Americans are not accustomed to learning lessons about democracy from Nigeria, Peru, or the Philippines. That disregard may soon change. Those countries offer examples of what it looks like to reclaim stolen or swindled wealth from fallen authoritarian rulers. Done right, this work can deliver justice and strengthen democratic institutions for the long run. But cleaning up after a corrupt regime also comes with serious challenges and hazards.The Trump presidency has often looked more like a post-Soviet or postcolonial regime than like a first-world democracy. The Trump post-presidency may look the same. Trump has abused his office to enrich himself and his family in ways that are completely unprecedented—not only in the United States but also in the history of almost any peer democracy. Only Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s notoriously lawless former prime minister, was in any way comparable, and Berlusconi was sentenced to prison.Trump faces little danger of prison. The U.S. Supreme Court has bestowed substantial criminal impunity on him, even assuming that he leaves office in 2029 as required by the Constitution. But an ex-president remains subject to civil liability, and the proceeds of bribery, extortion, insider trading, and market manipulation may be exposed to civil penalties. Other countries have shown the way.Alberto Fujimori, who was elected president of Peru in 1990, entered office at a time of extreme national crisis. The murderous Shining Path insurgency controlled much of Peru’s hinterland and terrorized the capital, Lima. Inflation ran at nearly 8,000 percent. Food and electricity were in constant shortage. Fujimori stopped the inflation and crushed the insurgency, but his harsh and sometimes criminal methods included warrantless detentions and extrajudicial killings. Fujimori dissolved Congress and the Supreme Court and rewrote Peru’s constitution to allow his own reelection in 1995. He won roughly two-thirds of the vote in a free, more or less, election.[Philippe Sands: How far does Trump’s immunity go?]But as Fujimori was doing things Peruvians wanted done, he was also presiding over a secret scheme of self-enrichment. His intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, operated a system of embezzlement and kickbacks that amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts. When this deception came to light, just after Fujimori’s 2000 reelection to a third term, he fled the country and resigned from office.To claw back these funds, Peru created a special prosecutor’s office and worked closely with the countries that hosted these contested assets. Peru has since recovered about $200 million of misappropriated wealth from accounts in the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, the United States, and Luxembourg, according to the database of the World Bank’s Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative. Peru’s economy also grew strongly after Fujimori’s fall from power. Foreign investment returned when the country renewed the rule of law. But then, in the 2010s, world demand slowed for Peru’s mineral exports, ensuring that Peru’s economy slowed too. Political instability returned.As Peru rotated through eight presidents over the past decade, a mood of “Fujimori nostalgia” gained strength. Fujimori’s daughter Keiko, who was elected to Congress in 2006, founded her own political party in 2010, built mostly on a message of family revenge and redemption. She ran for president in 2011, 2016, and 2021, losing narrowly each time. She ran again this year—and won.Believers in free and fair government can hope that Peru’s democratic institutions have strengthened sufficiently over the past quarter century to deter Keiko Fujimori from indulging in the deviousness that led to her father’s disgrace. But her tenure is new, and her political message has long been one of excusing her father’s abuses.Peru is not the only case of a former kleptocratic ruling family returning to power on a message of revenge and redemption. The Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos pillaged billions of dollars over two decades, from 1965 to 1986. After his ouster, his democratically elected successor, Corazon Aquino, created a Presidential Commission on Good Government to recover this stolen wealth. As of 2022, the PCGG had returned $5 billion to the Philippines, according to reporting by the country’s leading English-language newspaper.But as in Peru, proof of a former president’s corruption did not discredit his dynasty. In 2022, Marcos’s son—Ferdinand Marcos Jr., also known as “Bongbong”—was elected president. The PCGG still exists, but its work has ceased. The restored dynasty has reportedly returned to its corrupt ways, facing allegations of kickbacks as well as no-bid and no-work contracts, including more than $9 billion in devious government flood-control deals.Yet Bongbong Marcos has thus far respected the 1987 constitution adopted after his father’s dictatorship, which safeguards an independent judiciary and imposes an absolute ban on presidential reelection following a single six-year term. A big test for democracy in the Philippines is what happens in 2028.[Casey Michel: America has never seen corruption like this]The single most ambitious program of asset recovery has taken place in Nigeria. In the five years that Sani Abacha ruled the country as a military dictator, from 1993 until his death, in 1998, he stole perhaps $4 billion, stashing the funds in foreign accounts and shell companies. Revelations of his corruption discredited his military regime. In 1999, Nigeria returned to an elected government, which created a specialized unit in 2002, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, to reclaim these funds from Abacha’s heirs. This work received considerable help from the Swiss government, which agreed to freeze Abacha-related accounts, and from the United States, which cracked down on Abacha-owned shell companies. Nigeria got back about $1.5 billion, according to the World Bank’s tally.In Nigeria, the Abacha name has become synonymous with fraud and crime. If you receive scam letters from Nigerian fraudsters, you’ll notice how often they impersonate a member of the Abacha family and promise access to hidden millions if only these funds could be moved to a trusted bank account. For this reason, the Abacha family has not enjoyed next-generation political success in Nigeria. The ex-dictator’s son has run for governor of the family’s home state of Kano a couple of times, including this year, but never got close to winning.But as Nigeria dissolves into conflicts along religious, ethnic, and regional lines, many Nigerians yearn for a “strong leader” in the Abacha mold. The country’s successful reclamation of wealth from Abacha’s heirs has also bred a new cynicism about the country’s democratic institutions, because so much of this money has been “re-looted” by Nigeria’s post-Abacha elected governments, especially by officials in President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration.The message to Americans? The recovery of corrupt assets from fallen leaders is not hopeless, but it is difficult and risky. This work demands permanent institutions specifically tasked to investigate and prosecute, and broad international cooperation to locate, identify, seize, and return dirty money. Even so, most people generally believe that the Fujimori, Marcos, and Abacha families kept much—if not most—of their corruptly obtained wealth.More dangerous, not every citizen will agree that the out-of-office autocrat should be brought to justice. The former leader’s followers, and especially his children, may convert complaints about imperfect justice into fuel for their own corrupt restoration. The fortunes, the fame, and the followings bequeathed by corrupt rulers to their heirs can support authoritarian power grabs long after the corrupt ruler departs this Earth.If the Trump family can keep the money it has accumulated this term, the next generation of Trumps will be far richer than Donald Trump ever was until his 80th year. Americans traditionally let bygones be bygones after a president leaves office, on the theory that ex-presidents rarely cause much trouble. But money is power in politics, and dirty money needs power to protect itself from the law. As much as Americans may wish to forget the Trumps and their corruption after this presidency ends, the next generation of Trumps surely understands that political power is its surest defense against legal retribution. This makes recovering the Trumps’ wrongfully obtained wealth not only a matter of justice but also a matter of democratic survival.