In the lead-up to the midterms, Democrats have begun to fuse their messaging on the cost of living with a focus on corruption. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer went so far as to argue that the two reinforce each other. Rep. Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado, even directly said “corruption is why costs are so high.”
It isn’t hard to see why the party wants to talk about both at the same time. As poll after poll has shown, the cost of living is voters’ top concern. Simultaneously, 89% of Americans say that government corruption is widespread. And the Trump administration in particular is astoundingly, breathtakingly corrupt.
If Democrats take the House or Senate, they should aggressively investigate the Trump administration’s many misdeeds. But it is also important that Democrats not trick themselves into thinking that focusing on corruption is an adequate solution to lowering costs. The appropriate solution is to increase the supply of housing, energy, and health care. Subpoenas can’t substitute for supply. Democrats need subpoenas and supply.
Yes, Go After Trump
Trump’s personal corruption is so wide-ranging that it’s easy to lose track of, so let me remind readers of just a few examples of Trump’s activities. Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to running Binance without an effective anti-money-laundering program, which let terrorists and criminals move money through it; after Zhao boosted Trump’s crypto company, Trump pardoned him. After a donor pledged $2.5 million to his vanity ballroom project, he pardoned her father. Shortly after the pledge, a firm the donor had just set up hired Trump’s former personal lawyer Alina Habba on a deal guaranteeing Habba more than $50 million.
Almost a million people have lost a combined nearly $4 billion on the $TRUMP memecoin; financial disclosures show that Trump personally has made more than $600 million from it. He is de facto stealing from mostly his own supporters. Jared Kushner was trying to raise $5 billion for his private investment firm from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar while he was unofficially representing the U.S. in negotiations.
I could go on and on. These scandals, and many more just like them, deserve serious scrutiny.
In some contexts, Trump’s corruption really is connected to costs. To give one example, one of the things Trump clearly loves about tariffs is that they force businesses to come bowing and scraping before him begging for exemptions or protection. Those tariffs are now costing American families an average of $1,100 per year.
In Trump’s first term, the line of people asking to be let off via waivers and exemptions from the tariffs was formal and public. Companies filed thousands of exclusion requests with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. What came out the other end looked less like trade policy than a random draw. Bibles got tariff exemptions, but textbooks didn’t. Salmon got a break, but pollock didn’t. Children’s car seats were carved out; cribs weren’t.
It made no sense. Until you looked under the hood. When economists went through thousands of these applications, they found that companies whose executives gave to Republicans were more likely to get the exemptions they were after. That’s not technically bribery, but it isn’t far from it, either. Trump created a gate and then let through only the people who pleased him. That he did this and that this is his approach to tariffs—and to life more generally—surprises literally no one who has ever dealt with him.
In the second term, it’s been even more brazen. There’s been no formal application process for carve-outs. Exemptions arrive capriciously, sometimes without even a fig-leaf explanation, and the way to get one is to be on the president’s good side. It’s one of the most transparently mafia-boss parts of this presidency. He makes a decision that hurts everyone, then sells exceptions to whoever shows up with the right kind of obsequious tribute.
Democrats should absolutely look into who got which exemptions and why. But subpoenas and investigations, by themselves, won’t lower prices. What lowers prices is taking away the discretion and thus opportunity for capriciousness. And that means ending the tariffs, or at least the president’s power to hand out exemptions one by one. Congress needs to do its job and claw back its authority over tariffs—because, as the Supreme Court has noted and as every economist will tell you, tariffs are taxes.
To be sure, voters are angry about corruption that is wider than Trump alone. If Democrats want to go broader than just investigating Trump, there are certainly areas where it would make sense to do that. They could start by banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks; that’s a proposal that 86% of Americans support. Limiting the president’s pardoning power and banning gifts to Supreme Court justices could be other potential areas of reform too. Making the government less corrupt makes sense.
But This Doesn’t Make Corruption the Main Cost Driver in Most Areas of the Economy
As important as it is for Democrats to investigate the Trump administration’s various abuses of power and as worthy a goal as making the government less corrupt is, it is simply not the main reason why costs are too high for everyday Americans. Housing is too expensive because we don’t have enough housing, especially in places with high housing demand. Anti-development zoning is a policy problem (and at times an infuriating one)—but it’s not bribery. There’s no subpoena that the House Oversight Committee can send to make Boston build more housing.
Energy is a similar story. Electricity prices are too high mostly because we haven’t built enough power generation or transmission lines. The main element of corruption there is the Trump administration arbitrarily canceling the approvals of wind turbine projects. One proposed solution—which I favor—is to pass the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, which the Senate is set to take up when it returns after the midterms, both for its many pro-energy policies and for its regulatory certainty provisions that will constrain that kind of abuse of power moving forward.
Child care is expensive because it’s extremely labor-intensive. It would be emotionally satisfying if there were some shadowy figure driving up child care costs and we could get more affordable child care simply by dragging them before a congressional committee and verbally punching them—but that’s not the reality.
Health care is more of a mixed bag than the others but, even there, the story is mostly not corruption-related. There are definitely competition and pricing problems. Reformers have identified several, ranging from site-neutral payments to reforming certificate-of-need laws to the ways mergers and acquisitions in hospital systems stifle competition and drive up prices. But it is too sweeping to attribute high health care costs only to corruption. That sector faces significant supply constraints that do much to raise prices.
Don’t Forget the Main Objective: Bring Down Costs
Recently, Third Way polled 2,000 Americans about what their top priorities are. Here are the word clouds representing how frequently different policy problems got brought up. “Corruption” is visible for both Democrats and independents, but it pales in comparison to costs. When asked directly if they preferred congressional Democrats investigating the Trump administration or bringing down costs, the latter won 68%-27%.
Democrats can do two things at once: hold the Trump administration accountable for the scandalous corruption that it gleefully engages in on a daily basis, and at the same time, deliver policy reforms that, while less dramatic than a high-profile hearing, get the diagnosis of America’s scarcity-driven inflation correct and offer real solutions.
What the plan cannot be is to perform well in the midterms because voters are angry about prices being too high and then turn around and offer them nothing more than hearings and reversing a few of Trump’s cuts to services.
What Democrats need is a real strategy on costs, and that’s about supply more than subpoenas.
An earlier version of this article was first published in the author’s newsletter, The Rebuild.
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"And that means ending the tariffs, or at least the president’s power to hand out exemptions one by one." Which will require being able to overcome a Presidential veto which will require a bipartisan will to do that. The coming congressional Republicans are likely to be even more submissive to Trump.
As you indicate the political messaging around much of this is going to demand that Democrats must link Trump's corruption, chaotic governance and Republican complacency with the economic conditions voters are undergoing. Trump's (and Republican) resistance to allowing Congress to take back its authority on tariffs and war powers must be a campaign issue in 2028.
Even better would be a Democratic Party that champions the roll back of executive power across the board regardless of who occupies the White House. Hey, I know that is the stuff of fantasies and the Democrats tend to see every problem as best solved at the federal level and that they don't mind a unitary executive if the executive is one of their own. But a person can always hope.
It is also possible that the career politicians in the Republican Party will see the 2026 election as a wake up call and might decide Trumpism is at a dead end and that moving on from Trump is their best career move forward. Don't laugh! Anything is possible...