The game is rigged — you know it, I know it and so does a growing number of Americans know it. A recent Gallup poll found that in 2014 three in four Americans (75%) acknowledged corruption was widespread throughout the U.S. government. More revealing, it noted that over the last decade this perception increased; in 2007 and 2009, it was at two in three Americans, 67 percent and 66 percent, respectively. The belief that the game is rigged is a core assumption in the 2016 presidential election.
Last August, in one of the early Republican presidential debates, Donald Trump acknowledged the underlying truth of American politics. “Most of the people on this stage I’ve given to, just so you understand, a lot of money … I give to everybody. When they call, I give” he admitted. “And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”