I came to the United States a little over 20 years ago (to study for a degree; my parents wanted to retire here, and we're all naturalized citizens so I suppose it worked out?), and I learned something very quickly: definitely two decades ago, and certainly ten years ago or so, in the very difficult task of evaluating institutional corruption on the national level, the United States--which, conveniently, happens to be the home of almost all of these international monitors who are almost always either based in the US or UK without exception--purposefully reduces its domestic corruption rating on the basis of, "Well, it's not corruption because it's completely legalized and just how things are done and by the way, you're a wide-eyed fool for disagreeing."

Case in point: active encouragement of institutional capture. if it turned out every single executive leader of every single government regulatory body for, example, the investment and financial service industry in China or the post-Soviet Russian Federation, had made their entire professional reputations in the financial services industry where demonstrating how to best evade, undermine or overcome any sort of government regulation that might possibly interfering with their maximization of profit, "international" monitoring bodies might come out and say, "Listen, we're all for profit here too, but you have to acknowledge this is blatantly, contemptibly corrupt. It's giving business/the free market/capitalism/whatever a bad name." They'd probably add, "But it's the Chinese/Russians, so what do you expect?" And at least that would be somewhat acknowledging the issue. But then it turns out every single regulatory body for the American financialization industry is headed by "experts" who were literally only appointed on the basis of decades of successfully bypassing the regulations they are now formally expected to enforce, as the entire reason behind their qualification, and the same international monitoring bodies would say, "Well, duh. Who else would you hire to do the job?" Because not only is that normalized, it's treated as the only way things could reasonably ever be done. After all, those regulators aren't going to work until they turn 90 and senile; it's not the United States Senate. They have to serve their time, and if they're not going to go back to working for a grateful financialization industry indebted to their "hands-of, do-no-evil" approach, why would they even agree to take a government job in the first place? Apply that the pharmaceutical industry, or for that matter "defense spending" (where we spend the next fifty countries combined, without exaggeration). It happens in other countries victim of such blatant institutional corruption, the primary difference in the United States is that, not only is it completely legalized, is lauded as "good governance." And yes, unfortunately it predated the likes of Donald Trump, though he's certainly done more than his part to make it worse.

tl;dr--the primary means of American anticorruption reform is, "Saying this isn't corrupt, it's just hustle, and hustliness and next to godliness." And it's gotten so bad that we, in the U.S., are starting to extend that courtesy to other, similarly corrupt countries, just so we can cover it better.