vox / ezra klein

remember this?:

“The stakes on November 8 could not be higher,” he said. “A vote for Hillary is a vote to surrender our government to public corruption, graft, and cronyism that threatens the very foundations of our constitutional system. What makes us exceptional is that we are a nation of laws, and that we are all equal under those laws — Hillary’s corruption shreds that foundational principle.”

But the problem, Trump said, wasn’t just Clinton. It was the whole damn system.

“Public corruption is a grave and profound threat to a democracy,” he continued. “Government corruption spreads outward, like a cancer, and infects the operations of government itself. If the corruption is not removed, then the people are not able to have faith in their government.”

Trump unveiled a package of ethics reforms that day…. But the proposals were hardly the point. The point was that Washington was a cesspool of corruption and Trump was going to clean it up. You didn’t have to like him, trust him, or even think him qualified. You just had to believe that it was time to take a wrecking ball to the Beltway.