At bottom, it’s this rottenness of American political culture that allows Mr. Trump, for all his flaws as a candidate and human being, to find traction with so many voters. Not because he’s a uniquely attractive individual, but because he’s uniquely willing to violate the political taboos and challenge the status quo. Indeed, his most insidious offense may be his suggestion that some problems aren’t intractable.

Take another example of rottenness. On Thursday, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara indicted nine associates of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for bribes in connection with development grants for upstate. The region’s economic problems for the past half century are not due to a lack of government-backed capitalism, such as Gov. Cuomo’s adopted fetish for nanotechnology. Upstate’s problems stem from tax, regulatory and land-use policies designed to flatter the priorities and prejudices of wealthy New York City liberals.

The immediately relevant example is Gov. Cuomo’s ban on fracking, undoubtedly undertaken with an eye on burnishing his presidential bona fides with his party’s liberal greens. His subsequent blather about nanotechnology, his unlimbering of state development funds, were never seriously meant to compensate residents on the jobs and wealth they’d be forgoing. These gestures (with taxpayer money) merely give the governor something to say when the subject comes up. Everyone’s entitled to the presumption of innocence, and much of what is corrupt and rotten in politics is not illegal. Still, no one should be surprised when such offerings produce mainly a scramble among his donors and aides to allocate the benefits to themselves.