In-your-face Watergate: neutralizing government lawbreaking and the war against white-collar crime

Ample official evidence exists that the Trump administration was the most corrupt in modern American history. Donald Trump’s overall pattern of behavior not only resembled, but amplified that of major white-collar criminals. This paper has two main foci. First, it argues that government criminality and corruption were facilitated by rationales and excuses that denied effective social condemnation of such acts. Second, it considers how these defenses were weaponized by the Trump administration as part of a much larger and more deliberate “war on white-collar crime” more generally. As a result, enormous efforts are necessary to restore and strengthen regulatory and enforcement regimes, and transcend deepened political cleavages on such matters. Through a new hybrid neutralization technique, normalization of condemning the condemners, Trump exacerbated existing political differences and influenced supporters to at once ignore government crime and corruption, and accept new moral narratives that flew in the face of substantial evidence of criminality.