‘Hogs get slaughtered,’ as the old saying goes — people will tolerate graft only up to a point.
‘Hogs get slaughtered,’ as the old saying goes — people will tolerate graft only up to a point.
O n May 31, 1871, William Marcy Tweed threw a spectacularly lavish wedding for his daughter, Mary Amelia, in New York City. “Boss” Tweed was then at the height of his power as the political master of New York City, its ruling Democratic Party, and its Tammany Hall machine. Elected to the U.S. House at 29 in 1852, he sacrificed his career in Washington to vote for the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which was massively unpopular in the North. This was not a stance on principle: The vote was a test of party loyalty, and the Pierce administration paid off Tweed by appointing a friend to a job as postmaster. Returning home to New York, Tweed was running Tammany Hall by 1858.
The corruption he oversaw was immense. It at least doubled the cost of building anything that the city could touch. The Tweed Courthouse cost some $13-14 million to build, twice the cost of the Alaska Purchase during the same period. David McCullough argued in The Great Bridge that the Brooklyn Bridge would never have been completed had the Tweed Ring not fallen early in its construction. Tweed and his cronies were convicted of stealing tens of millions of dollars — some modern estimates place the real amount in the hundreds of millions — which would be worth billions today. Alfred Ely Beach, who published Scientific American, decided to build a pioneering subway line between 1868 and 1870, powered by an immense pneumatic tube, and to avoid paying off Tweed, he built it like a bank heist, removing the dirt at night and not telling the city what he was building until it was ready for passengers.
With the 1871 wedding, however, Tweed went too far. The bride and her parents were bedecked with immense diamonds, including the 10.5-carat diamond stickpin that Tweed always wore. “The Tweed family seemed to be a Christmas tree of diamonds,” wrote one observer. Newspapers gawked at the lavish gifts bestowed by the many people who owed Tweed for their livelihoods and government jobs; one newspaper estimated the total value of the gifts at $700,000. As McCullough described the scene: “The gifts lined all four walls and were said to surpass anything seen since the marriage of the daughter of the Khedive of Egypt two years before. There were forty sets of sterling silver. One piece of jewelry alone was known to have cost $45,000.” People started asking questions about how this sort of wealth was available to public servants on modest taxpayer salaries. In the words of James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, a Democratic-leaning paper: “What a testimony of the loyalty, the royalty, and the abounding East Indian resources of Tammany Hall.”
Things all fell apart for Tweed after that. The death of one of his bagmen in public office in a sleigh accident in January had cracked a window for his books to be looked into, and riots in July made New Yorkers less willing to look the other way at the actions of the people who governed them. Thomas Nast was hammering away at Tweed in his famous cartoons in Harper’s Weekly for all of 1871. But it was the spectacle of the wedding that catalyzed the press, in particular, to start digging into where all that money came from. The Times started printing leaks from disaffected former Tweed allies in sensational exposés in July and August. On October 27, 1871, Tweed was arrested. In November, with accomplices fleeing the jurisdiction, he was forced out of Tammany Hall and all of his public offices, his power broken. After a failed effort to flee the country himself in 1875, he died in jail in 1878.
There’s an old saying: “Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.” People will tolerate graft up to a point if they can avert their eyes from it. But ostentatious greed gets punished. The immense wipeout for Donald Trump’s party at the polls last week was caused by a handful of big factors and a multitude of smaller ones, but undeniably part of that picture was 54 percent of Americans who said in exit polls that “government corruption” was “crucial” to their vote (these voters broke 62 percent to 36 percent Democratic). Another 36 percent said it was a major factor, although these voters went Republican by a modest margin, 51 percent to 48 percent. Adding the two groups together, an astounding 90 percent of Americans cited corruption, with Democrats winning those voters by 14 points. That’s larger than the share of voters who cited the cost of living, immigration, or the Iran war.
Of course, when 90 percent of Americans say they agree on something, it’s often a sign that they are not all talking about the same thing. “Corruption” can be a word of many and contradictory meanings to many people. It can mean the Epstein files. It can mean the close bond between the government and the world’s richest man, who was put in charge of a federal department with sweeping powers and holds the on/off switch for the defense of American allies in war. It can mean the general power of Big Data, Big Pharma, Big Oil, or defense contractors, or it can mean the corruption of government to take stakes in private companies. It can mean the president and Congress trading stocks, sometimes apparently based on inside information. It can mean theories, some of them quite baroque, that our government is bought off by the governments of Russia, Israel, Ukraine, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, or possibly all of the above. It can mean the pervasive corruption of our welfare programs by affinity groups such as the Somalis of Minnesota. It can mean politicians doing self-interested political things such as gerrymandering. Certainly, the fact that a majority of voters citing corruption as a major factor voted Republican suggests that those people were not thinking primarily about punishing the Trump administration.
Still, one cannot ignore the egregious corruption scandals of this administration, nor the fact that they go all the way to the personal finances of the president and his family. Nothing was learned from the downfall of the Bidens, except maybe that you can pardon everybody on the way out the door. And while the UAE crypto business is the worst of these scandals in terms of its scale, its intersection with government policy, and the personal enrichment of the president, I have to think that obituaries of the second Trump term in the history books will prominently feature Donald Trump Jr. having his second wedding held at a lavish island getaway and bankrolled by a Russian oligarch who barely speaks English, yet is claimed by Don Jr. to be a close friend. Nothing in this entire circus of gross moneygrubbing, not even Don Jr.’s ex-girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle shaking down a donor to pay her $100,000 American Express bill, is quite as hoggish, ostentatious, ill-timed, and easily summarized as that. It’s the Mary Amelia Tweed wedding of 2026.
Why? A sense of impunity is doubtless a part of this, especially after all the lawfare that was directed at Trump and his family in 2023–24 and its ignominious collapse. There is something invigorating, and maybe even reckless, that comes out of being shot at and (mostly) missed — figuratively and literally, in the case of Trump. I also think there’s another parallel to the Bidens. Why, after years of relatively subtle grifting, did the Biden family engage in such malodorous cash grabs in 2015–16? Consider the timing. Joe was winding down his vice presidency and declined to run for president against Hillary Clinton, who was widely expected to win the presidency. In the midst of this, Joe’s political heir Beau dies. All of a sudden, there’s reason for the family to believe that this is their last chance at the political trough and that Joe’s riding off into the sunset of retired ex-vice presidents meant that nobody would look too closely at what he made off with on his way out the door.
The Trumps may not have the same expectation of evading scrutiny, but when you compare the mostly petty corruption of the first Trump term with the outrageousness of the second, the fact that Trump is 80 years old and term-limited feels like a central fact. Trump’s net worth actually declined in his first term but has exploded in his second — and one can hardly imagine a less credible answer than Trump telling Ross Douthat on 60 Minutes Sunday night that he doesn’t carefully watch his net worth. Yeah, and Pete Rose didn’t count his hits, either. Trump’s personal obsession with his net worth has been one of the things he was best known for long before entering politics.
Now we are seeing how it plays out when hogs get slaughtered.