Trump uses pay to play. Here’s why and how to fix it.

Trump-era corruption is like nothing anyone alive has seen, but America has been here before.

Extraordinary investigative reporting, published today at USA Today, shows that CEOs and lobbyists are paying for access to President Donald Trump by becoming members of his golf clubs and seeking interactions with him there. Trump spends considerable time at his own resorts, and the patterns developing as a result of his ownership of these clubs is raising the eyebrows (and maybe the blood pressure) of government ethics watchdogs.

There is a big difference between the type of “money buys access” claims that we’ve typically seen in the past few decades and what’s happening with President Trump. In short, the president is receiving personal profit, rather than campaign support, for the financial relationships being forged between him and those seeking access to him.

We can gain some insight into what’s happening with Trump by comparing it to what typically happens in politics, and looking at these events through a historical lens. The sources of money are largely the same as ever; they are CEOs, lobbyists, wealthy business leaders who seek government support or policies that favor their businesses or organizations. The big difference we’re seeing is the destination of the money.

Previously, the money would go into politicians’ campaigns, the PACs that support them, or be spent on behalf of the politician in a way that supports their reelection. In other words, the money was all going to help get someone into office, or stay in office. Donors are presumably willing to do this when they believe the politician is sympathetic to their goals.

In Trump’s case, it’s entirely different. The money being used to buy access to Trump is a part of his personal profit. Of course, he may self-fund his next campaign and so one might think of the exchange as being very similar to what we’ve seen before. But the fact of the matter is, it’s his money and he can do with it what he pleases.

The reporting from USA Today shows that wealthy donors (who are behaving perfectly legally and rationally, I might add) have an exceptional opportunity to make very large, very direct donations to the president’s personal profits. Memberships to his golf clubs, I understand, run around $100,000 annually. Then there’s all the fees and other expenses to use the club.

It’s unprecedented that certain classes of citizens can literally buy a membership to the president’s club and the payment personally enriches the president.

To be clear, there is nothing illegal about this arrangement. It’s probably not impeachable or even particularly un-American, insomuch as we’ve been here before (100 years ago). But it meets the definition of unethical and has all the right features for corruptibility.

This form of corruption is highly problematic for a healthy system of government. Politicians are supposed to want to please constituents, pass policies, and solve problems. The incentives to get and stay in elected office are supposed to entice leaders to build coalitions to provide public goods that people cannot create on their own. However, President Trump’s system of listening to business leaders who pay to access him is largely inconsistent with the benevolence of providing public goods. In addition to being a starkly unfair system of running government, history shows it’s also unsustainable. We’ve been here before.

American politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was ripe with corruption at nearly all levels of government. It was the way things were done.

There are two key elements of our political history that limited this type of corruption from happening. The first was created by government. Congress passed laws that regulated campaign finance, attempted to outlaw direct quid-pro-quo corruption where donors paid politicians so they could win government contracts, and anti-trust laws that curtailed the power of large corporations.

The second came from political parties. The progressive reforms enacted in the 1920s changed the way political parties nominated candidates and used political patronage, and effectively destroyed many local party machines. In particular, governments transitioned to a professional civil service, handing out desirable government jobs based on merit rather than partisan loyalty.

Together these laws and party reforms were successful at curtailing much of the corruption that plagued late 19th and early 20th century American politics.

One hundred years later, we’re seeing some of the same corrupt practices that vexed us before because some of the legal and party institutions that prevented it before have broken down.

On the legal side, campaign finance laws, despite the objectives of many reformers, are failing to curtail the outsized influence of a small subset of the donor class. Efforts to reform campaign finance in recent decades have focused more on strengthening the relationship between citizen donors and candidates, rather than political parties (see excellent research on this by Ray La Raja and Brian Schaffner). These reforms allow greater access for some citizens, but have had negative consequences for the power and ability of parties to coordinate candidates and policies.

On the parties’ side, President Trump, while the leader of his party, was elected in a primary and general election process that did not make him beholden to the traditional interests in his party. He operates more like a party boss than a party leader. He makes appointments based more on personal loyalty than merit or expertise. He appears to value media attention over policy achievements and he’s openly critical of other leaders in his party.

In the party machine days of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, politics and business were codependent. The government was the party, and vice-versa. Trump’s use of his own business interests as a means for citizens to access government is exactly parallel to the corrupt practices America largely escaped a century ago. If history is to be our guide, we should look to make legal changes that outlaw these entanglements, and demand that our political parties enact changes to their leadership and candidate selection that create incentives for them to focus on policy goals and building coalitions to achieve them.

Rather than be discouraged that we’ve been doomed to repeat a corrupt part of our history, I’m encouraged that history leaves us a blueprint for how to get out of it.

[Special thanks to Julia Azari for feedback on ideas presented here. All errors remain mine.]