Today: Why does there seem to be so much political corruption in the world these days? Now in print: The Signal, Extra No. 2.

+ Why is the U.S. economy showing such strange resiliency? Martin Wolf on its compounding advantages over Europe’s. & New music from Facta …

Altered States

In the United States, Democrats and Republicans talk chronically of their opponents as being defined by it—Democrats seeing corporate influence, dark money, and foreign interference; Republicans, deep-state conspiracies, voter fraud, and graft in federal agencies. When either looks into the possibility that one or another of these things might be happening, the other claims the investigation is politically motivated. Which is to say, corrupt.

Neither is this tendency entirely new. From colonial-era anti-monarchists to contemporary conspiracy theorists, time and again, Americans have understood corruption as an existential threat to their republic—sometimes perceiving elaborate plots in sparse arrays of evidence. The country’s founders established the checks and balances characteristic of their constitution partly to limit what they saw as the corrupting influence of concentrated power.

Nor is the tendency unique to the U.S. In the United Kingdom, it’s common for Labour supporters to see the Tories as enmeshed with wealthy donors, tax-avoidance schemes, and privileged access for corporate interests—and for Tories to see Labour as corrupting Britain through union influence, local-council mismanagement, and left-wing bias in public institutions. You can find similar themes from Canada to Australia and throughout the democratic world. You can trace them back to the republican city-states of the Italian Renaissance, or back from there to ancient Athens.

And there are at least grains of truth to a lot of them.

If anything’s fundamentally different today, it’s that media is now everywhere; its dominant business model is based on engagement—the time you give to it; nothing drives engagement like fear, anger, and hate; and nothing drives fear, anger, and hate like narratives about internal enemies corrupting your country. People are freaking out about corruption all the time. It’s a lot for a democratic society to bear.

Unfortunately, there’s another problem with narratives of corruption being everywhere—which is that it can create a kind of interpretive smog, making it harder for us to see the worst forms of corruption right in front of our noses: Around the world, literal dictators and the autocratic governments they run are appropriating their countries’ wealth and using it to buy power and influence in democratic countries.

It’s been happening for years. It’s been getting worse. And now, it’s getting worse still. As we go to press with this, The Signal’s second print extra, new leadership in the U.S. Department of Justice is significantly scaling back anti-corruption enforcement—dropping high-profile corruption cases, firing anti-corruption prosecutors, and disbanding efforts to enforce sanctions against Russian oligarchs. An executive order from the president is meanwhile formally suspending the application of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the landmark 1977 law that prohibits Americans from bribing foreign officials.

Corruption may be everywhere, because human beings are everywhere. But if we want to see it in real proportions, not just as our political biases want us to see it, we have to be able to follow real clues—not least, the money. And in 2025, that’s only getting tougher and more urgent.

—John Jamesen Gould

• “The United Arab Emirates doesn’t just spend more on sway in the U.S. than other autocratic regimes; they spend more than any other government, period. They’ve developed a phenomenally expansive and sophisticated influence machine in the United States.”

Miranda Patrucić:

• “They don’t want a strong U.S. promoting democracy abroad. They don’t want a strong U.K. implementing laws to prevent corrupt Russians from holding or laundering assets there. And generally, they don’t want strong democracies with high degrees of cohesion or common purpose as free societies.”

Justin Callais:

• “Corruption isn’t just, or even principally, a matter of illegal acts. It can be a matter of legal but unscrupulous acts—even including when powerful interests actually go and shape laws and regulations to their advantage.”

& Josh Rudolph:

• “Since before the [Trump] administration’s rollbacks on anti-corruption enforcement [in the U.S.], it’s been very, very difficult in today’s Washington to sustain any broad political support for countering strategic corruption from autocracies and closing the legal loopholes that enable it. When your country is chronically targeted for strategic corruption, the issues it raises are entirely and deeply bipartisan. Still, they always end up politicized.”

This edition, produced in partnership with the Human Rights Foundation, features conversations—with Ben Freeman, Miranda Patrucić, Justin Callais, and Josh Rudolph—on how authoritarian states build political influence in the U.S., why dictators keep disrupting so many other countries, why autocratic corruption is such a problem for democratic life, and what democracies can do about it.

Which didn’t help the dollar. Its value against other currencies has declined more in the first half of 2025 than in any year since 1973. America’s first-quarter GDP fell by 0.5 percent, its first negative quarter since the pandemic. Economists worldwide have marked down their forecasts for U.S. growth this year, and many analysts were saying the era of U.S. global economic primacy was over. Meanwhile, Trump still says that on August 1, he’ll impose his tariffs on every country that hasn’t cut a new trade deal with Washington.

But U.S. markets—and the broader economy—don’t seem bothered by any of this. Not only has the S&P 500 stock index regained everything it lost after April; it hit an all-time high in late June—and has just kept rising. In the second quarter of this year—right when Trump declared nearly universal tariffs—the S&P provided returns of 10.9 percent to investors, higher than the index’s average annual return over the past 100 years.

The NASDAQ exchange, led by tech firms, also set new records in June—and is also still climbing. Tech giants like Nvidia and Oracle have never been more valuable, while investors bought more U.S. tech stocks this year than in any year since 2009. Prices of U.S. government bonds are now up for the year. And despite all the tariff chaos and uncertainty, the country’s GDP appears to have grown by 2.4 percent in the second quarter, according to the latest estimate by the Federal Reserve.

What’s happening here?

• Trump hyper-compresses Putin’s timeline. U.S. President Donald Trump dramatically cut the Kremlin’s Ukraine-ceasefire deadline from 50 days to just 10-12 days, threatening massive tariffs on Moscow’s trade partners if there’s no deal. The big question: whether this pressure tactic will actually move Putin or simply give Russia a reason to accelerate a military push before the deadline hits.
• Southeast Asian neighbors call truce. Thailand and Cambodia agreed to an immediate ceasefire after five days of deadly border fighting that killed at least 38 people and displaced more than 270,000. Whether the Malaysia-brokered agreement can hold is still unclear, given the deep-rooted territorial disputes and political dynamics that led to the violence in the first place.
• The U.S. and the EU avoid a trade war. The United States and the European Union struck a framework deal setting 15 percent tariffs on European goods, averting the threatened 50 percent penalty tariffs that could have crippled transatlantic commerce. Still unknown: how this “middle ground” approach will play with Trump’s broader protectionist agenda—and whether other trading partners can expect similar compromises.

See you Thursday …

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