It would be ridiculous to say that Harvard Law professor and presidential candidate Lawrence Lessig was Donald Trump’s political twin. But Lessig, whose aim is to push through campaign-finance reform and then resign, drew some parallels between himself and the Republican billionaire. Namely, he admits they share one key belief: that the current system is fundamentally flawed.

The similarities, Lessig says, end there. “The solution Trump has is to basically be a billionaire,” he said in an interview with VF.com. “I think we fought a revolution against that idea. The solution isn’t that we have billionaires; it should be to change the way campaigns are funded.”

As Lessig explains, one possible outcome of a billionaire president is a Vladimir Putin–esque nightmare.

Vanity Fair: Right now you’re speaking out against money in politics, and it seems that the biggest player right now in the presidential field is a billionaire. How does that change the way that people are campaigning, and how does that change the way that you yourself are campaigning?

Lawrence Lessig: Well, Donald Trump’s presence is a big gift to the issue that I’m trying to talk about because he’s making it clear that the other politicians in the field are dependent on these funders, and that dependence makes it hard, impossible, Trump says to them, to make a judgment that’s in the public interest, and so he’s using that to demonstrate that he would be a better candidate than they would be. That’s an opportunity for me, because I can agree [with] those points he’s making, which is absolutely, these people are not independent and they can’t become independent, unless you change the way the campaigns are funded.

What’s wrong with being a really, really, really rich politician?

We should remember that most rich politicians who self-fund their campaigns lose because they’re actually not very attractive to people. Donald Trump has an advantage there because he’s the reality-TV star, so he has some sense of what creates a rise out of the people.

I think one of the things that’s striking about Trump is it’s clear he’s surrounded by a bunch of yes-men. Usually, billionaires are surrounded by yes-men. These are people who basically take every word and say, “Oh, Donald, that’s so smart, that’s so smart.” When he says these really truly objectively idiotic things, and he gets the reactions in the public that [says he’s] idiotic, he’s genuinely surprised because he’s not had that. . . . The people around him don’t want to tell him he’s wrong, because that might be a way to no longer be around him.

I think this kind of out-of-touch character feature of being a billionaire is really important for two reasons. One, a billionaire doesn’t live life the way ordinary people do, so they never think about the problem of dental insurance, or they don’t think about what it might be like to have to not have health insurance between jobs. Those are the real issues ordinary people think about. Also, they don’t actually confront criticism, or honest criticism, the way ordinary people do, and that often makes them blind to a second way to the things they need to know to be able to run effectively.

What kind of influence do you think Trump would be susceptible to, directly or indirectly, when it comes to lobbyists and moneyed interests?

I think that there’s a reality for a normal politician that they need to be able to play the relationship game. I think [Barack] Obama, for example, didn’t have a strong desire to play the relationship game. He’d much rather go home and have dinner with his wife and daughters, and that weakens him a little bit [compared] to a Bill Clinton, who loves to have all sorts of things happening all the time, because this is the kind of character he is. That’s one difference. Donald Trump, I think, can’t play the relationship game. . . . It’s not proper to say he doesn’t suffer fools, because I think he himself is a fool, but I think he has no patience and certainly no respect for most of these people. If you telegraph the fact you have no respect for them, they’re going to try to demonstrate, in fact, that they are more powerful than Donald Trump. The way to do that is basically to hold out and not give Donald Trump what he wants.