Swamp Creature

2016 WAS SUPPOSED to be the Dark Money Election, the year when a flood of anonymous campaign cash would dominate news cycles, the internet, and the airwaves, and pick our next president. In January 2015, the Koch brothers declared that their shadowy network of donors and political outfits would spend close to $1 billion. One analyst even predicted that the price tag for the entire election would come to $10 billion, the highest in US history.

Then, according to conventional wisdom, a superrich outsider blew all those predictions away. “In the end, Donald Trump defeated big money,” was how one postmortem put it. It’s true that Trump’s victory