Yes yes, all politicians are corrupt,
No, they really aren't.
Politics is extremely rough and competitive, and often the art of it is getting things done in the face of massive opposition and circumstantial difficulty. This predisposes us to see a lot of the ugliness, trickery, ambition, greed. (I would suggest a lot of the same machinery is going on in other organisations too, it's just hidden as they are private institutions who do not have the same public scrutiny.) However, even then, I would suggest many if not most politicians operate with at least reasonable ethical and legal standards, and have at least a decent share of genuine public interest - although the latter may not be viewed so by their political opponents.
"They're all as bad as each other" is arguably one of the most corrosive attitudes amongst the public. It fosters a sort of aparthy and learnt helplessness that improvement cannot be achieved. Improvement can be achieved, and the electorate have a key role in democracy of pushing for it. The more corrupt, negligent, and nakedly self-interested a politician is, the more than the voters need to make standards clear by kicking them to the kerb.
There is a genuine degree of defence of Trump that a lot of what went on during his tenure was Republican "business as usual", and the USA was still okay at the end. On the other hand, his venality, incompetence and corruption also inevitably infects the state. Impropriety, stacking courts, obstructing oversight, electoral interference, demagoguery... none of these broke anything critical 2017-2021, but they are all damage to good democratic governance. The failure of the system to firmly rein this in or be punished by the electorate sends a clear signal that this is fair game for politicians. The likely end result is (further) degeneration of politics.
