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High-level political corruption carried out under the guise of “anti-corruption” bears striking similarities in America and China.
Late last month, an unclassified report quietly appeared on the website of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. The document details vast corruption, from the highest levels of government down to lowly civil servants. It reveals massive wealth accumulation by arguably the most powerful man in the world. And it records the persecution of political rivals under the guise of anti-corruption efforts.
A majority of the observations in the report seem to describe our current American state of affairs, despite the report’s subject: the Chinese Communist Party.
In the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2023, DNI was instructed to compile a report on corruption inside the Chinese government. The report’s release—just days before Trump’s flurry of record-breaking tariffs on Chinese imports—was timely given multiple reports that members of Congress initiated high-volume stock trades hours before Trump’s tariffs were paused. According to market watchers and Trump himself, elected officials were not the only ones to profit off the unprecedented market volatility.
In an Oval Office press event that brought together distinguished NASCAR drivers and barons of finance for neither the first nor the last time, Trump pointed at Charles Schwab and informed the athletes that Charles Schwab is “not just a company, it’s actually an individual,” adding that Schwab had “made two and a half billion today” from the stock market.
The irony of the report is hard to overstate given America’s current backdrop. “Corruption is an endemic feature of and challenge for China, enabled by a political system with power highly centralized in the hands of the CCP, a CCP-centric concept of the rule of law, a lack of independent checks on public officials, and limited transparency,” the report notes.
As Donald Trump continues to normalize corruption among his advisers and allies, and cultivates a sympathetic Department of Justice that has all but abandoned white-collar enforcement, the president’s charges of election interference, corruption among the Democrats, and general attacks on the intelligence community still play second fiddle to the CCP’s efforts to combat corruption in its ranks.
According to the DNI report, since launching his anti-corruption campaign at the start of his tenure as party leader, Xi Jinping has “investigated—and found guilty—nearly five million officials at all levels of government.” The report also cites two studies which found that “8 to 65 percent of officials—depending on the official’s rank—received an unofficial income from bribery or graft” and that “a survey of public perceptions … estimated that approximately half of Chinese officials have engaged in corruption, especially at the local levels.”
A majority of the observations in the report seem to describe our current American state of affairs.
And while levels of corruption at low and intermediate levels of government in America diverge greatly from those in China—at least in part due to our dispersed system of legalized corruption in campaign finance—high-level political corruption carried out under the guise of “anti-corruption” bears striking similarities in America and China.
One of the most glaring similarities is in the financial realm. The ODNI report notes that CCP officials have accumulated vast financial holdings distributed across family members. “Xi’s siblings, nieces, and nephews held assets worth over $1 billion in business investments and real estate.” The Trump family’s net worth has been estimated at between 6 and 20 times that number, and maybe more depending on the value of their recently released crypto tokens.
Meanwhile, those in Trump’s “political” family, including once-trusted advisers and military figures, have found that their proximity to the king is rarely enough to protect them without the addition of total and unflinching loyalty. The CCP has a similar SOP. “Significantly, political connections to high-ranking officials have not protected officials from prosecution, including those with close personal ties to Xi himself; the anti-corruption campaign has purged top officials considered loyal to Xi and who had risen under his patronage,” the report notes.
Elon Musk, who paid out hundreds of millions to support Donald Trump’s campaign; National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, who inadvertently invited Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg into a highly sensitive national-security group chat; and several midlevel staffers on the National Security Council have all either been purged by the Trump Commissariat, or will be soon, per the rumor mill.
These imminent political departures follow a vast number of cabinet officials, military officers, and strategists who fell to Trump’s sword during his first term, including attorneys general Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions; chiefs of staff Reince Priebus, John Kelly, and Mick Mulvaney; and Vice President Mike Pence. Trump mistakenly called his former national security adviser H.R. McMaster last month while trying to reach the South Carolina governor with a similar name. Upon realizing his mistake, Trump proceeded to yell at the former employee whom he himself had fired.
The result of these constant purges is a political party that increasingly finds itself unbound to any sense of political economy, rationality, or history, and is instead chained to a single figurehead whose ruthless volatility has led to market implosion, nose-diving popularity, and the enrichment of his immediate friends and family.
The second half of the report concerns internal investigations. “The [Commissions for Discipline Inspection] organizations primarily responsible for investigating misbehaviors are political organizations that work directly for their Party committees and lack independent external oversight, allowing them to pursue anti-corruption cases in often arbitrary ways. The CCP is loath to allow external oversight and instead prioritizes self-rectification, probably fearing independent authorities would undermine central control, limiting accountability and any prospects for sweeping reforms.”
If this sounds familiar, it’s because Trump has purged the already impotent inspectors general of various agencies, eliminated scores of federal workers under the ruse of disloyalty, and attempted to eliminate not just enemies in the ranks of watchdog bureaus, but the watchdog bureaus themselves.
In the conclusion of the ODNI report, the China analysts quote Xi Jinping to reinforce the general thrust of the document: “In 2024, Xi stressed during a speech to military commanders that ‘the barrels of guns must always be in the hands of those who are loyal and dependable to the Party.’” Trump has yet to deploy active-duty military into the streets to suppress dissent, opting instead for domestic agents from DHS, FBI, and DEA engaging in official kidnapping and rendition. But Xi’s sentiment wouldn’t be out of place in Trump’s mouth. Earlier this week, Trump managed to call for “homegrown” dissidents to be deported to the same gulag where lawful permanent residents now languish in El Salvador.
As Trump continues to bludgeon his way toward economic isolationism, hoping to return scores of downwardly mobile Americans to the factories of the future, his stance seems to borrow from another famous authoritarian, Chairman Mao. “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos,” Mao wrote. “The situation is excellent.”
