but the real governing principle was Stay on Vladimir Vladimirovich’s good side … or else.

Seeking to make the world safe for gangsterism, Putin used propaganda, subversion, and other forms of influence to spread the model abroad. Over time, the patrimonial model gained ground in states as diverse as Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and India. Gradually (as my colleague Anne Applebaum has documented), those states coordinated in something like a syndicate of crime families—“working out problems,” write Hanson and Kopstein in their book, “divvying up the spoils, sometimes quarreling, but helping each other when needed. Putin in this scheme occupied the position of the capo di tutti capi, the boss of bosses.”

Until now. Move over, President Putin.

To understand the source of Trump’s hold on power, and its main weakness, one needs to understand what patrimonialism is not. It is not the same as classic authoritarianism. And it is not necessarily antidemocratic.

[Read: Trump says the corrupt part out loud]

Patrimonialism’s antithesis is not democracy; it is bureaucracy, or, more precisely, bureaucratic proceduralism. Classic authoritarianism—the sort of system seen in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—is often heavily bureaucratized. When authoritarians take power, they consolidate their rule by creating structures such as secret police, propaganda agencies, special military units, and politburos. They legitimate their power with legal codes and constitutions. Orwell understood the bureaucratic aspect of classic authoritarianism; in 1984, Oceania’s ministries of Truth (propaganda), Peace (war), and Love (state security) are the regime’s most characteristic (and terrifying) features.

By contrast, patrimonialism is suspicious of bureaucracies; after all, to exactly whom are they loyal? They might acquire powers of their own, and their rules and processes might prove obstructive. People with expertise, experience, and distinguished résumés are likewise suspect because they bring independent standing and authority. So patrimonialism stocks the government with nonentities and hacks, or, when possible, it bypasses bureaucratic procedures altogether. When security officials at USAID tried to protect classified information from Elon Musk’s uncleared DOGE team, they were simply put on leave. Patrimonial governance’s aversion to formalism makes it capricious and even whimsical—such as when the leader announces, out of nowhere, the renaming of international bodies of water or the U.S. occupation of Gaza.

Also unlike classic authoritarianism, patrimonialism can coexist with democracy, at least for a while. As Hanson and Kopstein write, “A leader may be democratically elected but still seek to legitimate his or her rule patrimonially. Increasingly, elected leaders have sought to demolish bureaucratic administrative states (‘deep states,’ they sometimes call them) built up over decades in favor of rule by family and friends.” India’s Narendra Modi, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Trump himself are examples of elected patrimonial leaders—and ones who have achieved substantial popular support and democratic legitimacy. Once in power, patrimonialists love to clothe themselves in the rhetoric of democracy, like Elon Musk justifying his team’s extralegal actions as making the “unelected fourth unconstitutional branch of government” be “responsive to the people.”

Nonetheless, as patrimonialism snips the government’s procedural tendons, it weakens and eventually cripples the state. Over time, as it seeks to embed itself, many leaders attempt the transition to full-blown authoritarianism. “Electoral processes and constitutional norms cannot survive long when patrimonial legitimacy begins to dominate the political arena,” write Hanson and Kopstein.

Even if authoritarianism is averted, the damage that patrimonialism does to state capacity is severe. Governments’ best people leave or are driven out. Agencies’ missions are distorted and their practices corrupted. Procedures and norms are abandoned and forgotten. Civil servants, contractors, grantees, corporations, and the public are corrupted by the habit of currying favor.

To say, then, that Trump lacks the temperament or attention span to be a dictator offers little comfort. He is patrimonialism’s perfect organism. He recognizes no distinction between what is public and private, legal and illegal, formal and informal, national and personal. “He can’t tell the difference between his own personal interest and the national interest, if he even understands what the national interest is,” John Bolton, who served as national security adviser in Trump’s first term, told The Bulwark. As one prominent Republican politician recently told me, understanding Trump is simple: “If you’re his friend, he’s your friend. If you’re not his friend, he’s not your friend.” This official chose to be Trump’s friend. Otherwise, he said, his job would be nearly impossible for the next four years.

Patrimonialism explains what might otherwise be puzzling. Every policy the president cares about is his personal property. Trump dropped the federal prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams because a pliant big-city mayor is a useful thing to have. He broke with 50 years of practice by treating the Justice Department as “his personal law firm.” He treats the enforcement of duly enacted statutes as optional—and, what’s more, claims the authority to indemnify lawbreakers. He halted proceedings against January 6 thugs and rioters because they are on his side. His agencies screen hires for loyalty to him rather than to the Constitution.

In Trump’s world, federal agencies are shut down on his say-so without so much as a nod to Congress. Henchmen with no statutory authority barge into agencies and take them over. A loyalist who had only ever managed two small nonprofits is chosen for the hardest management job in government. Conflicts of interest are tolerated if not outright blessed. Prosecutors and inspectors general are fired for doing their job. Thousands of civil servants are converted to employment at the president’s will. Former officials’ security protection is withdrawn because they are disloyal. The presidency itself is treated as a business opportunity.

Yet when Max Weber saw patrimonialism as obsolete in the era of the modern state, he was not daydreaming. As Hanson and Kopstein note, “Patrimonial regimes couldn’t compete militarily or economically with states led by expert bureaucracies.” They still can’t. Patrimonialism suffers from two inherent and in many cases fatal shortcomings.

The first is incompetence. “The arbitrary whims of the ruler and his personal coterie continually interfere with the regular functioning of state agencies,” write Hanson and Kopstein. Patrimonial regimes are “simply awful at managing any complex problem of modern governance,” they write. “At best they supply poorly functioning institutions, and at worst they actively prey on the economy.” Already, the administration seems bent on debilitating as much of the government as it can. Some examples of incompetence, such as the reported firing of staffers who safeguard nuclear weapons and prevent bird flu, would be laughable if they were not so alarming.

Eventually, incompetence makes itself evident to the voting public without needing too much help from the opposition. But helping the public understand patrimonialism’s other, even greater vulnerability—corruption—requires relentless messaging.

[Read: This is what happens when the DOGE guys take over]

Patrimonialism is corrupt by definition, because its reason for being is to exploit the state for gain—political, personal, and financial. At every turn, it is at war with the rules and institutions that impede rigging, robbing, and gutting the state. We know what to expect from Trump’s second term. As Larry Diamond of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution said in a recent podcast, “I think we are going to see an absolutely staggering orgy of corruption and crony capitalism in the next four years unlike anything we’ve seen since the late 19th century, the Gilded Age.” (Francis Fukuyama, also of Stanford, replied: “It’s going to be a lot worse than the Gilded Age.”)

Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum Photos

They weren’t wrong. “In the first three weeks of his administration,” reported the Associated Press, “President Donald Trump has moved with brazen haste to dismantle the federal government’s public integrity guardrails that he frequently tested during his first term but now seems intent on removing entirely.” The pace was eye-watering. Over the course of just a couple of days in February, for example, the Trump administration:

gutted enforcement of statutes against foreign influence, thus, according to the former White House counsel Bob Bauer, reducing “the legal risks faced by companies like the Trump Organization that interact with government officials to advance favorable conditions for business interests shared with foreign governments, and foreign-connected partners and counterparties”;

suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, further reducing, wrote Bauer, “legal risks and issues posed for the Trump Organization’s engagements with government officials both at home and abroad”;

fired, without cause, the head of the government’s ethics office, a supposedly independent agency overseeing anti-corruption rules and financial disclosures for the executive branch;

fired, also without cause, the inspector general of USAID after the official reported that outlay freezes and staff cuts had left oversight “largely nonoperational.”

By that point, Trump had already eviscerated conflict-of-interest rules, creating, according to Bauer, “ample space for foreign governments, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to work directly with the Trump Organization or an affiliate within the framework of existing agreements in ways highly beneficial to its business interests.” He had fired inspectors general in 19 agencies, without cause and probably illegally. One could go on—and Trump will.

Corruption is patrimonialism’s Achilles’ heel because the public understands it and doesn’t like it. It is not an abstraction like “democracy” or “Constitution” or “rule of law.” It conveys that the government is being run for them, not for you. The most dire threat that Putin faced was Alexei Navalny’s “ceaseless crusade” against corruption, which might have brought down the regime had Putin not arranged for Navalny’s death in prison. In Poland, the liberal opposition booted the patrimonialist Law and Justice Party from power in 2023 with an anti-corruption narrative.

In the United States, anyone seeking evidence of the power of anti-corruption need look no further than Republicans’ attacks against Jim Wright and Hillary Clinton. In Clinton’s case, Republicans and Trump bootstrapped a minor procedural violation (the use of a private server for classified emails) into a world-class scandal. Trump and his allies continually lambasted her as the most corrupt candidate ever. Sheer repetition convinced many voters that where there was smoke, there must be fire.

Even more on point is Newt Gingrich’s successful campaign to bring down Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright—a campaign that ended Wright’s career, launched Gingrich’s, and paved the way for the Republicans’ takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994. In the late 1980s, Wright was a congressional titan and Gingrich an eccentric backbencher, but Gingrich had a plan. “I’ll just keep pounding and pounding on his [Wright’s] ethics,” he said in 1987. “There comes a point where it comes together and the media takes off on it, or it dies.” Gingrich used ethics complaints and relentless public messaging (not necessarily fact-based) to brand Wright and, by implication, the Democrats as corrupt. “In virtually every speech and every interview, he attacked Wright,” John M. Barry wrote in Politico. “He told his audiences to write letters to the editor of their local newspapers, to call in on talk shows, to demand answers from their local members of Congress in public meetings. In his travels, he also sought out local political and investigative reporters or editorial writers, and urged them to look into Wright. And Gingrich routinely repeated, ‘Jim Wright is the most corrupt speaker in the 20th century.’”

[Read: Why Meta is paying $25 million to settle a Trump lawsuit]

Today, Gingrich’s campaign offers the Democrats a playbook. If they want to undermine Trump’s support, this model suggests that they should pursue a relentless, strategic, and thematic campaign branding Trump as America’s most corrupt president. Almost every development could provide fodder for such attacks, which would connect corruption not with generalities like the rule of law but with kitchen-table issues. Higher prices? Crony capitalism! Cuts to popular programs? Payoffs for Trump’s fat-cat clients! Tax cuts? A greedy raid on Social Security!

The best objection to this approach (perhaps the only objection, at this point) is that the corruption charge won’t stick against Trump. After all, the public has been hearing about his corruption for years and has priced it in or just doesn’t care. Besides, the public believes that all politicians are corrupt anyway.

But driving a strategic, coordinated message against Trump’s corruption is exactly what the opposition has not done. Instead, it has reacted to whatever is in the day’s news. By responding to daily fire drills and running in circles, it has failed to drive any message at all.

Also, it is not quite true that the public already knows Trump is corrupt and doesn’t care. Rather, because he seems so unfiltered, he benefits from a perception that he is authentic in a way that other politicians are not, and because he infuriates elites, he enjoys a reputation for being on the side of the common person. Breaking those perceptions can determine whether his approval rating is above 50 percent or below 40 percent, and politically speaking, that is all the difference in the world.

Do the Democrats need a positive message of their own? Sure, they should do that work. But right now, when they are out of power and Trump is the capo di tutti capi, the history of patrimonial rule suggests that their most effective approach will be hammering home the message that he is corrupt. One thing is certain: He will give them plenty to work with.