By Peter Lemiska

Joseph Robinette Biden is a corrupt politician. At least that’s what a recent survey suggests. A poll by Trafalgar Group indicates that more than half of American voters believe Biden and his family are guilty of influence peddling — receiving payments from foreign countries aimed at influencing national policy decisions. Less than one-third of voters believe they are innocent.

There are sound reasons for those poll results.

Early signs of Biden’s character flaws appeared in 1987, when he was forced to abandon his first presidential campaign. After several plagiarized campaign speeches were exposed, voters learned about more plagiarism going back to Biden’s years in law school. Besides that, as he often does today, Biden was embellishing his academic accomplishments and fabricating his involvement in the civil rights movement. It seems that back then, Democrat voters had no tolerance for dishonest politicians.

These days, political corruption doesn’t seem to bother Democrats, as long as it’s in-house. We’re not talking about plagiarism. That barely registers on today’s scale of corruption. But 50 years in politics is a long time for bad habits to fester and grow. And while most Americans now believe Biden has sold out his office, his supporters seem OK with it.

They can’t claim ignorance. The supporting evidence is so clear and overwhelming that it’s impossible not to see it. There are more than 150 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) tied to the Biden family, including millions of dollars from foreign sources paid into family accounts. Much of it came from America’s adversaries. There are the executive decisions and policies that inevitably benefit other countries while hurting American interests. There are incriminating emails from Hunter Biden, referencing a cut for the “big guy.” And there’s Hunter’s ill-fated WhatsApp message to a Chinese businessman threatening Joe’s vengeance if he doesn’t pony up some agreed-upon payment. There are former business partners and whistleblowers — numerous career federal employees — documenting specific incidents of influence peddling by the Bidens. And there are congressional investigations corroborating all of it.

Biden’s supporters argue that there is no “smoking gun” directly linking the president to all of this. As the saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water…”

Taken together, the cornucopia of evidence should convince any reasonable person that the man occasionally occupying the Oval Office is putting personal gain ahead of America’s interests. In fact, most Americans have been convinced. Only Democrats, with their newfound tolerance of political corruption and their irresistible impulse to circle the wagons, refuse to see it.

But Joe Biden’s corruption is not the worst part. Like raw sewage, corruption flows downhill. The people currently in charge of our government departments and agencies have been either unwilling or unable to stand up against the deluge of muck. Time and again, they’ve proven themselves to be nothing more than loyal apparatchiks, willing to say and do whatever is necessary to protect Biden’s presidency.

That becomes more apparent every time Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas smugly announces “the border is secure,” while record numbers of citizens from more than 100 different nations continue to surge across our southern border. It becomes increasingly obvious each time Attorney General Merrick Garland pontificates about “equal justice under the law,” while he stretches prosecutorial boundaries to ensnare conservatives, and then offers a sweetheart deal to Hunter Biden.

That sweetheart deal, incidentally, would probably have evaporated if the Secret Service investigation connected that bag of cocaine found in the White House to the president’s son. It’s one reason so many are dubious of the investigation.

No one can say with certainty that the USSS is covering for the younger Biden, but the 2018 mystery of the phantom Secret Service Agents adds to the suspicion. That was the incident surrounding Hunter’s illegal handgun purchase. Based on reliable sources, Politico reported that after it came to light, two Secret Service Agents visited the shop where Hunter purchased the weapon and unsuccessfully tried to seize the incriminating paperwork. That could have been an attempt to conceal evidence of a serious crime. Naturally, the Secret Service denies that it happened.

Whatever the case, the outcome of the recent cocaine investigation was never really in doubt.

Any U.S. president expects and is entitled to loyalty by his administration. But when administration officials engage in unethical or illegal activities and routinely deceive the people to protect their jobs and to defend a corrupt president, they do more than compromise their own integrity. They erode trust in our government.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but at the same time that most of the country believes Biden is peddling his influence, trust in our government has declined to an all-time low. According to the Pew Research Center, in 1958 roughly three-fourths of Americans trusted our government to do the right thing almost always or most of the time. Throughout the years, that number has continued to decline, and today only two in 10 Americans trust Washington to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time.”

Democracies and constitutional republics function only because the people generally trust their governments. As corruption spreads throughout this government, we can only hope that it’s just an anomaly — that it will end once Joe Biden leaves office.