Corruption in Washington Reaches Historic Levels: New Industries Doing their Part
An NBC News poll released on Sunday found that threats to democracy are the second most important issue to Americans. 
At the heart of these threats are the authoritarian and dictatorial ways of an unhinged, narcissistic President Trump. Another key factor, however, is the corruption of our democracy that pervades Washington D.C.
Two relatively new industries, AI (Artificial Intelligence) and cryptocurrency, have taken their place at the forefront of Washington’s influence-buying. (Cryptocurrency is also a key to the enormous increase in Trump’s wealth.)
AI and crypto are using the campaign finance system – unleashed by the Supreme Court – to flood the 2026 elections with influence-seeking political money. These industries are basically unregulated, and they want to keep it that way.
AI
AI is recognized as having enormous potential. There are, however, potential risks of job losses, business disruption, deepfakes (artificially manipulated audio and video content) and huge energy consumption for data centers, among other issues.
In a new poll, 91 percent of U.S. voters support some level of government regulation of AI, with 57 percent of the voters supporting significant regulation. AI companies are fighting this as hard as they can.
According to The New York Times, “The artificial intelligence industry is well on the way to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the midterm elections in an extraordinary demonstration of political power from Silicon Valley.”
AI industry leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic reportedly have already collectively contributed over $185 million to elections around the country. Candidates supported by AI companies have already been successful — only one of their 20 supported candidates in the Texas and North Carolina primaries lost.
One AI Super PAC, Leading the Future, already has raised $140 million for the midterms. The funders include investing firm Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI and Palantir co-founders, and AI company Perplexity.
This level of political spending gives the AI companies and Super PACs significant power as Congress debates issues like federal preemption of state AI regulation and liability standards. Republicans in Congress have taken the lead in attempting to enact federal legislation to ban states from regulating AI.
In the end, it is the role of the government to figure out how to protect Americans, in particular children, from the potential dangers of rapidly developing AI. Influence-seeking political money wielded by AI Super PACs will make this much more difficult.
Cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency tells a similar story, with even more direct ties to presidential power.
According to one report, as of February, crypto interests already had some $221 million available for the 2026 elections and had contributed an additional $74 million to Trump PACs.
One crypto Super PAC, Fairshake, had $171 million available by the end of February for use in the 2026 midterm elections, with future large contributions, no doubt, still to come.
At the same time the crypto industry is pouring influence money into Washington, Trump and his family have managed to make a fortune from crypto investments in the first year of his second term. Trump’s crypto investments reportedly increased his assets by some $1 billion in 2025.
Trump has returned the favor in his promises to make America the “crypto capital of the world,” and by adopting pro-crypto policies at every turn.
This was a reversal of the attacks he made on crypto during his first term.
Trump said then that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies “are not money,” and are “highly volatile and based on thin air.” Trump also said that crypto “can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.”
During 2025, however, Trump moved quickly to promote and protect cryptocurrency as he also moved to being a profiteer from these digital assets.
In his first week in office, Trump signed an executive order that supported the growth of cryptocurrency. He and his administration proceeded to restrict crypto regulation, appoint pro-crypto regulators and end a series of investigations, enforcement actions and lawsuits involving crypto groups. The Justice Department’s National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team was outright eliminated.
Conclusion
While Trump is an aberrational president, reforms must nevertheless be enacted to prevent his historic corruption from happening again.
Without fundamental changes to how campaigns are financed, the ever-growing power of influence-seeking political money, like the money from the AI and crypto industries, will continue to shape policy to benefit private interests at the expense of the public good.
A new campaign finance system must allow House and Senate candidates to run competitive races without being indebted to the big-money donors who pour money into our elections. Candidates need to be obligated to the people, not to the billionaires, millionaires, industries and corporations that are poisoning our democracy with billions of dollars of influence money.
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Fred’s Weekly Note appears on Thursdays in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s newsletter, and other recent editions, here. And subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.
