Sarah Chayes spent years documenting how corruption works in places like Afghanistan and Nigeria, where public office and private enrichment fuse into what she calls "vertically integrated criminal syndicates." In this book, she turns that same diagnostic toolkit on her own country.
Her argument is that American corruption is not a scattering of individual bad actors but a network: elected officials, family members, donors, and business partners whose interests interlock so tightly that public power and private gain become the same transaction. Financial deregulation, the revolving door between government and industry, and the flood of untraceable political money are the connective tissue.
She's explicit that this isn't a partisan diagnosis of one administration — it's a structural one, built over decades by both parties loosening the rules that once separated public office from private benefit. What changed after 2016, in her account, is how openly the fusion is now conducted.
The book doubles as a warning and a method: the same questions she asked in failing states abroad — who benefits, who's protected, who's exposed — are the questions worth asking of every deal this tracker logs.