We Have All Become Too Comfortable With Corruption

For years, we’ve written about the concept of “soft corruption,” which is the idea that there are certain actions that may not mean the full definition of corrupt practices in the legal sense, but are so obviously corrupt that they make people more cynical towards those who claim to represent our interests in the government.

Lately, of course, it feels like the corruption is becoming more and more blatant. But there’s something telling about how soft corruption works: it operates by creating an atmosphere where everyone implicitly understands the game, but no one says it out loud. Though, apparently, that may be changing. Teddy Schleifer got a fascinating quote from Wall Street investor (and LimeWire founder… and RFK Jr. anti-vax funder) Mark Gorton, who was one of Andrew Cuomo’s biggest donors in his complete flop of a New York City mayoral run/comeback from disgrace:

If you can’t read the screenshot, it reads:

As donors try to assess their next moves in the mayoral race, one of the biggest donors to Andrew Cuomo’s super PAC, the investor Mark Gorton, said he is likely to back Mamdani. That is because of the support that Mamdani had gotten from Brad Lander, who Gorton said he ranked first. “I feel like people misunderstood my $250,000 for Cuomo for real enthusiasm,” Gorton said in an interview. “It was basically, ‘Oh, looks like Cuomo is coming back. We don’t want to be shut out. Let’s try and get on his good side.’ That’s kind of how things work with Cuomo. It’s sad political pragmatism. I wish we lived in a world where those sort of things were not useful things to do.”

Read that again. “That’s kind of how things work with Cuomo.” A quarter-million dollar donation, described casually as protection money to avoid being “shut out” by a politician with a reputation for vindictive retaliation against those who cross him. And Gorton’s matter-of-fact tone suggests this isn’t scandalous—it’s just Wednesday in American politics.

This is notable on multiple levels, starting with the fact that one of Cuomo’s biggest donors didn’t even rank Cuomo first on the ranked-choice ballot. But, the real story is the honest admission from Gorton that the only reason he felt he needed to cough up a quarter of a million dollars to Cuomo was to stay in his good graces.

This is soft corruption in its purest form: not a quid pro quo, not a bag of cash, just the quiet understanding that those who don’t pay tribute risk being frozen out when decisions get made.

What makes Gorton’s admission so damning isn’t just what it says about Cuomo—it’s what it reveals about how normalized this has become. We’re not talking about some back-room deal or smoking-gun evidence. We’re talking about a major political donor casually explaining, to a reporter, that a $250,000 contribution was essentially protection money. The fact that he’s comfortable saying this publicly suggests that everyone already knows this is how the game works.

Of course, in this case, it may have also contributed to Cuomo’s loss to Zohran Mamdani. Even as some people remained critical or cautious of Mamdani’s policy proposals, he came across as real and earnestly wanting to help actual people in New York, whereas Andrew Cuomo came across as… Andrew Fucking Cuomo, deeply cynical and a career political opportunist with no fundamental principles or beliefs beyond the pursuit of power.

This kind of soft corruption creates a feedback loop that undermines democratic governance in ways that are harder to prosecute but just as destructive as outright bribery. When wealthy donors make contributions not because they believe in a candidate but because they fear retaliation, it distorts the entire political process. Politicians learn that intimidation works better than persuasion. Donors learn that access requires tribute. And the public learns that their representatives answer to whoever can afford the protection money.

It’s also worth noting how this normalizes the harder (and even more blatant) corruption we’re seeing at the federal level. When “stay on his good side” donations become routine political pragmatism, it’s a shorter leap to the kind of brazen pay-to-play schemes we’re witnessing with Trump’s corporate deal approval power and Meta’s $25 million protection payment. The soft corruption creates the cultural infrastructure that makes the hard corruption possible.

But, really, the main takeaway from this is that we’ve become so inured to the corruption all around us that major political donors can casually describe protection rackets to reporters without expecting any blowback.

When the quiet part gets said out loud—and nobody seems particularly surprised—we’ve crossed a line. We’ve moved from a system where corruption hides in shadows to one where it operates in plain sight, confident that we’ve all accepted it as just how things work.

The real question isn’t whether we’ll slide into a system where corruption operates openly—we’re already there. Trump’s presidency has made it clear that the “soft” and “hard” corruption aren’t sequential phases but parallel systems. While Gorton was cutting checks to stay in Cuomo’s good graces, Trump was openly selling access, handing out get out of jail free cards to those who help him, and now requiring corporate executives to kiss his ring for deal approvals.

What Gorton’s casual admission reveals isn’t a warning about where we might be headed—it’s evidence of how thoroughly we’ve normalized the foundation that makes brazen kleptocracy possible. When protection rackets become “sad political pragmatism” that donors discuss matter-of-factly with reporters, we’ve already crossed every meaningful line.

The question now is whether we have any capacity left to recognize that this isn’t normal, isn’t inevitable, and isn’t something we have to accept. Because once we’ve shrugged our way through both the soft corruption and the hard corruption, what’s left to protect?