During the first Republican debate in 2015, Donald Trump positioned himself as a bold truth-teller, almost a whistleblower, about the corrupt influence he’d exercised on politicians as a wealthy donor. The moderators asked why he’d given money to Democrats in the past, and he replied:

I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.

As Andrew Prokop dryly noted at the time, it was an unusual pitch. “Reformers usually present themselves as blameless.” Trump, instead, almost sounded like he was bragging. He presented himself as someone who’d played the system himself, knew it inside and out, and could thus be clear-eyed about what needed to be fixed.