President Trump became the Republican nominee because millions of voters felt that the establishment candidates didn’t offer them a real choice. They were all career politicians surrounded by lobbyists, using sweet promises and smooth speeches to gain power. Trump, at least, was different.
Trump beat Hillary Clinton for the presidency in part because Clinton struck so many voters as a scammy self-dealer who used her power to enrich herself and her family.
So now that we’re in Trump’s second year, we have to ask, “What’s the difference? Where’s the change?”
If you look closely enough, especially if you’re versed in the nuances and contours of New York City hustlers and Chicago patronage players, you can see the difference in character between Clinton and The Donald. The latest legal uproar in Trumpworld illustrates the similarities and differences perfectly.
It boils down to this: Donald Trump is the lower-rent version of Hillary Clinton. In New York parlance, Clinton was the 212 hustler, and Trump is the 718 grifter.
At the center of Monday night’s raid on the offices and residences of Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen was a paid speech Trump gave — while running for president — for an audience assembled by sketchy Ukranian oligarch Victor Pinchuk.
Trump wasn’t personally paid for the speech; instead, Pinchuk, at the bidding of Cohen, cut a $150,000 check to the Trump Foundation.
On one level, it’s hard to see the problem here. The speech was public, and a reporter was there. It was a totally innocuous — pointless, in fact — repackaging of the sort of things Trump used to say on the campaign trail: President Barack Obama is weak, Trump will be strong, you guys are all wonderful, some of my best friends are like you. And the incident hardly feeds the Trump-Russia narrative, because Pinchuk is about as anti-Putin as any oligarch from the former Soviet Union.
Trump defenders make another point about Pinchuk: He was also a major benefactor of the Clintons, who also spoke at his request, and a far bigger donor to the Clinton Foundation than he ever was to the Trump Foundation. Chelsea Clinton, for instance, spoke to a group assembled by Pinchuk, praising her father and Pinchuk as paragons of government transparency. Over the years, Pinchuk sent at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. Making matters worse, there’s reason to believe the Clintons provided more than just speeches in return for those hefty checks.
Pinchuk, who also employed Clinton confidant Doug Schoen, managed to secure more than 10 meetings at the State Department, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was directly involved in at least some of those meetings.
So if you’re an adamant defender of Hillary Clinton, you don’t have much ground on which to criticize Trump’s dealings with Pinchuk.
But the Pinchuk story can’t end there. Remember: Trump ran on the chant, “Lock her up,” and he won only because the American people saw the Clintons’ self-enrichment as corrupt and tawdry. Yet he was, while running, engaging in minor-league versions of the same racket: speaking to the very same oligarch, with the money — as with the Clintons — going into his own foundation. The main difference: With Trump, the checks were smaller, the foundation was smaller, the lawyers were sketchier, and what he gave the oligarchs was nothing we know of.
Trump, it turns out, is the poor man’s Hillary Clinton. He’s as prone to corruption and abuse of power as any swamp creature, it’s just that his corruption is of a more common flavor. He’s kind of an everyman’s crony.
This real estate developer from Queens is playing a lower-rent version of the game that brought Hillary and Bill to the height of power and wealth, and then brought them down. To use a different urban analogy, the Clintons are like the Daley machine of pinstripe patronage, while Trump is more like the Cook County machine, with its petty patronage.
While the Clintons were setting up a massive global foundation, using the power of the State Department to extract eight-figure gifts from steel oligarchs, Trump was giving a 20-minute incoherent video speech that paid enough to cover hush money for a porn star.
Are we better off with a small-time scammer who lacks the focus and resources to pull off a big con? Maybe. But that’s not exactly an endorsement.
