Russia was once the great kleptocracy. Trump’s America is giving it a run for its money

3 hours ago 3

Opinion

November 5, 2025 — 5.00am

A decade ago, when I was living in Moscow, my Russian teacher explained to me her standard procedure if ever she was pulled over by traffic police. She would swiftly take off any visible jewellery and hide it. Then she’d take out whatever cash was in her wallet, leaving only a 100 rouble note. That way, when the police requested a bribe in return for letting her off a fine (as they invariably did), she could show the meagre contents of her wallet. They’d grudgingly accept the 100 roubles (the equivalent of around $30 back then) and she’d be on her way.

US President Donald Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin met in Alaska in August.

Far from being outraged about this, my teacher was perfectly content with this system and said most Russians she knew were too. It saved the hassle of dealing with the bureaucracy involved in paying or contesting a fine. It probably worked out cheaper too. Widespread bribery and corruption, from the pettiest level up, was a mundane fact of life in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and was accepted with little more than a shrug.

While the narrative in the US focuses on America’s collapse into authoritarianism under Donald Trump, less is written about its descent into a Putin-style kleptocracy. Meaning “rule of thieves”, kleptocracy is a style of governance that Putin has perfected over his five presidential terms. British financier Bill Browder, formerly the largest foreign investor in Russia, believes Putin and his cronies have stolen as much as a trillion dollars from the Russian people.

Evidence that Trump is taking cues from the Kremlin’s crooked-regime-building playbook is in plain sight. American academic Karen Dawisha’s 2014 book Putin’s Kleptocracy – Who owns Russia? analysed the methods Putin used to systematically build a corrupt state, including bribe taking, kickbacks, election-fixing, the persecution of political enemies and total dominance over ultra-wealthy citizens. Recent actions undertaken by the White House reveal disturbing similarities between the Russian mafia state and the Trump administration.

In May, Trump hosted a private dinner for the top 25 investors in his $TRUMP meme coin. The final guest list spent an estimated $US148 million ($227 million) for their meal and presidential access. The top holder of Trump’s meme coin on the night (to the tune of $US18.5 million) was crypto entrepreneur and billionaire Justin Sun, who had been under investigation for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Sun also invested $US75 million in World Liberty Financial, the Trump’s family’s cryptocurrency company. The SEC halted its fraud case against him earlier this year.

In April, Trump’s family company, the Trump Organization, announced that it had signed a deal to build a luxury golf resort in Qatar. In May, Qatar gifted a $400 million jet to Trump viewed by many as a kickback. In early October, the Pentagon announced that a Qatari air force facility will be built in Idaho.

Then there’s election-fixing. A Department of Justice report released in January found Trump would have been convicted of illegally trying to overturn the 2020 election had he not been re-elected in 2024. The criminal case was dropped due to a longstanding policy against prosecuting a sitting president.

The persecution of political enemies has also begun in the Kremlin-on-the-Potomac. Investigations are under way into Democrat Senator Adam Schiff (who led the first impeachment trial against Trump) and former special counsel Jack Smith (who led the January 6 investigations into Trump). Former FBI director James Comey (head of the 2016 Russia investigation) and New York Attorney General Letitia James (who successfully prosecuted Trump for business fraud) have both been indicted by the Department of Justice, under direct pressure from Trump.

Trump has also called for federal racketeering charges to be laid against billionaire Democrat donor George Soros and has directed the Justice Department to launch an investigation into the Soros-founded Open Society Foundations, which gives grants to groups that work to support human rights and democracy. This has echoes of Putin’s vendetta against Russian banking and oil billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was once the richest man in Russia. In 2001, Khodorkovsky founded reformist organisation Open Russia, which was dedicated to fighting for human rights and democracy. Two years later, Putin had Khodorkovsky arrested on what were widely believed to be fraudulent charges. Khodorkovsky served 10 years in prison. In a similar vein, both Vice-President JD Vance and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recently pledged to go after leftist non-profits and organisations that they say promote violence.

The final point on the abridged version of Putin’s How-to-Build-A-Kleptocracy checklist is the capture of the ultra-wealthy. The term “poligarch” is most commonly used to refer to Russian oligarchs who are also politicians. This Trump administration is stacked with poligarchs such as multi-billionaires Howard Lutnick (commerce secretary), Warren Stephens (US ambassador to the UK) and Steve Witkoff (special envoy to the Middle East).

American tech oligarchs are already benefiting from relaxed regulations around AI and cryptocurrency. There was also the April incident, which many Democrats believed merited investigation as insider trading. Trump had posted on social media: “This is a great time to buy.” Hours later he announced that he was pausing many of his harshest tariffs, which resulted in the largest one-day gain in the history of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Musk was the major beneficiary of the skyrocketing stock market, adding $US36 billion to his fortune. Mark Zuckerberg gained around $US26 billion.

Acts of corruption that the US public and the world once considered shameful are now the daily reality of Trump’s White House. It remains to be seen if American citizens will react in the same way as my Russian teacher, by shrugging and accepting systemic corruption as the cost of having a leader who does other things that they support.

But it would be worth remembering that, despite Putin’s calculated construction of a kleptocratic regime, a facade of democracy has always been maintained in Russia. If Trump continues to follow Putin’s blueprint, the US might also be left with nothing more than a Potemkin democratic system, shattering the myth of American exceptionalism that rests upon the success of their democracy.

Melanie La’Brooy is an Australian novelist who has lived in Russia and writes on politics and social justice issues.

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