On Calling Donald Trump 'Corrupt'

This chapter advances an eccentric model of corruption both to understand various disturbing features of Donald Trump’s political career, and to explore the risks of using the term “corrupt” as a pejorative label for Trump. Here corruption refers to the transfer of value from higher to lower positions along a moral gradient through a violation of the sacred. Curiously, Trump himself celebrates his own sacrilegious transfer of value from the "elite" to those ordinary (coded white) people positioned at the bottom (the so-called “Deplorables”) of a moral gradient identified with "The Establishment." Therefore, adversarial assertions of Trump’s corruption risk mimetically affirming the modes of agency he arrogates to himself. More specifically, they risk testifying to his successful transfer of (mostly symbolic) value through a set of three tactics-- excitation, transduction, and shunting-- explored throughout the chapter.