That man, of course, is Donald Trump.

He grew up in Queens, one of New York City’s five boroughs. In 1971, he fled his native county, leaving behind a community wracked by violence, strife, and corruption, crossing the water in search of greater opportunity and a better life in Manhattan. But Trump seems to have brought the very worst aspects of his native political culture along with him.

Consider the political leadership of Queens the year Trump crossed the East River. Donald Manes was elected Queens borough president in 1971. He killed himself in 1986, after being implicated in a massive kickback scheme, in which associates were trading political appointments and other favors for cash.

The man who aided Manes’s rise, a lawyer and politician named Matthew Troy, secured the post of Queens Democratic Party boss in 1971. He’d later plead guilty to taking $37,000 from his clients’ estates and concealing the income on his 1972 tax forms.

But Troy and Manes weren’t corrupting Queens; they were simply abiding by the indigenous political culture. In 1988, Troy delivered a talk to law students taking a class titled “Corruption and Integrity in Government” that offers a bracing look at the culture in which Trump came of age.

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The public has the impression that politicians are corrupt, Troy told the students, and “usually they are right.” When he was first elected to the city council, in 1964, a reporter offered him the chance to get his name in the paper a lot for just $300 a week. (A native of such a media culture is likely to conclude that it’s perfectly normal to, say, use a newspaper to pay off a porn star who’s threatening to go public with allegations of an affair.)

And bribery was endemic. “There were so many instances where bribes were offered to me—that I did not ever take—that, while I can’t teach you the difference between right and wrong, I have an obligation to help you better understand,” Troy said. The going rate for judgeships, he explained, was $35,000 for a lower-court post and $75,000 for the state supreme court, New York’s trial-level court. He left the class with this thought: “If you are going to enter public life, and you are a young guy with a large family, there are lots of debts. It takes a super man or woman to say no.”

Wasn’t anyone enforcing the laws? Well, the Queens County district attorney at the time was Thomas J. Mackell. In 1972, federal investigators announced that they were looking at nine assistant district attorneys in his office for investing in a Ponzi scheme and concealing the income on their taxes. The ensuing scandal would eventually lead to Mackell’s resignation, indictment, and conviction for blocking the prosecution of the operator of the scheme. (The conviction was later thrown out on appeal.)