From top to bottom, Trump has rebranded the Republican Party as a criminal enterprise and made graft and corruption permissible, if not downright de rigueur, for GOP politicians. While he was at his own criminal trial on Friday, one of his minor supporters, Utica former mayor Louis LaPolla was copping a plea in his own corruption case.
Utica, New York (AKA, “Sin City) is the county seat of Oneida County. A Rust Belt city in economic decline, corruption and organized crime are firmly woven into its politics, both under Republican and Democratic administrations. Oneida County is a Republican stronghold with GOP County Executives from 1980 onward. The county didn’t even ever vote for FDR and GOP presidential candidates have been winning as a matter of course. Trump beat Hillary with 56.5% and beat Biden with 56.7%. In 2022, in the open-seat congressional race, the county voted 62-38% for Republican Brandon Williams. This is as red as any non-rural county in New York State gets.
Louis LaPolla is Utica’s former Republican mayor (1984-95). Afterwards, he was the head of the city’s housing authority and then served on the city board of education for 21 years, the final 4 of them as board president. On Friday, the 78 year old LaPolla pled guilty to a mail fraud scheme in which he enriched himself through donations to a scholarship fund in his late wife's name. He managed to collect around $40,000 and used virtually all of it for himself. He’ll be sentenced on September 10 but because of a plea deal he’s likely to get far less than the 20 year maximum sentence he was facing.
It’s LaPolla's second plea deal of the year, having pled guilty in Oneida County Court to a misdemeanor petit larceny charge after admitting that he used envelopes, stamps and mailing labels belonging to the Utica City School District to send out fundraising flyers relating to the scholarship. In that case, LaPolla was sentenced to 60 days of house arrest, 3 years of probation and ordered to pay $3,100 in restitution. Conservative politicians have long believed they are entitled to take whatever they can but this has greatly accelerated during the Age of Trump. Trump personally is almost universally seen as the most corrupt president in history. Corruption in the political arena has commonly, if narrowly, been understood as exploitation of political, social or economic power for illicit financial gain, including bribery, extortion, influence peddling, graft and embezzlement. ‘Contemporary tales of corruption in the United States have most often centered on how the wealthy exploit corporate power and tax regimes or how powerful politicians use their offices to retain power and secure private monetary rewards,’ write University of Colorado Boulder scholars Donna M. Goldstein and Kristen Drybread, editors of a new anthology, Corruption and Illiberal Politics in the Trump Era…15 essays that expand notions of corruption to include a wide array of political abuses of power, from illiberalism to the obliteration of norms, stacking courts, repression of opponents, police brutality, persistent racial inequities and a ‘corrosion of character’ that prizes ‘avarice, individualism and short-term gain above collective well-being, and the future.’”
Corruption is endemic to the United States, the editors argue.
“Elite avarice and country-club cronyism are nothing new. Today’s Wall Street profiteers, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Big Pharma families and millionaire politicians arguably have much in common with Reconstruction-era robber barons whose inconceivable fortunes were matched only by their disregard for the law and their greed,” Goldstein and Drybread write.
At the same time, the volume wrestles with questions of whether corruption has accelerated or morphed into something more virulent in the “Trump era”— the 2016 campaign, administration and post-2020-election behavior of former President Donald J. Trump— and whether he is sui generis in American politics.
But while taking seriously arguments that the “Trump era has not created anything new in the world of corruption,” Drybread and Goldstein lean toward the argument that “something is different here.”
“I think we never really have had a president with so many ongoing businesses and conflicts of interests before,” Drybread says.
…Drybread examines Trump’s friendship with the late convicted sex criminal and billionaire Jeffrey Epstein as an example of the former president’s “ability to convert moral and legal transgressions into political capital.”
“It is important to remember that corruption is more than just illicit financial or political gain. It is the corrosion of moral principles and ethical standards and their replacement by cruder motives,” she writes. “As Jeffrey Epstein’s case patently demonstrates, this practice entails inflicting pain on people whose lives are not valued, and whose suffering is evidence of charismatic authority wielded.”
Daniel Jordan Smith, professor of international studies and anthropology at Brown University, examines why Trump is held in high repute by many members of the Igbo ethnic group in Nigeria, a nation he reportedly described as a “shithole.”
“Igbos’ shared sense that politics as usual leads to elite corruption with impunity— and the idea that even though everyone knows what’s going on nothing is ever done to change the situation— makes Trump’s disdain for accepted truths popular,” writes Smith, who has done extensive work in Nigeria.
But he also notes that the Igbos and middle-class American men who support Trump are “relatively advantaged groups anxious because they see their status slipping away.”
“Perhaps it should not be surprising that Trump’s messages, primarily derived from and designed to assuage his narcissistic insecurity, are especially popular among relatively advantaged groups anxious about their collective social standing,” he concludes.
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