“Grift,” once a folksy term for carnival swindlers and petty con games, has become the defining issue of the US midterm elections. Front-page headlines in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times last week reported that voter anxiety over corruption now outranks almost every other concern. A Financial Times survey found that 69 per cent of registered voters — and nearly half of those who backed Donald Trump in 2024 — worry about “corruption, self-dealing, or conflicts of interest” in his administration. Even Fox News polling showed 88 per cent of voters “extremely” or “very” concerned about government corruption.Americans are hardly naive about public corruption. This is the country of Tammany Hall, the Keating Five, and Mr Smith Goes to Washington, the 1939 film classic about a naive, newly appointed senator who takes on government corruption. But American political corruption was traditionally clandestine, operated out of smoke-filled back rooms.AdvertisementWhat is truly remarkable about corruption in the Trump administration is how blatant and in-your-face it has been. Trump has made no effort to hide the fact that he and his family have made an estimated $4 billion while in office, enough to make banana republic dictators blush. Between presidential pardons treated as currency, venture capital windfalls for his sons, crypto regulations bent toward family allies, insider stock plays, and private jets gifted by foreign regimes, Trump has turned the government into a personal enrichment machine.The only reasonable explanation for this brazenness is that Trump must not think his self-enrichment is wrong. And, until now, neither did his base.To understand why, one must look beyond politics to the grotesque evolution of the American Dream. The competitive ethos of American society has long manifested itself in the notion that, as a famous American football coach put it, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.’’ Combine this with the self-image of a nation that was conceived in rebellion against the old European world of pedigreed privilege and you get the wholehearted adulation of self-made winners. In the American imagination, those who climb to the top by talent, hustle, or sheer market savvy earn moral legitimacy — luck and contingency notwithstanding. It is a short step from this to believing that society’s winners are inherently superior and unbound by the pedestrian constraints governing ordinary citizens.AdvertisementAlso Read | The worldwide outbursts of the powerless pose new political questionsTrump weaponised this sentiment. By glossing over the fact that he came from privilege and presenting a myth of self-made triumph, he cast himself as the ultimate “winner”. It is no surprise that his go-to insult is to call someone a ‘’loser’’. Trump never claimed to be a traditional public servant. Instead, he placed himself as an insider of the winning super elite whose exempt status was proof of his dominance. His use of social media to communicate directly turned this message into a core element of his personality cult. When he hawked branded trinkets from the campaign trail or funneled federal spending into private properties, it did not scandalise his base.That bargain is breaking.A hollowed-out middle class that backed Trump out of cultural and economic despair is finding it impossible to reconcile his White House grift with their daily reality. Treading water under the weight of tariffs, rising inflation, and steep petrol prices, voters are watching a billionaire cash in while their own lives get tougher. Top-level corruption has transformed into a pocketbook issue.Yet Trump is merely the most visible symptom of a deeper structural rot. Over three decades of economic distortion, America has birthed a class of unaccountable, ultra-winners: the “Epstein class”. Comprising less than 0.1 per cent of the population, this circle spans tech founders, private equity barons, hedge fund titans, and media moguls. Because many come from modest backgrounds, they claim the bulletproof moral armour of meritocracy.you may likeThe Epstein class inhabits a separate stratosphere — a world of private islands, gated enclaves, superyachts, corporate jets, plush VIP boxes, and red carpet extravaganzas such as the Met Gala. But their real privilege is structural, not recreational. They enjoy carried-interest tax loopholes, multi-million-dollar compensation payouts from their buddies on company boards and golden parachutes after catastrophic failure, private profits backstopped by Federal Reserve liquidity and public bailouts, and immunity from punishment for obvious criminality. They commercialise billions in taxpayer-funded university research, rely on state subsidies for renewables, and massive government contracts in healthcare, defence, and space.This is not the capitalism described in textbooks. The “free market’’ that is practically a religion for Americans is in reality a heavily rigged oligarchy wrapped up in the garb of merit. Armies of well-funded lobbyists, lawyers, and tax advisers, and the opaque web of non-disclosure agreements ensure that it stays this way.Bernie Sanders and others on the left have been railing about this for years. But they have struggled to make arcane tax carve-outs, back-scratching executive compensation deals, and regulatory capture into a politically sellable issue. But as working Americans face an acute affordability crisis, the illusion of the deserving winner is cracking. The central question for American democracy is whether voters finally realise the game isn’t just broken at the White House — it is rigged across the entire board.The writer is an investor