It's the incipient fascism, stupid
On Wednesday morning, the lead story on FoxNews.com was not Michael Cohens admission that Donald Trump had instructed him to violate campaign-finance laws by paying hush money to two of Trumps mistresses. It was the alleged murder of a white Iowa woman, Mollie Tibbetts, by an undocumented Latino immigrant, Cristhian Rivera.
On their face, the two stories have little in common. Fox is simply covering the Iowa murder because it distracts attention from a revelation that makes Trump look bad. But dig deeper and the two stories are connected: They represent competing notions of what corruption is.
Cohens admission highlights one of the enduring riddles of the Trump era. Trumps 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 Cohens allegation is unlikely to change that.
The money shot:
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 politicians 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.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/what-trumps-supporters-think-of-corruption/568147/