On Monday, August 8, 2022—on the 48th anniversary of Richard Nixon resigning the presidency—the FBI issued a warrant to search former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago, for classified documents that he had refused to turn over to the National Archives and appropriate departments upon leaving the White House. And by Thursday, it had been reported that some of the classified documents pertained to America’s nuclear weapons.
When the news broke on Monday, I immediately thought about Ukrainian politics and their former president Viktor Yanukovych, and this connection is something I cover at length in my book The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America.
In chapter nine of my book, “Cultural Vulgarity and Destroying Dignity” I describe how the Ukrainian and Russian word “Poshlost” can help us understand the horrors, dangers, and vulgarity of Trump and his presidency. Yanukovych’s political career and life has many similarities to Trump’s. Yanukovych and Trump both have close relationships with Vladimir Putin, Paul Manafort was hired by both of them to implement smear campaigns against a woman politician running for president, and both men lived in gaudy, poshlyi mansions. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago is Yanukovych’s Mezhyhirya.
In my book, I describe Yanukovych’s gaudy estate:
Mezhyhirya is a luxurious, over-the-top compound situated on 350 acres and enclosed by a sixteen-foot fence. On the property there is a large wooden main club house that is also called the Honka house (after the Finnish log-home manufacturer), and there are also tennis courts, hunting grounds, an equestrian club, a shooting range, a yacht pier, a golf course, an ostrich farm, a dog kennel, man-made lakes, a helicopter pad, and a small church. Despite the unholy nature of Yanukovych’s kleptocratic cabal, a church remained among such vulgar opulence because Mezhyhirya had been an Orthodox Christian monastery for nearly a thousand years until 1922 and the rise of the Soviet Union.
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Yanukovych paid for much of Mezhyhirya’s construction by plundering Ukraine’s treasury, so following the Euromaidan Revolution in 2014 that forced Yanukovych to flee the country to Russia, the Ukrainian people invaded Mezhyhirya to see what Yanukovych had built with their money. Upon witnessing the tacky, vulgar, and over-the-top aesthetic, Ukrainians collectively laughed at Yanukovych. This corrupt, poshlyi politician betrayed his people, stole their money, and has been forced to live in Russia in absentia, and he did all of this so that he could build a vulgar, classless house.
Ukrainians needed to laugh at this horrible person, but their laughter did not mean that they overlooked the danger that Yanukovych and people like him posed for the well-being and stability of Ukraine. The joke consists of acknowledging that some people are willing to make another person’s life miserable in order to fund their vulgar way of life.
Rarely does the falsely important, clownish lifestyle of a poshlyi person become accessible to the average person, but Mezhyhirya provided a unique opportunity. This was the home of a reviled and exiled former president, and now Ukraine had to figure out what to do with it. Instead of bulldozing the property, the Ukrainian government did something brilliant. They turned Mezhyhirya into a museum dedicated to laughing at their former president. Yanukovych’s former home is now unofficially called “The Museum of Corruption.”
Mar-a-Lago, and essentially all of Trump’s properties, should become American museums of corruption, yet for that to occur the United States needs a better understanding of the meaning of corruption.
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A Corrupt Existence
Corruption is often seen as something that you recognize once you see it, and people kind of operate without needing an explicit definition of corruption to understand corruption. Our understanding of corruption is very emotive, and this can create many conflicting definitions of corruption. Both the Republicans and Democrats will describe the other as “corrupt” but it is often unclear what their definition of corruption means.
Since the American public, and American politicians, appear to have conflicting definitions of corruption, it would be impossible for the United States to erect a museum of corruption for Trump, and this should alarm all Americans. How corrupt must your country be to not have a clear understanding of corruption?
In America, the word “corruption” has been corrupted, so in order to no longer embrace, elevate, and protect corrupt politicians we must understand why “corruption” has become corrupted.
In the case of Yanukovych, Ukrainians consider him to be corrupt because he was elected to serve the people, but used the presidency to serve himself. He was supposed to serve the people, and used the façade of a statesman and civil servant to serve himself. He had become an untrustworthy person who lived in bad faith, or mauvaise foi, and this is why he was corrupt.
I endorse this as a very accurate definition and understanding of corruption that extends beyond the political realm, and also highlights why the term corruption itself has become corrupted in the United States.
A corrupt business executive would be someone who stole money from a company or misled consumers and investors to enrich themselves. This person is in a position of power where benefiting others will also benefit themselves, and they instead choose to benefit themselves while lying to others.
Trump is clearly a corrupt politician and businessman, but many Americans are not bothered by his corruption, and I believe that this is because the United States has never had a common people. But what does it mean to have a common people?
America’s ethnocidal foundation has meant that our society has always had a population of people who resided in this country for the explicit purpose of being exploited by white Americans. Division had become America’s lifeforce, so a white American becoming wealthy via lying to and exploiting the Black community had always been excusable. This ethnocidal relationship built around mauvaise foi created a corrupt existence that America has embraced since the beginning of colonization.
America’s corrupt existence and embrace of chattel slavery not only enriched white Americans, but was also the foundation of their white identity. America’s white identity was preserved by the “one-drop” rule, and equitable, uncorrupted relationships with non-white Americans would increase the chances of a white American becoming “corrupted” by a drop of non-whiteness, leading to the loss of their white identity forever.
The centuries-long preservation of American whiteness depends on the corruption of our understanding of corruption. Essentially, for those white Americans who are totally committed to sustaining American whiteness, and the wealth that supposedly comes with it, the act of no longer being a corrupt individual will be described as being “corrupted.”
These white people would have been “corrupted” by equitably coexisting and sharing existence as a common people in community with non-white people. This uncorrupted, diverse coexistence would erase their whiteness by giving them a drop of something non-white. This uncorrupted way of life is often described by white supremacists as replacing white people with non-white people, or Replacement Theory, and as the Buffalo shooting shows us, some white Americans will kill innocent people of color so that their whiteness will not get replaced.
For many Americans, Trump’s corruption that extends beyond his presidency and business practices and into his worldview and how he treats non-white people will never be described as “corruption.” His corruption, to them, is how America is supposed to be, and punishing him for being corrupt would be “un-American” and treasonous. None of us should be surprised by calls for civil war and violence in order to defend Trump’s corruption. America responded the same way in the 1860s, and this is all a part of the dystopian, regressive American Cycle.
Corrupting Democracy
Museums showcase important relics from the past to educate and enlighten people in the present, ideally so that we can cultivate a better future. But, if your society exists to normalize corruption, it will also corrupt the past and museums will become temples to propaganda.
Mezhyhirya is a museum dedicated to a recent past, and it exists to inspire people to not live corrupted lives. Mar-a-Lago presents a similar opportunity, but it is clear that the United States is not yet ready to take this vital step. The Republican Party and Fox News remain in lockstep to defend Trump’s corruption even if it includes the leaking of classified information. What used to be criminal is no longer criminal because the absence of corruption would destroy their way of life.
And while the FBI’s warrant pertains to the stealing of documents, Trump’s corruption extends to every facet of his life and undermines the legitimacy of our democracy.
Much of Trump’s philosophy of corruption exists to ensure that he does not become contaminated by a non-white existence because that one-drop could make him lose his sense of self. Therefore, any thing that could contaminate him or make him lose—and losing would make him weak and susceptible to contamination—becomes illegitimate or “corrupt.”
The American voters who voted for a white president with a Black vice president are deemed illegitimate and the election has been corrupted. In Georgia, where Trump lost due to a large turnout of Black voters, Trump asked the secretary of state to find more votes so that he could win.
Democracy exists so that an entire community can vote, but in the United States, many Americans have always believed that our democracy becomes corrupted when certain people vote, especially when Americans of color vote.
Years ago, I wrote an op-ed proclaiming that the United States should allow the incarcerated to vote, and many people thought this was a crazy idea. Many of the people I spoke to about the story argued that the incarcerated would be irresponsible voters who could threaten the stability of our democracy. No one said that race played any role in their logic, but we all know that America’s incarcerated population is mostly people of color. Yet if I asked these same people today, if the people who stormed the Capitol and helped Trump in any way attempt a coup d’etat should have their voting rights taken away, they would probably argue that they should keep their voting rights. Essentially, they would argue against Albert Woodfox being able to vote, but articulate the necessity of Alex Jones voting.
America’s democracy has always embraced an iteration of corruption that sustains division, and allows white Americans to live corrupt lives, regardless of whether they choose to be corrupt or not.
It is inevitable that our normalized corruption will threaten to destroy or corrupt our democracy. Yet what is not inevitable in America is the shunning of corruption, and the capacity to erect a museum dedicated to laughing at a corrupt American and teaching all of us about the pitfalls of living a corrupt life.
Maybe one day we’ll live in a society where we can all visit Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster, and Trump Tower so that we can laugh at the worst president in American history.