Cleaning up corruption in Washington has become a major campaign focus for Democrats, who believe President Donald Trump is exploiting the nation’s highest office to enrich himself and his family through cryptocurrency ventures and other business deals around the world.

Top Democrats say allegations of self-dealing in Trump’s administration will particularly resonate with the many Americans who are struggling with high costs of health care, gas, groceries and utility bills. They see highlighting the issue as a way to paint Trump and Republicans as out of touch and failing to address economic concerns that are paramount for most voters.

“People are seeing more and more that when Trump wakes up every morning, his focus is on enriching himself and his family and his billionaire buddies at other people’s expense, and he just doesn’t give a damn about everybody else,” Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen said in an exclusive interview with NOTUS on Wednesday.

Van Hollen, who has led both the House and Senate campaign arms, said Trump’s personal cryptocurrency meme coin is a good example. Forbes last year estimated that Trump’s family has profited over $1 billion so far from the coin, even as many investors lost money on the digital currency.

The senator also criticized Middle East business deals inked by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff while both men are leading active negotiations with Iran.

“They have turned the White House into a casino where they always win and the American people always lose,” Van Hollen said.

Democratic operatives don’t believe that simply calling out Trump over the issue is enough. Instead, they argue Democrats should adopt a campaign agenda aimed at rooting out corruption in the administration.

Over 200 Democratic congressional candidates have now signed a pledge to reject donations from corporate PACs, pass a ban on trading stocks while in office and work to end “dark money” in politics. The pledge, organized by the group End Citizens United, is modeled after a similar platform Democrats adopted in 2018 when they took back control of the House midway through Trump’s first term, which included a major ethics reform package titled “For the People Act.”

The new campaign, called “Unrig Washington,” is increasingly central to Democratic messaging on why they should be the party running Washington.

“It is not some niche issue or some issue that voters think doesn’t impact their day-to-day lives,” Tiffany Muller, the president of End Citizens United, said in an interview. “What we saw in our most recent polling is that actually their concerns about government corruption even topped their concerns about rising prices.” The organization was founded to elect candidates who support campaign finance reform.

A Change Research poll conducted for the group in April found that 42 percent of battleground-state voters identify corruption in Washington as one of their top concerns, just ahead of the 40 percent of voters who identify the cost of groceries and gas as a top concern. However, the survey found that voters don’t know which party to trust in tackling corruption, with 46 percent of battleground voters saying they trust neither party.

But Democrats have moved more aggressively to address the issue.

Muller said Republicans are playing defense without proposing a fix to address larger corruption in Washington and in the broader political system that enables it.

“Republicans aren’t coming with a single policy, priority, or agenda to actually fix the broken system. Instead, they continue to vote against any fixes to the system, and they act like, well, this is just the way it is,” she said.

Sen. Jon Ossoff, the vulnerable Georgia Democrat who faces reelection this year, has leaned into accusing Trump of running a “Mar-a-Lago Mafia” to enrich himself and his allies. But he hasn’t spared his party from criticism for relying on dark money, either.

“Because how does American politics really work? It’s coin-operated. Money goes in, favors come out,” Ossoff said last month at a rally in Georgia.

Congressional Democrats are also planning to go on the attack over $1 billion in proposed security funding for Trump’s planned 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom. Trump had said the project would be paid for with private donations, but Republicans added the funding to an immigration bill they hope to pass in the coming weeks.

The legislation will soon move through Congress and Democrats expect to force votes to strip out the ballroom funding, a move aimed at putting the GOP on defense.

“That’s just one more example of the fact that he just is very loose with taxpayer money when it benefits his personal pet projects … there’ll definitely be some focus on that,” Van Hollen told NOTUS when asked about the ballroom project.