It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

by Stuart Stevens

Mike Lofgren had a close view of the corruption of our campaign finance system: The police and petty bureaucrats in many Third World countries are openly corrupt and will take bribes in order to augment their miserable salaries. In the United States it is relatively difficult to bribe a cop to get out of a traffic ticket or to slip money to a DMV functionary to get preferential treatment. You need to go higher up the governmental food chain in order to practice corruption successfully. But you can find bribery and corruption just about anytime, year-round, in Washington. It is called a fund-raiser, when a congress member’s campaign committee rents a room in a restaurant and invites a hundred or so of his or her closest friends from the lobbying shops on K Street, from industry, and from the trade associations. I’ve been to a few of these over the years and often wondered whether any of the Gucci-shod participants in their two-thousand-dollar suits and monogrammed shirts imagined that they were righteously engaged in the constitutional practice of petitioning for the redress of grievances as they handed over their checks before tucking into the hors d’oeuvres.16