President Trump accepted a gift of a new Air Force One from Qatar. Credit: Getty
If I wasn’t already convinced that America had entered a new golden age of corruption, proof showed up at my door wearing a badge.
One afternoon last year, a Dauphin County sheriff’s deputy showed up at the house I was renting in Harrisburg, Pa.. The deputy sought my landlord and something called Diverse Investments Group. I told him I’d never heard of it. He left a card, and I began wondering whether my home was about to be swallowed by some unpaid debt. So I did what any tenant with a broadband connection would do: I started digging.
What I discovered wasn’t some spectacular scandal worthy of a prestige-TV miniseries, but something both smaller and, in its own way, more disturbing: the kind of mundane, bureaucratized grift that now passes with barely a mention in normal American life.
Diverse Investments Group turned out to be a company connected to my landlord and to Noah Spence, a former NFL defensive end and a homegrown sports hero once named Pennsylvania’s Player of the Year. “As tremendous as you are as an athlete, you are an even better person,” Dauphin County Commissioner Mike Pries told Spence in 2012. “I’ll make you guys proud,” Spence replied.
That pledge didn’t age well. Since 2024, Pries and the other commissioners awarded Spence’s investment company $55,000 in grants under a county program that doles out money generated by Pennsylvania’s ever-growing slot-machine revenue. Diverse Investment Group promised to build affordable housing from modified shipping containers in the nearby suburb of Steelton for an extracurricular school program, which would also teach kids to build and own their own property. It was a feel-good pitch that promised trade skills for students, new homes for the community, and a hometown hero giving back.
The problem? More than three years later, Spence’s project is a flop. Not a single home has been built, no permits have been filed, and the two plots of land the company purchased were subject to unpaid taxes and auctioned off, dragging Steelton and the school district into civil court. The school even denies there was ever a partnership. The details are damning: Diverse Investments Group allegedly purchased three shipping containers and architectural work from two Ohio companies, also owned by Spence, both of which magically appeared as businesses less than three months before the invoice was submitted. To top it off, Spence’s own mother, who also works for the county, denied knowing who her son was after the sheriff visited to deliver a notice. Oops.
My landlord, listed as COO of the company on the grant materials, was nowhere to be found (as I told the sherriff). In mid-2024, he moved to Florida and rented his Harrisburg house to me. When I reached out to Dauphin County officials last fall with what I’d dug up, I was either ignored or gently redirected. I eventually handed my research to a PennLive reporter, who was already months into a broader investigation. That resulting reporting series is devastating. It shows that Dauphin County handed out more than a quarter-billion dollars in casino revenue over the last 17 years, millions of it funneled to private businesses through a grant program so loosely designed that it had no clear eligibility criteria, no consistent audit requirements, and a pattern of awards flowing to people with direct connections to the officials deciding where the money went.
Some projects that received grants years ago have never materialized. I tell this story not because I think it’s particularly shocking, but because it isn’t. The kind of thing that showed up at my door — the overlapping grift, the minor officials looking the other way, the public money quietly converted to private benefit, politicians trading favors — has become so routine, it barely registers as a scandal anymore.
Sure, it’s nothing novel, politics has always been thick with grifters, though when it pertains to government, the practice goes by a more stately term: graft. The common grifter has to put in some elbow grease, while the noble officeholder can simply sit there and let the money, favors, or opportunities adhere to him like lint to a dark suit. That is what graft really is: the fastening of private gain to public office, until the two start to look inseparable.
What’s new is the pervasiveness of the corruption. Indeed, we are living in a new Gilded Age of greasy palms in America.
At the national level, much of the permission structure for this now radiates downward from the golden feet of King Graft himself, President Trump. His second term has made the conflict-of-interest scandals of the first look restrained by comparison: crypto ventures; a golden jet gifted by Qatar; questionable pardons (Trump granted clemency to Paul Walczak, who had dodged millions in taxes, after Walczak’s mother helped raise millions for MAGA candidates and paid $1 million for a seat at the president’s table at Mar-a-Lago); and hundreds of potential conflicts of interest.
To be clear, Trump didn’t invent corruption any more than McDonald’s invented hamburgers. What he did was supersize it, gold-plate it, and turn it into a more explicit style of rule. The old etiquette of American public life held that if you were going to monetize public office, you should at least have the decency to act embarrassed when caught. Trump’s great contribution to civic decay was to eliminate the embarrassment. Self-dealing was no longer a regrettable byproduct of power. It was the point.
The Biden family’s entanglements, the influence-peddling odor around Hunter, the long trail of sleazy proximity, and Joe Biden’s final pardon were smaller in scale and less systemically dangerous. Still, they were real, and the fact that they were largely waved away by one party’s media apparatus tells you something about our selective tolerance for rot.
Congress is hardly any better. Every few weeks comes another lawmaker accused of fraud, campaign-finance violations, self-enrichment, sexual misconduct, stock-trading acrobatics, or using public office as a side hustle. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Florida Democrat, was found guilty by the House Ethics Committee on 25 violations, most notably funneling $5 million in Federal Emergency Management Administration funds into her congressional campaign.
Cory Mills, a Florida Republican, faces calls for his resignation after an investigation found domestic abuse, stolen-valor allegations, and financial misconduct — also involving millions of dollars of Covid-era relief funding. Axios noted this week that lawmakers were reaching “a breaking point” in terms of ethics violations. And yet none of it shocks like it once might have. It is absorbed into the general Washington weather system, one more humid front moving across the map.
But the corruption has filtered far below the level of national politics and into the tiniest of jurisdictions. Roughly half of corruption convictions against officials in America are at the state or local level — mostly for bribery, theft of public property, or similar crimes. We tend to have a cinematic idea of what corruption looks like, imagining it as a parade of lurid set pieces: the cash-stuffed freezer, the bribed alderman, the mayor in handcuffs, the contractor with a pinky ring and a no-show job. We still get some of that, of course. But the American version in 2026 is often more banal, more administrative, and more pervasive. It arrives not in a trench coat, but in a grant application. Not as a singular scandal, but as routine paperwork moving quietly through offices too understaffed, too captured, or too demoralized to stop it. The buck never seems to stop here.
Technology was supposed to fix this. The democratization of information, the citizen journalist, the viral exposé — all of it was supposed to flood the old smoke-filled rooms with sunlight. And in some narrow respects, it has. It is easier now than at any point in history to cross-reference property records, identify shell structures, and share a thread of findings with tens of thousands of people in minutes; the smartphone has turned every citizen into a potential sleuth.
But tools require human operators, and what we’ve lost in the digital transition is the class of paid, full-time, institutionally supported operators who used to do this work as a profession rather than a calling. Local investigative journalism has been gutted to a degree that is hard to overstate. Newsrooms once had full-time reporters who were entrenched in city hall, county commissioners’ meetings, and school-board hearings.
Now, many local papers have either closed down entirely or been degraded into so-called ghost papers by their new owners, typically private-equity and hedge-fund barons. Few if any full-time writers and editors remain, much of the copy syndicated nationally (i.e., no local news), and the publication is mostly managed for cashflow; the old newspaper buildings are often seen as real-estate assets, to be pawned off for condos.
The consequences are measurable: one Columbia Journalism Review study found that when a local newspaper closes, corruption charges in that community rise by nearly 7%, indictments of defendants by almost as much, and cases filed by even more.
And when the news does find ill-gotten gains, there’s the question of whether anyone will care. Corruption stories, especially local ones, require concentration and discernment. They involve authorities no one has heard of, agencies with alphabet soup names, and arcane documents that don’t lend themselves to TikTok narration. A county grant scandal in Pennsylvania or a patronage loop in Illinois struggles to compete with the dopamine economy of the culture war, celebrity scandal, and whatever fresh distraction has been algorithmically selected for us by lunchtime.
The nature of the economy perhaps has something to do with it, too. The old manufacturing economy, warts and all, demanded long-term capital investment that tied the asset-rich to local communities; reputations mattered. As the economy has become ever more financialized and abstract, everyone is out to make the right bet and cash out as fast as possible: the right bit of information on the Iran war, gleaned from proximity to a Trump administration official, means making a life-changing amount of money on futures or Kalshi or Polymarket; reputations matter considerably less against such a backdrop. In that world, even infamy can feel like a rounding error.
More consequential still is the atrophying of America’s capacity for moral outrage. What used to produce genuine public outcry — a mayor forgiving a donor’s debts, a congressman funneling relief money into his own campaign — now produces only a brief flicker of engagement, then nothing. Outrage now tends to attach not to the act itself, but to the partisan identity of the wrongdoer. If a politician on the other side is caught feathering his nest, then he or she proves the whole regime is rotten. If one’s own side does something similar, it becomes complicated, contextual, or simply old news. Who cares?
Perhaps, we have not become more tolerant of corruption so much as more selective in who we permit to commit it.
None of this means that America is uniquely corrupt by world-historical standards. It means something arguably worse for a country that still flatters itself as a republic of laws: corruption has become boring. Ordinary. So ordinary, in fact, that it has turned up at my address more than once in the last year. Days before the November 2025 election, Harrisburg Mayor Wanda Williams pushed a garbage-bill forgiveness program that, to outside eyes at least, looked suspiciously like a pre-election bid for goodwill. My landlord, who hadn’t paid his bill in years and owed thousands, got forgiven anyway. By that point, it was hard not to feel that my address had become an accidental field office for the new world order.
Now what? The PennLive series on central Pennsylvania gaming-grant fraud will probably be shared by a few hundred people and generate some official tsk-tsks. The county commissioners will likely support a few mild procedural reforms, and then, most likely, a slow return to business as usual. My old landlord (I moved out in October) will continue operating from the Sunshine State. Nobody will be held responsible. Around here, the scandal is not the fraud but the fantasy that anyone might answer for it.
