Donald Trump, in Manheim, Pennsylvania. Photograph by Mandel Ngan / AFP / GETTY

This past summer, when Donald Trump dumped his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, in the midst of revelations about Manafort's financial ties to Russian oligarchs, Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post, wrote that the real problem wasn’t that Trump is sympathetic to Russian oligarchs, it was that “he is a Russian oligarch.” Trump, Applebaum explained, is “an oligarch in the Russian style—a rich man who aspires to combine business with politics and has an entirely cynical and instrumental attitude toward both.”

Now, with the Times reporting that congressionally crafted loopholes for real-estate magnates could have enabled Trump to legally evade all income taxes for eighteen years, while earning as much as fifty million dollars a year, we have a perfect example of how oligarchic interests have made inroads in the United States. The question now is whether the American public favors this trend.

One definition of an oligarch, according to the Northwestern University political scientist Jeffrey A. Winters, the author of "Oligarchy," is an individual with enough money to employ the protection of what he calls the “wealth defense industry.” Oligarchs worldwide face threats of different kinds, but in the U.S. the greatest threat is from redistribution—which is achieved by the state imposing progressive income taxes. So the “wealth defense industry” in America—sophisticated accountants, consultants, lawyers, lobbyists, and think-tank apologists—is uniquely focussed on carving out tax loopholes for its rich clients. The key measure of an American oligarch’s success, Winters notes, is the difference between his official tax rate and his effective rate—the amount that actually comes out of his pocket on April 15th. By that yardstick, Trump achieved the oligarch’s ultimate ambition: for almost two decades, he had the ability to live like a sultan while paying nothing—less than a cleaning lady or a kid in his first job—to support the public good.

In Trump’s eyes, as he put it in his first Presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, last week, “That makes me smart.”

As they struggled to deal with the revelations from the Times this weekend, Trump’s surrogates doubled down on his argument that paying no income taxes was a sign of “genius—absolute genius,” as Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, put it on the Sunday talk show "This Week." New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is the chair of Trump’s transition team, said much the same on "Fox News Sunday”: “There’s no one who’s showed more genius in their way to move around the tax code.” The surrogates also tried a line from a Trump campaign statement that went out last night: that the candidate “knows the tax code far better than anyone who has ever run for President, and he is the only one that knows how to fix it.”

If Americans turn out to agree with this statement, that would signal a profound shift from embracing the ideal of political equality and joint sacrifice, which has been the basis of our democracy, to accepting the might-is-right form of governance in oligarchic states. To reach this point, though, would require a truly significant change. As Steven R. Weisman noted in the Washington Post, while Americans have long loved to grouse about paying taxes, polls show that a majority think that the amount they pay is “fair.” What really infuriates them, though, is when other Americans, particularly the wealthy or ultra-wealthy, and corporations, dodge their tax bills. In a recent study conducted by Pew Research, Weisman notes, six out of ten Americans said they were troubled that the rich weren’t paying their fair share. Mitt Romney discovered how unforgiving the American public could be about this when, in 2012, the multimillionaire Republican nominee was forced to reveal that he had paid an effective federal tax rate of 14.1 per cent, which is less than most middle-class Americans, while simultaneously criticizing the poor as “takers.” Trump and his surrogates are hoping that Americans will admire his guile, but they may discover that the country’s worship of success is tempered by a deeply ingrained respect for fair play.

The defense of tax avoidance by Trump and his surrogates may be a particularly hard sell in light of his relentless trash-talking of America’s roads, airports, schools, military, and other publicly financed projects. “Our country’s becoming a Third World country!” Trump reiterated at a rally in Manheim, Pennsylvania, on Saturday night. If so, voters might fairly say, as Hillary Clinton did at last week’s debate, “Maybe because you haven’t paid any federal income tax for a lot of years.”

During that debate, Trump’s best line of attack was to hit Clinton for having been involved in politics for thirty years while so many problems have festered. But the same point could be made about him. For decades, Trump has been part of the private sector that has used its wealth and power to carve out tax loopholes for its own self-interest. This may be acceptable in Russia, and other oligarchic parts of the world, but whether it’s O.K. in America, too, is now on the ballot next month.