Corruption was front of mind for US voters in this month’s midterms. In the lead-up to the election, surveys by CNBC and Fox News put government corruption among voters’ leading concerns. On polling day, exit polling found that roughly nine in ten voters said it was a major factor in their vote.
That concern went far wider than campaign finance. Voters were reacting to public office being used for private gain, and to a sense that politics serves the wealthy and well-connected while ordinary people struggle with the cost of living. As the Brennan Center, a non-partisan policy institute, put it, corruption felt "visceral" to voters this year. Record campaign spending could not buy back their trust.
That should register in Westminster. When people come to believe that politics is corrupt, the damage does not stop with those responsible: it taints every politician and every institution. Protecting our democracy means showing that the system can be trusted, and acting before that belief takes hold.
Private gain from public office
An October AP-NORC poll found that 56% of US adults believed Trump had prioritised his personal business interests “a lot” since returning to office. Views differ significantly by party: about 8 in 10 Democrats believe he has done something illegal, compared with about 3 in 10 independents and about 1 in 10 Republicans. Even so, about half of Republicans said he had prioritised his own business interests, or those of his friends and family, “at least somewhat”.
Reuters reported that Trump’s financial disclosure for 2025 recorded more than $1.4 billion in income from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures. In May 2025, he hosted a dinner at his private golf club for leading holders of his own branded cryptocurrency.
The administration also accepted a $400 million Boeing 747 from the government of Qatar, despite questions about the ethics and legality of such a gift. It now serves as Air Force One.
This pay-to-play politics places the president’s private financial interests alongside his administration’s decisions on fiscal priorities. That overlap creates conflicts of interest that demand independent scrutiny.
Those risks deepen when the institutions meant to hold power to account are weakened.
Over the past two years, the Trump administration has weakened important safeguards against corruption. Inspectors general have been fired. In February 2025, the Justice Department ordered the disbanding of Task Force KleptoCapture and the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, which pursued sanctions evasion and the proceeds of foreign corruption.
Enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was paused in February 2025 and resumed under new guidelines in June, with greater emphasis on US economic and national security interests. Requirements for US-created companies to disclose their real owners to the federal government were removed. And in September this year, the US announced its withdrawal from GRECO, the Council of Europe’s anti-corruption monitoring body, effective from January 2027. These institutions were dependent on norms and red lines being respected, so they
This is how the conditions for kleptocracy can develop. Academic research on state capture identifies the disabling of accountability institutions as one of the main ways that narrow interests take control of a state, alongside changing the rules in their favour and diverting public resources. Elections remain a vital check, but investigators and watchdogs must be able to act between them.
Big money
These were the most expensive midterm elections in American history, with total spending reaching nearly $12 billion, according to OpenSecrets. Very wealthy donors played a prominent role on both sides of the aisle. By late October, analysis by Public Citizen recorded $445 million in super PAC contributions from Elon Musk, a major Republican backer, and $81 million from Michael Bloomberg, a major Democratic donor.
Yet heavy spending did not guarantee victory. Alongside the cost of living, concern about corruption was one of the reasons: voters increasingly see big money as part of the same problem, a system that gives wealthy interests access and influence ordinary people cannot match.
Calls to clean up politics
Attention in the US is now turning to what comes next. The incoming congressional majority has said it will pass legislation to root out corruption, with ideas under discussion including a push for term limits at the Supreme Court, a ban on stock trading by members of Congress and other officials, and limits on super PAC spending. Independent experts have been making the case for wider reform for some time.
The lesson is that restoring trust takes a whole package of reform, not a single fix.
What can the UK learn from this?
The UK is not immune. Many of the rules on ministers' conduct, conflicts of interest and lobbying still rest on convention rather than law. Money is also playing a growing role in our politics: our last general election was the most expensive in British history, at £94.5 million. If voters here conclude that politics works for those with money and connections, that belief will not attach to one party or one government. It will damage trust in all of them.
Andy Burnham has promised the biggest changes in 40 years. He should now bring forward a credible Clean Up Politics agenda as part of his 10-year plan. Next year's King's Speech should include legislation to reform lobbying, building on the Ethics and Integrity Commission's recent review, and to put independent oversight of ministerial standards and conflicts of interest on a statutory footing. A cap on donations and annual spending limits should be part of that plan too: the Representation of the People Bill, now in the Lords, is an opportunity to address the influence of a wealthy few. And the UK must keep strengthening its defences against kleptocracy, so that corrupt fortunes cannot find a safe home here.
Democratic resilience means building safeguards that hold regardless of who is in power. That requires rules on political money that can be enforced and institutions able to investigate wrongdoing independently. The UK should strengthen them now, while it can, rather than wait to find out how much they can withstand.