Peter Beinart: “For the most part, [Republicans] don’t care about Trump’s brazen legal transgressions during the Republican convention, or at any other point in his presidency. This isn’t because they don’t care about corruption. It’s because of the way they define the term: less as the violation of America’s laws than as the violation of America’s traditional hierarchies. Thus, so long as Trump promotes ‘Republican values,’ he can’t be corrupt.”

“As I have previously noted, the word corruption can connote different things. It’s used to describe the betrayal of public trust for private gain. But, etymologically, it is also linked to contamination, debasement, and impurity. And throughout American history, Americans have often labeled as ‘corrupt’ people who undermined not the rule of law but the preexisting racial or gender order. In public discourse for much of the 20th century, the Reconstruction era—in which Black southerners gained some political representation—was synonymous with corruption. In fact, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has pointed out, the Jim Crow era that followed Reconstruction constituted the real ‘kleptocracy’; Black citizens were robbed of their political rights, their economic freedom, their possessions, and their land. But many white Americans associated Reconstruction with corruption because it had corrupted the white dominance that they considered essential to legitimate government.”