Former President Barack Obama said in his newly launched literary podcast that the federal government is “so much less corrupt” than it has been in the past, a striking admission given that Republicans currently hold the White House and Congress.

“People are always surprised when I tell them the federal government is so much less corrupt than probably it’s ever been, in terms of just pure bribes, or patronage or favors,” Obama stated in a preview clip from “A Great Book with Barack Obama,” which premiered Thursday on Audible.

The six-episode series features Obama discussing influential books with high-profile guests. In the third episode, he joins Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jill Lepore to examine Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel “All the King’s Men,” the story of a populist governor’s rise and fall amid political corruption.

Obama reflected on his own experience in the Illinois legislature, Congress, and the White House. He noted that older political machines ran on favors, patronage, and vote-trading. Post-Watergate reforms, he said, largely ended those practices.

“Part of what was interesting is that a lot of reforms that we think of as positive — pre-Watergate, post-Watergate — eliminated or greatly reduced the possibilities of maintaining those old political machines, and trading votes and doing favors,” Obama explained. The loss of that informal “lubrication,” he added, made it harder to bridge ideological gaps and pass legislation.

Lepore agreed that the death of the old machines left a vacuum filled by the political-consulting industry.

Coming from a Democratic former president while Donald Trump occupies the White House, the remarks amount to an unexpected defense of the current federal government’s integrity. Obama’s claim that pure bribery and patronage are at historic lows directly challenges the narrative pushed by progressive critics that the Trump administration represents a peak of corruption.