What the president’s supporters fear most isn’t the corruption of American law, but the corruption of America’s traditional identity.Cohen’s admission highlights one of the enduring riddles of the Trump era. Trump’s supporters say they care about corruption. During the campaign, they cheered his vow to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C. When Morning Consult asked Americans in May 2016 to explain why they disliked Hillary Clinton, the second-most-common answer was that she was “corrupt.” And yet, Trump supporters appear largely unfazed by the mounting evidence that Trump is the least ethical president in modern American history. When asked last month whether they considered Trump corrupt, only 14 percent of Republicans said yes. Even Cohen’s allegation is unlikely to change that.
The answer may lie in how Trump and his supporters define corruption. In a forthcoming book titled How Fascism Works, the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley makes an intriguing claim. “Corruption, to the fascist politician,” he suggests, “is really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of the traditional order.”
I've been aware of an alternate language at work in right-wing circles (or to phrase it more aggressively, dogwhistling). For example, "globalist" means Jew. The older "states' rights" means the right to enslave and/or racially discriminate. "Corruption" having another meaning didn't occur to me. But it makes a lot of sense that they'd have this alternate meaning for it, and it even seems to be something they've come by more honestly than the other blatantly disguised dogwhistle terms. It's a terrible example of white supremacy's prominence, but it is very useful to know.