Ben Wofford is a researcher at Politico Magazine. Aaron Mak and Isabelle Taft contributed reporting.

It’s become fashionable on the left to sneer at the very sound of Donald Trump’s name; Bernie Sanders more or less captured the mood when he dismissed Trump as “an embarrassment” in a recent interview. But there is one contingent of liberals who take a very different view. They believe, cheerfully, that Trump is nothing less than the second coming—of campaign finance reform.

One of them is Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, arguably the country’s leading proponent of reform, who said the greatest entertainer in politics has done so much to jazz up an otherwise eye-glazing issue that if Trump agreed to resign the presidency after enacting some serious campaign finance reforms, Lessig would consider running on the same ticket with Trump as a third-party candidate.


“Donald Trump is the biggest gift to the movement for reform since the Supreme Court gave us Citizens United,” said Lessig in a recent interview, referring to the court decision that riled up liberals by granting essentially unlimited campaign contributions from corporate entities. “What he’s saying is absolutely correct, the absolute truth. He has pulled back the curtain.” (Lessig has since criticized Trump for seeking campaign contributions from wealthy donors.)

As pundits search for the source of Trump’s resilient appeal, reformers say they’ve long known the answer: the constant emphasis on how his staggering wealth immunizes him from insider influence. It has arguably now become the campaign’s most salient theme. “I don’t need anybody’s money. I’m using my own money,” Trump scoffed at his campaign announcement in June. A month later, he told the Wall Street Journal, “When you give [contributions], they do whatever the hell you want them to do.” And primary voters seem spellbound. “The guys who want to give me a million—I said, forget it. Who cares?” Trump recently told a rapt audience. “All of the money that’s going to Hillary, and Jeb, and Scott and Marco? They’re totally controlled. Totally.”

The drubbing has only continued, and many share the sentiment that Trump has become an educator, if accidentally, on campaign finance. “In the course of explaining his many political contributions, he’s made the same points the reformers have made: that this is a pay-to-play system, that people put their money in and expect to get results,” said Trevor Potter, founding president of the Campaign Legal Center and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission during the Clinton administration. David Donnelly, president of the nonpartisan group Every Voice, a leading nonprofit that advocates for campaign finance laws, agreed. “What Trump is saying is the truth because he can afford to say it,” said Donnelly. “A lot of the other candidates don’t feel like they can afford to say it, because they’d bite the hand that feeds.”

To be sure, Trump is no reformer, and his contemptuous reminders that he deigns to buy off national pols is meant simply to emphasize how his acquisition of playthings—helicopters, women, and yes, politicians—is part of the Trumpian worldview of how ceaselessly cool it is to be rich. Yet like a roulette ball landing on their number, reformers can’t help but seize on how Trump’s irreverent approach to politics has coincidentally highlighted one small sliver of reality: theirs.

“It always helps to have celebrities and reality TV stars talking about an issue. To that degree, I will grant him that he has raised its visibility,” said Miles Rappaport, the national president of the good-government advocacy group Common Cause. Rappaport emphasized his aversion to Trump's actual politics before acknowledging, “In a way, I’m glad he’s raised these issues and spoken on them. And the truth is that he is emblematic of the problem itself.”

So enamored are some reformers with Trump’s truth-telling invective that Lessig, who announced this month that he is considering a run for president to highlight the issue, told POLITICO Magazine he would not rule out a third party run with Trump should the opportunity arise. (A spokesperson for Trump could not be reached for comment.)

“I’ll make a promise,” Lessig later added. “If Trump said he was going to do one thing and fix this corrupted system, then go back to his life as an entertainment figure, I absolutely would link up with Donald Trump.”

Small wonder: Trump’s manifold quips on money and politics now resemble something like a cross between Sorkinesque soliloquies from The West Wing and the ring-strutting trash talk of a professional wrestler. “The lobbyists will come and see me. But I don’t give a shit about lobbyists, OK?” Trump hollered at a New Hampshire event in May, to a standing ovation. This month in Iowa, Trump told a supportive crowd that Jeb Bush “is a puppet to his donors.” He’s taken to social media to continue the drubbing:

While I’m beating my opponents in the polls, I’m also beating lobbyists, special interests & donors that are supporting them with billions. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 28, 2015

Then came the debates, where Trump cleverly positioned satellite candidates around Planet Donald by recounting how he had purchased their fealty. “You know, most of the people on this stage I’ve given … a lot of money,” Trump said, adding, “I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them, and they are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”

“I was listening to the debate, and I’m saying—Trump is giving our message!” chuckled the left-leaning pollster Stan Greenberg. “Trump is essentially giving a big public education about how money corrupts the process.”

For one, Trump may have unlocked a riddle that has vexed reformers for years: how to stir up sex appeal around an issue about as titillating as watching paint peel on the side of a Wisconsin barn. Analysts have noted—even before he entered the race—that Trump’s bombastic insistence that he can't be purchased amounts to political heroin for the GOP’s demographic bread and butter: white, typically working-class voters without a college degree. In some sense, the appeal behind reform is hardly a Balkanized one, with overwhelming majorities polled in both parties rejecting the Citizens United decision. But in Trump's case, Greenberg notes that few issues ignite the raw fury of his voters quite like the trenchant belief that Washington politics is accountable to those who wield checks rather than those who cast votes. “Trump has correctly read Greenberg’s polls, or someone else’s polls,” said Potter. “A big piece of that is the money-in-politics problem. And he’s using it to attack the system for his own electoral advantage.”

“That explains why there’s so much amazing support for Trump,” added Lessig. “Americans are willing to put up with his olutrageous views because they look at this guy and say, Holy crap. Here it is. A politician not beholden to these crony funders. That’s the gift.”

Greenberg said the data back up Lessig’s analysis. “Voters aren’t stupid,” he said. “They’ve lived through two billion-dollar cycles paid for by these big interests.” Greenberg described focus group results in which he tested a hypothesis: How much trust could candidates gain just by proposing election reform? In a series of messages, he cycled campaign finance to the front of the candidate’s pitch. “If you present your reform agenda first, then support for your economic plan rises 12-13 points higher,” Greenberg said. “But people need to hear the reform agenda first.”

It appears they already have. In the wake of Trump’s recent success, nearly every reformer who spoke with POLITICO Magazine predicted with confidence that 2016 would be the first cycle in which campaign finance plays a central role. But the billionaire may still have a few pleasant surprises left to hand reformers.

“Trump has never been on the receiving end of an attack ad,” observed Donnelly, noting Trump's notoriously sensitive ego. “When super PAC ads begin to fly, let’s see what happens with his messaging about money and politics.” He added, “He’ll have something to say, not just about the content, but the system that allows them to propagate.”

This week, questions have emerged about Trump’s willingness to live up to his incorruptible campaign aura, with a potential pro-Donald super PAC on the way. And at a campaign rally this week that resembled a scene from a 19th-century American revivalist ceremony, Trump appeared to be toying with the issue, whipping supporters into a frenzied chorus as he recounted how a lobbyist offered to donate $5 million to his campaign. Trump playfully asked the crowd, “Should I rethink it?” “NO!” they roared back with glee.

Indeed, Trump has yet to propose any concrete solutions of his own, Potter and other reformers note—but has only held himself up as immune to corruption on account of his billionaire status. But that itself only underlines the outstanding issue, Potter said. “His view of the solution is: Elect me, because I can afford to self-finance. That's not a solution. That's part of the problem,” he said. Yet reformers agreed that Trump—or rather, his voters—show little sign of cooling off. Said Potter, “He’s tapped into a significant protest vote.”

Clarification: This article has been updated to reflect that Lessig said he would "link up" with Trump only if Trump promised to tackle campaign finance reform and then return to his life as an entertainer.

