At the Trump SoHo Hotel, on Wednesday, Donald Trump offered what is likely to be the central argument of his general-election campaign against Hillary Clinton: “They totally own her, and that will never, ever change, including if she ever became President, God help us.” The identity of the Clinton owners—the “they” in Trump’s charge—is at once multifarious and vague. It includes, to mention a few of the entities that Trump brought up in his speech, “big donors,” “Wall Street banks,” “oppressive regimes,” lobbyists, special interests, a foreign telecom company, the Sultan of Brunei, the King of Saudi Arabia, “her financial backers in Communist China,” and other, unspecified foreign powers who, he is certain, have hacked her private e-mail server, which he figures she set up in order to hide her “corrupt dealings” while she was Secretary of State. “So they probably now have a blackmail file over someone who wants to be President of the United States,” Trump said. “We can’t hand over our government to someone whose deepest, darkest secrets may be in the hands of our enemies. Can’t do it.” Instead, Trump recommends handing it over to Trump, someone whose deepest, darkest impulses aren’t secrets at all.

Trump has been promising a speech focussed on Clinton scandals for a while; he had originally planned to deliver it last Monday, but he put it off because of the Orlando shooting. (He used the time, instead, to call for the second-class treatment of Muslim Americans and, once again, for a ban on non-citizen Muslims entering the United States.) On Wednesday, he read it before a small audience of family members, invited supporters, and reporters, from a teleprompter, which may account for the notable absence of the epithet Crooked Hillary, which he throws about at will at his rallies. The speech was not as wild as he’d hinted that it might be, which, by Trump standards, mainly means that he didn’t bring up sexual allegations and anecdotes involving Bill Clinton, or baseless accusations about the death of Vince Foster. This was a money speech, for the most part. What Trump attempted to do was to connect the complicated question of the Clintons’ money with the painful one of ordinary Americans’ financial security. “Hillary Clinton may be the most corrupt person ever to seek the Presidency of the United States,” Trump said, in what was the speech’s biggest applause line. While serving special interests, “she’s been taking plenty of money out for herself. Hillary Clinton has perfected the politics of personal profit and even theft.” (“Theft” was another ill-defined term in the speech.) He cited figures on the trade deficit with China (inaccurate ones, as it happens), the effects of various trade deals, and seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in speaking fees that Bill Clinton received from people or organizations with connections to the Chinese government during his wife’s tenure as Secretary of State. He concluded, “Hillary Clinton gave China millions of jobs—our best jobs—and effectively let China rebuild itself. In return, Hillary Clinton got rich.” Or, in the shorter version, “She gets rich making you poor.”

It should be obvious that the long-term forces that left our economy and China’s in the shape they are now in did not hinge on a check that Bill Clinton took to speak at the Huatuo C.E.O. Forum, in 2011 (any more than, as Trump claimed in another part of the speech, Hillary Clinton had “almost single-handedly destabilized the Middle East”). The Huatuo Forum was actually backed by a Chinese real-estate developer known for his grandiose schemes, although his business dealings involved government entities. (Clinton’s fee for that speech was five hundred and fifty thousand dollars.) As Politico noted in a report last year, although there was a procedure in place at the State Department designed to vet Bill Clinton’s speeches, to make sure that they weren’t being paid for directly by foreign-government entities, it was imperfect, largely because it did not always account for where the speech’s sponsors got their money. One problem, which Clinton supporters would be best to be upfront about, is that the Clintons have given Trump some raw materials, however unsteady the structures that he builds from them may be. There were plenty of inaccuracies in Trump’s speech (we are not the most taxed nation in the world; Trump was not a brave, lonely voice against the Iraq war), as well as wild misdirection. For example, Trump said that Clinton had accepted fifty-eight thousand dollars in jewelry from the Sultan of Brunei; as with all such official gifts, however, she turned it over to the National Archives. (The Sultan’s wife gave Michelle Obama an even more expensive piece of jewelry, which she, too, handed over.) At the same time, it is true that the Sultan of Brunei gave between a million and five million dollars to what was originally called the William J. Clinton Foundation, and was renamed, after Hillary Clinton resigned from the State Department, in 2013, the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. It is also accurate that Hillary Clinton earned twenty-one million dollars in speaking fees between the time that she left State and when she announced her candidacy for President. Trump described them as “secret speeches.”

One of Trump’s key moves in his speech was to erase all distinctions between the two Clintons and their Foundation. He said that “Hillary took twenty-five million dollars from Saudi Arabia.” She did not, personally. The Foundation accepted between ten million and twenty-five million dollars from the Saudis, and from many other governments. Trump mentioned the ones that his supporters would view as scary—“Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and many other countries that horribly abuse women and L.G.B.T. citizens”—though other countries, from Norway to Australia, contributed, too. Such donations make sense for an organization doing charitable work around the world. And Clinton’s supporters have emphasized that there is no evidence of a quid pro quo, as opposed to an interest coinciding with a charitable donation. (Though such side-by-side occurrences can be troubling, as in the case of a uranium deal involving Russia and a Canadian mining magnate, which Trump mentioned, citing the book “Clinton Cash,” as he also did in making other allegations.) Trump, though, seems to take it for granted that a charity bearing a person’s name is not much more than a self-aggrandizing, financially convenient vanity project. He may have reasons based on his own experience for thinking so.

Clinton’s supporters point out that many of the allegations related to her finances would be better described as politically motivated innuendo and insinuation, and that they come from a man facing a fraud trial who has refused to release even his tax returns. Clinton has released decades of hers. That is the sort of nuance that does not bother Trump. “We will lose everything” if Clinton is elected, he said. At the State Department, she had “spread death and destruction.” He spoke of his campaign against her as if it were the ersatz prosecution of a criminal the government was unwilling to pursue. (“The voters are the jury. Their ballots are the verdict.”) And, after making a direct appeal to Bernie Sanders’s supporters, he said, “It’s not just the political system that’s rigged. It’s the whole economy.” Trump calls Clinton a “world-class liar” while slandering whole communities and exhibiting a very tenuous hold on the truth. This is a disorienting campaign, and one of its many dangers is that a disregard for reality can come to seem normal. That makes it all the more crucial to hold on to facts as one finds them—on all sides. There are reasons to be concerned about even the appearance of conflicts of interest; we have not had a situation like the Clintons’ before. That does not mean that anything about their financial arrangements is corrupt, but for voters they may be legitimately confusing. And Trump makes it all sound so simple.