Americans Think ‘Corruption’ Is Everywhere. Is That Why We Vote for It?

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Americans Think ‘Corruption’ Is Everywhere. Is That Why We Vote for It?

By Charles Homans

    July 10, 2018

At one of the last rallies of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, I found myself speaking with a pair of middle-aged women who emigrated years ago from the Philippines. We got to talking about Rodrigo Duterte, the belligerent strongman who was elected president there six months earlier, and I asked them if they thought Duterte and Trump would get along. “Oh, my gosh!” the first woman said. “Probably — they are the same!”

Duterte had won in a landslide on his promises to extrajudicially exterminate the nation’s drug dealers and users, a pledge understood by Filipinos as a proxy battle in the country’s long war against endemic corruption. In 2006, Transparency International ranked the Philippines 121st out of the 163 countries on its Corruption Perceptions Index (that’s the bad end); a similar ranking the following year by the Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy rated it the most corrupt nation in Asia.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/magazine/americans-think-corruption-is-everywhere-is-that-why-we-vote-for-it.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fmagazine&action=click&contentCollection=magazine&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=18&pgtype=sectionfront