Critics of President Donald Trump frequently use the word “kleptocracy” to describe his leadership, administration, and imprint on American policy writ large.

Before 2016 — before Trump’s election and presidency flipped assumptions about America’s liberal democratic project on its head — the word, which literally means “rule of thieves,” was mostly only used by academics and foreign policy wonks.

Thanks to Trump’s reign, though, “kleptocracy” is having an unprecedented moment.

It’s not hard to see why. As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp argued in 2017, “Trump’s kleptocratic instincts” share significant overlap with post-Soviet dictators and autocratic strongmen elsewhere, from his nepotistic corruption to his insistence on targeting opponents with all the levers of power at his disposal — as seen most obviously in his attempt to strong-arm a foreign government into trying to investigate a political rival.

All of that is, of course, true: Trump’s illiberalism, and his predilection for inserting and expanding corruption wherever he can, is hardly a secret.

But this administration is merely the culmination of the US’s decades-long slide toward becoming the center of modern kleptocracy. The US has become the world’s greatest offshore haven, allowing the crooked and the criminal to launder and stash their ill-gotten gains across the […]